Over the last two weeks, controversies about cancel culture have spread across Facebook and Twitter like a brain rotting fungus infecting every edgelord or cranky uncle it came across. The latest hysterics came after the Dr. Seuss Foundation announced it was pulling six books from publication because of racist drawings and then again when news broke that a scene with Pepe le Pew was cut from the new Space Jam movie.
There's a lot to unpack about why this is so ridiculous and why we're all the stupider for it, but, to clear things up, neither of these things are examples of anything getting cancelled. No one called for the Dr. Seuss books to get pulled from publication, it was something the company decided on their own because they don't want to be associated with images like these anymore.
It's important to note the real problem underlying the Dr. Seuss books isn't that the books were pulled, it's that they were pulled without a fight.
Even if you take the view that the books were for purely economic reasons- i. e., they did it to protect the brand - what that says is that the Dr. Seuss Foundation looked at their products, looked at the potential damage the controversy could do to their non-racist books, and decided that their better option would be to just recall the titles with those drawings. Even in this telling, which is nothing more than a stripped down cost-benefit analysis, the reactions of Asian and Black communities were deemed important enough that the mere potential of the financial harm they could leverage was enough to change their practices.
I'm not saying that's how it went down, just using it as an example that no matter how you look at this, this decision was made because the Foundation thought how their minority customers felt about their product, mattered. They thought it was important enough to do something about it without anyone pressuring them to do so.
What all those headlines about political correctness gone too far are saying is that people who weren't important in the past, are important now. It's amazing how much this simple recognition bothers people, like they can't stand living in a world were other people are important, too. That's all any of this is, all any of it ever is, just blind anger over the fact that minorities get to have a say in the world they live in.
As for the Pepe le Pew thing, his scene got deleted when Space Jam changed directors. This is what's called making a movie. If this upsets you, I congratulate you on living a life with no actual problems.
What annoys me most about all the outrage pieces over cancel culture is that they universally don't engage with why such a thing would exist in the first place. If they do, it's usually just complaining about how kids get so offended at everything these days. Which, yeah, if you look for people being stupidly upset over inoffensive things you're going to find them, obviously. Conveniently, the push to make this solely about overly sensitive millennials and Gen Z'ers let's people with actual power off the hook for making things this bad in the first place.
Consider the world since the start of the millennium. We had Bush II lie his way into starting a war, operate a global torture regime, launch an illegal spying program, with no consequences. Then, the global economy burns to the ground in the fallout of fraudulent trading and business practices from literally the entire financial sector. Then, the same banks get caught actively laundering money for the Sinaloa drug cartel, rigging interest rates, and stealing money from their customers. No one went to jail or was even arrested for any of this, naturally. That's not to say we were limited to white collar villainy. For more blue collar scumbags, we have the cops who killed Eric Garner, Michael Brown or Tamir Rice - for just a small sampling - who all walked away clean after killing unarmed civilians.
Then, Donald Trump happened. If there's any lesson from the Trump administration, is that people in power get away with whatever they want because other people in power choose not to stop them. Mitch McConnell could've pulled Trump's leash anytime he wanted by slowing down Trump's pet projects in the Senate until Trump behaved like a good little dog on camera, but that never happened. The Democrats could've decimated Trump's agenda by passing budgets that didn't allocate money for the wall, or the Space Force, or for any of the other ridiculous projects Trump undertook. But they didn't, because why would they? Sure, Trump himself is an asshole, but he's still President and this is still America. That Biden is continuing some of Trump's policies- like keeping the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem and supporting failed puppet Juan Guadio in Venezuela - show for the umpteenth time that Washington's problem with Trump was his personality, not his actions.
You can't expect people to look at the world, see all the open, unpunished corruption, and do nothing about it. Normal people can't arrest anyone, can't throw them out of office on a whim, but they can mobilize online to publicly shun or humiliate people off social networks. That's what cancel culture is, a response to offi cial failures to hold obvious criminals accountable so that someone, somehow suffers for the shitty things they've done.
Naturally, there are pitfalls to this. Mass public outrage doesn't leave room for nuance or a sense of scale; for example, when Kathy Griffin posted that picture holding Trump's decapitated head, all that called for was a "wow, that's a bit over-the-top and desperate," not the massive dog piling she ended up buried under.
It also acts as convenient cover for actual censorship, like when YouTube took down videos by independent news channel Staus Coup. The videos in question were coverage of the Capitol Riot, they weren't endorsing or advocating, just standard reporting. Corporations always move to co-opt the language of social movements to neuter their momentum, cancel culture gives them fertile ground to move against independent creators in the name of "protecting" the discourse from controversial elements.
Critics of cancel culture are right that it's not good to rely solely on mobilizing mass movements of angry people against new outrages of the week. That what's happening isn't so much accountability as it is the public devouring of randomly selected individuals and doesn't address the systemic issues that allowed the harm in the first place.
All of that is true, but to spend all the energy tsk tsking cancel culture as a sign of national decline seems more like a modern version of hating on hippies more than anything else. Cancel culture is the product of larger failures, not the cause of them.
The easiest way to end cancel culture is to tear down the failed institutions that spawned it. Sure, there will always be people railing against something or other but if we can get the world to a place where assholes get punished for their asshole shit as an everyday thing, then at least we'll get to choose how much we want to stick around to listen.
