1. a case study of sorts
This is the first part in a series where I will be analyzing different specific instances of cancellation in detail. I want to know what it is about our relationships to other people that lets us engage in this kind of behaviour, what positive and negative impacts come from it, and develop some ideas and frameworks for how we can handle things differently.
I think that there is a level of specificity and humanity missing from a lot of conversations on community standards and individual behaviour, so this series will have a fair amount of detail on the events discussed. I’ll be using initials for the people involved and will try to be transparent about the things that may factor into my opinions. The event I’m addressing in the first several parts of this series is something that has happened locally to me. If you are reading this from outside the circles directly involved my aim is to give you enough information to understand some of the complexities at play. If you are reading this as someone directly or tangentially involved, I hope to present a nuanced analysis of what has unfolded and prompt some more critical questions than I have seen being asked publicly.
We make fun of right wing pundits for invoking ‘cancel culture’ when elites of their political persuasion face minor pushback or consequences for their actions. Their reactions easily make caricatures of a huge variety of complaints, from minor public commentary through to high level criminal investigations. It’s clear to me that ‘cancellation’ is a nebulous catch-all that does not adequately indicate the severity of any number of factors involved.
I think that the dilution of this term has been reflected on the left in a really interesting way: insidiously preying on our tendency towards political fracture and absolutist views on social issues. There is a perception among folks who initiate and engage in cancellation campaigns that the individual impacts aren’t real, and that even if they were real all the effects are either justified or unavoidable (or both). This is fucking bullshit. A cancellation event - whether contained to your small community of peers or spread virally to whole corners of the internet that you inhabit - is a sudden, sustained onslaught of bullying and we should treat it as such and condemn it accordingly.
Many, if not most, things that end up as cancellations are simple and understandable interpersonal conflicts that in no way call for input from the public sphere. I’d like to think we can be mature enough to handle ourselves and others with more grace and recognize that publicly lambasting someone is almost never truly called for.
Obviously there are things that are called cancellations that are, in fact, a warning to community members about a person who is putting people’s safety at serious risk. This is not what I am discussing here, but I will say I currently consider myself to be an abolitionist and I think that these things are undoubtedly interconnected. At the end of it all, you cannot humanely remove people from other people. We have to find a different approach.
so, about cancel culture on the left:
I’ve been online for a while. I was here for the call-in/call-out discourse of the early 2010s; primed from years on tumblr I remember coming into a deeper understanding of my own political leanings at the age of 20 during the spring and summer of 2014: catalyzed by the police murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; the misogyny-fueled killing spree of Elliot Rogers; and the massive online harassment campaign of Gamergate. These three events, happening over the summer after my first year of university, began shaping my views of the world and my appreciation of how complex, far-reaching , and dangerous the political divides that have developed over the last decades truly are.
I’ve spent my fair share of time being an annoying, young, online leftist. I’ve spent my fair share of time arguing with other annoying, young, online leftists. I’ve been angry at people for disagreeing with me and I’ve had people angry at me for disagreeing with them. I’ve been online enough that getting facebook comment notifications still sparks a vague sense of unease, despite moving most of my commentary to private discussions. I’ve dipped my toes and out of several communities, online and off, and I have seen the same basic types of disagreements and problems arise in every single one, though I have pulled back from directly engaging in these over time as I began to view them as futile infighting. I have a broad understanding of the history of different political movements and I know that these same patterns have carried through progressive spaces for decades.
I feel fairly well equipped to share some opinions on this whole thing.
There’s a lot of space for arguing semantics when talking about call ins, call outs, and cancel culture. I view them all as interconnected: call-ins are an attempt to bring someone in line with a particular orthodoxy; call outs are an escalation of an “unsuccessful” call in; and cancel culture is the things that has congealed around the two of them which often obfuscates the base pieces of information like a radiating game of telephone where often the accusation gets larger and the evidence becomes less relevant the further from the nexus point you are.
I have seen countless people cancelled. People in my close communities, people peripheral to my life, people whose work I enjoyed or didn’t enjoy, people who I had never before heard of. People with massively different levels of fame and influence, summarily stripped of their privacy, humanity, and social standing for reasons so broad they are difficult to understand as coming from the same place. Sometimes I’ve agreed with these campaigns, sometimes I’ve been skeptical. I’ve seen large scale community responses to clearly evidenced wrongdoing and to spurious, vague accusations. I’ve seen these things justified with lies and exaggerations, truth buried by volume and that volume of accusations eventually catching flame and burning down significant pieces of someone’s world.
I have engaged in some of these, undoubtedly. There are people I’ve unfollowed without looking into the specifics of what they’d done “wrong”. There are people I’ve chosen not to interact with based on vague whispers of unknown origin. I have uncritically taken the word of someone I have a trusting parasocial relationship with. I have certainly passed along an unverified rumour more than once. These are not behaviours I am proud of, but they are ones I have experience with. I deeply empathize with the impulses that come up when we witness someone being publicly accused or called out, and I want to explore these impulses with the intention of diffusing the explosive impact on our ability to build stronger movements and create agreed upon goals.
These campaigns, on any scale, are incredibly frustrating to witness, even to many of the people engaging in them. There is a demand, explicit or not, that the community will take the accusations shared at face value and often a genuine risk to pushing back or asking questions. I think that being online flattens the reality to each situation in comparison to another, making it nearly impossible to think critically and make our own decisions about how to react to each individual event.
I am so tired of this.
We can do better. We should hold ourselves to higher standards when we are dealing with conflict in our lives, and we need to look at the implications of our actions as accusers, as perpetrators, as victims, as witnesses, as people. I think the most effective way to do this is by looking at the way we handle conflict in the microcosms of the communities we exist in, and hopefully from there we can initiate larger sea-changes in how the left functions - perhaps finding effective ways of being in solidarity with each other even without strictly aligned adherence to a particular orthodoxy
So, here we go. Writing out of a sometimes-inexplicable sense of optimism and fuelled often by fury at the way people treat each other, I present to you something of a case study.
I hope that by asking difficult questions about the organizational and interpersonal responsibilities we take on in our personal lives we can loosen the chokehold of perfectionism that stifles our joy, our feelings of belonging, and our ability to connect with people different from ourselves.
a super brief overview of the event i’m addressing
On September 17, 2023, the burlesque community in my city was made broadly aware of a ongoing conflict between some local producers. One producer, FF, was being accused in a public facebook post of ongoing “harmful behaviour” within the scene, including “bullying performers of colour, tokenizing BIPOC, dismissing local producers, and continuing to rehire problematic headliners after being informed of their history.”
This sparked a flurry of comments and statements from members of the community. Performers dropped out of FF’s upcoming shows and they faced a considerable amount of public anger, calls for “accountability,” and a general loss of social standing as well as direct financial impacts. These things are all par for the course in a public call out and should surprise nobody.
There is nothing exceptional about this call-out, so I think it is an excellent example to illustrate several concerning trends I' see in how we address conflict in our communities. It is small enough in scale that I feel I can more or less get my arms around it, and it is big enough to - I hope - generate several conversations among people involved about whether we should find a different way to deal with conflict in our communities.
Over the next while, I’m going to dig into this event in detail to demonstrate some baseline reactivities that I see as deeply embedded patterns of behaviour across leftist social groups. I’d love for you to come along and explore this with me, even in the parts where you disagree with my reading. There is no single correct answer, so I’m not promising to find one. I’m here to ask an incessant amount of questions about why we act the way we act, and maybe by the end we’ll find some ideas for how to act differently. Let’s see what happens. I believe in us.
My next instalment will look at the facebook post that initiated this public discussion. I’ll try to give a brief synopsis of the main players in this story and will address the problems I have with the specific text of the post.
Later, I plan to look at the comments the post garnered, the specific accusations contained within the post, and the intersecting realities of the lives of the people involved.
Who gets to define community? What do we expect of our leaders, and how do we agree upon and uphold standards that honour the diversity of experience and involvement of the people we consider ourselves connected to?