Cancel Culture: Part I

What is cancel culture (and what is it not)?

I’ve felt for a long time that I no longer want to talk much about cancel culture. I’ve written and spoken about it extensively for years, and on my podcast and in various articles I feel that I’ve said pretty much everything I want to say about it: gotten into its causes and effects, theorized about how it works and why, analyzed it to death. At this point not only do I feel like I’m repeating myself, but I’m also just very tired of dealing with it. I also feel that the leftwing pushback against cancel culture, in which I’m happy to have played a part, has been pretty successful, and cancel culture is no longer as hegemonic on the left as it once was.

This being said, it’s still a real concern, and I’ve realized recently that there isn’t really a single, cohesive document out there bringing together all the different threads and laying out the left-wing critique and analysis of cancel culture in a clear way. So, I’ve decided to pull together all my thoughts on the subject, once and for all, after which I hope to never write extensively about it again. I’ll be releasing it in a couple of parts, starting with this one, which is a detailed look at the characteristics of cancel culture. The next part will examine the ideological and political context of cancel culture and the role which it plays within that context.

Although I wrote this piece, most of these concepts were developed with my partner and colleague Clementine Morrigan and are the product of our long collaboration on this topic.

A note about the term ‘cancel culture’:

A lot of people get bent out of shape about calling cancel culture cancel culture, but to be honest, I haven’t heard a better suggestion. After all the term touches on the two most important elements inherent in the practice. First, targets are indeed cancelled – a term originating on the left, used to describe the ongoing harassment and blacklisting of targets. One reason I don’t like alternatives like ‘callout culture’ is that being ‘called out’ or criticized is typically a one-time thing, for some kind of specific reason (even if it’s a silly one), which isn’t expected to extend to every area of the target’s life indefinitely or to be taken up by everybody else. I also don’t prefer ‘disposability culture’, though it gets closer to the mark, because disposability doesn’t capture the specific, extremely politicized register of cancellation; it’s not just that people are being callous or cutthroat with their friends, it’s that they subject their friends to ideological witchhunts.

Second, it is indeed a culture, in a few important ways. It’s a culture in the sense that it’s a normalized social practice which ends up structuring the behaviour of the people involved in it, even people who are involved in it unwillingly, like rape culture or intoxication culture. It’s also a culture in another interesting sense: cancellation as a practice exists in a kind of feedback loop with a specific political subculture. It flourishes within this subculture, and in so doing reproduces the subculture in its own image and makes the subculture more hospitable to cancel culture.

More on all these points later; the point is that ‘cancel culture’ is a clear and well-known term which accurately describes the phenomenon we’re talking about. It’s true that many people on the right use ‘cancel culture’ to describe basically anything they don’t like, while hypocritically engaging in the bloodthirsty dehumanization and repression of their political opponents, but most people on the right are congenitally confused about nearly everything, so that’s no surprise and needn’t bother us much.

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What is cancel culture (and what is it not?)

Cancellation occurs when an individual (sometimes an organization) is successfully targeted for ongoing harassment and social blacklisting, usually beginning online, using a highly politicized framework nearly always rooted in identitarian¹ concerns and calibrated for maximum reputational damage. There is almost never any attempt at a truth-discerning process (something analogous to a trial) or any kind of limitation on the outcome (something analogous to sentencing guidelines), and accusations almost always drift widely and mutate over time. Partly this is because cancellations are very rarely carried out by organized groups of any kind, though groups may participate; rather, they are structureless ‘crowd-sourced’ processes. The accused is not presumed to have any right to defend herself, nor to enjoy any presumption of innocence, and indeed defending oneself is considered proof of guilt and presuming innocence is considered proof of complicity. The blacklisting is enforced by also targeting people who don’t participate in the blacklisting. The more embedded in a ‘social justice’ oriented scene or subculture the target is, the more likely the cancellation attempt is to stick.

Cancellation is not when someone is removed from their position as a result of a fair and structured disciplinary process within a workplace or organization. Cancellation is not when someone’s ideas are rebutted online. Cancellation is not when a celebrity takes shit in the tabloids. Cancellation is not when someone boycotts a brand, company or genocidal ethnostate.

Cancellation in the sense it is usually meant occurs in progressive and/or left-wing subcultures, and this is the type of cancellation I am talking about in this piece. However it is true that right-wing scenes, in particular on the radical and far right, participate in similar social practices: purity spirals, scapegoating, and ideologically-driven campaigns of character assassination.

Some people are insulated from the process of cancellation through immense wealth and material power. It is effectively impossible to socially blacklist someone if they are rich enough, eg Taylor Swift or JK Rowling. In this way it may not make sense to refer to the ‘cancellation’ of powerful people, though it is worth noting that ordinary people can be cancelled for their perceived affiliation with such figures. In any case when I talk about cancel culture I am very rarely concerned with wealthy celebrities or public figures with bigoted opinions because they represent a tiny minority of people who are cancelled, most of whom are not rich, or powerful, or even right-wing. The vast majority of targets are ordinary people from the working or middle class who are affiliated in some way with very progressive and/or left-wing subcultural scenes. The demographics of cancelled people reflect the demographics of scenes afflicted with cancel culture and for this reason actually tend more toward being female, queer, trans, racialized, and disabled than the average.

I will now go through these characteristics of cancellation in more detail.

Ongoing harassment and social blacklisting.

Targets of cancellation usually receive various forms of ‘hate mail’, often on social media, which is the most direct and basic form of harassment normal within cancel culture. This stuff can range from demands for ideological compliance to nasty messages to deranged death threats. Sometimes it spills out into ‘real life’ (slashed tires, destroyed property, stalking) and in some cases people have been beaten and, rarely, killed.

Cancellers attempt to bar their targets from as many parts of social life as feasible, often with no reference to the accusations involved (ie someone losing their job over something totally unrelated to work). Targets can lose their housing (roommates pressured to evict them), their educations (school environment becomes too hostile to continue), their jobs (employers pressured to fire them), new employment opportunities (new employers unwilling to hire them), self-employment opportunities (banned from fairs and markets), opportunities for self-actualization and creativity (bandmates or studio pressured to kick them out), romantic opportunities (new dates warned or pressured to stay away), friend groups (friends forced to abandon them), and so on. In severe cases people can lose all of these at once, leading to severe isolation and immense psychological distress.

Notably, this blacklisting can follow people around the country or even internationally as it is facilitated by the internet. Crucially, it is not organic, as peripheral people are actively pressured into participating rather than choosing to do so of their own accord because of something the target actually did. People always have the freedom to cut ties with somebody they don’t like, but it’s a different story when they are being threatened into cutting ties with someone they have no real problem with. It usually continues for years, and can even go on indefinitely, though usually the intensity wanes eventually. Often the core material of the cancellation is archived online and never goes away. The ongoing and sometimes inescapable nature of the phenomenon contributes to PTSD and suicidality in many targets.

A highly politicized framework rooted in identitarian concerns.

People are never cancelled for robbery or drunk driving or being late all the time or whatever. Almost exclusively, they are cancelled for ideological deviation from progressive orthodoxy around identity and privilege, or for relational issues framed through progressive orthodoxy around identity and privilege. Both categories can involve accusations that are more accurate or less, about behaviour that is more worrisome or less, but they are always articulated through that particular ideological lens.

For example, people might attempt to cancel someone for ‘being silent’ about a trending topic on social media. This may or may not be true, but the important thing is that the topic must be related to identitarian ‘social justice’ culture. It can’t be environmentalism or sports or something. It’s got to be Black Lives Matter or the Trans Day of Remembrance. Likewise an accusation of plagiarism might be based on a valid complaint or not, but in order to really make it as a cancellation, it must be articulated as the theft of the emotional labour of femmes of colour or something similar. In my unfortunate experience as a pretty keen observer of this stuff over the last decade, this is essentially always true.

When a cancellation involves accusations of being a bad friend or partner, it is basically always framed through the lens of abuse. The accusation is never that someone was inattentive, or emotionally unavailable, or withholding, or needlessly argumentative or whatever. These imply some level of equality in the situation, a scenario you can walk away from. Abuse on the other hand implies being trapped and oppressed and lends itself well to identitarian framings, which are always used to their maximum effect. Notably this is true even when the accused person holds multiple marginalized identities themselves, as long as the accuser holds similar or different marginalized identities. For example, I know multiple (!) racialized lesbians who have been accused of ‘preying on femmes of colour’ or something similar.

At the risk of being slightly callous I will also note that while accusations of rape in cancel culture often tend to be less dressed up with identitarian language, presumably because the crime involved is on the left universally seen as horrible enough in its own right to not need it, sexual assault still carries an inherent identitarian connotation because people automatically think of a man raping a woman (regardless of the identities of the people involved). I have seen dozens of cancellations over sexual assault but I have never seen a single one over simple assault, eg, he got drunk and fought someone at a bar.

All this is to say that cancellation on the left takes place exclusively within a particular ideological framework, to which it is intimately and inextricably tied. All accusations in cancel culture are either based on identitarian concerns or are recast to fit an identitarian framework.

Calibration for maximal reputational damage.

In every single cancellation I have ever seen, the accusation is stated in such a way as to make the supposed offence as egregious as possible. This is unsurprising because one of the goals of a cancellation is to make its target look like a good person to target, but it can lead to some very wild places. It’s often accomplished at the same time as the recasting in identitarian terms. You might be accused of, say, hiring a grad student to help you with a book project and not giving her enough credit in the final product; she gets thanks and an acknowledgment but wanted to be credited as a co-author. This will be recast as stealing labour and embodied knowledge from queer, fat women of colour, part of a long history of white entitlement to the bodies and souls of racialized people, making you no different from someone who owned slaves and exterminated Indigenous people. If you’re a fuckboy you are ‘preying on nonbinary femmes’; if you’re mildly critical of some of the wackier things people say about gender you’re a ‘trans-exterminationist’; if you have a materialist understanding of race (or get into any kind of conflict with the wrong person) you’re a ‘white supremacist’ or are ‘weaponizing your proximity to whiteness in the service of white supremacy’.

The upshot here is that while many people would shrug if they are told that their friend got in an argument with someone on Twitter, they might sit up and pay attention if they are told that their friend is a known abuser who wants to exterminate trans people. They will also have to wonder why anyone would say such an extreme thing if it wasn’t true, and whether it’s worth it to remain friends with someone who is being accused of such egregious shit. The same goes for employers, bandmates and so on.

Accusation drift.

I’ve already noted that in cancel culture accusations are almost always recast in the most egregious light possible, using the most inflammatory identitarian language the cancellers can think of. But there’s a further distorting mechanism, which is the tendency of the accusations to become unmoored from the initial cancellation and ‘drift’.

A very common example is that people who are accused of ‘abuse’ – given the context, itself often an inflated accusation referring to events most people would identify as normative conflict – rapidly find themselves in a situation where it is ‘common knowledge’ that they are a rapist, even though no one has ever actually come forward and alleged such a thing. Somewhere along the line someone figures that abuse and rape are pretty much the same thing, and rape gets added to the list, and afterward no one is going to question such a serious accusation. Sometimes this drift can reach truly comical proportions, as when a severely mentally ill stranger began publicly accusing Clementine of being involved in a sex trafficking cult. Even though this accusation is self-evidently completely insane, just by being repeated it got added to the lore by the more hardcore haters, who are of course totally uninterested in checking to see if the things they say are delusional or not. Through this kind of internet-wide game of broken telephone, cancelled people can find themselves being asked to ‘respond to the accusations’ and being confronted with totally bizarre stories of things that never happened and, often, that no one is even alleging actually happened to them.

Another kind of drift can take place in cancellations which I call ‘Afropessimist drift’ because it has a tendency to play out most plainly in cancellations having to do with alleged anti-Blackness (though the same mechanism can and does play out in other genres of cancellation). It’s a bit more rare but you see it play out every once in a while. This kind of drift often happens when the accused is able to some degree to ‘beat the accusations’ – say they’re accused of stealing labour from Black femmes but then everyone is clearly able to see that the aggrieved party was actually well compensated for precisely defined work as spelled out in an unremarkable contract. In such a scenario, if the mob is really fixated on blood, people will perform a kind of bait and switch where the actual accusation is replaced with a general observation about the existence of anti-Black racism in the world: the whole field of fat liberation owes a debt to Black femmes, so it doesn’t actually matter that in this specific instance, this specific Black femme was actually paid for her work in a totally normal way. Trying to prove that you did in fact pay this particular person is simply denying the existence of the systemic marginalization of Black femmes in the fat liberation movement. The accusation, such as it is, then drifts away from ‘not paying an intern’ towards ‘refusing to be accountable for anti-Black racism’ or similar. (Notably, this is absolutely not limited to white targets; I’ve seen someone try to pull this exact thing on a Black woman on the basis that their skin was darker than hers.) Essentially, it is the equivalent of cops or inquisitors declaring that even if you’re not guilty of what you’re being accused of, you must be guilty of something.

One reason for all this is that cancellations exist in a social ecosystem with a heavy online component; they are content, and they are ‘competing’ with other content. If an articulation of a cancellation is boring, it doesn’t get reshared and thus dissipates. If it’s lurid and exciting, it gets reshared and is successful. There is a kind of evolutionary pressure towards accusations being as extreme as possible.

No trials, no limits

In the criminal justice system an accusation is brought forth and then the guilt of the accused is adjudicated with reference to evidence in a systematized way designed, in spite of all its faults, to apply the law equally to everyone. The accused is allowed to know who is accusing them, and what they are supposed to have done, and what proof there is. The accusation must be related to some sort of clearly delineated criminal offence. They have the chance to defend themselves before a professional judge. They have the right to be considered innocent before proven guilty. They have the right to appeal the judge’s decision. If they are found not guilty, it’s over. If they are found guilty, there is a specific sentence. In many jurisdictions they have the right to a certain degree of privacy during this whole process.

By contrast, in a cancellation none of this applies, most notably I think in that the accusation is itself the proof of guilt. This is so engrained that asking for evidence, or pointing out that the evidence shows that it’s all bullshit, is usually treated as a very grave crime in and of itself. In court if you can clearly show that you didn’t do it, you’re exonerated. On Instagram, it’s evidence that you’re a liar, or an apologist.

An even weirder element that can make it all particularly Kafkaesque and crazymaking is that sometimes there isn’t really an accusation at all. I’ve gotten into ‘accusation drift’ already; as a related phenomenon I’ve seen cancellations end up with a situation in which the cancelled person is widely seen as just generally bad news, even though nobody can really come up with a specific reason why. Everybody knows she’s transphobic or racist or abusive – but nobody can point to something she’s actually said or written or done. Sometimes too there are no accusers, because everything is anonymous, and sometimes there is an accusation but it is kept from the accused in order to ‘protect’ the accuser. All in all it often creates a situation in which it’s completely impossible to try to defend yourself, you can’t even respond to accusations because they’re so vague or bizarre, and even if you did it would make things worse.

And, most saliently, there is in a very real sense nobody to defend yourself to, because there is no judge, and no court, and no one keeping track of any of it. I’ve seen people try to respond to accusations and end up writing these endless Google docs that read like the ramblings of an insane person from some distant clown dimension: “REGARDING ACCUSATIONS OF WHITE SUPREMACY: On June 5^th, I spoke with Emerson on Discord about creating the Covid Conscious Queer Walks group. On June 9^th, Kai posted in their stories about wanting to be able to go on walks with fellow queers who were still masking. I messaged them and told them I was working on CCQW with Emerson. When I officially launched CCQW on July 2^nd, Kai claimed that I had stolen their idea and that launching CCQW without the input of Indigenous voices was violent. In fact Emerson, the co-founder of CCQW is Métis” etc etc etc. Very often, it just ends up with people ruthlessly picking apart the statement and finding a dozen new things to be angry about; certainly there is almost never the thing every cancelled person secretly wants, which is for a well-respected arbiter to pop up, slam the gavel down and proclaim the innocence of the accused.

The lack typical to cancel culture of any kind of structure also means that the punishment rarely ‘fits the crime’ in any meaningful way. First of all the demands of the accusers may be, and often are, unrelated to the accusation: someone is accused of making an oppressive joke while hosting queer trivia night at the bar, so they’re not allowed to be in a band anymore, for example – one has basically nothing to do with the other. But further, the initial demands are often forgotten more or less immediately. If the original cancellation material only demands that the accused be barred from participating in lesbian speed dating in the future, no one is going to point that out when she is also barred from volunteering at the Dyke March. If the accusers throw in a line about not wanting their target to be harassed, nobody’s going to call a community meeting to deal with the fact that cancellers are commenting ‘abuser’ every time she posts a picture of herself on Instagram.

Cancellation is a pretty classic example of mob (in)justice and, in its form if not its severity, it exists on a spectrum alongside phenomena like McCarthyism, witch trials, show trials, lynching, and the Satanic Panic: unaccountable group expressions of fear and vengeance acted out on individual scapegoats.

Contagion and chains of cancellation

As noted already, the blacklisting of cancellation targets is not an ‘organic’ process, in that people are coerced to some degree into participating. More than once, I have made friends with a new person, only to learn that that person’s friends were threatening to cut them off completely unless they cut ties with me. To their great credit, some of these people were so disgusted by this controlling behaviour that they told their ‘friends’ to take a hike, but it’s frankly unrealistic to expect most people to have that kind of strength of character. Social pressure of that kind can be an extremely powerful motivator.

But this practice of enforcing the blacklisting by pressuring people peripheral to the target doesn’t end there. In many cases, people who refuse to cut ties with the target end up experiencing consequences not very different from those experienced by the target. They become ‘tainted’ by their association with the cancelled person, and can and do lose friends and community and opportunities as a result. This is especially brutal for the romantic partners of cancelled people, who often experience immense pressure to end their relationships and can be targeted with equal vitriol if they refuse.

Sometimes, this contagion effect can form chains of tainted people, a phenomenon which was I believe first described by Natalie Wynn. In some cases these chains can reach ludicrous lengths: someone being cancelled for being associated with someone who remained friends with someone who interviewed someone who publicly defended JK Rowling.

The upshot of all this is a climate of paralyzing fear and extremely insecure relationships for people who are very deep into these subcultures, as well as people’s lives being upended for stupid and inexplicable reasons.

The ‘social justice’ context.

There is a scene, or subculture, or series of overlapping scenes and subcultures, which we can call the ‘social justice’ context, in which cancel culture flourishes most readily. Notably, I think there has been a very marked decrease in the power and scope of this context from the height of its influence around 2020. Cancellation campaigns which would have been totally life-destroying a few years ago are having more trouble getting off the ground, and the more deranged cancellations are now happening mostly in certain holdouts of very hardcore ‘social justice’ ideology, in scenes like the forever-maskers, or the ‘it/its pronouns’ end of the trans scene.

However cancel culture remains a salient factor on the left, and the broader ‘social justice’ context remains its main medium. I will explain in more detail the particular relationship between social justice and cancel culture later, but for now I want to point out something which may be obvious but is nevertheless worth mentioning: cancel culture depends on people participating in it for it to work, and not everyone is going to participate in it.

The fact is that many people outside of the ‘social justice’ context are much less likely to take seriously the kinds of accusations often levelled in a cancellation. Or, if they do take them seriously (most people think abuse is a very bad thing), they are much more likely to be totally baffled and annoyed when they find out that the ‘abuse’ in question consists of being polyamorous while white, or agreeing to date someone and changing one’s mind, or whatever it is. People outside of ‘social justice’ contexts are also much less likely to be afraid of their entire social world evaporating because that kind of thing never happens to them or anyone they know. Conversely, people deeply embedded in these scenes are primed to take certain kinds of accusations very, very seriously, regardless of the actual content, and are also deeply aware, whether they are honest about it with themselves or not, that peers in their community are somewhat regularly blacklisted, exiled and scapegoated and end up totally isolated. They are much more likely to tacitly endorse or actively participate in cancellation campaigns, both because they may be ideologically invested in cancel culture and because they may be terrified of becoming a target themselves.

What this means is that the deeper you are in the ‘social justice’ context, the scarier cancel culture is and the worse its effects are likely to be. For people whose social world has come to exist almost entirely within the confines of the ‘social justice’ context, the effects of cancellation are often so extreme that people in the wider society literally cannot believe it; it sounds completely made up that 95% of someone’s friends and acquaintances would abandon someone overnight because they did a workshop on herbs which didn’t adequately centre Indigenous voices. But for people immersed in these scenes, it is not only believable but something they may have to spend a lot of time thinking about, consciously or unconsciously; and for people in these scenes who end up cancelled, the resulting isolation can be crushing. This is especially true for queer and trans people who can have great difficulty finding peers outside of these scenes.

Who is actually getting cancelled?

Some people are under the impression that cancelled people are largely straight white men who ‘deserve it’. Others believe that white people or men cannot ‘really’ be cancelled because their privilege protects them, and that cancel culture, if it’s real at all, affects only people of colour or people holding other marginalized identities. Clementine and I have talked to countless cancelled people over the years and we have noted that neither of these assumptions is correct. The biggest predictor of being cancelled is your proximity to hardcore social justice scenes, and other major predictors include being a promiscuous top, being high profile and outspoken, being autistic, and not having a college education; identity barely plays a part. This seems somewhat bizarre, because ‘social justice’ contexts are so obsessed with identity. But that obsession with identity means that anyone can be taken down using expertly weaponized identitarianism. You can literally be a racialized transgender wheelchair user and find yourself being viciously dogpiled online, or you can be the hot white frontman of a popular band and watch your career be permanently destroyed overnight; we’ve seen both.

Neither being ‘privileged’ nor oppressed will save you. What might save you is having relatively few sexual and romantic relationships, in which you rarely do any pursuing or take the lead in any meaningful way; not being noteworthy or, if you are, never really saying or doing anything unorthodox or interesting; having very adroit social skills, at least when it comes to navigating the high-stakes vibes-based world of ‘social justice’; and having a top notch university education in the humanities, where you learn the extremely specific linguistic patterns of the professional-managerial class, the vocabulary of postmodernism and critical theory, and the mode of engaging with the work of others where you ignore its content and instead skim it expertly for anything problematic. Even these things, though, can easily not be enough, if they decide to really come for you. What will certainly help is having a diversified social world and some distance from the really rabid members of the ‘social justice’ crowd, and what will make you immune is having almost no contact with these people at all. Unfortunately, however, if you are involved with the left in almost any capacity, it is impossible to be completely insulated from that political subculture.

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Thanks for reading Part I. Subsequent parts, coming soon, will cover the causes and consequences of cancel culture as well as its social and ideological context in more detail. If you liked this piece, consider subscribing to my Substack:

1. Identitarianism is a political framework which takes identity to be the primary factor in nearly everything, usually at the expense of other relevant factors (such as, notably, class). It’s distinct from identity politics, which is focused on identity but not in such an exclusive and comprehensive way.