@rabbithearth i don’t know if you’ve seen it, but popehat wrote a response to that nyt article that discusses a lot of the issues with people just going “cancel culture is bad” & makes some similar points
Mostly stuff I’ve seen individually before, but its handy to have them in one place: https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-shame-and?s=r
@Satsuma I'd be careful about that essay, it heavily criticizes POC backlash to racism for being "disproportionate" and a "shitshow." Personally I'd share it with caveats at least.
@ljwrites ah I wasn’t familiar with all of the incidents that paragraph references, clearly I missed one of the important ones. My apologies!
@Satsuma It's fine, it's a long article and I had to click into the links to see what he was talking about. I'm not offended, I'd just be sure you know what he's saying because linking the article without comment might be seen as a full endorsement of his views.
I do agree with a lot of what he says in the actual text, and I'd even agree that the examples he criticizes (like the David Shor firing) are objectionable--but not because of "cancel culture" or ideas of proportionality, but because these are examples of corporations simply jettisoning individuals who have become controversial and short-circuiting any kind of serious dialogue on systemic issues.
@ljwrites yeah corporations love to blame individuals so that they don’t have to discuss wider issues! It’s annoyingly effective most of the time as well, esp since social media tends to have such a short (collective) attention span that people are already looking for reasons to move on to sometime else it feels like
@Satsuma Yeah why are randos on Twitter being blamed for someone being fired or getting their book pulled, why isn't the actual company or publisher being scrutinized for their allegedly disproportionate responses? As if they have no agency and ~no choice~ but to react by firing someone/canceling their book at the first whiff of controversy? Oh those poor innocent corporate dears!
Tumblr and other places definitely have a problem with treating contemporary U.S. norms as some universal moral standard, but in my opinion that's good old dominance and ignorance at play rather than "cancel culture."
@ljwrites yeah dominance and ignorance is definitely a good way of putting it!
My main issue with these kinds of outrage responses is that, in my experience, they largely only effect people who are already vulnerable. There are exceptions of course (some of the men during the Me Too movement) but I often feel like its people who are disabled/poc/etc who are dependent on social media get seriously hurt while J K Rowling can keep tweeting & spending her millions on TERFS
@Satsuma Oh yes, I commented on the asymmetric effect just recently, that these very reachy bad-faith attacks have little effect on relatively privileged people who have recourse and other sources of support, but can be literally deadly to the most vulnerable. Even someone as humble as yours truly could brush off multiple bs nitpicks online thanks to being cis, abled, and economically stable, but for disabled trans people it can be a whole another story. This trans game creator's narrative is a searing case in point. https://thenewinquiry.com/hot-allostatic-load/ (TW harassment, abuse, sexual assault, suicidal thoughts, illness, trauma)
@ljwrites yeah I’ve always been very dependent on the internet for my social life (bc disability, for a few years I was almost housebound & even now I dont have a lot of capacity of offline socialization) and I don’t want to find out what would happen if I ended up the target of a fullscale dogpile
I would like to think I have the resources to handle it, but.
@Satsuma yeah it's deeply scary stuff :( The thought that the people you rely on for companionship and support might turn on you one day, or simply dump you for being too radioactive... I was lucky, since the one time it happened en masse there were friends who stuck by me and were attacked for it themselves, sadly. And I guess that comes back to the question of disposability, because more marginalized people are likelier to be considered disposable and not worth the potential cost of defending.
@ljwrites yeah it really sucks that that happened to you & especially that so many of your friends turned on you or walked away in response.
The way even systems (theoretically) designed to protect marginalized people from people in power inevitably get turned on people in power is really frustrating
@ljwrites Also, i can think of examples that were disproportionate in terms of level of response (mostly on tumblr bc thats where I was but i get the impression it happens on twitter at times as well). I remember a handful of times when people got up in arms over people to use the worst transsexual who were very clearly just like, allies/older queers using slightly outdated terminology (esp since often whatever they dug up would frequently have been a few years old already, so like from 2014 or so)
So its a shame he didn’t pick something like that if he wanted an example