A simple theory of cancel culture
...and a wee bit of prognostication
Now that everyone’s tired of talking about cancel culture, it seems about the right time for us academics to weigh in. I recently read with interest Eve Ng’s Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis, which isn’t really all that critical but does provide a useful history of the phenomenon. Unfortunately, it does not offer a clear definition or explanation of what has been going on, merely a profusion of examples. My goal here is to correct that deficiency, by providing a simple theory of cancel culture, based on an analysis of the underlying social dynamics.
In order to get going on the discussion, the first thing that needs to be made clear is that the origins of cancel culture are neither political nor cultural. Cancel culture arises from a structural change in the dynamics of social interaction facilitated by the development of social media. This is reflected in the fact that its basic features (manifest in what Ng refers to as cancellation practices) have been observed in countries all over the world and have been mobilized by individuals with a wide range of different political orientations.
In the United States, criticism of cancel culture has been deeply interwoven with controversies over “woke” politics, but as many commentators have noted, the internal dynamics of the Republican party exhibit many of the same characteristics. Fear of being labelled a RINO or cuck has had a disciplining effect on speech among conservatives that closely resembles the tyranny of speech codes on the left. So there is nothing intrinsically left-wing or woke about cancel culture. Furthermore, it is not a consequence of political polarization in the U.S., since cancellation has become an enormous issue in China as well, in this case with nationalist mobs policing online speech for minor slights, then extracting groveling confessions and apologies from celebrities.
Just this morning, I read an article about a Chinese chef who is being cancelled for posting a fried rice recipe on Weibo. (“As a chef, I will never make egg fried rice again,” Wang Gang, a celebrity chef with more than 10 million online fans, pledged in a video message on Monday. Wang’s “solemn apology” attempted to tame a frothing torrent of criticism about the video… ”) Sound familiar?
Reading this, any sensible person should be able to see there’s something going on that is new, weird, concerning, and much bigger and more important than our petty domestic political disputes. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that some people are still hold-outs, claiming that there is no such thing as cancel culture, that it’s just consequence culture, and so on. In my experience, this is a defensive reaction among those who enjoy participating in cancellation practices, most of whom seem to have a bad case of the “are we the baddies?” problem:
To put it simply, if you still don’t think that cancel culture is a problem, it’s probably because you’re a part of the problem.
On the other hand, apologists for cancel culture are correct to point out that there is nothing new about the reactions that certain forms of online speech are eliciting. That is, the social dynamics involved in cancel culture are not novel, they have been a feature of human social interaction for as long as we know. The difference is that certain strategies that individuals employ to manage interpersonal conflict have been potentiated by social media, generating mass phenomena that pose a new set of challenges.
Put succinctly, social media have dramatically expanded the power to individuals to recruit third parties to conflict. Human beings are distinctive in a variety of different ways, but one of the most important is that otherwise uninvolved third parties will often intervene in conflicts that erupt between strangers. In some cases this involves enforcement of the normative order. Among chimpanzees there is a dominance ranking, but the onus to enforce that order rests entirely with those who enjoy higher rank. If a lower-ranked individual steals something from a dominant male, that’s a problem for the dominant male – no one else is going to step up and say “hey, you’re not supposed to do that!” Humans, on the other hand, will often get involved even when they have nothing personal at stake in a conflict.
How we got to be this way remains an important unsolved problem in evolutionary theory, but it’s pretty obvious that in all different areas of social life people have a strong tendency to get involved in one another’s business. This often leads to greater social stability, because it allows for the formation of ad hoc coalitions to enforce social norms (e.g. consider how strangers will confront someone who tries to cut into line, or who is mistreating a weak or vulnerable person.) In other cases, however, it leads to an escalation of conflict. A great deal of lethal violence arises out of these third-party effects, which is to say, it is not perpetrated by the initial parties to the conflict, but rather by the allies recruited by those parties. This is a major topic in criminology and conflict studies — trying to understand why interventions sometimes reduce conflict but in other cases exacerbate it. (On this point, I cannot recommend highly enough Mark Cooney’s book, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence.)
Whatever the ultimate explanation, a central feature of human social interaction is that whenever we find ourselves in a conflict, we naturally and automatically look for allies. Indeed, people trying to prosecute an argument in public will sometimes look around the room and implore others to “back me up on this.” Others will try to silence their opponent by telling them to “read the room” (i.e. “you have no allies”). (Just to drop some even more recherché literature, the importance of such recruitment is the focus of Luc Boltanski’s seminal article “La dénonciation,” which I also highly recommend.)
It’s not difficult to see how the internet generates massive amplification of people’s ability to solicit allies. Everyday conflicts that would traditionally have come and gone without notice to anyone but the parties involved can now be publicly prosecuted. People need only shoot some video, or take a picture, post it online, and invite others to take their side. It is often not difficult to find thousands, tens of thousands, sometimes even millions, who are happy to oblige. Consider this rather quotidian post to the /mildlyinfuriating subbreddit, which received over 4,400 upvotes and 176 comments, promoting it to the front page (“This is how my husband loads the dishwasher”):
This is the world we now live in. You can come home from work one day to find out, not just that your wife is mad at you, but that she has literally thousands of people on her side.
Of course, the idea that a minor domestic conflict of this sort should be a private matter, to be resolved among those directly affected, is a relatively recent one. As the institution of the charivari makes clear, people in medieval European societies took a keen interest in one another’s domestic affairs. Private life, as most of us understand it, is an 18th century innovation. The important point is not that society is reverting to an older set of norms, but that the scale of third-party intervention is vastly greater. This has dramatically enhanced people’s ability to escalate conflict, which has two notable effects. First, it has resulted in many minor conflicts, such as routine violations of etiquette, becoming much more severely contested and sanctioned. Second, it has made it possible to intimidate individuals and institutions in ways that had previously not been possible.
All of the talk about “social justice” has obscured many of these dynamics – the appropriate lens through which to understand the phenomenon of cancel culture is that of conflict theory. Indeed, one of the most frustrating things about contemporary “victimhood culture” is that so many complaints are lodged in a way that is self-evidently a form of relational aggression. This explains also why criticisms of cancel culture are likely to be ineffective at making it go away. The underlying human propensity to recruit third parties to conflict is unlikely to change, and the technological amplification of this capacity is clearly irreversible. Thus cancellation practices are not going to disappear. The only productive question is whether the way that people respond to these practices is likely to change.
Here there are grounds for some optimism. Our current perceptions of cancel culture have been strongly influenced by the generationally staggered adoption of the relevant communication technologies. Specifically, because young people were early adopters of social media, the enhanced capacity to escalate conflict that I have been describing was for a time quite unevenly distributed in the population. As a result, many institutions staffed by people my age and older were blindsided by the sudden appearance of online mobs of young people making various demands. Many of these older people, quite frankly, panicked, leading them to make very foolish choices.
(I recall quite vividly a meeting several years ago at my own institution, where I and a few colleagues succeeded in talking down a group of administrators and staff who were in the throes of overreaction to a petition they had received demanding that Jordan Peterson be fired. “What are we going to do?” they asked. “How about nothing?” we suggested. “But what are we going to say to all these people?” they replied. This led to the highlight of the meeting, when my colleague from the law school, a rather formal, button-down type, looked at them as though they had lost their minds and said “How about telling them to fuck off?”)
The point is, we have reason to be hopeful that the days when senior administrators at a major public university could be thrown for a loop by an online petition will soon be behind us. This is mainly due to the discovery that most of these online mobs are paper tigers. They have no second move. Cancellation is a “shock and awe” strategy, it relies upon an initial wave of intimidation to achieve its effects.
The lack of follow-up is due to the difficulty of translating domination of online spaces into real-world action. This may also explain the rather extraordinary political ineptitude of the current younger generation. The early success of cancellation practices led to a rush of excitement, as young people found themselves able to evict from positions of power and authority members of the older generation. (The movie Tár is great on this aspect of intergenerational conflict.) This unfortunately gave rise to an entire cohort of young people who seem to feel exempt from the obligation to engage in traditional political argumentation. They became convinced that they had no need to defend their views, they could just assemble an online mob to intimidate anyone who disagreed with them. At the same time, they have not figured out how to translate this successful domination of online spaces into real-world political mobilization (e.g. getting young people to vote). This has left them in a strange political limbo, where they have not acquired the skills to win a political argument, but also lack the capacity to engage in real-world organization-building. As a result, they have mastered none of the essential techniques of effective political change.
In the fullness of time, the staff at major social institutions will be replaced by people with native expertise in online spaces and more effective strategies for managing social media. This will level the playing field to a significant degree, neutralizing whatever advantages young people have enjoyed over the past decade or so. One can already sense the asymmetry diminishing. My feeling is that, at least in North American, peak effectiveness of cancellation practices was reached sometime around 2018 and has since been in decline, although I could easily be wrong about that.
In principle, an increased capacity of individuals to draw attention to injustice and for aggrieved parties to recruit others to their side could be a positive development. The problem is that we have not figured out yet how to sort the wheat from the chaff in the deluge of complaints that has resulted. Again, there is reason to expect progress on this front, but probably only once the transitional phase that we are currently living through has ended.