CANCEL CULTURE: Who's Afraid of the Online Mob?

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The whole thing about the basis text for the "psychology of crowds" being like an allergic reaction to the Paris' Communes really shocked me. Is there any more case studies of "mob psychology" not being that true?

👍︎︎ 22 👤︎︎ u/MetalNobZolid 📅︎︎ Feb 11 2021 🗫︎ replies

Did Mr.bean got cancelled?

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/Takelu2424 📅︎︎ Feb 12 2021 🗫︎ replies
👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Hecateus 📅︎︎ Feb 11 2021 🗫︎ replies
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TERRIBLE FRENCH ACCENT: Bonjour! I believe I have le displeasure of speaking with le Marquis et le Marquess de Pamplemousse. It is, uhhh, my solemn duty to inform you zat the Committee de Public Safety has pronounced you, uhhh, CANCELLED. Et moi, et le grande, grande mob which is awaiting just around ze corner have come to transport you to Paris, where you will be making... COMMENTER ONE: Yo, what is this? COMMENTER TWO: Is that meant to be a French accent? COMMENTER THREE: Well, this is the most cringe thing I've watched all day. COMMENTER FOUR: Is this like a Borat kinda thing? Is this supposed to be ironic? COMMENTER FIVE: First! COMMENTER SIX: My great, great, great grandma actually died in the French Revolution so sorry if I'm failing to see the humour here. COMMENTER SEVEN: Does anyone know what yikes is in French? COMMENTER EIGHT: Long-time subscriber here and, yeah, I'm really not sure about this. COMMENTER NINE: Yeah, sorry Tom, but I think maybe you should rethink this one. Ohhh, shhhhhhhi- Few ideas have captured the collective imagination of the internet in the past year or so more than that of “cancel culture”. For the uninitiated, the broad idea is that the contemporary internet (and, in some formulations, society more broadly) has become an increasingly hostile, uncompromising and censorious place. Say the wrong thing, or even the right thing but in the wrong way or at the wrong time, and one runs the risk of being “cancelled”—set-upon by an outraged online mob who won’t stop until you’ve lost your job, your friends, your family and been fully exiled from public life. Debate over this supposed phenomenon reached boiling point in July of 2020, when an open letter titled A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, written by The New York Times Magazine journalist Thomas Chatterton Williams and signed by 152 journalists, writers and academics, appeared in the American publication Harper’s Magazine. Although not using the phrase “cancel culture” itself, the letter hit all the main beats of the same argument, warning that ‘the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted’, continuing that ‘while we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture’. In fact, at a time when America, the country in which the vast majority of the signatories are based, was witnessing a brutal crackdown on freedom of expression through popular protest by right-wing politicians and police chiefs, it was mostly online social justice advocates which the letter implied represented an existential threat to the body politic. One aspect of the letter which stood out given the urgency of its language was its lack of reference to specific incidents. It contained several vague allusions to ‘books [being] withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity’ and ‘journalists [being] barred from writing on certain topics’, and readers with a bit of time on their hands could likely decode some of the events to which these allusions referred by looking over the list of those who had signed. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that a letter which stated that ‘it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought’ refused to outright name any of these apparently oh-so-common events. The vagueness of what has since become known in some quarters simply as “the Harper’s letter” is fairly representative of discussions surrounding cancel culture. Those making the case that we should be worried about this supposed phenomenon are quick to diagnose what Jurgen Habermas calls the ‘public sphere’ with a malignant disease but much slower to point to any specific symptoms of that ailment. In fact, as appeared to be the case with the Harper’s letter, when the phrase “cancel culture” is invoked, there is often the sense that the person raising it does so precisely so that they don’t have to engage with the specificities of a particular incident. There are several reasons why proponents of the idea that “cancelling” is a widespread phenomenon that we should be deeply worried about might prefer to talk about a broad, “cultural” issue at the direct expense of focusing on any specific “cancellings” themselves. We’ll touch upon some of those reasons in the course of this video. There’s a specific thread which I want to pull upon as a means of unravelling this recent anxiety about cancel culture, however, and that is its frequent engagement of the figure of “the mob”. The phrases “mob rule” and “mob mentality” crop up frequently in opinion pieces and articles discussing cancel culture. As I was writing this video, Rowan Atkinson, the actor who portrays Mr Bean, Blackadder and Johnny English, told the UK magazine the Radio Times that ‘what we have now is the digital equivalent of the medieval mob roaming the streets looking for someone to burn’. Where the word “mob” itself doesn’t appear, the broader idea is surely there. At the heart of what we might call the “cancel culture hypothesis” is the idea that all of us are at constant risk of unwittingly angering a merciless online mass which is untameable and unrelenting, a faceless digital crowd which is prone to whipping itself up into a frenzy and which knows no limits in the destruction it can cause. In doing so, proponents of the cancel culture hypothesis tap into a powerful and ingrained cultural idea. “The mob” and the notion that individuals who find themselves within a crowd have a tendency to lose all sense of reason and become prone to engaging in extreme, violent acts is a longstanding trope. It is also one which has been frequently invoked in the past year or so in relation to physical groups, peaceful or otherwise, as crowds have once again become a central force in our politics. In fact, the cultural trope of the frenzied mob is central to anxieties over cancel culture. It is in many ways our learned fear of the uncontrollable mob which gives the cancel culture hypothesis its power. In order to unpack this proposed contemporary phenomenon, I therefore want to begin by exploring the origins of the idea of the mob itself. We’ll come back to call-outs and cancellations shortly. But, first, let me transport you back to the 19th century and the birth of the mob. DEEPLY SAD VOICE: Helloooo... It's my seventeenth attempt to record this... I'm just not used to speaking from the heart without a script. So, by now, most of you will have seen may most recent video. And, if you haven't, you've probably seen some of the... controversy... that it's provoked. Oh god, it's raining, of course it's raining. So I just wanted to make a quick video to address the situation, because I think some people might've... got the wrong end of the baguette. Can't say that... can't say that... Many of you will know that I've been trying to take more creative risks with my videos lately and that's really difficult for me because I just have all these amazing creative ideas coming at me all the time. I just have to bat them away like "get away from me amazing idea, get away, I can't use you all". Sometimes, this is gonna mean that ideas that are less good... or maybe too powerful that you can't appreciate them are gonna slip through and so I just, I... I... I... I wanna apologise. Okay? If the particular creative direction that my last video went in was too much for you. You know, I deeply, deeply regret putting something out there into the world which some of you clearly weren't ready for. You know, that is my fault, that is my fault, that is on me. You know, I love all of you. Every single one. I love my subscribers. I love those of you have yet to make the life-changing and mind-expanding decision to click subscribe and, uhhh, ring that bell. You know, I love you whether you smash like or whether you haven't worked out how to do that yet. Hell, I love you whether or whether not you've been to patreon dot com forward-slash Tom Nicholas to sign up to support the channel whilst getting early access to my videos and more or whether Patreon's not available in your region. I guess... I guess the main point is that... I'm sorry. And, in the future, I'll try not to put out videos which are just so ahead of the curve. It’s important to begin by acknowledging that, at least in periods where there has existed some density of living, there have always been mobs of one form or another. In their beautifully composed video essay "Crowds, Masses, Riots", TheLitCritGuy and LaborKyle highlight that the mob or crowd was an important force in the politics of the Roman Republic. Senators proposing new policies would often find themselves supported or contested by throngs of plebs and peasants. These crowds would regularly turn violent and, even when they didn’t, it was always the implicit threat of violence which gave them their power. Yet, while they were certainly viewed as an inconvenience to those they opposed, the Roman mob was not viewed as irrational or exceptional but was in many regards an accepted part of the Republic’s political process. As Kyle puts it ‘what modern eyes may interpret as an unruly mob was, to the Romans, something that was regulated by civil society. The crowd had a role to play in politics’. In a society in which few of those assembled in these crowds had any real voice within the formal political system, it was taken as a given that it was through physically gathering to show their collective power that they would express themselves. The idea of “the mob” as it is passed down to us today: as irrational, uncontrollable and as an intrinsic threat to public order is a product of what Eric Hobsbawm refers to as the ‘dual revolution’ of the late-18th and early-to-mid-19th centuries. The first of these revolutions was the Industrial Revolution, in which first Britain, and subsequently other countries, leapt from being largely agrarian and artisanal societies to ones which revolved around mechanised production. One impact among many of the Industrial Revolution was an unprecedented change in the size and geography of the population. Census data shows that, between 1801 and 1851, the population of England more than doubled. Moreover, people began to be more and more concentrated in cities. As Clifford Stott and John Drury write, ‘industrialisation created an explosion in the scale of urban society; for the first time in history, large urban populations emerged’. Over time, this increasing concentration of working-class people in cities gave them the ability to organise with a view to bettering their lot in life. The second revolution to which Hobsbawm refers and which gave birth to the idea of “the mob” was the French Revolution. The period of the French Revolution from the abolishment of absolute monarchy in 1789 to the installation of Napoleon as First Consul in 1799 was one of radical and fast-moving change. Whilst much of this was the result of politicking amongst royals, nobles and clergymen, throughout, crowds (in particular the people of Paris) were a decisive force. There were several moments in which the Revolution would likely have been defeated were it not for crowds of Parisians marching on the Palace of Versaille to make their voices heard and the most enduring image of the Revolution likely remains that of the storming of the Bastille on 14th July 1789. If the Industrial Revolution gave the new European, urban working-class the ability to organise, the French Revolution thus served as an inspiration and a testament to what could be achieved when people physically gathered together to make their voices heard. The following decades only saw further instances of mass action by (usually urban) crowds. Sometimes this action was violent. The revolutionary wave of 1848 often referred to as the “Springtime of the Peoples”, for example, saw barricades erected in cities across Europe. Elsewhere, it was entirely peaceful (at least on the part of the crowds themselves). The Chartist movement in Britain, for instance, campaigned to secure the vote for all men over the age of 21 and employed as one of their primary methods of campaigning the mass meeting in which thousands would gather to listen to speeches and show their support. To a world which, for centuries, had been accustomed to the direct rule of kings, such modes of political action and agitation seemed strange and new. To the wealthy and powerful, they were downright terrifying. Several journalists and scholars therefore set out to try and understand what it was that made crowds tick. And, in doing so, they founded a field of research known as ‘crowd psychology’. Unsurprisingly, given how many revolts and revolutions the country underwent during the 18th and 19th centuries, the most influential proponents of this new “crowd psychology” were French. Chief among them was the writer and polymath Gustave Le Bon. Le Bon had been living in Paris during the pronouncement and later violent suppression of the Paris Commune, the world’s first socialist republic. A committed conservative, he very much viewed such mass action by crowds through the eyes of the anxious elite. In his 1895 book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Le Bon argued that crowds were intrinsically dangerous and that the simple act of being in a crowd changed people. ‘By the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd’, Le Bon wrote, ‘a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian’. To Le Bon, and other crowd psychologists like him, crowds were irrational and intrinsically prone to violence. In the introduction to his book he writes that ‘little adapted to reasoning, crowds, on the contrary, are quick to act’, adding later that ‘crowds are only powerful for destruction’. In short, crowds could not be reasoned with and, by extension, their grievances were never legitimate. While there have perhaps always been mobs of one form or another, then, it was as recently as the 19th century that the idea of the mob as irrational and inherently destructive was born. Le Bon’s work has been immensely influential. It continues to be cited in academic studies (including, interestingly for our discussion here, in relation to so-called digital crowds). Moreover, it is the very foundation of contemporary popular perceptions of mobs. Ideas about individuals being intoxicated by the crowd and becoming prone to perform unthinkable acts when part of a mob, first expressed by Le Bon, continue to have considerable currency. And, it’s an alluring thesis. The only problem is that, as soon as we try and apply it to any actual examples of what might be described as mobs, physical or digital, Le Bon’s thesis simply doesn’t hold water. HOST: Okay, well, next up we have a guest on the stream and it's my pleasure to introduce Tom Nicholas, a YouTube creator who some of you might be familiar with following a recent bit of a... dispute shall we say... surrounding a video about the French Revolution and perhaps a slightly misjudged choice of accent. TOM: Hello? He- hello? HOST: Hello Tom. TOM: Ohh, ohh, hello. Yes. It's a- a- a- pleasure to grace your stream with my presence. HOST: You're... uhhh... you're welcome. Uhhh, so I know we don't know each other overly well but you've always seemed like a decent enough guy so I wanted to bring you on and give you the opportunity to perhaps clear some of the confusion surrounding your latest video. TOM: Thank you. Uhhh, I mean obviously I thought that the complete and unreserved apology which I uploaded to my third channel would have been more than enough but, uhhh - HOST: Well, yeah, about that, I... I guess some people felt that it didn't... uhhh... come across as entirely sincere. TOM: Well, I think you'll find that I said that it was... uhhh... and I'm... I'm quoting myself here... "my fault"... twice... in quick succession for emphasis. HOST: Yes, but you did also imply that the blame for this scenario was really more on the viewers of the video, rather than yourself. TOM: Yes. Yes I did. HOST: I'm sure that's not what you meant though. I... I'm sure you realise that perhaps there's a tiny bit of a misjudgement on your part and that you'd like to say that... now... so we can all get on with our lives. TOM: Look... I thought that at first as well. You know, I saw those comments coming in saying "Tom's made a very minor judgement of error here" and I though... ohh, maybe they've got a point. But, at the same time, I've been getting a lot of new followers on Twitter lately. And lots of them have been saying "No Tom, you were completely correct to upload that video". And that just seems more logical to me. Because, no one's ever told me that I've been wrong about anything before. So, it just seems more likely that I'm probably completely in the right here as well. HOST: Yeah, but you have to aware that some people, perhaps those with connections to France most of all they're gonna feel a little uncomfortable with your... performance? TOM: Yeah, well maybe that's a good thing. HOST: I don't follow. TOM: Well, these... "French people"... if I'm even allowed to say that any more. Maybe they need taking down a peg or two. HOST: I'm not sure what you're trying to - TOM: Well, why should they get the special treatment, hmmm? Yeah? "Le treatment speciale"? If you ask me, we've been bending over backwards for these people for far too long and I will not be silenced by them. I will not... [TOM PULLS PLUG FROM MICROPHONE] The crowd psychology of Gustave Le Bon and his peers has been hugely influential, including on debates surrounding cancel culture. In fact, Le Bon’s work is given some attention in Jon Ronson’s 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed which, following its publication, sparked the first wave of anxiety over online “cancellations”. Ronson’s book starts from the proposition that the early 2010s marked what he calls ‘the start of a great renaissance of public shaming’ and argues that contemporary instances of Twitter backlash against both celebrities and ordinary people can be likened to historical practices of public punishment, such as the stocks. Ronson’s discussion of Le Bonian crowd psychology is complex. On the face of it, it is primarily critical. Drawing on an interview with the psychologist Stephen Reicher, Ronson foregrounds the manner in which what might initially appear as unified, frenzied Twitter mobs are, in fact, always infinitely diverse. He writes that ‘for Gustave Le Bon a crowd was just a great ideology-free explosion of madness—a single blob of violent colour without variation. But that wasn’t Twitter. Twitter did not speak with one voice’. He highlights that, in any instance of Twitter backlash, people’s particular grievances and the form that they take—from constructive criticism to heartfelt pleading to outright abuse—vary wildly. Later in the book, Ronson suggests that he has discounted Le Bon’s ideas from his analysis of so-called “public shaming” entirely. Nevertheless, as soon as his direct critique of Le Bon is complete, many of the same notions, that digital crowds are irrational, that they are intoxicating for those “swept up” in them and that they have an inherent tendency towards destruction, quickly come crawling back. There are two primary reasons for this. For one, Ronson is a pop-science writer and is never one to let the facts or even argumentative consistency get in the way of telling a good story. He will often acknowledge that a particular argument is ridiculous before preceding to make that very argument anyway. There’s one section in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed where he writes that ‘there’s an old Internet adage that as soon as you compare something to the Nazis you lose the argument. Maybe the same could be said about the Stasi—the East Germans’ secret police force during the Cold War’. He then proceeds to spend the next two pages comparing people getting angry on Twitter with the Stasi. Yet, Ronson’s embrace of the idea of the frenzied mob even while acknowledging that the evidence for crowds working in this way is shoddy also points to how ingrained this idea is in our culture. For, the evidence that crowds work in the manner in which Le Bon suggests they do is bad. Very bad. One of the most-referenced works in rebuffs of Le Bonian style crowd psychology is a study by the British historian E.P. Thompson. Thompson undertook a detailed survey of the food riots which were a semi-regular feature of 18th-century England. Such riots have often been viewed by historians as largely irrational outbreaks of mob violence which were, as best, inspired by the base desire of “the mob” to satiate their hunger. Yet, on closer inspection, Thompson found that such riots were, in fact, ‘a highly-complex form of direct popular action, disciplined and with clear objectives’. Firstly, these riots were not driven solely by hunger but by a moral and broadly political concern with changing laws and economic structures which either enabled farmers and merchants to charge the poor more for the grain with which they made their bread or, if they felt they could get a better price, to transport that grain elsewhere. Those who participated in these so-called riots therefore had very specific demands: they wanted to purchase the grain which they relied upon for sustenance at the price which they had previously been told was fair. Secondly, whilst these outbreaks often involved violence, Thompson continues that ‘it is the restraint, rather than the disorder, which is remarkable’. Counter to what Le Bon suggests, these crowds did not undertake wild rampages but used the power of numbers to achieve a very specific end. They could simply have stolen the grain which they needed; but this was rarely the case. Thompson recalls the example of ‘the Honiton lace-workers, in 1766, who, having taken corn from the farmers and sold it at the popular price in the market, brought back to the farmers not only the money but also the sacks’. While some may attempt to write such events off as instances of illogical, unrestrained outbursts of frenzied mobs, then, what we actually find is that those who participated in these food riots had very specific reasons for taking part and that, on joining the crowd, they did not find themselves impassioned to undertake complete destruction but came together to achieve very specific goals, after which, they stopped and went home. Many other studies which have analysed specific so-called “mobs” have found that, once we view them within their proper social and historical context and account for the particular reasons they assembled, Le Bon’s ideas begin to look ridiculous. In fact, it is Le Bon’s suggestion that we ignore such details in favour of viewing the phenomenon of the crowd itself as a kind of intoxicant and those who find themselves within crowds as suffering from something akin to mental ill health that is the very reason that his work was embraced by his peers. The ruling classes of the late 19th century didn’t want to view the crowds which had so frequently sought to overthrow them as intelligent and rational and they certainly didn’t want to contemplate the idea that the revolutions, protests and mass movements which had dominated the previous century might have been in any way an outcome of their own actions in creating a deeply unequal society. It was comforting, in a way, to simply explain these events away as simply another instance of what Charles Mackey called the ‘madness of crowds’. Moreover, Le Bon’s ideas were politically useful. For, in ignoring the specificities of individual crowds, his work implied that all crowds were essentially the same. It suggested that, no matter how orderly and peaceful a crowd seemed, they were always a potential threat in need of suppression. We can see how powerful this notion was in its influence on the novelist Charles Dickens. Dickens was, as anyone with even a passing knowledge of his work will know, deeply distressed by the poverty and inequality which surrounded him. Yet, as is evidenced in his 1859 book A Tale of Two Cities, he was terrified that any mass movement which sought to end that suffering would lead to uncontrollable violence. In 1848, he went as far as serving as a volunteer policeman in order to help suppress meetings of Chartists campaigning for a more representative democracy. Such was the power of the idea that all mobs were reprehensible, then, that it could lead to someone as dedicated to social reform as Dickens signing up to wield a truncheon with which to beat down people with whom he likely agreed on a substantial amount. So, having developed a slightly more complex understanding of crowds and seen the political motivations behind the circulation of the idea of “the mob”, let’s return to the present day to consider what parallels we might find between the emergence of the figure of “the mob” in the 19th century and contemporary warnings about “cancel culture”. Hey everyone, I just wanted to say a quick "hi" to all the new followers I've had on here lately. You know, it has been a really rough couple of weeks for me. But to all the haters, I just wanna say... AU REVOIR! [LAUGHTER] Nah, nah, nah but seriously I appreciate the support and... some of you... you've really opened my eyes to just how deep some of this goes. Yeah? Cause the... the French lobby, they've been trying to stop truth-tellers like me... and like you from... well, you know, like... telling the truth... for a long, long time. Yeah? The other day on my... uhhh... super-secret Discord server which you can join for just seventy dollars a month... some people were saying... and I don't wanna fully endorse this idea just yet, you know? I've gotta do some of my own research... watch a YouTube video or two... But some people have been saying that France... NOT EVEN REAL. Yeah. Yeah, just completely made up to... to silence, yeah? And... and you. AND TO DESTROY WESTERN CULTURE. Yeah. As I say, I don't wanna fully authorise this ideal just yet but... does seem pretty convincing. I mean, just look at a map. What kind of a shape... for a country... is that? Yeah, but anyway... uhhh... you all... uhhh... stay vigilant. Right? And I'll speak to you soon. In the previous sections, we’ve explored the idea of “the mob” as it emerged in the 19th century and has been passed down to us in the present. And, we’ve seen that it is just that, an idea, a cultural trope which, as soon as we examine any actually-existing examples of so-called “mobs” is quickly proven to be a fiction. But it has been a useful fiction. Whenever there have been instances of mass collective action, it has served as a way of drawing attention away from the reasons that have inspired people to join in with that action and as a means to encouraging us to view the arguments they have made as inherently unworthy of our time and energy. In the introduction to this video, I highlighted that, whenever someone invokes the idea of “cancel culture”, they tend to appear to have a specific supposed “cancelling” in mind. And yet, by centring the conversation on cancel culture, rather than focussing on the specific event which has provoked them to speak on the topic, they only end up drawing the discussion further and further away from the matter at hand. This may, initially, seem odd. Yet, the similarities between cancel culture anxieties about digital mobs and the historical anxieties surrounding physical mobs that we’ve been looking at suggests that, in short, this might be the whole point. See, the ruling classes of the 19th century were vehemently opposed to the reforms demanded by the socialist and democratic mass movements which arose throughout that century. They certainly weren’t above arguing that even limited expansions of the vote might lead to the complete downfall of civilisation. Yet, it was simply easier to disparage those campaigning for such reforms as an unruly and irrational mob—the added benefit being that doing so didn’t run the risk of legitimising the grievances and hopes of these movements as being worthy of debate. As I see it, the term “cancel culture” operates in a very similar way. Let’s take one of the higher profile cases of a supposed “cancelling” as an example: the backlash against J.K. Rowling’s increasingly confident and proud transphobia. There is, of course, a more basic question to be asked here about whether someone who, at time of recording, has a book at number one on the New York Times Best Sellers list can be meaningfully said to have been “cancelled”. With regards to the debates which have sprung up around the affair, however, the manner in which those defending Rowling so often try to move the conversation towards being about the broad notion of “cancel culture” works to tacitly discourage people from actually looking into the things that she’s said and from actually considering whether there might be any evidentiary basis for her spurious claims that the happiness and basic safety of trans people conflicts with that of cis women. The suggestion is that you don’t need to look at the details; they’re not important. And, it’s a clever rhetorical turn. For, whilst those seeking to defend Rowling often do agree with her transphobic rhetoric, guiding the conversation toward this vague notion of “cancel culture” enables them to defend the author without having to do the hard work of actually piecing together a defence of the specific things she’s said and written. At a perhaps even more pernicious level, the notion that there exists a thing called “cancel culture” encourages us to view all instances in which someone receives online backlash for their words or actions as essentially the same. This also carries over aspects of historical discourses surrounding mobs. George Rudé has argued that the work of crowd psychologists such as Le Bon ‘served to foster the illusion that, regardless of time and place, “a mob is a mob is a mob”’. It perhaps goes without saying that crowds have done both brilliant and terrible things throughout history. It was a crowd which stormed the Bastille, but it was also a crowd which [...]. Crowds marched (and continue to march) declaring that Black Lives Matter whilst, not so long ago, other crowds [...]. The mob hypothesis, however, encourages us to view all of these crowds as identical. The implication being that, if we want to criticise one of these supposed “mobs”, we have to be willing to criticise all of them. This same idea, transposed into the key of the internet, is central to “cancel culture” discourses. To return to the founding document of cancel culture”anxieties, it is the unacknowledged glue which holds together Ronson’s argument in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. The book is essentially a loosely-structured set of anecdotes about people, both celebrities and ordinary folk, who have received some form of backlash on the internet. Despite Ronson’s hesitancy to concede any wrongdoing or lack of judgement on the part of those on the receiving end of these instances of backlash, most people who read the book will likely come to differing conclusions about whether some push back might have been warranted (or not) in each individual case. Yet, the argumentative thrust of the book is that we should view every single case as fundamentally the same. Ronson’s thesis is that, if you don’t think that the online mocking of a pop science writer for fabricating quotes and plagiarising the work of others is completely barbaric, then you’re also sanctioning care workers who took a misjudged humorous photo at Arlington Cemetery being piled upon and losing their jobs. In fact, the “cancel culture” hypothesis relies upon the complete stripping away of detail and nuance. Like the theories of physical crowds which it so clearly echoes, it is, at best, a lazy attempt to string together a profound-sounding cultural analysis which there is little evidence to support. At its worst, it is an opportunistic attempt by media figures who would prefer to operate in a scenario in which their communication with the general public was entirely one-way to delegitimise any criticism of their words or actions. Either way, it asks us to make an all-or-nothing pronouncement on the legitimacy and morality of collective action on the internet. Yet, just as, when we look at specific examples of physical mobs, we find them to be infinitely more complex than Le Bon suggested, usually having very clear grievances and objectives, so too does taking a closer look at any instance of online backlash usually reveal a very specific disagreement. On some occasions, we might feel that a certain comment or action justifies being challenged; at other times, we might feel as though someone is being unfairly victimised. But retaining that nuance is important if we’re to have meaningful conversations about how we want our public sphere to operate. [♪ GENTLE CLASSICAL MUSIC ♪] [SOUND OF PHONE VIBRATING] TOM: Hello, you've reached the telephone of Tom Nicholas. You must be one of my new three-hundred dollars a month Patreon subscribers looking for your free five-minute chat. Oh, or is this about the divorce. LAURA: Hi Tom, no actually this is Laura from Pidgeon Books. TOM: Oh, so you received my manuscript then? LAURA: Yes. Although having it sent by armed courier wasn't... strictly necessary. TOM: I wish it wasn't... I wish it wasn't... LAURA: It wasn't. But we had a read anyway. TOM: Still trying to... piece your mind back together after having it blown. LAURA: Not exactly. TOM: Perhaps you weren't quite ready to hear the truth, yeah? The... the real truth. I understand. I understand. LAURA: Frankly Tom, it's one of the worst pieces of writing I've ever had the displeasure to receive in my entire career. There were less than ten fullstops in the entire document. And you argument... that France... isn't... real? A country I've been to literally multiple times... doesn't exist? To put it kindly Tom, ludicrous. Tom: [sighs] So they've got to you too? You know I've always hated the publishing industry and they're idiotic pro-France agenda. LAURA: Let me finish... let me finish... Yes, it's an intellectual and literary car crash. One of our fact checkers experienced physical pain reading it, Tom. But... Dr. Peterson's got himself in another meat coma so we're pushing back the publication of "I Pity The Rule: You Guessed It, Even More Rules" and we think this might appeal to a similar market. TOM: Hmmmmm... Hyper-intellectual renaissance men with abnormally large brains. LAURA: Sure. TOM: Ahh, I've always loved the publishing industry! Never afraid to print the truth no matter the cost! LAURA: So... and it makes me deeply... existentially sad to say this Tom... if you could get us a full draft... say by the spring... and please could you break it into chapters this time... we would be... delighted... to publish. TOM: Well, you better be ready for the fight of your lives 'cause they're gonna pull out all the stops to try and stop this one. LAURA: I am a hundred percent certain that won't be a problem. TOM: Of course it won't... of course it won't... [SIGHS] I want to close out this video with a few thoughts which I would have liked to have touched upon in greater detail but, for reasons of time, will merely pose as questions which you might want to mull over whenever you see the notion of “cancel culture” brought up in conversation. In particular, I want to highlight the extent to which the idea of the “frenzied mob”, whether online or off, only really makes sense through its opposition to the idea of the “rational individual”. In his own study of crowds in 1841, the Scottish journalist Charles Mackey wrote that ‘men, it has been well said, think in herds; […] they go mad in herds, while they recover their senses slowly, and one by one’. This idea that, alone, we are logical and intelligent whilst, collectively, we lose something of our mental faculties and become prone to some form of “groupthink” is deeply ingrained in our culture. It is not hard to see why such an idea has been so heavily circulated: contemporary capitalism requires us to view ourselves as disconnected individuals pursuing our own personal interests and the notion that there is an inherent connection between rationality and individuality helps to keep us skeptical of those who think or work collectively. The cancel culture hypothesis, knowingly or otherwise, cleverly narrativises this opposition. Articles and anecdotes which encourage sympathy towards someone who has supposedly been “cancelled” generally work to construct a mythic saga in which a lone individual has found themselves facing-off against an undifferentiated online mass. Our highly individualistic culture has taught us where our sympathies should lie in such a scenario. Yet, we have to recognise that such framings are always selective. For one, as we explored earlier in this video, we do not lose our individuality once we become part of a digital crowd. If we did, then online forums, subreddits or Facebook groups, to name but a few examples, would be perfectly harmonious places entirely free from conflict; something which they evidently are not. It would, therefore, be more than possible to re-tell any of these stories of supposed “cancellations” in a way which highlighted the specific reasons that a particular individual chose to call out behaviour that they found objectionable or hurtful. And, the opposite is true as well. For, at least in most of the higher-profile cases, the person who has been “cancelled” is also, in one way or another, part of a crowd. To go back to the example of J.K. Rowling, Rowling retains legions of fans, at least some of whom have come to support her precisely for her transphobic comments. Indeed, those new fans seem to have shaped some of her thinking about trans rights. Rowling is, therefore, every bit as much part of a “mob” as those who criticise her. It is simply that a choice has been made in how to tell the story of her radicalisation and the criticisms it has engendered. Who is part of a “mob” and who is not is therefore not something absolute but something which is decided by how these events are thought, written and spoken about. Once we begin to recognise this, we likely begin to see how these decisions might be informed, at some level, by the broader issue of who gets to be seen as an individual in our society and who is denied that right. The word “masses” has long been used as a synonym for working-class people in manner which denies their individuality and, through the cultural connection between individuality and rationality discussed a moment ago, their intelligence. And, a similar phenomenon frequently occurs in relation to other marginalised groups. Phrases like “the LGBTQ+ community” or “the Black community”, to point to just a couple of examples, can be powerful adhesives when used by people within those communities to organise. But they can also be used (carelessly or maliciously) by outsiders in ways which infer a level of homogeneity to the concerns and experiences of the countless individuals who make up those groups. It’s therefore important, when appraising discussions of “cancel culture” to consider how this broader inequity between who is allowed to be seen as an individual and who is denied that privilege might be tacitly informing the conversation. To approach this from the opposite angle, we would also do well to be skeptical of the notion that those who present themselves as completely disconnected individuals are inherently and extraordinarily rational. For, recent years seem to have seen a rising tide of contrarianism in our culture. This is evident in (often quite pathetic) attempts by some to get themselves “cancelled” precisely as a means to gaining attention and sympathy. It also has some echoes in the formation of conspiracy theory groups. Nevertheless, there is also a broader trend in which, following any cultural or political event, a competition begins to compose the most “unique” take on that incident. It doesn’t matter how terrible that take is, as long as it is unique. This seems to be driven by a similar fetishisation of individualist rationality and by a desire to be seen as more intelligent than “the crowd” solely for the reason that one’s analysis differs from that which is more widely accepted. Obviously, sometimes, someone’s unique viewpoint can enable us to understand a certain topic or event in new (and perhaps better) ways. Yet, we should be cautious to think this is always the case; sometimes consensus has emerged for a reason and “the mob” actually might have a point.
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Channel: Tom Nicholas
Views: 342,198
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: cancel culture, cancel, culture, canceling, public shaming, shame, so you've been publicly shamed, JK Rowling, J.K. Rowling, Rowling, publicly shamed, jon ronson, ronson, call-out culture, mob, digital mob, digital mobs, online mobs, online mob, mobs, Tom Nicholas, harpers letter, harper's letter, cancelling, social justice, crowds, madness of crowds, mob rule, celebrities, media, canceled, cancelled, what the theory, woke, woke scold, wokescold, sjw, political correctness, pc, Gina Carano
Id: Ns_qnfUqEJI
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 47min 20sec (2840 seconds)
Published: Sat Feb 06 2021
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