Last week, The New Republic published an essay, written by Osita Nwanevu, ridiculing “cancel culture” as a great modern concern.
What’s “cancel culture”? What’s with the scare quotes?
It’s the culture war, baby.
If you’re a “social justice warrior,” then “cancel culture” is best understood as a right-wing concern about left-wing activists who use social media to shame provocative figures through hyper-coordinated criticism.
If you’re a “heterodox podcast host,” then “cancel culture” is best understood as a dreadful resurgence of Mao’s old struggle sessions as a model for web-based activism and discourse, as the “hyper-coordinated criticism” from web activists sounds more like death threats and unruly calls for even the most trivial offenders to be fired, disavowed, outed, imprisoned, killed, “cancelled.”
Really, we’re conflating a few terms, “call-out culture,” “outrage culture,” and “cancel culture,” each bearing slightly different connotations.
The general conflict includes several factions which all vary in prominence, politics, demographics, etc., and no, you needn’t be a Twitter user for “cancel culture” to impress upon you in some way.
In “The ‘Cancel Culture’ Con,” of course, Nwanevu examines “cancel culture,” the variant most closely associated with web-based crusades against public figures, individually: Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., et al.
(In contrast, “outrage culture” might describe some backlash to a comedian’s jokes, but it might also describe some backlash to a newspaper headline, a fast-food restaurant’s menu, a movie trailer, etc.)
Nwanevu casts comedians as the most prominent faction on defense in the broader “cancel culture” conflict. “They’ve set about scolding us about scolds, whining about whiners, and complaining about complaints,” Nwanevu writes, “because they would rather cling to material that was never going to stay fresh and funny forever than adapt to changing audiences, a new set of critical concerns, and a culture that might soon leave them behind.”
Dave Chappelle jokes about transgender identity, and these jokes irritate some progressive viewers who once loved Chappelle unreservedly. But Dave Chappelle is no Lenny Bruce, Nwanevu argues, Dave Chappelle is doing just fine.
Nwanevu errs, I think, in limiting his engagement with “cancel culture” to high-profile, high-profit subjects, such as Chappelle, though I understand why Nwanevu does so.
It’s easy for culture war factions — and then, for readers — to converge around celebrities as common reference points for otherwise dissimilar groups. Plus, it’s regrettably easy to assign gratuitous significance — e.g., political significance — to celebrities since “gratuitous significance” is, essentially, a celebrity’s currency.
I think social media cultivates a tendency for users to mistake civilians for public figures in terms of “accountability,” a term which “cancel culture” deploys somewhat menacingly against low-profile targets.
For non-celebrities, “cancel culture” is a privacy problem.
For celebrities, though, “cancel culture,” as a concern, seems to be a hackneyed re-branding of the celebrity’s long war against criticism, which many comedians can’t take any better than “snowflakes” can take a joke.
But Nwanevu didn’t limit his criticisms to various comedians in cars getting cancelled.
He also named several journalists who, Nwanevu believes, promote the general hysteria about “cancel culture” in print: Robby Soave, Jesse Singal, Kat Rosenfield, and Katie Herzog.
These are dissimilar writers, in some respects, but they fraternize with each other on Twitter and elsewhere, which I note only because I suspect Nwanevu recruited them all together, as a faction, into his thesis for this reason — a reason I’ll revisit below.
In his essay, Nwanevu mocks Soave, Singal, Rosenfield, and Herzog for agonizing about various “cancel culture” victims whose critics never successfully “cancelled” them in any real, enduring way.
Nwanevu cites Singal’s January 2019 reporting for Tablet about the young-adult novelist, Amélie Wen Zhao, who suffered a highly-speculative “whisper campaign” about racist themes in her debut novel, Blood Heir, among other innuendo about Zhao personally. Rosenfield also covered the Blood Heir controversy as Zhao apologized for writing about slavery in her book. “Some (including Ellen Oh) lauded Zhao for her bravery, others derided her for cowardice,” Rosenfield reported, “and many wondered aloud if the author had self-censored voluntarily out of fear of a mob that would hound her until publication and beyond. Soave characterized Zhao’s ordeal as modern book-burning led by “social justice zealots” who wished to get Zhao’s publishing contract cancelled.
Several months later, with hindsight as his advantage, Nwanevu presents the controversy’s resolution as his counterpoint: “Zhao’s Blood Heir—the novel that inspired Soave’s allusion to book burnings, the novel Singal suggested would never be released thanks to a controversy that ‘derailed’ Zhao’s career—will be out in November.”
Elsewhere, Nwanevu cites Herzog’s reference, in a recent essay for The Stranger, to the former University of Oklahoma quarterback, Kyler Murray, who, as a teenager, repeatedly tweeted “queer” as an epithet. Six years later, once Murray won a Heisman Trophy, Twitter users to resurfaced Murray’s tweets in order to shame him.
Herzog characterizes Murray’s cancellation as cruel and unusual, given Murray's age, 15, when he tweeted so offensively.
Nwanevu cites Herzog’s concern as classic proof of “cancel culture” critics overstating “cancel culture” in effect. “Those curious about how low cancellation has brought Murray should tune into Fox next Sunday afternoon,” Nwanevu writes. “He’s now the starting quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals.”
The downright profitability of so many “cancel culture” martyrs inspires Nwanevu to describe “cancel culture,” the concern, as a "con.”
Crucially, Nwanevu declines to spend much time contemplating the counter-examples: “cancel culture” targets who were, in fact, cancelled, and unfairly.
On Thursday, Singal published a newsletter in response to Nwanevu’s essay. He says Nwanevu “doesn’t really engage with any of the interesting ‘cancel culture’ arguments,” which Singal puts forth as arguments about partisan equivocation, the nature and scale of social media outrage, and the non-celebrity’s experience as a subject of such “cancellation” campaigns.
“The vast majority of his piece simply points out, over and over, that various people purported to have been ‘cancelled’ are doing fine (more or less),” Singal writes, “which is a rebuttal to an argument few people are making.”
If you want to litigate “cancel culture” on the merits, then I suggest reading Nwanevu’s essay, and then reading Singal’s newsletter, and then writing your own damn newsletter: you decide. I think the two entries are fairly representative dispatches (for better or worse) from the two major factions in the “cancel culture” argument.
I agree with Nwanevu about the hysteria in so much “cancel culture” discourse about comedians and other celebrities, but I agree with Singal about the perils which cancellation campaigns (and other punitive activism modes) pose for everyone else.
I’m more so interested in litigating the secondary concern, about factionalism in online disagreements, in Singal’s newsletter.
Singal opens his newsletter by admitting the glibness which has polluted “cancel culture” as a shorthand. Singal then coins another eager-to-be-hackneyed term, “slalom journalism,” to ridicule Nwanevu’s essay.
“It’s a style in which certain pundits position themselves as tackling big issues in bold, fearless, truthtelling ways, cutting through all the bullshit out there, but in which they themselves are, in fact, the bullshitters,” Singal writes. “This particular subgenre of bullshitting involves whooshing past, slalom-style, any of the arguments or facts that could disrupt the author’s own certitude and moral righteousness without making any attempt to engage with them.”
Nwanevu engaged in “slalom journalism,” Singal argues, by eviscerating so many articles which, in fact, anticipated and addressed his counterpoints despite his pretending otherwise. He’s thus misled his audience, which need not read the offending articles for themselves since Nwanevu has given his audience the excerpts and the gist.
Here, I agree with Singal about Nwanevu’s comprehension: most of the articles which Nwavenu cites do concede that “cancellation” is, in many cases, a farcical state; “to cancel” someone is, in many cases, to express some wishful thinking.
Singal objects to Nwanevu’s casting celebrities as the exclusive concern of “cancel culture,” when really, Singal argues, “cancel culture” errs far more crucially in its tendency to harass ordinary civilians, for sketchy reasons, with overwhelming scrutiny and threats.
Singal cites Monica Foy, a young woman who tweeted an insult, in response to news headlines, about “a dead cop” with “creepy perv eyes” only to find Breitbart News launching a massive backlash against her. Foy received rape threats and death threats, which Singal reported in a September 2015 story about Foy for New York.
“Foy’s scary story isn’t the only example of how questionable media behavior can exacerbate these situations and cause harm,” Singal writes in his newsletter. He cites several other compelling examples, including instances where progressive activists and mainstream news media cultivated misinformation and harm.
Singal contrasts Nwanevu’s concerns about “the fate of Dave Chappelle” with his own, righteous concerns about Foy and others.
Again, Singal undersells his own critical interest in Dave Chappelle.
Days before Nwanevu published his essay in The New Republic, Singal published a newsletter about Chappelle and his latest stand-up comedy special, Sticks and Stones, distributed by Netflix.
“Comedy isn’t a particularly important example in the grand scheme of things,” Singal writes, “but it’s an instructive one.” He describes Chappelle’s frustrations with the “arbitrary and inconsistent” standards which design to determine which jokes, about which groups, e.g., transgender people, are prohibitively offensive, and which aren’t. “This is an argument that appears to have a great deal of resonance among Americans,” Singal notes.
A day after he published his thoughts about Chappelle, Singal re-circulated the newsletter on Twitter with a comment: “Think this is my most-viewed newsletter yet.”
Let’s make some deductions here.
Chappelle, a comedian, has expressed some crucial insights about “cancel culture”;
Singal cares enough about Chappelle and “cancel culture,” together, to write a newsletter about these two subjects, together; and
enough readers care about Chappelle and “cancel culture,” together, to rank Singal’s newsletter about these two subjects, together, among his most-viewed newsletters yet.
So it’s frustrating to read Singal’s insistence, spelled out in his response to Nwanevu, that “only a tiny, tiny subset of the people discussing ‘cancel culture’ whose most pressing concern is the fate of Dave Chappelle.”
It would be stretch to characterize Chappelle as as Singal’s “most pressing concern,” of course, but it’s also a stretch to characterize the discourse about comedians, and other celebrities, as “a tiny, tiny subset” in “cancel culture” discourse. The suggestion defies six million different headlines about Dave Chappelle, six trillion different tweets about him and other comedians, and countless hours of The Joe Rogan Experience.
Essentially, Singal means to underscore social media’s role in coordinating cruelty and misinformation against helpless targets (Foy). Singal sees Nwanevu evading these more realistic observations about these more obscure and sympathetic targets by making glib arguments about celebrities (Chappelle).
But Singal can seem to be evading the obvious motivation for Nwanevu’s approach: Singal, his readers, and his allies in “cancel culture” discourse have indeed obsessed over Chappelle, they do indeed cast celebrities as stars in their arguments against “cancel culture,” “wokeness,” etc.
Singal’s right about the broader “cancel culture” discourse being more advanced, complex, and realistic than Nwanevu’s essay suggests. But he’s disingenuous to suggest that comedians, and other celebrities, are some straw-man faction which only some obscure corner of “cancel culture” discourse really cares about.
I don’t think Nwanevu cares about Chappelle any more or less than Singal and his allies in the culture wars do.
I refer to Singal’s allies; Nwanevu, in a Twitter exchange with Singal, refers to Singal’s “ilk,” a term which irritates Singal. “I also don’t know what Nwanevu means by my ‘ilk’,” Singal writes in his newsletter, “it is a lonely feeling to lack knowledge of one’s own ilk!”
In the spirit of no-bullshiting, I can tell you Singal’s “ilk” includes Soave, Herzog, Rosenfield, plus Cathy Young, Wesley Yang, and Conor Friedersdorf.
I can tell you that both Singal and Nwanevu know these people to be who Nwanevu regards as Singal’s “ilk.”
Strangely, Singal can’t just say this in his own newsletter, and he can’t just say this in his longer Twitter exchange with Nwanevu.
He can’t simply explain to his readers that the reason why Nwanevu regards Soave, Rosenfield, and Herzog as Singal’s “ilk” is because they are in fact his ilk; they publicly converse as allies in the “cancel culture” conflict, they interview one another, they link to each other in articles, they defend one another’s work against criticism, they appear to be friends, etc.
Singal won’t just argue that Nwanevu should address him, individually, since he can only speak for himself and shouldn’t be made to account for the opinions of other writers, including his friends and allies.
Singal has to pretend he has no idea what, or whom, Nwanevu is even talking about.
He’s bullshitting you.
I know who Nwanevu is talking about, and I don’t even have a Twitter account!
In fairness, Singal was only compounding the mystery introduced by Nwanevu, who also declined, in his own essay, to explain the Twitter association which would lead him to his address Soave, Singal, Herzog, Rosenfield, et al. as a faction.
The articles don’t fully explain Nwanevu’s approach.
The reader would need to possess some familiarity with Soave, Singal, Rosenfield, and Herzog’s tweets, which reveal their camaraderie in opposing “cancel culture” as an anti-“woke” clique.
Without Twitter, I’m not sure Nwanevu would have ever thought to link all these writers under his essay’s central criticism (about “cancel culture,” as a concern, being a self-serving con). Chappelle and Zhao are dissimilar figures. Weiss and Zhao are dissimilar figures. Zhao didn’t gain anything from “cancel culture.” She got bullied into contrition and revision by forces mimicking the CCP.
But then, without Twitter, I would fail to perceive the degree to which Singal is playing dumb about his “ilk.”
Twitter is the outsized influence in Nwanevu and Singal’s respective essays, though neither writer wants to admit as much, on the interpersonal level, because admitting Twitter’s outsized influence in intellectual rivalries is fucking embarrassing.
So Nwanevu and Singal, in heated disagreement, must at least agree to pretend to be motivated by, I don’t know, astrology.
There’s real tragedy in the fact that I’ve needed to cite Twitter so frequently to illuminate the real tensions in the Nwanevu-Singal exchange. Seriously, without reading the relevant Twitter feeds as endnotes, the reader is left to decode all manners of “bullshit” in both essays.
In a sense, Twitter assigned these two pieces while also rendering the pieces illegible beyond Twitter.
Writing about the Nwanevu-Singal exchange has got me thinking about Bret Stephens, the conservative New York Times columnist who, more than any other New York Times columnist, has a contentious and disordered relationship with Twitter.
Last month, the George Washington University professor Dave Karpf tweeted a joke in response to reports about a bedbug infestation in the New York Times newsroom. “The bedbugs are a metaphor,” Karpf wrote. “The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”
Bret Stephens sucks: that’s the joke.
Crucially, Karpf didn’t include Stephens’ handle in his tweet. In order for Stephens to have discovered Karpf’s tweet, then, Stephens must have been scouring all mentions of his name (as opposed to his handle) in Twitter search — a self-obsessive and cringeworthy habit for a 45-year-old man.
In further debasement, Stephens emailed Karpf’s provost to complain about the tweet.
“I'm often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people—people they've never met—on Twitter,” Stephens wrote. “Come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for a minute, and then call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face.”
Stephens ranted about Karpf in an MSNBC interview; Stephens compared Karpf to a Nazi police commander in a New York Times column; and then Stephens, as self-immolation, deleted his Twitter account.
“Twitter is a sewer. It brings out the worst in humanity,” Stephens tweeted in his final dispatch. “I sincerely apologize for any part I’ve played in making it worse.”
In pitting his old-fashioned sensibilities in contrast with modern web discourse, embodied by Karpf, Stephens, ironically, excelled in several extremely-online behaviors:
obsessively policing mentions of his own name on Twitter;
tweeting through it;
tripling down;
deleting his Twitter account, but not before issuing a big, self-righteous pronouncement about his reasons for deleting his Twitter account;
comparing a Twitter user who insulted him, with a mild joke, to a Nazi police commander; and, specifically,
comparing a Twitter user who insulted him, with a mild joke, to a Nazi police commander by subtweeting the user with a reference to “bed bugs” in a New York Times column, where the Twitter user goes unnamed and the underlying conflict goes unarticulated.
You read a man sounding so hysterical in response to obscure jokes about the bedbugs at Port Authority, and you begin to wonder whether his own cautions about modern discourse are entirely lost on him.
So I have a hard time taking these big showdowns between the web-savages and the web-rationalists very seriously.
They’re all brain-damaged Twitter obsessives.
It’s a minor problem in many discussions about social media culture. The web-rationalists who warn about “outrage culture,” “media bubbles,” and whatnot: these crusaders all turn out to be the most cliquish, entrenched, and extremely-online people imaginable, despite their protestations about everyone else.
I enjoy Wesley Yang’s provocations, I really do, but he tweets like he’s the goddamn Raincoat Killer!
After Singal published his newsletter, he and Herzog both relished the cautionary tale of Aaron Calvin, a Des Moines Register reporter who retweeted the New Yorker writer Helen Rosner’s generic praise for Nwanevu’s essay shortly before succumbing to his own strange “cancel culture” controversy:
Twitter users unearthed old, offensive tweets from Calvin, who had unearthed his subject Carson King’s old, offensive tweets in a recent story about King’s viral charity fundraiser, which began as a tailgate beer-fund, for a local children’s hospital. Ultimately, Anheuser-Busch, which bolstered the fundraiser, disavowed King, and then the Des Moines Register fired Calvin.
Sharing a screenshot from Calvin’s Twitter feed (now private), Herzog and Singal ridiculed Calvin for retweeting Nwanevu’s article.
“Someone needs to tell this young journalist who was fired from his job over old offensive tweets and who was driven from his home and who is afraid to go out in public because of death threats that ‘cancel culture’ isn't real,” Singal tweeted.
Mind you, Calvin retweeted a link.
That was his great contribution to the Nwanevu-Singal exchange.
Retweeting a link.
Dog-piling a journalist for retweeting another journalist who linked to a third journalist who wrote mean things about you and your friends for The New Republic ranks among the most extremely-online “bullshit” a web journalist could do to disgrace their own arguments about how journalists (if no one else) should ideally behave on the internet.
Stubbornly, I’m sure, Singal and Herzog would insist they weren’t “dog-piling” Calvin or “making an example out of him” — they were just “making a point,” from clever perception, in passive, benign fashion.
The only sort of person who might accept the “passive, benign” pretense in patrolling Calvin’s retweets, like a cop, is anyone else whose brain has been liquefied by Twitter, like Singal.
Singal’s critics being cops, too, doesn’t mean he’s not a cop, too.
It’s one thing to read Singal’s newsletter and agree/disagree with his arguments about “cancel culture” and Nwanevu’s approach.
But it’s hard to read Singal with fuller context — so, including his Twitter account — and identify in him any real counter-example to how Nwanevu think we all ought to behave together, as model citizens, as respectable intellectuals, on the internet.
I guess the great difference between Nwanevu and Singal regarding “cancel culture” is Nwanevu thinking we should excavate the worst tweets of random people for punitive purposes while Singal thinks we shouldn’t.
I guess that’s it?
But “cancel culture” is largely an argument about civilized disagreement in the twenty-first century. It’s an argument about vicious, disordered discourse. It’s an argument about fairness. It’s an argument about damage. It is, of course, an argument about Twitter.
It’s an argument which Singal will never win so long as readers have his Twitter account to compare to Nwanevu’s Twitter account.
They are, essentially, the same Twitter account.
Every web journalist’s Twitter account is the same Twitter account.
Yes, even Bret Stephens. (R.I.P.)
I read the these factions interacting on the social media platform which we’re largely arguing about in the first place, and I struggle to distinguish the savages from the rationalists.
I read journalists obsessing over Dave Chappelle only to complain about other journalists obsessing over Dave Chappelle, who, despite massive evidence to the contrary, no one cares about.
I read journalists tweeting six trillion times per day, about petty nonsense, complaining about other journalists tweeting six trillion times per day, about petty nonsense.
I see sleepless screenshot warriors who have the nerve to criticize everyone else as too extremely online.
I read cliquishness and hysteria written in opposition to media cliques and partisan hysterias.
I read “media bubbles” bitching about “media bubbles,” as if any of these people are farm-striding populists, unmoved by timelines and group chats.
I read journalists having meltdowns over headlines, quotes, and excerpts from arguments which they will never comprehend beyond parody, from articles which they will never read in full.
I read journalists playing dumb.
I watch journalists performing daily meltdown routines in defense of decorum.
I read so many overheated, unhinged Twitter threads written in defense of cold, calm thought.
This is web media.
It’s bullshit.
But you can’t cancel us all.