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Obviously cancel culture works both ways now. Not new. When Trump was first almost assassinated, you may remember a video of a Home Depot worker which always struck me. Lady is middle aged and working the front desk - actually already one of the most thankless positions, as a former employee there - and is confronted by a guy filming who looked up her social media on his own time before. She basically just asks him to leave. But still, fired. That one stuck in my memory because it felt like an especially low blow, not like someone more professional with more job security, but a true near-minimum wage worker.
But it was recently pointed out to me that the beginnings of what might be termed cancel culture (less individualized but still targeted pressure campaigns) were way earlier. Remember Christian groups trying to cancel different movies because of inappropriate content? Certain songs, company actions too. Actually plenty of moral crusades going back even farther. And the left of course had the apartheid boycott, Vietnam era protest against officials and companies supporting the war, or certain college speakers, stuff like that.
This makes me think that in some fashion it’s more about social media itself than any deliberate action by the left or right in particular. Somewhat supporting this is how when Twitter was left dominated? Lots of leftist cancelling. Now that X is right dominated? Lots of rightist cancelling.
So to me I really don’t think it makes sense to adopt a paradigm of “they did it first”, on neither side. I used to think otherwise, but the longer I see it go on all over, the more I suspect it’s a human nature meets new technology problem. It could be that social media becomes the new workplace in terms of banal corporate-speak and circumspection.
Those fit with what we call cancel culture, yes. They are the examples I, and many others like me, used in apoplectic exasperation when we were begging progressives (donglegate, elevatorgate, gamergate, etcetera ad infinitum) not to enable a culture of getting people fired for saying dumb shit in their private lives, because by the noughts we were finally establishing a moderately stable and coherent application of free speech to the home/work divide, and the only thing that was required to keep it, the only thing that people had to do to maintain it, was not be petty vindictive assholes who stew for days over words on the internet. But apparently that was a bridge too far.
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Well put. The "they started it" angle of attack obscures that we've all "started it" in a messy, volley-like and cross-cutting manner.
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"Cancel culture" does not mean "moral crusade".
Wanting to ban a movie because the movie itself contains inappropriate content isn't cancel culture. It would have to be something like "wanting to ban an innocuous movie because it was produced by someone who used inappropriate content in a different movie".
This definition would exclude many, if not most, prominent examples of cancellation.
Such as?
Off the top of my head: Gina Carano (or Chuck Wendig :V), Louis CK, Bret Weinstein, and James Damore were all censured for things they said/did, not for tangential association with someone else.
The equivalent to "banning a movie for the contents of the movie itself", for people, is "firing someone from his job for things said in his role in his job"--writers publishing books that say bad things, politicians making speeches that say bad things, celebrities saying things during publicity for their films, professors teaching bad things in their class, etc. None of your examples are like that and thus are not excluded by my definition.
Damore posted things in a forum at his job, but posting there wasn't part of his job duties. (And even if it had been, he had been assured that he could speak freely.)
I'm not sure I agree with that equivalency, but nevertheless: Louis CK wasn't fired (and, as with many cancelled individuals, couldn't be fired by the very nature of his work). He got in trouble for actions taken in the course of his professional career that were not even political, which led to people disassociating from him for a while. Bret Weinstein got in trouble for statements made in his capacity as an Evergreen State professor, and also wasn't fired (he resigned). Damore got in trouble for statements made in his capacity as a Google employee; whether or not they pertained to his regular duties does not strike me as particularly relevant (to illustrate: suppose Damore had made unambiguously fireable remarks to a fellow employee over his lunch break. The fact that this was outside of his normal duties is irrelevant). The argument in Damore's favor is not that Google had no basis to fire him over stuff not directly related to his job duties, but that he was punished for something that didn't warrant it.
However, as I said, I think this is an incredible narrow conceptualization of cancellation that doesn't match common usage, would exclude many instance that are generally considered to be central examples, and would capture all sorts of things that don't fit common understanding.
Like, hypothetical: someone makes a film disparaging MLK Jr (or whoever; it doesn't really matter). Outraged social media mobs lobby to have showings pulled and the director and producer blacklisted. Under your criteria, this would not be cancellation.
Being constructively fired counts as being fired. So does being blacklisted or constructively blacklisted.
His lunch break is outside his job; actions in his lunch break are not performance of job duties.
It would not be cancellation if they pulled showings of this particular movie. If they tried to get him removed from producing anything, even movies unrelated to MLK, it would be cancellation. Each movie counts separately, even if you could phrase it as saying he has a single job to make movies.
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Wanting to censor a movie because of the contents of the movie, wanting to get someone fired because of something he said, and wanting to get someone fired for association with someone else are three different things. The first is censorship but not really what people refer to with "canceling".
If your book publisher says "censor the racial slurs or we don't publish the book, I don't care how historically accurate they are", that's censorship. If it says "a viral Twitter thread has brought to our attention that you wrote racial slurs in a previous book, we will not publish anything you write" that's cancellation. Cancellations for speech are a kind of attempted censorship by intimidation, and censorship or self-censorship can be motivated by cancel culture even without an actual campaign, but they're not the same thing. Something like the Comics Code wasn't cancellation because (as far as I know) they didn't care if you had made comics that violated it before. On the other hand the Hollywood blacklist of communists was more similar to cancellation. When episodes of It's Always Sunny get taken down for blackface, or episodes of South Park get taken down for depicting Muhammad, that's censorship but it's not a (successful) cancellation unless the people responsible for those episodes get blacklisted or similar.
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If you find these examples applicable, that seems to suggest an underlying picture of these individuals along the lines of "lead star in the movie that is their life", whence banning a movie from public screening ~ removing the person from positions in which others can get exposed to their life-movie.
Flipping your modus ponens into a modus tollens, are you saying we should see those people in that way? To do so and draw the appropriate consequences may feel like poetic justice when applied to influencers and other attention whores, but it also feels like a setup for dystopian sci-fi. The face you present to society gets judged on age-appropriateness, moral wholesomeness and non-offensiveness in the same way a movie release would. Always act like the children are watching.
I am not sure I follow. My comment was not meant to suggest these people deserved to be shitcanned; it was meant to provide well-known examples of people being cancelled for their actions. That in turn was meant to substantiate my point that Jiro's proposed definition of being cancelled would exclude many cases we'd intuitive consider to be central examples.
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