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When we're checking for hypocrisy, I think it's important to remember what original 'cancelations' and cancel culture entailed, even if that sometimes comes off as quibbling over degree. Plenty of your post still stands even if we're talking about minor retribution over speech, but some relies on the weight of what we knew as 'cancel culture' that just isn't applicable IMO.
Rather than just being a synonym for 'fired', 'canceled' was instead typified by the twitter phrase "wait, why is this person still being heard from? Didn't we cancel him?" It wasn't just getting someone unemployed from their current job, but instead attempting to actively make them unemployable. A complete salting of the earth by the mob, an ongoing blacklisting from society, kept up by dozens of psychos on twitter keeping tabs on targets for years on end (and rallying the troops if there was a new sighting). If Louis CK or Warren Ellis bounced back with a new sitcom or movie, that company would have been eating a ton of shit and facing boycotts. Pressure was put on their friends, family, and past colleagues to denounce them personally. Ethan Van Sciver was a top artist at DC, but he was openly republican and celebrated trump winning in 2016. For that he was hounded out of DC, and definitely wasn't going to be allowed to jump to Marvel or Image. The SJWs (not really 'woke', which is more of a high society new religion, though we conflate these now) wanted him bagging groceries or working fast food, or preferably just killing himself, and said so. He and some others had to jump to independent crowd-funded comics projects, and then got kicked off Kickstarter from this cancel culture pressure (until finally getting to Indiegogo who held tough).
If Jimmy Kimmel gets a new cable channel show, or tries going independent on Rumble or Substack, and rightwingers follow him around everywhere trying to him fired off those as well ("Do you know what he said about Charlie Kirk in his previous job? He can't be given another platform"), then there's a good case that we've entered right-wing cancel culture. Did people track the Home Depot lady to what job she got next, and go after that one too? Until that point, these seem to be pretty limited acts of retribution, rather than "canceling" people.
This is a valid point, although I'd (lightly) push back in a few areas:
Well, are there many examples of people who bounced back into other (non-independent) jobs after being canceled by the mob? I think Roseanne and Gina Carano never worked again except for some Daily Wire stuff? But part of this is just definitional I guess, where I'm suggesting that a cancellation means it's more serious than a one-time 'eye of sauron' moment of fury. In your post you said Bari Weiss was canceled, but that was just a story about her getting 'dogpiled on twitter' for a tweet a year after she joined NYT, and then she eventually ended up resigning from NYT 2.5 years after that for other reasons. I just wouldn't define that as a cancellation in even a weak way.
I think you're right about the institutional power. Wikipedia is an underappreciated tool here where the skew can range from slight to major, and it really functions as a kind of 'final say' on people's stories.
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What would you say is the distinction here? To me they were interchangeable, SJW was just the older term that didn’t achieve offline usage
Yeah they're interchangeable at this point, especially from the perspective of everyone understanding basically what you mean. And the 1-syllable version is certainly easier to be workable offline rather than the 5-syllable one.
I just think there was meaningfully something different being gestured at with the "warrior" part of it that we were seeing in the mid 2010s, while 'woke' was more like new elite manners or religion that especially spread among coastal urban white people who were susceptible to guilt tripping or were looking for meaning. I don't know why it works, but being told that you have the original sin of being born white and thus being intrinsically racist (even if you don't consciously think you're racist), but that the good news is you can repent and strive to actively be anti-racist and elevate PoC in your life while spreading this awakening to others...somehow this did actually work on a lot of people. So at least the way I saw it, there's usually a well-meaning core to wokeness. A lot of these people actually did think the non-woke were simply lacking education about historical injustice or something, while other older boomers maybe just shrugged their shoulders and went along with it to avoid status loss, like "I guess this is where society is going now, I can adapt".
So in my opinion, wokeness is enough to ruin movies/shows/fiction, or to make events or press conferences annoying with land acknowledgements or massive split-screen sign-language translations. But it took some real coordinated meanness/nastiness of self-styled social justice warriors to actively cancel people and salt their earth. This had a different level of commitment where these people knew they were down in the trenches of the culture war and had enemies.
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This is a very important point now that "Cancel Culture" has become a generic term. Part of the reason, I think, is that the cancelled ecosystem has grown strong enough that it's not as easy to drum people out of society. For a timely example, Blake Neff was canceled and fired from Tucker Carlson's show in 2020, then hired by Charlie Kirk. Of course, there were attempts to keep him canceled, but Kirk didn't care.
Still, even though the situation has improved greatly in the post-covid era, it's important to remember that canceling didn't originally mean punishment, it meant unpersoning. I suppose, too, that the belief of cancelers that they would be able to keep their targets canceled forever was inextricably linked with the Great Awokening belief that their total, eternal cultural victory was inevitable. Whoops.
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