#1 In Praise of Cancel Culture
Cancel culture originated in Ireland. And it’s not what you think.
by Joseph Valente and Seán Kennedy
From an Irish studies perspective, the genealogy of cancel culture can be traced back to September 1881 when Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the non-violent Irish Home Rule movement, gave an influential speech in which he urged his followers not to respond to colonial predation with shootings and agrarian mayhem, but by holding the offenders and their fellow travelers in “moral coventry”, ostracizing them in every aspect of their public life. His words that day introduced the practice of boycotting (named after its first target, the land agent, Charles Boycott), a signal event. But more than that, Parnell’s speech galvanized a culture of civil recalcitrance grounded in a simple but transformative insight: that the rich and powerful British garrison class, the so-called Protestant Ascendancy, remained dependent upon the poor and disenfranchised plebeians for the effective prosecution of empire in Ireland. Parnell’s paleolithic version of cancel culture, moral coventry, was above all else a means of exploiting that dependency, persuading the Irish people to refuse to participate in the economic practices and social rituals of their own oppression. In this regard, the boycott exploited the existing architecture of colonial rule, in which those relegated to the ethnic and socioeconomic basement formed the building blocks of the entire structure, its material and symbolic support.
A similar structure of mandarin dependency characterizes the neoliberal dispensation of capitalism. The masters of the universe today possess powers unprecedented in modern liberal society. Always a significant political force, wealth has come to dominate and override the social compact as never before, owing both to its accelerating concentration in a tiny percentage of the citizenry, and the absent, or toothless, regulation of how it may be applied in the shaping of policy and legislation, in electoral campaigns and the determination of the rules that govern them. This consolidation of lucre as political influence has been exacerbated by legal rulings such as Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission (2010), which conferred personhood on corporate entities, whose expenditures on political advocacy acquired the status of constitutionally protected speech. Since then, no limits can be placed on lobbying in American politics. Money talks, like never before. It is the new currency of social value.
Similarly, the neoliberalisation of the EU has all-but-destroyed the European social-democratic project: “There is no such thing anymore as domestic policy making”, said Angela Merkel in 2012. The traditional tension at the heart of democratic capitalism — equality before the law versus a staggered inequality of resources — has been dissipated in favor of the latter economic disparity and the system as a whole commandeered to serve the disproportionately privileged.
At the same time, however, the economic regime of neoliberalism is also, and foundationally, a consumerist regime. The system that enables the concentration of financial clout depends upon the corresponding dispersal of discretionary income by people of every class, all the way down the line, in a manner consistent with their ability to pay (or rather their ability to carry consumer debt). As Jean Baudrillard pointed out nearly 50 years ago, the concept of need in late capitalism refers not to what individuals must be supplied with to sustain life, but to what the economy requires individuals to need if it is to operate efficiently.
By the same token, those enriched and empowered by the system, the elites but also the affluent middle classes, the 30% not the 1%, need the consumer buy-in of the lower orders to guarantee their continued socioeconomic advancement and security, much as the landlords of Ireland needed the productive labor and social recognition of their underlings. And like Parnell’s moral coventry, cancel culture exploits this dependency along lines isomorphic with the architecture of the domination that it opposes.
Whereas corporate culture has sought to inoculate itself against the democratizing impetus of electoral politics by confounding expenditure with expression, speech with subvention, the practitioners of cancel culture “talk back” to this strategy by withdrawing material support, in the form of patronage, from those who violate the values they cherish. We use the phrase “talk back” advisedly. In a world where lobbying can be legally enshrined as protected speech, the withdrawal of custom and recognition as ways of calling out offending corporations, institutions and opinion makers must be considered protected speech as well — and not, as certain entitled quarters have been heard to bemoan, the suppression thereof.
Indeed, those wont to insist that the remedy for unwelcome speech is not censorship but more and dissenting speech should, by rights, embrace cancel culture which, far from barring, muzzling or outlawing anyone’s voice, serves to add another, forceful chorus to the social dialogue. Certain long empowered social commentators — whether from the political, business, academic or artistic communities — should not feel shouted down by the collective lungs of the cancel movement. They should feel instructed in the frustration their outsized megaphones have caused their less fortunate and enfranchised fellows these many years.
Of course to argue that cancel culture is a legitimate exercise of collective political rights does not answer the question: “but is it the right thing to do?”; to show moral coventry to be an effective response to systemic inequity does not necessarily prove that it is a moral tactic in itself. For that, we must begin by dissociating cancel culture from those toxic practices of symbolic violence — trolling, online bullying, personal ridicule and harassment etc. — with which certain of its critics have tried, invidiously, to identify it. Properly considered, the demarche of cancelling is always directed at the stronger, less vulnerable position by the weaker more precarious one. Bullying is bullying, a time-honoured tactic. We don’t need new ways to describe it. We just need to get better at calling it out.
We must also distinguish cancel culture from all attempts to remove from their posts, or otherwise discipline professionally, anyone who expresses views different from our own. Cancel culture is not about the suppression of free speech, as the Harper letter signatories suppose. No one is positively silenced by cancel culture. When Marc Lamont Hill was fired from CNN for expressing his views on the occupation of Palestine, for example, that was not cancel culture. That was suppression. Cancel culture is not what happens when we deny someone a platform. It is what happens when we cease to pay them attention. It is what happens when we refuse to heed them and their views, abjure them in both their person and their politics, as a function of our disdain for their conduct. When we hold someone in moral coventry, we protect their basic rights. But we nevertheless refuse to sanction their conduct. It is an act of human conscience. A mode of non-violent aggression meant to protect the moral fabric of society from the degradations of contemporary politics.
Critics of cancel culture liken it to discrimination. And they are right. Cancel culture is about discrimination: moral discrimination. It is a deliberate rejection of all that we find morally repugnant. And such acts of discrimination are increasingly necessary in an undiscriminating world where everything is for sale and corporations dictate the moral remit of politics. Left to itself, capitalism is a monster. From the perspective of capital, it doesn’t matter what one is doing so long as it generates profit. The logic of capital, conceived as a pure logic of accumulation, doesn’t care. Is not designed to care. Indeed, cannot care. Capitalism is not capable of feeling. Hence it is not capable of ethical thought. It is a logic, a system. A system for the accumulation of profit. Whether one is educating children, or selling them for sex, or harvesting their organs, where profit is being made the venture is always-already successful from a purely capitalist perspective. The profit motive, we might say, is sociopathic: it can conceive no other source of value than itself. Quite literally, nothing else matters.
The logic of capital is not so much immoral as amoral: beyond good and evil. And this, above all, is why it needs to be regulated. Why the ‘art of the deal’ finds its purest embodiment in the pitilessness of a figure like Donald Trump. If Covid has taught us anything, it is not that Trump does not care, but that he cannot care. Cannot afford to care. In this, he is quintessentially capitalist. For there to be moral life under capitalism, properly human life, the profit motive will always need to be regulated against itself. Against its own inherent tendency towards the degradation of human values and the value of humans.
A chief lesson of our times, then, is that for human societies to thrive economies need to be regulated. And perhaps the central insight of cancel culture is that human attention is an economy: it is something we pay. The principle of marketing has always been that wherever human attention is being paid, there is money to be made. To the extent that we pay attention, we are always liable to become the product. And this is where the ethics of the new social media and the sociopathic logic of capital converge. The large social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, for example, have succeeded in monetising the human attention span per se. It no longer matters what one attends to — what one’s interests are — however much they talk about such things. To the extent that one pays attention to the platform, the platform is in business.
Historically, advertisers sold things to our attention. Social media just sell our attention. In this, they are among the purest mediators of the logic of capital. It is a great irony of the so-called ‘social network’ that it is, in fact, profoundly anti-social, even sociopathic: indifferent to all sources of value except profit. And it profits simply by fixing your attention on itself. This is the ethical significance of the growing advertiser boycott of Facebook. People are waking up to the sociopathy of social media as pure mediators of the profit motive. From a human perspective, there is a difference between educating a child and selling them for sex, or harvesting their organs. And attending to these differences is what makes society possible. But just as capitalism doesn’t care what you are doing to that child, so Facebook doesn’t care what you are doing on Facebook. It doesn’t have to care. Organ harvesting, data harvesting, what’s the difference? From the perspective of the profit motive, there is none. One is sold to the highest bidder at the level of the gaze. They don’t need you to be happy. They don’t need you to be sad. They just need your attention.
Cancel culture is what happens when we decide to pay attention differently. It is a necessary moral supplement to the new attention economy of social media and the debasement of politics under neoliberalism. Cancel culture asserts that if attention is an economy then it, too, can be regulated. It is not about attacking a person or their position. It is about refusing to buttress their position by dint of complicity, or bolster it by way of silence. Facebook, conceived as a pure economy of attention, has no interest in self-regulation. It is as pitiless as the demagogues that it protects. It will only change to the extent that it is required to change. It will only moderate its content — more or less reluctantly — for the same reasons that corporations might be made to moderate their profiteering: in response to deliberate policies and practices that regulate their conduct and hurt their bottom line. Cancel culture represents one way to do both. Billy Bragg, writing in The Guardian, attributes recent alarm about cancel culture to an old guard losing its grip, but it is more about a new old guard — the mandarins of social media, the oligarchs of neoliberalism — realising they are not going to have it all their own way.
Cancel culture challenges impunity, not free speech. It is a diffuse assault on the complacencies of power by the impoverished and the dispossessed. A democratic response to an increasingly undemocratic society. “There is no such thing as society”, Margaret Thatcher suggested in 1987. Cancel culture disputes that claim, weaponising our need to belong in the attempt to bring us back to our better selves. It is a mode of insurgency, invented in Ireland by Charles Stewart Parnell, and it works. As a form of moral regulation, the message of cancel culture is clear: “You can say (or do) what you will, but we do not have to respect you for it”.
By Joseph Valente and Seán Kennedy
