Cancel culture IRL

[Elaedith]

First, I read an entire book on moral grandstanding. Second, I watched the Lindsay Ellis cancellation roll out over the course of several days. Finally, I thought about how the tweets appear to relate to the book for several weeks.

Haven't read that one yet.

I have been reading some academic research on moral grandstanding, by the same authors.

Moral grandstanding as a threat to free expression

Moral grandstanding in public discourse: Status-seeking motives as a potential explanatory mechanism in predicting conflict

 

[autumn1971]

I actually watched a lot of Ellis’s YouTube pieces and enjoy them. She suffered no harm and is still making a living doing exactly what she has done before.

Totally cancelled

 

[Dr. Keith]

Hard to say. Personally, I would not accuse anyone of propagating the idea that Asian culture and/or Asian people are somehow inferior to others unless I could find some solid evidence that they have actually done so.

These folks seem much less restrained:

https://twitter.com/azrieIism/status/1375509428661678082

maybe if you had a culture of your own you wouldn't need to come up with racist takes on asian works with your westernized and very limited knowledge of actual asian cultures

Is this really the type of post that keeps you up at night? ****, have you stumbled through AAH and seen what sort of garbage we occasionally throw out?

I'm not getting the sense that any of them stopped to ask whether Lindsay might simply have been unimpressed with a couple of creative works, without stopping to consider the ethnic composition of their respective creative teams.

Why should they? She posted a random thought on twitter without much thought or research and they are responding without much thought or research. Isn't that twitter in a nutshell? And the difference in fallout is that her income is tied to her twitter persona while most of their incomes are not. So, maybe she should have been far more concerned about the consequences.

By the way, I love that it is on the commenters to do all the work, not the original poster. "What, I was just posing some musings? Why didn't you do some basic research and put some real thought into your reply to my off hand post."

First, I read an entire book on moral grandstanding. Second, I watched the Lindsay Ellis cancellation roll out over the course of a few days. Finally, I thought about how the tweets appear to relate to the book for several weeks. After all that, though, I still took the time to mention a distinct possibility other than moral grandstanding and made an effort to keep an open mind about further possibilities.

So, no mention of the time you put into that particular post. Got it.

By the way, I watched the Avatar, twice, so I think we're about even on the research angle.

 

[Dr. Keith]

I actually watched a lot of Ellis’s YouTube pieces and enjoy them. She suffered no harm and is still making a living doing exactly what she has done before.

Totally cancelled

I think that is fairly typical of cancellations.

Well, except this CEO who was not a fan of boys wearing prom dresses.

 

[dudalb]

Of course there is going to be a certain amount of grandstanding by people on ANY issue.
We all know that a number of people are jumping on the police shooting bandwagon because it is a bandwagon. You always have people who will jump on whatever is trendy..unitl the next trendy thing comes along.
But what needs to focused on is the underlying issues, and thr whole problem I have with the right wing cancel culture mentaltiy is they dismiss any concern about racism as being grandstanding.
IMHO it is just another defense of bigotry.
And there is lots of moral grandstanding on the right on certian issues..something that the Trumpers here ignore.

 

[dudalb]

I didn't, but the end of his career strikes me as a textbook example of cancel culture:



Probably one the the early warning signs that internet-enabled rage-fueled mobs would rather cancel an individual than refute an argument.

You mean like the Trump inspired mob who stormed the capitol building?

 

[ponderingturtle]

You mean like the Trump inspired mob who stormed the capitol building?

Someone isn't really canceled until they are swinging from the gallows. So Jan 6 totally doesn't count.

 

[JoeMorgue]

We're 71 pages now of "I don't understand why people aren't my friends anymore after I treat them like crap."

What about "nobody owes you their interaction" is so hard to grasp?

 

[kookbreaker]

I think we can safely file this in the failed cancellations folder as she appears to be still going strong and news of her Twitter experience is rapidly falling down the page when you search her name.

There's actually reasons that Ellis was able to survive:

1) She had actually already lost the hypersensitive fans the previous year when she refused to support the cancellation of Contrapoints (for the crime of using a slightly problematic person in a 10 second voice acting bit). A lot of the breadtubers took hits for that one, but once gone these folks couldn't leave twice.

2) Ellis has already had at least one attempt at a full cancellation in previous years, started by bad-faith arguments from right-wingers. She's learned to roll with the punches (mostly, she admits her reply to the critics of her initial tweet was not thought out) but even rolling with the punches can still hurt.

3) Her reply, although lengthy, was genuine while the attackers turned out to be less than genuine. One major critic turned out to be a white guy pretending to be an offended Asian woman. The crowd also showed its truly ugly colors after Ellis closed her twitter account temporarily by saying stuff like "Jenny's next! Jenny's next!" (referring to youtuber Jenny Nicholson, who is frankly a sweetheart) which made them just look like complete douchebags. Once Ellis's response video was up the critics made all kinds of excuses as to why it was wrong when they obviously hadn't watched it or still demanding an apology in utterly bad-faith. Was not a good look but they didn't care.

I'm uncertain of Ellis' regular employment status but besides her own channel (which she cannot be fired from) she is employed by PBS for 'Its Lit" series, which already dealt with the right-wing cancellation attempt and probably will just roll their eyes at the latest attempt. Beyond that she has a publishing company of her book and they seem to not care about twitter drama. She also has some kind of filmmaking employment but no sign twitter had any effect on that.

So in the end it was mostly just piled-on bad-faith abuse on twitter that she managed, with some bruising, to recover from. I am hesitant to call it nothing as online abuse/cancellation attempts are no fun, even when they are ineffective*.



* I have mentioned here before that an internet kook psychic waaaaaay back on USENET tried to call my place of employment to get me fired for calling him a fake. It was laughable in how it turned out but if it had been several folks with anonymous accounts this would not have been fun.

 

[d4m10n]

She suffered no harm and is still making a living doing exactly what she has done before.

I think that is fairly typical of cancellations.

How can you two be confident there was no harm done? Seems to me that having dozens or hundreds of strangers calling you out for various shades of evil might be emotionally impactful, even if the YT ad revenue only takes a minor hit.

Why should they?

Are you really asking why should someone stop to ask whether public accusations of racism are well-grounded, before making them?

You mean like the Trump inspired mob who stormed the capitol building?

In the sense that both mobs were fueled by rage and untruths, yes. In the (more important) sense of consequences on the ground, no.

 

[Dr. Keith]

How can you two be confident there was no harm done? Seems to me that having dozens or hundreds of strangers calling you out for various shades of evil might be emotionally impactful, even if the YT ad revenue only takes a minor hit.

If she takes twitter comments seriously then she should be more careful when she posts.

Are you really asking why should someone stop to ask whether public accusations of racism are well-grounded, before making them?

If in a court of law or published in the local paper, sure. But as others have pointed out it was just trash posting on twitter and most people recognized it as such.

 

[d4m10n]

But as others have pointed out it was just trash posting on twitter and most people recognized it as such.

I'm not even sure what we're disagreeing about now; I've basically been saying those posts are trash.

ETA: Why should letters to the editor be held to a different moral standard?

 

[dirtywick]

There's actually reasons that Ellis was able to survive:

1) She had actually already lost the hypersensitive fans the previous year when she refused to support the cancellation of Contrapoints (for the crime of using a slightly problematic person in a 10 second voice acting bit). A lot of the breadtubers took hits for that one, but once gone these folks couldn't leave twice.

2) Ellis has already had at least one attempt at a full cancellation in previous years, started by bad-faith arguments from right-wingers. She's learned to roll with the punches (mostly, she admits her reply to the critics of her initial tweet was not thought out) but even rolling with the punches can still hurt.

3) Her reply, although lengthy, was genuine while the attackers turned out to be less than genuine. One major critic turned out to be a white guy pretending to be an offended Asian woman. The crowd also showed its truly ugly colors after Ellis closed her twitter account temporarily by saying stuff like "Jenny's next! Jenny's next!" (referring to youtuber Jenny Nicholson, who is frankly a sweetheart) which made them just look like complete douchebags. Once Ellis's response video was up the critics made all kinds of excuses as to why it was wrong when they obviously hadn't watched it or still demanding an apology in utterly bad-faith. Was not a good look but they didn't care.

I'm uncertain of Ellis' regular employment status but besides her own channel (which she cannot be fired from) she is employed by PBS for 'Its Lit" series, which already dealt with the right-wing cancellation attempt and probably will just roll their eyes at the latest attempt. Beyond that she has a publishing company of her book and they seem to not care about twitter drama. She also has some kind of filmmaking employment but no sign twitter had any effect on that.

So in the end it was mostly just piled-on bad-faith abuse on twitter that she managed, with some bruising, to recover from. I am hesitant to call it nothing as online abuse/cancellation attempts are no fun, even when they are ineffective*.



* I have mentioned here before that an internet kook psychic waaaaaay back on USENET tried to call my place of employment to get me fired for calling him a fake. It was laughable in how it turned out but if it had been several folks with anonymous accounts this would not have been fun.

I agree with you that a bad faith pile on sucks. I also agree that people should, in general, try and get it right when they're criticizing others on social media.

I also came into this thread with the opinion that cancel culture isn't a real thing, but I don't think that's really true anymore, but I also think that a mob of people getting angry on the internet is an oversimplification of it in the same way that pointing to the quaint religious boycotts of musicians in the 90s is and getting upset about tabloid lies. YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, whatever you got, social media drama is really an industry in and of itself. Commentators, reaction videos, reactions to the commentators reactions, bad faith arguments, analysis of the bad faith arguments. There's money to be made in social media drama. This is all part of the game she's in.

But I also still think that some of this, and every case, was genuine. I think people should be allowed to feel how they want to, and people should be allowed to express how they feel.

Anyway, I'm glad she's learned how to deal with it. It's not going anywhere.

 

[Dr. Keith]

I'm not even sure what we're disagreeing about now; I've essentially been saying those posts are trash.

And the public at large seems to give them their due consideration. So, the issue is what?

If Darat PMs me that I may want to reconsider a post I made, I may click on the link. If Thermal sends me a link I'm not clicking on it with your browser. Knowing the difference between tweets that matter and those that don't is basic digital citizenship.

 

[dirtywick]

And the public at large seems to give them their due consideration. So, the issue is what?

If Darat PMs me that I may want to reconsider a post I made, I may click on the link. If Thermal sends me a link I'm not clicking on it with your browser. Knowing the difference between tweets that matter and those that don't is basic digital citizenship.

I also think that if you want to be a YouTube personality, it's more of a job hazard than anything. She deals in opinions for a living, not all of them will be well received, whether it's in good faith or not.

 

[Stout]

She suffered no harm and is still making a living doing exactly what she has done before.

Totally cancelled

You know you can get PTSD from Twitter, right ? We have an example of that on this very thread. Ellis may look like she's suffered no harm but time will tell.

 

[d4m10n]

Knowing the difference between tweets that matter and those that don't is basic digital citizenship.

Do you have the sense that the folks making HR decisions at major corporations are well-versed in basic digital citizenship? I'm really asking here, I don't claim to know.

 

[dirtywick]

Do you have the sense that the folks making HR decisions at major corporations are well-versed in basic digital citizenship? I'm really asking here, I don't claim to know.

I'm sure it varies, but the answer is probably never no. Managing social media is a major aspect of branding for even the smallest businesses.

 

[Stout]

I think that is fairly typical of cancellations.

Well, except this CEO who was not a fan of boys wearing prom dresses.

Look at that guy, he was totally hot for the kid in the dress and with his wife and kids on the premises he had to do something to deflate his semi. The ones who protest the most that have the most to hide

 

[autumn1971]

You know you can get PTSD from Twitter, right ? We have an example of that on this very thread. Ellis may look like she's suffered no harm but time will tell.

Jesus, if you can suffer PTSD from random people whom you have to seek out in order to even encounter, then just live in an oubliette.

If you are an adult and making money on various social media platforms you have given up the right to claim you had no idea people might get stupidly upset at innocuous statements