yk, I've been thinking about cancelling/cancel culture, and idk, it's like, on one hand, it's is something legitimately dangerous and harmful, like what happened to Lindsay Ellis, for example, but also, as you pointed out in your jkr vid, Rowling saying she must be on her fifth cancellation now just proves how basically harmless it was to her, right? It's just kinda hard to reconcile, yk? Idk what are your thoughts on it?
i would say the term ‘cancel culture’ is a little difficult to work with at all, because so many different groups of people use it to mean so many different things. endlessly harassing someone for a shitty tweet they made when they were fifteen could be termed ‘cancel culture’; criticizing someone in a mild-mannered way could be termed ‘cancel culture’; mass calling someone’s employer to try to get them fired or reporting their content online could be termed ‘cancel culture’; a creator deciding of their own volition to remove old problematic content they no longer stand by could be termed ‘cancel culture’.
i think when people use the term, it’s easy for folks to talk over each other because of the endless definitions that a word like cancel culture can have, especially when it’s been so thoroughly warped by tucker carlson types into meaning ‘anything i don’t like’. so i don’t necessarily think two seemingly discordant takes on cancel culture are necessarily at odds, because oftentimes the term refers to two completely different things.
in the specific context of what you’re bringing up, i think those are two different situations for sure- lindsay points out in her video on the topic that she’s doing fine and that her own career hasn’t taken any real hit from the dogpile she received, but rather that the culture that encourages what happened with her is harmful in general, especially to smaller creators and those who belong to more marginalized groups. for example, this culture of ‘someone makes a tweet that was probably not intended harmfully, and then they log in hours later and people have decided en masse that the worst possible interpretation of that tweet is true and are now sending that person mass online abuse’ isn’t necessarily career-ending, but it is really shitty and is more likely to harm someone who doesn’t have the platform to fight against it.
conversely, i think what jk rowling was snidely referencing when she talks about how many people have ‘cancelled’ her is.... realistically a mix of the online abuse any public woman online will receive in any context, and more prominently, trans activists and especially trans people just trying to explain to her and to others why people are (rightfully) calling her transphobic, and disavowing her work. in her case, it, at least to me, read as ‘people have been constantly disavowing me and my stories, i guess it’s happening again, sigh’. so there is similarity there in that i think both people were talking about some degree of mass online backlash, but i think the contexts are definitely different, and i don’t think the things JK Rowling said were being interpreted in bad faith. i think the conclusion that she’s a terf, based on her words and actions and the repeated ways she’s shown adherence to the same belief system over and over again, is pretty well-founded, and when people call her a terf en masse, they’re not wrong. obviously that’s not to justify online abuse, but rather to indicate that just because both things might get called ‘cancel culture’ doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same
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