@philippesanerā responds to my post from yesterday:
Here on Tumblr, we know that callouts are usually not about what they claim to be about. The alleged āreasonsā that somebody needs to be cancelled are not the actual reasons people want to cancel them.
And thatās as true now as it was in 2013; looking at the i-am-a-fish fiasco, callouts may just have gotten worse.
You say youāre confused by this pattern showing up in the media. But why should you be? Why should the David Shor or Lee Fang cancellation be any more sensible than the John Green or glumshoe callouts?
Did you expect this pattern to remain a Tumblr-ism forever?
In the first part of my post, I talked about 3 different things:
I have heard about several recent nonsensical callouts of high-profile media figures have been happening
It looks to me like these are happening at a greater-than-usual rate (āan upsurge")
This coincided with the protests, and various commentators see them as connected to the protests, perhaps a natural outgrowth of them
#1 doesnāt confuse me, for same reasons it doesnāt confuse you.
#2 confuses me in the trivial way that any change in events surprises me until I can explain it.Ā Your explanation for #1 doesnāt explain #2 (nor does it intend to).
But Iām not too surprised by #2.Ā Social trends often acquire their own momentum without needing external pushes.Ā Especially when itās a trend like this, where each occurrence is a proof-of-concept for a weapon with broad applicability.Ā If someone rants about their coworker on twitter, and the one who gets hauled into HR and fired over it is the coworker, bystanders are going to thinkĀ āhmm!ā and contemplate the coworkers theyĀ hate . . .Ā
#3 is the one that confuses me most, as I said in the post.
Itās easy to imagine mechanisms here, likeĀ āprotests happen --> corporate world starts making big shows of ally-ship --> some people read the room and decide HR will be more receptive to this kind of thing than usual --> they try it, it works --> others notice it works and try it too.ā
That seems plausible, but itās incompatible with the claim (which Iāve seen frequently in right-wing commentary) that the same āwokeā left mindset is behind both the protests and the cancellations.Ā I find explanations like this most plausible, where the protests and cancellations areĀ āconnectedā maybe by material cause-and-effect but not by anything deeper like the same people or ideology wanting both.
I guess I could have said āI think people are wrong to say theyāre connected,ā rather thanĀ āIām confused how they are connected,ā but I have a habit of saying the latter when I suspect the former but am not too confident.
