an incomplete part 2 – following the same thought path as on banning things.
Today I read this quote from an article by Nina Power:
first, the simple fact of the material power of platforms to remove whatever book, film, image or piece of music is deemed ‘problematic’ at any time; second, the idea that there is a ‘correct’ way to read the cultural products that we are permitted to access; and, third, that the consumers of culture cannot be trusted to think for themselves, but must be told or shown how to understand images, words and sounds.
As Nina puts it, these three traits of no-platforming represent: controlling access, controlling reception, controlling minds.
The more time I spend watching other people get annoyed – scrolling through my twitter feed, reading long threads of replies, watching people get mad and mad back, consuming the content of drama and conflict and backstabbing and who-said-what masked in the virtuosity language of justice – the more I start to hate the whole thing.
People want power. We have to admit this. There is power to having your voice heard, which is why de-platforming is actually an effective tactic for shutting down a person and their ideas. It can and does work. That doesn’t make it right.
When we lean into techniques of authoritarianism is the name of anti-authoritarianism, we cannot just shed that cloak when all of the TERFs and nazis have been “vanquished” and now we get to have our real society. We can’t ignore that. Creating culture is creating culture, and the one we’re creating is a morally imperative authoritarian one. We can change the world without taking power.
Why do people revel in cancel culture? Why has it taken our modern digital world by storm to such a degree?
Moral superiority.
Schadenfreude.
But also that genuine feeling of seeing things going to shit all around you and wanting to cling on to some semblance of moral righteousness and finding a gospel to follow in times of strife. Cancel culture may be about social capital and performative wokeness, but why do people latch onto performing wokeness? Because we’re becoming increasingly disconnected, people are deemed toxic and dropped off, and people want to create a community that really truly seems to embrace values, and equality, and openness, and want to build that better future they’re imagining.
It’s not right to critique the people. Or the culture. Let’s examine the ways in which our ever-deepening political divide and ever-increasing human hopelessness drives reasonable people to cancel culture, or to QAnon, whatever’s closer. And no, I’m not saying that the people who are neither are correct, either. They’re just missing the train on its way to the new future. No one’s correct here.