It's really difficult to talk about cancel culture without the conversation turning into a swamp.
I'm going to paraphrase Hank Green here, but there was an insight he shared that I think is really relevant. He said something to the effect of "You'll navigate the conversation much more successfully when you replace the word 'cancelled' with 'had some harm done to their reputation'."
It's a bit of an oversimplification but that's also the truth. Left of center we don't talk much about being cancelled, we tend to distinguish between reputational harm and deplatforming. The definitions of those words being kinda self-evident but for the sake of being thorough, when I say reputational harm, I am talking about what everyone thinks of a person, and when I say deplatforming, I mean an entity taking away a person's platform. An account banned on Twitter, being locked out of posting videos on YouTube, being blacklisted from speaking on college campuses. A body that determines a person's speech is harmful enough to not provide them with a platform.
And make no mistake of it, I think that there are people who we think should be deplatformed, who should lose their ability to continue doing harm. The big example being Woody Allen, a convicted sexual abuser who fled imprisonment and is living mostly consequence free. Or Alex Jones, who spread his Sandy Hook hoax conspiracy theory so far and wide it ended up harming the parents of the children victimized in a school shooting. And I don't take deplatforming lightly, to me it is the hammer of last resort reserved for when the evidence against a person is very strong and no other recourse for justice is available.
Reputational harm is different. This is your garden variety cancelled. Someone sees you said some shit online and distance themselves from you. You're still allowed to post or whatever but folks decide you are not worth their time. Losing good-will with the people.
And if your job is contingent on not losing people's good will, that's a harder problem to solve, but it is yours.
Posting on the internet can suck if your job is dependent on your reputation and you have enemies or you're just a bad public speaker or you have nothing in terms of public relations. There's a reason people spend six figure amounts on a good PR Team or a good PR Campaign. It's hard to gain people's trust and very easy to lose it.
We live in a low trust media environment, both in that we can't trust a lot of our news outlets and in that there is so much misinformation and disinformation online that you can't be sure of the truth of anything you read. And people launch misinformation campaigns, someone out there can decide that you are their enemy and you must at all costs be stopped.
Should we forgive online figures for messing up? Honestly, yes. I believe that people should be able to make mistakes, make mistakes repeatedly, and as long as they are making a good faith effort to fix the issue, we shouldn't dole out infinite punishment. That's not to say I don't think some mistakes are beyond coming back for. No one wants to bat for a sex pest, no one wants to bat for an abuser. But people make mistakes and people are human.
There isn't a clean note to end this on. I might change my mind on this a bunch more in the future. But what I know about this in the here and now is that we can't keep going on like this. This isn't going away and we're destroying the mental health of creators who are constantly walking on eggshells.
We need better solutions to these problems.
