When I saw the title of the article below in the New York Times‘s Sunday magazine, I thought I was in for a long attack on cancel culture by the woke magazine, and was mentally prepared to look critically at it.
It turns out that criticality wasn’t really needed, for the article doesn’t seem to have either a theme or a point (there’s one exception at the end). It’s a long and boring account of how “cancel culture” has been with us forever—from the Inquisition, Hester Prynne, and the Salem witch trials down to Louis C. K. and J. K. Rowling. And that’s true—public shaming has been going on for millennia. What I wanted to know, however, is why what’s going on today, on Twitter and elsewhere, seems to differ in both the nature of the targets and the intensity of the shaming. But Ligaya Mishan doesn’t say much about that. (She seems to be largely a food writer for the newspaper.) Rather, she issues a bunch of pseudo-profundities that circle around the phenomenon without attempting an incisive analysis. And she takes 4,500 words to do so! If she didn’t have a point to make, then she shouldn’t have written the piece. It is in fact, one of the more pompous and boring pieces I’ve seen in the Times. Where was an editor to spike this piece?
Essay it if you will, and perhaps you’ll find some nuggets that I overlooked. Click on the screenshots below:
Beyond the victims of cancel culture, which most of us know—people like Rowling, editor James Bennet of the NYT, and the hapless Professor Greg Patton of USC—there’s a lot of recounting of history and literature with Oedipus, Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery,” and the literal Biblical scapegoat making dutiful appearances. But to what end? You got me, pal.
The writing is especially tedious, as one hacks their way through paragraphs like these:
“Cancel” is a consumerist verb, almost always involving a commodity or transaction. Readers cancel magazine subscriptions; studio heads cancel TV shows; bank tellers cancel checks to show that they’ve been exhausted of value. The journalist Aja Romano, writing in Vox, tracked down what may be the first popular reference to canceling people instead of things in Mario van Peebles’s 1991 cult movie, “New Jack City,” when the crime boss Nino Brown slams his girlfriend down on a table — she’s protesting his fondness for murder — and sloshes champagne over her, saying, “Cancel that bitch. I’ll buy another one.” The rapper 50 Cent reprised Nino’s line in his 2005 hit “Hustler’s Ambition,” and Lil Wayne did the same five years later in “I’m Single.” As this informal usage entered broader slang (again, like “woke” and much of contemporary American lexicon, taken from Black culture), it fused with the more common meaning of the verb and became an imperative to revoke allegiance. In perhaps the earliest instance of cancel culture to include the term, in 2014, the official Twitter account of the Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report” posted a joke that could be taken as a denigration of Asians, and the activist Suey Park responded with the hashtag #CancelColbert — only to end up getting doxxed and canceled herself, with so much vitriol directed her way that she fled her home and started communicating with burner phones.
In “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” (2020), the American journalist Isabel Wilkerson reaches back to the Book of Leviticus to examine one of the mechanisms underlying hierarchy and the insistence of exclusion: the scapegoat, or sa’ir la’aza’zel — a literal goat, ceremonially endowed by the high priest with “all the guilt and misdeeds” of the community and driven out into the wilderness. The Greeks practiced a kindred rite, using a human sacrifice, the pharmakos, who was beaten and promenaded in the streets before being exiled, which was considered a kind of death. (Some historians believe that executions took place as well, but others find the evidence inconclusive.) This was at once diversion and atonement, a way for a dominant group to label an “other” as evil and cast that evil out, as if it would then no longer abide within them and they could imagine themselves “free of blemish,” Wilkerson writes.
Oy!
There’s a lot of other etymology here (“woke” is also dissected), but it doesn’t support any thesis.
I’ve used a lot of words to argue that Mishan has no “there” there, but she does make one point at the end of her piece. And that is this: that the instigation and supporting of Cancel Culture is largely a capitalistic manipulation by Twitter and Facebook, who gain from all the social-justice fights on its site:
The many subcultures whose complaints buoy the larger, nebulous cancel culture tend to fixate on minutiae, which can distract from attempts to achieve broader change.
And this may be an intentional distraction. Every obsessive search on Google for proof of wrongdoing, every angry post on Twitter and Facebook to call the guilty to account, is a silent ka-ching in the great repositories of these corporations, which woo advertisers by pointing to the intensity of user engagement. “Despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers … this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital,” the British cultural critic Mark Fisher wrote in his 2013 essay “Exiting the Vampire’s Castle.” Twitter, cancel culture’s main arena, is not the digital equivalent of the public square, however touted as such. We think of it as an open space because we pay no admission, forgetting that it’s a commercial enterprise, committed to herding us in. We are customers but also uncredited workers, doing the free labor of making the platform more valuable.
Well, I’m sure Twitter and Facebook like the traffic, but I doubt that they actually instigate cancel-culture posts. If so, how do they do it? And if they do, does it really matter? No, I think that there’s another explanation for why people have become so eager to attack and demonize others on these platforms. And while that analysis is above my pay grade, it’s perceptively analyzed in the article that Mishan didn’t write.
Twitter and Facebook have zero need to instigate cancel-culture posts. We human users are perfectly capable of doing that ourselves.
Yeah, they are merely enablers, but perfectly happy to help, and get the free advertising everyone complains about them. It as if Madame Defarge got paid for each stitch.
I read this morning that tic-tok is now in the business of consumers shaming big time.
Hokay… CC taps into a vein that is owned by all Primates. I guess that is her point.
Love your last line: “it’s perceptively analyzed in the article that Mishan didn’t write.”
I couldn’t get through much of this article but enough to wholeheartedly agree with your analysis. It’s one of many articles that deliver the message, “Cancel Culture? What’s the big deal?” My impression is that they haven’t really engaged with the subject or are simply unable to empathize with those whose lives are hurt by it. Or maybe they just think life is unfair so its just more of the same.
Well, to paraphrase the French mathematician and philosophe Blaise Pascal, perhaps she would have written a shorter piece if she had more time.
Sounds more like Yogi Berra.
Ol’ Yogi was a philosopher in his own right. 🙂
There ARE some places where it gets late early.
As well as quite a few places no one goes anymore because there are too many people there.
“Where was an editor to spike this piece?”
I suspect they commissioned it and had blocked the space, so had to make do with what they got.
Didn’t read the whole article because I don’t have/didn’t want an account, but some of the excerpts (the scapegoat explanation) suggest the author thinks “cancel culture” is real and not just public disapproval.
I very much doubt though that Twitter and Facebook are encouraging cancel culture for the clicks. They routinely shut down “offensive” accounts when leaving them up would result in more angry arguments and more activity.
Sure seems Ms. Mishan kept a team of NYT researchers busy while writing the article. But for all its corruscations of erudition, her piece never gets down to discussing the hard nut of the matter in a meaningful way.
Another recent treatise by Ligaya Mishan, under the heading “Food Matters”, was:
The Appealing and Potentially Lethal Delicacy That Is Fugu
Eating has been a perilous act for most of human history, but Western diners have lately become that much more obsessed with the idea that meals might destroy us.
It is perhaps surprising the piece under discussion by Ms. Mishan didn’t comment on how to sautée cancel culture with mushrooms. I suppose she neglected to do so because that would have implied that the NYT took the subject of cancel culture too seriously.
Your analysis is spot-on of how I felt. As I slogged through it, I was constantly asking myself, “is there going to be a point yet?” and repeatedly getting annoyed at the overly put-on affect of profundity, quoting classical treatises and long-ago historical eras. Even the images they use to accompany the piece seem intended to add to the sense of gravitas that this is some sort of work of highbrow erudition.
4,500 words to say virtually nothing of substance! What disappointment to see this in the Times. When they’re not being obnoxiously woke and preachy, they’re being uselessly verbose.
The one thing I will give her credit for is that she referenced a lot of instances of cancellation and didn’t try to dismiss them as “not a big deal” as many in that cohort tend to do.
HA! I saw this the other day also and thought: “Oh, I should send this to the Chicago Anti-Woke Death Star of Coyne, he might like this.” But when I read it I came to the same conclusion: its basically just a food writer wandering around aimlessly. Maybe she’s run out of restaurants to review?
D.A, J.D.
NYC
ps “Chicago Anti-Woke Death Star of Coyne” in Chicago: (c) me!
I think that the NYT article is somewhat better than is alleged. In particular, the author makes an important point about who is – and is not – affected by “cancel culture”:
“It’s instructive that, for all the fear that cancel culture elicits, it hasn’t succeeded in toppling any major figures — high-level politicians, corporate titans — let alone institutions. Those most vulnerable to harm tend to be individuals previously unknown to the public, like the communications director who was fired in 2013 after tweeting, from her personal account, an ill-thought-out joke about Africa, AIDS and her own white privilege (she landed another job six months later) or the data analyst who was fired last spring after tweeting, in the wake of protests against the death of George Floyd in police custody, a study that suggested that riots depressed rather than increased Democratic Party votes (his employer has denied that the tweet was the cause for his dismissal) — although both situations reveal less about the impact of cancel culture than the precariousness of at-will employment, in which one can be fired for any reason, whether legitimate or not. The more power someone has, the less affected they are: The British writer J.K. Rowling, one of the signatories of the Harper’s letter, has been publicly excoriated in the past year for expressing her views on gender identity and biological sex, but people continue to buy her books; disgraced high-profile comedians who’ve returned to the stand-up circuit, not always repentant, have been rewarded with sold-out shows. When the mighty do fall, it often takes years, coupled with behavior that’s not just immoral but illegal. The studio head Harvey Weinstein was indicted for crimes, not canceled.”
I noticed that some comments thought that she was perhaps dismissive of the social impact of “cancel culture”, but I don’t think that’s the case.
I do agree that her article is a bit overlong and some of the prose is a bit “sludgy” and cumbersome, but it’s not all bad. She’s not exactly “proving” anything, but then again the rubric under which the article is written – “notes on the culture” – does not necessarily require that she does. It does, as one might say, “smell of the lamp” in that it ‘burnt the midnight oil” to include all sorts of cultural references, and kept some NYT staffers busy checking up on references. I must admit that the wikipedia entry on “cancel culture” is more concise but also includes so plenty of references in the notes that an investigation on the matter could well start there. I might recommend the UNHERD article (a British web magazine):
“How the mob can silence you” :
Is it possible to stop prominent figures from expressing themselves?
BY TOM CHIVERS
https://unherd.com/2020/12/how-the-mob-can-silence-you/
Mr Chivers in that article does a better job of actually driving home a point, namely the way in which “cancel culture” can have a chilling effect much lower down the social ladder where one’s livelihood can be at stake. This is related to the point above that the NYT writer makes that very prominent figures and institutions are not themselves much silenced or permanently cancelled by “cancel culture” in the way that a more obscure person might be.
The thing that seems to be lacking is just any sense of what is the extent of the alleged damage of “cancel culture”. How does one measure that? Just when is “cancelling” legitimate and when not? It seems that losing one’s job and just clicking “dislike” on a video get both folded in the concept of ‘”cancel culture”, but surely that is too broad?
I cancelled my subscription to the NYT several weeks after the death of George Floyd. I just could no longer take the level of what struck me as just over the top “woke” journalism, but especially what struck me as an “anti-white” kind of racism that pervaded the op-ed pieces, with what struck me as just so much moralizing fingers being shoved in my face as if I had been complicit in the killing of George Floyd (even though I live in France!).
But in cancelling my subscription, was I also tacitly participating in “cancel culture” too? Did I inadvertently succumb to “offense culture” in being too easily offended by what I took to be angry (covertly) racist “anti-racist” screeds? I hope not!
As a first time commenter, you haven’t yet read the Roolz on the sidebar. Your comment is not a comment, but an essay: it’s 700+ words long. The upper limit is 600 words. Please do not submit essays again; comments that are much shorter, in general are what we are looking for.
And you do not need to give long excerpts from the article. Capiche?
My apologies … I hadn’t even realized just how long it was … point taken!
Wandering is a good way to describe the writing. Have a read of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/t-magazine/humble-foods-poverty.html