I wanted to talk a bit about cancel culture. Specifically how we all participate in cancel culture whether you are on the right or left politically speaking. Right now it seems like if someone or something (organization, entity, corporation, etc.) messes up and gets “cancelled” there is nothing they can really do to be forgiven of that, even if they reverse whatever got them cancelled in the first place. The best thing that can happen is if you can get cancelled from one side, you can hope that people from the other side will support you.
I’m hoping that people who participate in cancel culture are few and far between, not the majority of people, but this has not been my experience. I see this on both sides, everywhere I go. I see it in mainstream culture, gaming, books, movies, restaurants, etc. Outside of just talking to people, one of things I like to do is go through large posts on Facebook or Twitter so I can look through the comments and gauge how people are thinking. Maybe this isn’t a good idea, maybe these places are full of political partisanship and I’m not getting a good enough sample size just looking at social media posts. The comments I see on there aren’t looking good, I don’t care about the vulgar language or personal attacks, as much as the ideas I see being spread around. I’m hoping there is a quiet majority that are moderate in their politics, but I’m not sure how true that is anymore with respect to cancel culture.
To just come up with an example, there was a big story on Coca-Cola and their “be less white” diversity curriculum. While this supposedly came from an internal employee at Coca-Cola, this also seems to credit some parts to Robin DiAngelo (who also tried to separate herself from this), so who knows where this come from and if Coca-Cola actually forced this on all of their employees. The consensus (at least on one side) is that most large corporations are promoting this sort of curriculum in their DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) Training, so people took this at face value of being correct that Coca-Cola was pushing this on their employees. There was obviously tons of backlash for this. So naturally, many people on the right and center thought this was a “cancellable” offense and stopped buying Coca-Cola products. This seems to have continued even though Coca-Cola has released a statement , they denied this being a part of the curriculum and this curriculum was not something they were focusing on. Either way, it seems like they felt the backlash and are backing off on this. So why are they still cancelled? If they stopped doing this or admitted they are not going in this direction, shouldn’t we give them the benefit of the doubt and go back to buying Coca-Cola?
Obviously this Coca-Cola cancellation isn’t a situation that I know in great detail. My point isn’t necessarily about Coca-Cola, but about cancel culture in general. Once someone is cancelled, what is the point that they can get un-cancelled? If you are someone that was in favor of cancelling Coca-Cola, what is the point for you to go back and buy Coca-Cola (assuming you liked Coca-Cola to begin with)?
Beyond just the general act of forgiveness if someone turns away from doing something that hurt or offended you, I don’t think this type of cancel culture has the effect that people think it does. I think this type of cancel culture is very inefficient. For example, if you continue to not buy Coca-Cola products even after they reverse the action they took with this DEI Program, what incentive do they have to respond to cancel culture? Nothing has changed, they are still noticing even after they reverse on this DEI Program, the same people who aren’t buying their product, STILL aren’t buying their product. So what’s stopping them from just going back to that program and accepting this is what things are going to be like since their decisions on this really don’t have any predictable outcome on their bottom line? All they can do is try to get ahead of any cancelling trends that might come in the future.
Am I totally off on this? Do you agree? Please let me know what you think.
Moderately Conservative 