As the most critical issue facing a nation continues to rage, whether Spotify should cancel Joe Rogan, one element of the name calling is how to distinguish ordinary criticism from cancel culture. This is not so much a free speech question, as both are protected speech under the First Amendment, but a matter of norms and social reaction to them.
Criticism is not only normal, fair and expected, but a greatly valued aspect of the marketplace of ideas. A claim that sounds good at first will often be revealed as silly, if not dangerous, in the face of criticism. It may take the form of a carefully argued and documented critique or a blithe “you’re an asshole,” not quite as informative but just as much an assertion of disagreement.
Social media has certainly altered the nature of criticism in the sense that a critical response, fair or not, thoughtful or vulgar, can go viral in an instant and be amplified by a million people. But the nature of criticism, a direct expression to or directly about a specific idea, person or thing, remains the same, even if it’s reach is now greatly expanded. Much like a wealthy or famous person has the ability to spread his views far beyond that of a poorer person, it’s still criticism.
But I’ve argued that the defining characteristic of cancel culture isn’t criticism, but the shift in direction away from the person, idea or thing being criticized to what’s akin to a secondary boycott in labor relations. The target of the attack, for example, might be Joe Rogan, but the attack was on a third party, Spotify, who was threatened to do as demanded, remove Rogan, or suffer the consequences.
There is primary condemnation, your choice to associate with someone or not. But cancel culture is about secondary condemnation, enforcing your choice of association upon others who may not share your condemnation, or at least not to the extent of banishment. If someone you despise writes a book, you don’t have to read it. If enough people don’t read the book, it will fail and no one will publish that person’s books in the future. Fair enough.
But if you despise an “offensive” author and demand that the publisher not publish the book, that stores not sell the book, that the book be banned from libraries and schools, then you’re engaging in secondary action. For those familiar with labor law, it’s the difference between a strike, which the Wagner Act protects, and a secondary boycott, which is prohibited. It’s not because secondary action is ineffective. Quite the contrary.
While in the Rogan scenario, Spotify may be willing to hold firm, whether for principled reasons that it won’t let the mob dictate what it can and cannot disseminate, many people, universities and businesses have succumbed to the fear of the mob’s threats to do them harm unless they capitulates to the mob’s demands to excise the real target of the mob’s outrage. The third party becomes an unwitting pawn in the mob’s game, having done nothing wrong, yet being held to account for the “wrongs” of anther.
The dangers of allowing this very effective method of coercing a third party to do the bidding of the mob or suffer is why secondary boycotts are unlawful in labor law. As applied to cancel culture, the rationale is the same.
If Rogan’s show went away because his listeners stopped tuning in, that would be the market doing its thing. This is more like the landlord of a massively popular restaurant being pressured to kick the restaurant off the property by people who hate the restaurant.
Is this the right distinction between criticism, words and deeds taken against a party with whom one chooses not to associate, and cancel culture, words and deeds taken against another party to coerce them not to associate with whomever the mob decides they shouldn’t? Does this fail to serve as a rational limiting principle, a workable distinction between the righteousness of criticism and the wrongfulness of leveraging threats against third parties to damage the real target of one’s ire?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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The distinction works at face value, but might be bogged down in exceptions if you’re going to start allowing some secondary condemnation as legitimate. Then it would morph into a question of what makes a cause legitimate and we’d quickly be back in partisan camps barking at each other. I’m not ready to condemn all secondary condemnation. We could look at historical examples if present ones are too hot to handle. There are cases when a boycott or other collective action would be necessary under the circumstances. The distinction is a useful starting point, maybe, and interesting to a point, but it won’t survive criticism entirely, no. As if anything can.
This is Jake-level thinking, PK. You might want to reconsider hanging out at the book club. The mechanism of secondary boycotts doesn’t change because you like when it’s applied sometimes and don’t other times. Either it’s a fair mechanism, to threaten damage to a third party to coerce them to destroy your enemy, or it’s not.
And yes, Hitler and the Nazis are an exception here as they are to everything. Which would also be Jake-level thinking.
It’s fair, then. I object to calling things “Jake-level”. We’re both trying even if our efforts don’t always garner your approval, and it is TT. Is this your application to join the book club too? If so, you’re in.
“The third party becomes an unwitting pawn in the mob’s game, having done nothing wrong, yet being held to account for the “wrongs” of another.”
Is that it? Or is it, in this example, that the third party provides the offender with a platform to communicate deadly misinformation for profit, thereby becoming, in the mind of the mob, an accomplice?
In either case, mobs gonna mob, and profiters gonna profit. It’s all free speech, right? Why do you hate free speech?
Jake. It’s all free speech, yes. This isn’t about that. This is your chance to shine, brother. It’s “a matter of norms and social reaction to them.” Can you see a difference in criticizing someone individually and trying to extinguish them from existence? The mob isn’t yours or mine, Jake. It’s a mob. It’s a with us/against us question. It doesn’t feel healthy or pro-social to be out for blood all the time. Or is your conclusion really that such is life without more?
I’m resisting the urge to turn this into a book club meeting by talking about my own fascination with conflict which is fundamental to my understanding of almost anything and which maybe comes from old dusty leftist tomes. While I’d love to discuss the ever-present nature of conflict with you, we should try to respect the space and stay somewhat on topic at least, right?
“Can you see a difference in criticizing someone individually and trying to extinguish them from existence?”
Yes. Can you admit these are different tactics and there’s a time for both?
How many punches in the face would you take before you fight back? How many times would you let someone stab your brother before you intervened? How many people have to die before society must hold broadcasters and those who profit from them responsible for spreading deadly misinformation?
The mob isn’t real. Individuals exercising their right to criticize Joe Rogan and the platform that provides him access to his audience is not the worst that things can get but it is free speech.
Yes, I say as much in my own comment. You know I hate numbers and yet you ask me to quantify things anyway. Rude. The character is a Quaker and a complete coward so you won’t get the answers you’re looking for, if that matters. Control your violent impulses for a moment, please.
The mob isn’t real? A little Men in Black for you: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.” Is talking about a mob a way for me to feel superior despite my pathetic material circumstances? Damn, Jake, that cuts deep.
Have you talked to each of these rugged individuals yourself or are you going to talk to me about dreaded sample sizes and statistics? Please don’t do that and admit you’re fired up and a part of the mob yourself such that you can’t or refuse to see outside of it.
Personally, I have not asked to speak to Joe Rogan’s manager. But I’m not going to shed any tears because others have. Does that make me part of the mob? Do we have a duty to cancel the cancellers? Or does my freedom to speech afford me the freedom to STFU?
Interesting question, albeit likely unintentional. I don’t know if that makes you part of the mob. I don’t know if you should be out there criticizing the cancellers. You have no duty to do so, but we’re talking norms and social matters, so that might not matter much.
Of course you can always standby and allow this to happen without comment. It’s just Joe Rogan, who cares about that bozo who any proper elitist would look down upon and ignore? He and the artists and Spotify could all disappear right now and I wouldn’t notice the difference, but here we are having a chat about it anyway.
You didn’t talk about the distinction at all except in reply to Miles. Why do you hate me so much? C’est la vie, I suppose.
We’re having a chat about it because it’s Tuesday talk and this is what Scott chose, in spite of opening with remarks that seem to indicate awareness of how tedious and brainless the discourse is. If he had asked me, I might have suggested a discussion on people who had been tangibly impacted by a mob.
Is there some sort of visceral pain you suffer if you don’t get in the last word, no matter how pathologically clueless you sound?
You’ve already made clear you lack the capacity to understand the point of the post, but you’re compulsion to drive your ignorance home in comment after comment is impressive.
…coming from the guy who usually has the last (and best) word.
They remind me of two fleas arguing about the existence of dog.
Right on Jake! Cancel CNN.
I am shocked that the nuance of what’s wrong with a secondary boycott flew right over your head. Nobody loves butterflies more than you, Jake.
Ah well, Happy Tuesday Miles. I am not shocked that you fell for OP conflating the legal term of art, secondary boycott, with what’s going on with Joe Rogan and Spotify.
It’s a concept, Jake. Naturally it makes no sense to you.
Jake, in this example the worst part is that the party most opposed to misinformation is the group that tried to convince us that the mult-trillion BBB was actually going to be free. And since they are the government pushing for Rogan’s cancellation that makes it a constitutional violation as well. The hypocrisy is so thick you can’t cut it with a pile driver.
Isn’t the US mint issuing some One Trillion Dollar coins to cover the cost of BBB?
A more fundamental distinction is that the function of criticism is not to silence the targeted views, while the central goal of cancel culture is to silence the targeted views, and on a scorched earth, at-all-costs basis.
Alicia Garza.
“We all lose when bullying and personal attacks become a substitute for genuine conversation and principled disagreement.”
Apparently the activists’ goal is ensure that there is no shared culture in the US. There will right wing podcast companies and left wing podcast companies (Foxify and MSNBoxify). No one will ever have to be inconvenienced by listening to something that might be slightest bit uncomfortable. Musicians, film makers, journalists and artists will declare their loyalty by choosing where to publish. Accepting a job will be a declaration of fealty. Your burger will be served with either a side of freedom fries or local organic potatoes cooked in non GMO oil.
You might try to have a non-political company but some knitter will mention liking India and you will have to choose. Any mention of music will be a formal proclamation of your political views. Liking an article will brand you as a racist or communist.
People listen to Joe Rogan’s show because he has interesting people on and unlike other pundit shows or podcasts, actually let’s those people talk and answer pointed questions without talking over them. He’s also neither right-wing or left-wing.
Contrast that with someone like Kieth Olbermann, who is a left-wing nutjob and has absolutely no audience at all. He burned every bridge on his way towards irrelevance. Or CNN where they’ve lost 90% of their viewers.
The CEO of Spotify was right in not backing down. I believe he told his employees that if they couldn’t archive the library of music and podcasts, perhaps they needed to find other employment.
This isn’t about Joe Rogan. It’s about the definition of cancel culture. Focus.
Okie dokie. Simple then.
Cancel culture is unadulterated bullshit no matter which side tries it. You don’t like someone’s music, magazine article, book or TV show, simply don’t listen/read/watch their product. No one forces you to participate. But don’t tell me I can’t.
In principle individuals or groups with identifiable viewpoints can abstain from cancel culture. In practice no one can unilaterally stop. Conservatives attempted this at the University level to terrible results.
In concept i get the idea, in theory we would like to fix ‘bad speech’ with ‘good speech’. In todays world the average information bubble contains just the ‘bad’ or just the ‘good’ speech with almost zero overlap.
Cancel culture tries to fix that problem by trying to delete the, in their view, bad speech.
It is a stupid idea and i dont support it in any way, but denying that a problem doesnt exist is just as stupid.
At a very basic and high level of abstraction, seems like “criticism” is mostly a social phenomenon, like J.S. Mill wrote about when he was trying to form a philosophy of free speech 150 years ago, while “cancel culture” is aimed at punishing, particularly economically, people who say unapproved things, and the social ostracism goes beyond mere rejection by your group (which Mill correctly said you can’t really do anything about unless you want to compel people to be friends), to tarring you as someone who someone absolutely no one should associate with, including by threatening to wreck the lives of people who would associate with you, going beyond ostracism and almost into a modern form of exile.
There’s no neat distinction between the social and economic, though, and I’m sure anyone can think of many exceptions. And if someone wants to jump in and say that that means boycotts, primary or secondary, are “cancel culture”, then sure, they’re cancel culture.