Cancel culture sucks, but Big Tech sucks more

Fighting against the insanity of cancellation is an exercise in futility so long as the tech oligopoly reigns supreme as architects of our digital social lives.

The recent Facebook whistleblower revealed what we all already knew, which is that Facebook and Instagram intentionally maximize their profits through an algorithm that rewards rage and discord. This is what I've been saying folks. "Social" (marketing) media is anti-social and as such, anti-human. For all of my polemicizing about cancel culture, for all of my obstinate demands that we stop fucking cannibalizing each other, I also recognize a fact of human psychology: Our behavior is highly influenced by our context. What is most convenient (meaning, highest reward for least energy) in our environment is often what we end up doing. What everyone else is doing, we do too. What our environment gives us, we make do with.

So when you put human beings into a global social environment where they are 1) rewarded with dopamine shots to the fucking brain with every notification-jackpot that breeds daydreams of a book deal or blue checks, which are not only emblems of the American-imagination’s obsession with fame but mirages of material stability; and 2) that reward is achieved through sensationalism and anti-social behavior, you’ve got a social disaster. Big tech has created an environment where it is, in my opinion, not only entirely impossible to eradicate the cancellation spectacle, but where that spectacle is the ideal for achieving security: recognition, connection, and power. Further, what once may have been localized experiences of interpersonal warfare (for example, the all-too-similar phenomenon of “trashing” in feminist communities of the 60s and 70s) now take place on a global stage.

The discourse around cancel culture on the left is valuable as a practice in catharsis and social realignment. Dissenting publicly from it on the left means people can identify others who are “safe” based on shared values. But ultimately, I see this issue falling into yet another culture war battle or leftist infighting. Spectacles of public execution and social exile are a tale as old as time. The impulse for vengeance is human. Schadenfreude is human. Zealotry is human. Violence is human. I don't believe we can fully eradicate such drives, but we can cultivate conditions that greatly minimize the need to act on them, and the impacts of such actions. Right now, our conditions actively reward these impulses, and we have very little that cushions the impact (very rarely can one afford legal recourse, for example). And how possible is it to eradicate this technology? Not very. How about just changing the technology? You can go check out Mastodon, but that doesn’t fully solve the issue.

I can't stand watching people's lives crumble before a mob of moral puritans unconsciously avoiding their own trip to the gallows. Experiencing internet harassment myself and seeing a friend I love be full on cancelled over an actual lie are part of what drove me to devote way too much of my time to criticizing these spectacles from a leftist perspective over the last 12 months. But after a year talking about it, I've arrived at a sort of pessimistic conclusion. Cancel culture will never go away as long as our current model of international, profit-driven social media—so intimately entwined with every aspect of our human lives from the private to public sphere—remains in place. Fighting against the insanity of cancellation is an exercise in futility so long as the tech oligopoly reigns supreme as architects of our digital social lives.

I do absolutely believe we can mitigate the impact of cancellation on people's material lives, such as improving access to legal recourse for online defamation, eliminating at-will employment, expanding employee benefits for paid time off, socializing healthcare, and so on. Mental health providers must become aware that cancellation is indeed a mental health issue for both victims and participants/observers; media trauma is real and experienced by far, far more people than merely high-profile celebrities (not to suggest they deserve it either). We can take a public stand against cancellation spectacles and advocate for people to not join the mob, diffusing some of the tension of stifled opinions on the matter. We can try to cultivate a micro-culture that foremost values genuine camaraderie, good humor, loyalty, and belief in the transformative potential of human beings. I support all of these endeavors, but do not see any of this as sufficient enough to eradicate the phenomenon. I have come to see cancellation spectacles as a symptom of the much broader issue of capitalist interference in our most private affairs. Under the constraints of Big Tech’s rage-baiting algorithm, our most anti-social, narcissistic impulses are one means of achieving a modicum of success in our alienating, stratified society. Again and again we go at each other’s throats, secure in the delusion that the weaponization of capital’s perverse technology against each other is justice.

The capitalist capture of our digital social lives is a problem infinitely more far-reaching than cancel culture. The most obvious, opposite solution is to nationalize the internet. Even as a socialist, that seems just as bleak as our current situation, so long as our government serves capitalist interests and engages in mass surveillance. Nevertheless, as cancel-critical discourse spins around in perpetuity, it is my hope that we remain aware that the real enemy at the root of this issue is not simply each other, nor some inner human propensity for violence, but a ruling class that cultivates the conditions under which we suffer so that they can turn a profit as the world burns.