People are freaking out. Why? Well,
did you see what Peter
coffin said on Twitter?
To say the least it was not
it chief, what can I say?
But yikes,
I am writing you up for Corinne.
They should log off, delete
their account retire, b***h.
I know it's probably not nice to say,
but the world will be better off.
If Peter just got COVID already,
someone should call nine 11 or a port,
a hostage situation at your address
and claim. You have a shotgun.
You're just dumb s**t. Head.
F**k you eat s**t and die.
You deserve to contract terminal
cancer. Peter should kill themselves.
Kill yourself. Peter.
Sure.
Cancel culture. Can't sew
culture. Can't so culture,
you say it three times to
summon it like beetle juice,
but it also summons a hoard of terminally
online people who love to tell you
that cancel culture. Isn't
real also, it's actually good.
Now someone's going to say that I'm a
white supremacist class reductionist
stress, right?
NA's ball game or Gator or whatever
for saying cancel culture is real,
but it's real. It's so,
so real. However,
I think the term cancelled culture
is a bit of a misleading one.
It's a term that implies it
is a culture unto itself.
And I kind of see this
as a compartmentalization
of a very visible set of
behaviors,
which are ultimately simply a part of
the prevailing ideology of our society.
Cancel culture helps
keep society atomized.
It helps to channel a desire the powerless
have for justice and does something
well profitable and is ultimately
a means for those with power to
avoid scrutiny.
And I think it's a logical outcome
of life and a capitalist society.
[Inaudible].
Part one. What is cancel culture?
So you really don't know
what canceling is. Oh,
well get out while you can. You
don't need this s**t in their life,
like cleared out, go out. Okay.
So now that precisely none
of you have left canceling.
According to urban dictionary is
to stop giving support to a person.
The act of canceling could entail
boycotting and actors, movies,
or no longer reading and
promoting a writer's works.
This definition I think is workable,
but I think we need to add
a couple of things first.
You don't have to be a famous person.
You could be a volunteer firefighter
or like a librarian or some s**t.
You could also be like a brand.
You don't even have to be a person that
canceled. Wendy's pretty good one time.
Remember, but I mean, as far as people go,
we Americans almost all have
some kind of social media and our
accounts are available
to everyone. So yeah,
we're all a certain kind of limited
purpose public figure. Second,
yes. Canceling is certainly
an active withholding support,
but just like the range of people it
affects is broader than this definition
accounts for the process of canceling a
person often goes way further as well.
The way I see it,
the goal is often to brand
someone persona non grata or an
unacceptable or unwelcome person
in case you don't know Latin,
that is exact a citation and
remove them from the space they
occupy,
whether physically or virtually
for more on the actual act of
canceling like the action itself.
I would recommend watching the contact
points video as she lays out an in depth
process, broken into tropes, presumption
of guilt, abstraction, essentialism,
pseudo moralism, and
pseudo intellectual ism,
no forgiveness and guilt
by association genuinely.
I don't really think there's a better
means to understand individual behavior
during a cancellation than her video on
the subject. However, from this point,
I'll be focusing on some history,
lots of ideology and what I
think that ideology is attempting
to justify.
No I've seen a lot of takes on
where cancel culture comes from.
I've seen some say it comes from
mouth via the 1960s, new left.
I've also seen some say it comes from
boycotting during the civil rights
movement. I don't want to provide an
argument fully against these takes.
As I think the behaviors that we might
characterize as cancelled culture do have
some historic precedent in left movements.
But I don't think that this phenomenon
is exclusively sprung forth from these
sources or Amy one source that
you can point to all together.
The former idea that cancel
culture comes from Mao's cultural
revolution by way of the 1960s. New left,
I think makes the assumption that
cancel culture is primarily a problem of
the left. And I do not
think that's the case.
Are you the manager bath and body works?
When did you say again? Ma'am
you said f**k Donald Trump.
Thank you.
Sure. Yes. Some of the behaviors on
display are absolutely comparable,
but I don't think it should be
seen as the progenitor look.
The idea makes sense to some extent,
but I don't think it's anywhere
nearly that simple. However,
I think the latter idea that cancel
culture specifically originated from
boycotting in the 1950s and
1960s, civil rights movement.
I actually think that's kind
of stupid to think exclusively.
It came from an article
that Vox published,
trying to say that while call
out culture came from fandom,
cancel culture is completely
different. The came from black people.
So you see it is a different thing
that must be anchored in struggle.
UNO, Neo liberal ed poll
that's all right off the rule.
Is that got to do that neoliberal
fetishization of identity politics or else
I'm sorry, but what like,
do you notice that pattern
recognition thing we humans do?
It happens when you say call
out culture and cancel culture.
It's not just because they sound similar.
It's because of the same damn thing.
It's people with very little power
collectivizing to undermine a perceived
injustice as the base motive.
This also makes the whole thing less
acceptable to paint as pure evil or
sociopathic or something.
Although the ensuing behavior can get
to a point where those characterizations
begin to feel more apt.
Also the injustice is in question or
in some cases very real and actually
extremely awful like with R Kelly
or Harvey Weinstein in some other
cases, not so much. Uh,
and the mechanism has the potential
to be weaponized against the person or
groups, adversaries or
competition, a word of advice.
If that's the path you're
taking, however, don't, um,
try to grift the social
capital off Justin Bieber,
who apparently extensively catalogs his
own every move and is happy to prove
exactly where he was in 2014 down to the
minute. If you make claims against him,
sometimes the stuff you do, thanks
to weed. Paranoia works out.
I guess you can't have weed
here. Kenya, I'm writing you up.
Hold on it here. The term
canceling became popular.
Thanks to a 2014 episode of a
reality show, love and hip hop,
New York music, executive
and record producer.
Cisco Rosato ended an argument with
singer and then love interests.
Diamond strawberry. By
saying, you are canceled,
You're away from your castle.
Canceled.
This moment became a meme on
Twitter almost immediately.
I was just watching new Jack city the
night before I met with her that day.
So I think that's what the whole cast
cast Rosato notes that he said it because
he had watched the 1991 film
new Jack city the day before,
which contains this clip.
Bye.
So the term,
or at least applying the term to a human
being comes from a movie where blade
runs a mafia rather than being some
kind of major cultural milestone.
The punitive behavior on the other
hand does not in his forthcoming book,
canceling comedians while the world burns.
Ben Burgess describes the phenomenon
as such cancel culture refers to a
cluster of cultural trends that held
different levels of impact in different
parts of our culture.
It might be more precisely accurate to
call it denunciation culture or shaming
culture. If we're talking
about denunciation,
we might look back to the Spanish and
position that we're talking about.
Shaming. We might mention the
pillories of Kings and Lords.
Lots of people characterize,
cancel culture as mob justice,
which we could go back to the Salem
witch trials or lynching to look into as
well also related excommunication
and public flogging.
I think it makes sense that people link
any of these things to cancel culture
like they're obviously related.
But I think we miss a large part
of the character of cancel culture.
If we act like any one of these things,
or even some combination of them
fully explains it specifically,
I think we need to consider that they all
have a character to them which mirrors
their era and or social system.
The pillory was a product of the middle
ages where authority was centered around
a King. The Salem witch trials
were instituted by a Puritan town.
Lynching was a means to drive fear in
black Americans after Shatz all slavery
ended in the U S you were excommunicated
from the church for not following Roman
Catholicism correctly.
You were publicly flogged to
show the other surfs or subjects.
What happens if you get out of line?
Basically these were all punishments
to keep the powerless polite.
No alliteration is not against
the rules, actually good job.
It keeps those powerless folks
respectable in law abiding,
and also keeps them from finding too
much sympathy for discontents or the
other either by direct application of
institutional power or by incentivized
actions. Today's world is
neoliberal. I mean, complex,
complex. We are atomized.
Meaning the individual is
the base unit of society.
Social relations aren't
arranged cooperatively,
but so that we act alone and primarily
in self-interest and almost anything
that mediates our interactions manifests
as some form of market forcing an
exchange dynamic into our everyday
activity. Very neoliberal.
Complex complex.
Hi movie, Bob cancel
culture is, as I said,
related to all previously mentioned
phenomena from now to the pillories to new
Jack city. However, the way it works,
I believe could not have existed in
any prior time to illustrate this.
I'd like to give you another definition
of cancel culture this time from a
marketer in an interview, marketing
executive M amongst put it this way.
The term cancel culture describes a
mass online public reaction to perceived
wrongs done by an individual or entity
by withdrawing support or consumer
patronage. If Neo liberalism is the
justifying ideology of capitalism,
it is, and it refers to the state
and privately held entities,
making use of market mechanisms to
process and manage people, resources,
information, culture, and all other
things. It does then cancel culture,
which is in fact,
a thing might just have
something to do with it per to
market logic can public shaming,
let's say you're in a society
ruled by the free market
to fund sentence. Isn't it
just like previous societies.
People are going to do stuff
you don't want them to,
but if you strap people to a pole
and beat them in the town square,
when they said the market is an unjust
mechanism for appropriating resources and
wealth,
then it gets a lot harder to conflate
the market with freedom because in
absolutely no sense is the market free.
Oh, juicing.
Uncle, the word, seriously, you have
to have power to operate in the market.
And power has been extremely
unevenly distributed.
So there's a class that has infinitely
more power than most other people in the
world. And it's called the owning class
or the ruling class or those folks,
the elite, whatever we want to
call them, you know who they are.
And if you think that, I mean Jews,
that is a writeup. Cause I don't,
I do not mean Jews I'm mean
capitalists and we can't have people
figuring that out. Can we? That's
why the Jew thing is so useful,
but we don't need everyone
to be a Nazi. Most people,
we just need to think the market's
straightforwardly supplies,
what is demanded and that all aspects
of our lives are trustable to this
mechanism. It is superior to
human understanding. You see,
ignore all that privatization of the
public sphere that deregulation of the
corporate sector and that lowering of
wealth and corporate taxes paid for with
cuts to public spending. Ignore it
all. This is the end of history Bay.
We're not doing that system s**t anymore.
That is so 2000 and late. Wait a second.
Why are you alluding that target?
Why are you burning down that Wendy's
what hell are you trying to bring back a
criticism of institutionalized
power you are canceled? I mean,
that's not exactly how it goes. In fact,
your perception might be quite different.
Cancel culture is often portrayed in
the media as a form of mob justice,
the rebel getting out of control,
but I'd argue notable examples of mob
justice generally serve some form of
institutional power. Take lynching
in the U S South post slavery.
Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh boy.
Now you might think that racism is a
simple one word explanation for why
that happened and I'd assert you'd
be wrong when we don't specify.
Otherwise we default the motive
of racism to be primarily about
individual's opinion on
race. Racism is much,
much more complicated than that.
And not just as an explanation for
why lynching happened while fear of
the others and a phobia and demagoguery
existed before the United States.
And we might look back through history
and characterize a lot of that.
As racism.
We didn't really have the current
concept of race until we invented race
science, which as you may know,
is not so much actual science,
but rather a justifying ideology for
how the United States and its brand of
capitalist society was being built.
You see the founding fathers dramatic
to the location of the national treasure
and on the back of it, they,
the declaration of independence,
which explicitly stated that
all men are created equal. Now,
if all men were created equal,
then kidnapping a bunch,
categorizing them as property and
forcing them into unpaid labor would be.
Kind of an atrocity.
And it's also a thing.
We're doing a pretty large amount
of all things considered. So yeah.
What to do about that?
Well, you could stop,
but that would slow the development
of your budding nation state a bit.
And the alternatives to that.
Oh, what's that you say creative.
Scientific sounding designations to
Rob people of their satisfaction.
Yeah. That could work. Race
is a false classification.
It's not based in legitimate biological
differences or in any science.
The modern concept of race as a political
construction created to legitimize
atrocities perpetuated by people in
power to exploit people without power.
And even when those
atrocities became illegal,
the fact former slaves could work very
hard and not get anywhere and needed to
be explained and justified as well
without race science and institutional
power pushing it, inundating
the public sphere with it.
Then there really wouldn't have
been a formal designation of race.
And without race, the question, why are
all black people treated as property?
If all men are created equal has a
bit more of a chance that coming up,
it doesn't even really matter if those
benefiting from slave labor even believed
it either though I'd wager
plenty of them did a,
what matters is the ideology had the
power of both state and capital behind it
and white people were
conditioned to believe it.
So now lynching starts to feel a
little bit different. Doesn't it?
It's not just about how some group of
individuals felt about black people.
It's that the ruling class created
and perpetuated ideology that
instigates hatred via super officiality
to justify state atrocities and
why a group of formerly enslaved people
had a total lack of generational wealth
or resources that could be utilized
to achieve upward mobility.
Is that really totally disconnected
from institutional power?
Like just something a mob
did and a fit of passion.
I don't really think so.
I think the state engineered a situation
where lynching made the world make
sense.
Now canceling is obviously not something
we should put on the same level as
lynching. Not that it stops anyone,
but I believe they both serve to
seemingly democratize the authority to
punish on behalf of the social
order in a similar way. However,
I think the character of cancel
culture is pretty unique to our time.
I think a system of market incentives
results in very consumer like behavior is,
and none of the participants really know
they're participating on this level.
So do they.
I really have a choice. I'd
say no with that in mind,
we're not just consumers also.
Kind of prisoners. If you
built a prison as a big circle,
you wouldn't need guards walking
around monitoring every corner,
hallway nook and cranny
because there are no crannies,
no crannies, I'm sorry I have to do this.
No crannies is pretty serious offense.
You might have one or two guards in
a tower in the middle looking around,
but you certainly wouldn't
have a large number patrolling.
This prison is optimized.
The guards can look out and
around and see everything.
And so from the prisoners who
in a way act as guards as well,
either intentionally or not,
you see anything they might do
to call attention to a situation,
serves a similar function as a guard.
The literal structure I'm talking about
was designed as a prison by Jeremy
Bentham and the 18 hundreds. However,
it isn't necessarily as a
physical structure of the
panopticon as it was called,
became a topic of discussion. In fact,
it's been widely used as a metaphor for
the structure of an authoritarian state
in which people are never 100%
sure if they're being watched,
we see this everywhere
from critical theory,
like McKell for cous discipline and
punish to fiction like George Orwell's
1984. So imagine the
Panoptix con as an app,
because I'm ashamed of what I do
for money. I call YouTube video,
Uber along these lines, lines of shame.
Let's consider Twitter
a sort of punishment.
Uber I'll say that doesn't sound
particularly appealing to me.
I don't think I intentionally download
an app build as a means to observe and
report on my fellow citizens,
which also ensures I'm subject to the
same observing and reporting myself.
I mean, unless I got something out
of it, likes favorites, retweets,
subscribers, followers, attention,
attention is currency in
the marketplace of ideas.
Like actually for real,
it's not just a meme.
It's something I've been saying for
a reason saying that s**t again,
it's gotta be a rule. There's
gotta be a rule. I'm gonna,
I'm gonna write you up.
All these metrics you see on social
media posts are a form of attention as
currency. They all act a
little bit differently,
but we accumulate these metrics,
building social capital or social
connections seen as a form of capital.
And when we talk about cancel
culture, as I said in the beginning,
we are at least partially talking about
a desire that otherwise powerless people
have for justice. In some respects,
you can kind of feel like a means to
gain some power, even if temporarily,
not that it can't build more permanent
social capital for someone. I mean,
for an example,
see the revolution consultant and
her 120 tweet chatbot a fash pipeline
thread, just to be clear and fair.
Twitter serves other functions as
well. It can be punishment, Uber,
but it can also be joke Uber.
And a lot of other things,
some people have built real comedy
careers on the attention they get.
They're reified is social capital.
Rob Delaney is a popular example of this
and also a noticeably decent person who
has been through some terrible s**t.
But we're talking about cancel culture,
not developing a talent into a craft
to fully understand what happens to a
person when they are canceled. I think
we have to view them as a commodity,
as I think the power structure does
not because I think it's good too,
because I actually think it's a tragedy,
but I also think this is the
ideology that's currently just buying
capitalism, neoliberalism.
I think probably the easiest way to do
that is to quickly define a concept.
I referenced a moment ago, reification,
you can read Marx and especially
Lucas for a more detailed theory,
but to put it simply it's the process of
turning social relations into a thing,
or perhaps more appropriately
for our purposes, a commodity
commodity.
It's commodity dumb ass.
It's the process of turning
social relations into a thing,
or perhaps more appropriately for our
purposes, a commodity reification.
Stamps. It's imprint upon the
whole consciousness of man.
His qualities and abilities are no longer
an organic part of his personality.
They are things which he can own or
dispose of like the various objects of the
external world.
And there is no natural form in which
human relations can be cast no way in
which man could bring his physical
and psychic qualities into play.
Without there being subjected
increasingly to this reifying process,
we can apply this to cancel culture
by visualizing people as some
form of content subscription.
We consume the image of a person doing
things as we give them attention.
When the person behind the commodified
image of themselves does things that
contradict the version of them. We'd
like to see and therefore consume.
We cancel our subscription to that person.
We cease to consume them.
We reject them as something we are
willing to exchange our attention for.
And further, we look at them
with some form of disgust,
for failing to uphold their end of
the bargain that we had with them.
And therefore the customer
is always right. You see?
And that feels a little bit
like power at this point.
I think that cancel culture is an
integrated part of capitalist life,
which through Neil liberal ideology
converts more and more of our interactions
into transactions. Take the case of
Holyoke, Massachusetts mayor Alex Morris,
currently running for Congress who
is accused of inappropriate behavior,
specifically.
Talking to people over.
Tinder,
investigative journalism at the intercept
revealed members of the campus group.
College Democrats conspired for a full
year to paint this as a means of him
exercising his power as mayor and
adjunct professor at the university of
Massachusetts.
But it turns out he didn't even tell
people he was meeting online that he was
either.
These things. The cancel
campaign was out of the words,
the president of local chapter of
college Democrats, Timothy Enos,
his own mouth a means to an end.
Your job being a said, Neil
will give me an internship.
Neo being incumbent
representative Richard Neal,
who is Morris's opponent
in this congressional race.
Also Neil was innocent
journalism professor as well,
which is very interesting.
I kind of think it would be obvious
how this plays out as a transaction.
You match on Tinder with
your teacher's opponent.
You contextualize everything
he says is creepy.
Despite the fact that everything
this guy says was wholesome as hell.
And you get rewarded with a
internship in a political campaign.
If you look into cancel campaigns
of a less scrupulous nature,
you'll tend to find similar motives
of varying magnitude because of this
dynamic. I think we should see cancel
culture, not as a vigilante strategy,
some form of populous
mob justice, or however,
someone complaining about terminally
online. People might characterize it,
but rather as one incentivized
behavior in an attention economy,
which drives engagement
per platform holders,
and therefore generates profit and
two entirely dependent on the whims of
institutional power. Yes, cancel
culture does look like a mob,
descending on someone.
And that's pretty convenient for platform
holders who absolve themselves of all
responsibility in their tos.
As people stay on their website and
Leslie check for replies and sift through
content obsessively,
hurling abuse at each other
that's engagement you see in their
eyes,
it's just a plan or a group of plebs
ceasing to consume someone or something
while loudly requesting that the
platform holder get rid of it.
Like one might do with the show.
Remember hashtag cancel
Kobe where it's like that.
Now it may be a little
less straight forward.
The request may be directed to the
holder of a child platform on the parent
platform like a community channel or
even just a well known account holder on
the parent platform.
What that child platform holder does is
still dependent on the parent platforms.
Institutional power though, as their
actions would have no weight without it.
If say someone says, Hey, sewing
community, this person is no good.
And the sewing community
X communicates them.
That's still the institutional power of
the parent platform being exerted as all
the social capital held by the
sewing community used to non-person.
The target is relevant to,
and only to the parent platform to
put it another way without Twitter,
you don't have Twitter followers.
The power one might hold on a
platform is entirely derived from the
platform that is afforded to you.
And what it is capable of is entirely
under the control of that platform as
well. This is ultimately how
the free market works too.
It's not about supplying things.
People demand it's about using
power to appropriate commodities.
The market isn't about everyday
consumers and what they want,
but what the class,
people who own everything wants
you don't mean s**t in the
market.
Bill Gates does a lot of people
conflate democracy and the market voting
with your dollar as
well. If that's the case,
Jeff Bezos has way more votes
than you and always will.
Is that not a problem?
An atomized society that is primarily
thinking about how to pay bills is a
pretty ideal scapegoat.
When the solution for society's ills
is supposedly making better choices,
like driving a Tesla on top of that,
we're competing not only
in the labor market,
but as consumers keeping
up with the Jones.
So we tend to trust only ourselves,
which leads to a lot of snap judgments
based on the first information we're
presented with. Am I describing cancel
culture or am I describing marketing?
The T he, so is cancelled
culture, a leftist thing.
The goal of cancel culture is to make
decent Americans live in fear of being
fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated,
and driven from society. As we know it,
the far left wants to coerce
you into saying what you know,
to be false and scare you
out of saying what you know
to be true. Very sad.
Well, no, it's not a leftist thing.
It's a neoliberal thing in a
neoliberal society. I mean,
to me it seems pretty obviously tied
up in market logic and what we call
leftism. Isn't just liberalism plus. Yes,
it has some of the same stated goals
like Liberty equality and fraternity.
But the point is that liberalism's
ideas don't achieve any of that
at all. And that's why I left us.
Think we got to do something totally
different instead of the same thing,
but more in truth.
I think cancelled culture functions to
help obfuscate the ongoing negotiation
between massive power is which
completely excludes the everyday person.
The appearance of democratizing
accountability transforms. We,
the people into a mix of consumer
police, judge, jury, prisoner and guard,
and we're roaming the halls. People
are ready to write you up again.
It channels a desire. The powerless have
for justice into something profitable.
So not only do the powerful
avoid scrutiny, they make money,
which I've got to say really sounds
like a cross section of like their two
favorite pastimes. To me,
part three, just canceling,
do anything. And to whom
that's all fun, Peter,
but obviously none of this really
matters. No one's ever really canceled,
right?
It's all just a bunch of people pissing
into their own mounds on social media,
right? Yeah, no one's
ever really canceled it.
It's up those that are now I can end,
we'll talk all day about how the market
is set up to make it seem fair that
people with institutionalized
power own and run things.
I continually hammer home the
point that it isn't fair though.
So if cancel culture is
an example of the market,
as an ideology made manifest
in social relations,
like I've been saying for years,
what else I'll give you a hint.
Can you cancel Jeff Bezos? Nope.
You can cancel someone with no relevant
institutional power or connections
though.
It's not even really that hard to cancel
a random individual poor or working
class person.
You just have to create a perception
either based on evidence or not that they
have deviated from what a vocal passionate
group considers acceptable and then
petition relevant institutional
power to cut the target off.
You can get an employee fired.
You can get a vulnerable
community member thrown out,
even with the total destruction
of Harvey Weinstein's reputation,
the bankruptcy of the company. He owned
following backlash, massive legal fees,
a $19 million settlement
with his accusers,
a divorce and a 23 year prison sentence.
He still has in his possession
at this very moment,
$25 million.
And he's not going to sit
in prison for 23 years.
Does anyone really think
that's going to happen? True.
If Harvey Weinstein hadn't of been
canceled by a hashtag, me too avalanche,
he probably wouldn't have gotten into
proper judicial trouble. However,
the vast majority of canceling does
not get to a point involving the legal
system.
So the apparatus that got levied
against him is technically the big guns.
Harvey Weinstein is a convicted
rapist who lost around
$470 million due to his actions.
And he still has the capital to easily
start a company and make another fortune
or just chill and live in
luxury. The rest of his life.
If we're voting with our dollars,
a convicted rapist sitting in prison
at this very moment has significantly
more votes than everyone
watching this video put together.
And like I said, most of the
time, it doesn't even go that far.
If you have institutes power or backing,
you cannot be canceled unless that power
vanishes or whatever institution backs,
you revokes their backing, which
don't get me wrong can happen.
Like with Milo Yiannopoulos who
conservatives canceled for a while
by totally revoking their involvement
with him and their budgets for him,
I've never really
believed he was desolate.
It seems weird that people just
took a guy who lies for a living
at his word with that one.
They got over that though
and brought him back though.
A lot of people like to
pretend they haven't,
but the person might not be a CIS white
talk show, host a reactionary pundit,
or even a leftist who
dares mentioned class.
It might just be a poor trans woman like
Chloe Seagal who aspired to be a game,
but ended up attracting a hate following
of people who sat around all day,
reading forums, poor people,
typically can't afford health insurance
and therefore poor trans people
typically can't access
trans related healthcare.
She ended up falsely claiming
to be crowdfunding a surgery,
to get shrapnel from a car
accident removed when she
really needed money to get
trans related healthcare,
which she obviously not only
didn't have the money for,
but is also seen through a very
ideological lens as a want,
rather than a need by the general
public in the grand scheme,
$35,000. Really isn't a lot of
money. I mean, maybe to you and me,
it is,
it would definitely make my life a lot
better if it fell out of the sky and
landed in my lap. But I mean, it's a
tiny portion of all the money out there.
Maybe she could have crowdfunded
it in a more honest fashion.
I can't tell you whether
that's true or not.
It seems like she didn't
think she could though.
And I'd say society is set up in a way
that would generally lead someone in her
position to think that,
but not only was she poor,
she was also mentally ill.
And you might be able to extrapolate
that if she was trying to crowdfund
translated healthcare,
she probably wasn't really flushed with
cash for mental health care either.
We've been conditioned to see George Floyd
attempting to pass a fake $20 bill is
a crime he's committing rather than
the crime of systemic poverty committed
against him. And the rest of the poor.
If Seagal had all of her
health needs taken care of.
How much of this would have happened. Now.
Seagal did a fair number
of pretty messed up things,
including publicly threatening
to kill us. Zinnia Jones.
If you don't take that seriously,
I don't know what to tell you,
but society tends not to ask
why with any of it though.
Instead she just got canceled repeatedly
thrown out of any formal or informal
structure she got near, and
then she killed herself.
I knew her a little. She was.
Sometimes pretty volatile towards
me, but also sometimes pretty nice.
Whenever I think about her though,
I regret not attempting
to understand her better.
When people get canceled,
they get taken off the market.
A cancel campaign is a collective of
small time buyers at the consumer level
committing to revoke their buying power,
their subscription to the human content
and engaging in a marketing campaign to
enlist more, to do the same,
to continue this metaphor.
We might like an individual
without institutional power
or backing to a content
creator with a Patrion.
While someone with those things is maybe
a little more like something available
on Netflix. You could probably f**k up
most Patrion supported creators lives.
If you could get a few hundred
people to commit to unsubscribe,
but you're probably not going
to get Netflix to do anything,
but getting a few hundred
people to unsubscribe because
Brite sucked or whatever
the mainstream conception of cancel
culture is that it's simply a popular
backlash to public wrongdoing,
either real or imagined.
But if canceling was actually that
we wouldn't still be talking about
Donald Trump or Joe Biden at all,
but it's clearly not that which makes it
seem pretty worthwhile to talk about to
me also, whether you
think they should or not.
A lot of people care about
cancel culture and plenty enough,
despite the whole thing,
being a logical conclusion of the
justifying ideology of a system,
they don't love it.
Recent polling shows that whether
you think that they should or not,
a majority of Americans think that
cancelled culture is a big problem,
which would mean they think that it's
a priority and that something should be
done about it. That's why Trump
making that speech in that way,
relating it to everyday.
People's jobs. Isn't appeal to me.
Will large number of people in
this country, including Democrats,
people need to pay rent
and eat. And if frankly,
the majority of people in the country,
whether you agree with them or
not consider this a concern,
is it not worth at least trying
to figure this thing out?
I try not to blame individuals
for something that happened
systemically because I don't think
simply engaging in the current
social paradigm is really
something to be blamed for.
As I said earlier, a lot of these
people thirst for some form of justice,
a counterweight to the wrongdoing.
We all see on such a constant
basis in this world in a way
it quenches that thirst in the same way,
seawater mites in that it
doesn't really help with thirst.
It's also really bad for your kidneys too,
because to get the extra salt out of
your system or a person has to pee more
than they drink. And eventually
you die of dehydration.
As you become incredibly thirsty. Now,
obviously nobody canceling someone
else is going to die from it.
Sometimes the canceled person dies like
the people we've mentioned or tries to
kill themselves like that time.
A teenager drew a Steven universe
character with the wrong body type and
attempted suicide after the
way people reacted to it.
But the so-called cancel mob also does
suffer. The truth is neoliberalism.
The thing I think created this is
an ideology that's fundamentally
anti society to say the most
obvious possible thing as people are
turned against each other, they
forget what they have in common.
It is a road tested strategy,
divide and conquer given.
I think this is all a logical
outcome of neoliberalism.
Some might be tempted to
think the solution is that
all we need to do is change
neoliberalism. But if that's all we did,
another ideology would emerge
to justify capitalism in place.
We need to go after the
root cause. Neil liberalism,
isn't something separate from capitalism.
It's what makes capitalism as
it exists right now seem okay.
And I don't think that cancel culture
is somehow separate from that.
Everything about the world right now,
including neoliberalism and capitalism
itself is the result of a sequence of
events that have already happened.
We live in the result and we can't undo
history and go back to whatever version
of capitalism people think is
the good one. There's a reason.
Life feels transactional
in today's society.
It's that today's society values the
accumulation of capital over all else.
It's not because this generation is greedy
or entitled or whatever thing people
think to justify their ideological
perception of themselves.
It's that an owning class has used its
power to mold society, how they like it,
and that a social narrative has to
exist to help keep the help from
beheading them,
incentivizing the help to be head each
other and making a ton of money from the
engagement metrics. It generates.
That's what cancel culture is.
And it reflects the character
of the system capitalism.
And it's justifying ideology. The
market driven ideas of Neil liberalism.
I don't know about you, but I don't
think being a hall monitor is fun.
I don't think it's enjoyable to spend
my time looking at other people,
figuring out what they're doing wrong
so I can present it to my followers and
reap the rewards. I don't
like that. And sure. Yeah,
people should be accountable
for their actions,
but what is accountability on these
platforms? It's not what you think it is.
It's a fetish.
It's dangerous and
homeowners are huge nerds.
This world doesn't need
no opera. We're here.
Follow the app. Rayshaun.
We don't need Oh, bigger knife.
Cause we got guns. We got guns,
we got guns.
We got guns, your bed. Or.
So you watch that whole thing. That was
cool of you. Thanks. I appreciate it.
This is what I like to call the value
extraction portion of the video,
where I tell you that, uh,
liking the video helps me a lot.
Subscribing helps me even more.
And the thing that helps me most is
becoming a patron at patrion.com/peter
coffin.
I also have a podcast which you
can listen to@lowsociety.net.
It's a lot of fun. It's myself,
Ashley, Angie speaks and Jake,
her partner, uh, it's a hell
of a good time and we do that.
So please check it. I
think you'll enjoy it.
Um, beyond that, just thanks. Thanks for
watching. Thanks for sticking around.
Leave me a comment. Say whatever it's
not, you know the word, whatever you say,
whatever pops into your head. I
mean, it could be the word, whatever.
Yeah.
[inaudible] strange. Strange.
[inaudible].
