00:04:25.220It feels like, you know, there's that scene in The Simpsons where Homer is sent to hell and he's forced to kind of gulp on like endless supplies of donuts.
00:04:33.900That's me and cursed discourses having to do with gender and sexuality in 2024.
00:05:31.420Thank you to everybody in the audience, both here at City Lights and online.
00:05:34.620I loved this book and I so loved seeing this phenomenon of cancel culture and these fears about like discursive excess on the left that I have witnessed sort of shape the political discourses in my country for so long.
00:05:52.420I love seeing it filtered through your analytical mind at great length, like much longer than the typical like tweet length quip about cancel culture, because I feel like the standard line about cancel culture is that, you know, it's hypocritical, right?
00:06:11.040And what you do is you really establish it as a habit of conservative thought that allows what you call the moral entrepreneur, which is such a great phrase.
00:08:14.820And the funny thing is that type of text did travel the globe.
00:08:18.260Like you could read stuff like that in the UK, read it in Germany, in France.
00:08:22.780You can even read them in places in Argentina and Chile.
00:08:25.520And at the same time, you wouldn't read them necessarily just in the Wall Street Journal.
00:08:30.300You would read them in the New York Times.
00:08:32.000You'd read them in the Washington Post.
00:08:33.880And they were appealing sort of not to the inveterate culture warrior in your family,
00:08:38.760but they were appealing to a worried liberal as well.
00:08:41.800And so I thought this is, to me, really sort of the figure for the Trump age, really, where, you know, like some kind of barrier between center right and far right is really breaking down and where also the way everything seems to be networked now.
00:08:57.660Right. That like, you know, Trumpism seems to sort of like travel the globe and like anti-immigration sentiment sort of keeps getting repeated, like that we kind of recapitulate what the UK did five years ago or like the gender panic, which came from France to the United States.
00:09:12.060So it just seemed to me such a rich thing to kind of trace. So the fact that the description of cancel culture as an object isn't accurate and that the panic around it is a moral panic is kind of the premise of the book, not the main argument.
00:09:24.560I mean, argument is about what that shows about a particular moment and about the politics of that moment.
00:09:31.180This might be a good moment for me to interject and explain to you that because Adrian is the hardest working person in the world, to a degree that's, you know, maybe a little bit insane.
00:09:42.320He actually wrote a version of this book in German for a German audience, and then instead of merely translating the book he already wrote, he, in fact, reconceived of the book to make it more legible to an American audience and then wrote it again in English.
00:10:03.880So we got a very nice blurb about Adrian's accomplishments here in California and at Stanford, but he's also a pundit for German language media.
00:10:14.040And something that is really interesting to me is I feel like a lot of people who start critically engaging with cancel culture as a moral panic and start thinking about this discourse in American media and how it functions, it's because either they were subjected to some kind of cancellation or because they were accused of canceling others.
00:10:39.120right uh so there's kind of a first person element of this which speaks to its its anecdotal like
00:10:45.780iterative nature but you didn't come upon it that way no no never never been canceled
00:10:50.140i mean maybe tonight the night is young but i was gonna say the night is young but you started
00:10:56.140looking at this as a genre and and you really started looking at it how it how it was operating
00:11:01.040in an international global context yeah well i i related to it as a producer right as you mentioned
00:11:06.880I'm a bit of a pundit. And so basically I was asked to write these kinds of texts. And I would
00:11:11.820say, you know, they're like, don't you think that your students are becoming so authoritarian? I'm
00:11:16.040like, I don't know, they're 19 years old. I don't think they're, I'm not sure how you get to be
00:11:20.840authoritarian if I get to grade you, right? But then they wouldn't like write me back and then
00:11:26.560someone else would write the piece. And I'm like, oh, okay, that's what you would want it from me.
00:11:30.700And meanwhile, whenever I would talk to, you know, French audiences, German audiences,
00:11:34.760or went to the UK, people would ask me these questions that they seem to know the answers
00:12:33.740You know, whatever field you're in, like, is this truly a kind of, I mean, like, you kind of have to see and then you go into a whole five minute description and people glaze over and get super bored. That's a sign of that you're an expert in that particular field, I would say.
00:12:46.900But there is this kind of security and safety that really, I think, comes from distance.
00:12:52.560And in the United States, a lot of stories about cancer culture on college campuses came
00:12:56.580from people who weren't at college campuses or who had left them.
00:13:01.220And it comes with living with stories, right?
00:13:04.340Our stories tend to be clearer in what they mean and what they communicate about the world
00:13:09.020than the messy reality we all live through.
00:19:05.040we probably should shut that on our website.
00:19:06.520Like the N word's on there and you're like,
00:19:08.080Well, I would hope that that's not on any Stanford website, right? But so is the word Karen, where you're like, well, feels hard to avoid with a faculty of several thousand people. We're going to have some Karens. No hate, but like there's going to be just some literal Karens out there. But that's the thing. Like you had to kind of dig down into like who did what to whom. And then the second question was like, how? And this is the question I never was able to figure out. Like, how did the Wall Street Journal get this? Right. I have my theories. I'm not going to say, but like, it's very noticeable that a
00:19:38.080person who's like, I can't believe those wokesters at Stanford, right? Like has to not ask themselves1.00
00:19:43.160like, wait, why am I hearing about this? Like, how did this get to me? Which might bring me to
00:19:49.260something you identify as a real telling feature of the cancel culture panic genre, which is this
00:19:54.920kind of like motivated disproportionality, right? Like these tiny incidents where the motivation is
00:20:03.280not what's being presented and really the stakes could not possibly be any lower is being blown up
00:20:08.640into quite literally a national scandal what are the mechanisms that make it travel that far
00:20:13.580the mechanisms are sort of association and comparison right like this is where you get like
00:20:18.940oh this is like the mccarthy era right like stephen pinker is very fond of that comparison
00:20:23.680right sometimes they use the dreyfus affair the dreyfus affair there's a piece by peggy noonan
00:20:28.240from 2021 about cancer culture showing a bunch of Chinese kids from the cultural revolution being
00:20:33.900like, now comes this struggle session. And you're like, I don't know, man, I would be much more
00:20:38.620afraid of an actual struggle session than, you know, people were mean to me on Twitter or whatever.
00:20:43.900But yeah, it's this comparison. Then it's the claim that this is getting worse, right? Like
00:20:49.420these may seem like small potatoes, but it's getting worse and it's getting more. What of
00:20:54.680course they don't reflect on is that these kinds of discourses tend to create feedback loops. They
00:20:58.960tend to create their own positives, right? Like once you've put it in everyone's head that like
00:21:03.080you can get a lot of attention in the media ecosphere by saying you were canceled, just
00:21:09.900disproportionately more people will say that that's what happened to them. So these are all sort of the
00:21:14.920mechanisms. And then the other thing about it is, of course, the mechanisms themselves, they may not
00:21:19.660work for most people. There are a lot of people who see through them, right? People on Twitter have
00:21:23.980a lot of fun dunking on these. What actually happened here, right? But I think the reason
00:21:29.200that they work is also the secret kind of principle of the thing. The worry about cancer
00:21:34.160culture started around 1819 and then really caught on in 2020. And if you think about what
00:21:41.660happened between 2018 and 2020, right, about things that have to do with anecdotes and then
00:21:47.480make broader claims about those anecdotes, right? You have Me Too and you have Black Lives Matter.
00:21:52.040And to some extent, I think, or I argue in the book, I try to show in the book, that the cancel culture anecdote functions as the antidote, right? It's me too for people who are scared of me too. People who think that me too went too far, but who want to sort of come up with their own anecdotes to invalidate those other anecdotes, right? The same people who want like five more Weinstein accusers before they're like going to believe that he did anything wrong, right?
00:22:16.920They're like, but can you believe what those kids did at Oberlin, right?
00:22:19.720And you're like, okay, I see what you're doing, right?
00:22:21.560You're playing with the relationship between the individual case, right?
00:22:27.040Because in the end, like Me Too is to some extent an anecdotal discourse too.
00:22:31.140It's just like, it's a lot more anecdotes.
00:22:33.240But like in the end, we do, when I say Me Too, we do flashback to individual proper names,
00:22:38.300So does someone who's scared of cancel culture.
00:22:40.320It's actually fairly similar in their mind.
00:22:43.160It's just that like the numbers are super low.
00:22:44.760And as you say, the stakes are far less and far smaller than especially for Black Lives Matter.
00:22:49.160You're starting to tap in to what I think is really the overarching novel insight of your book,
00:22:55.660which is how cancel culture allows a lot of different anxieties to get laundered from sometimes the quite far marginal reaches of the right into our mainstream centrist discourses.
00:23:07.780Before we get really into the weeds in that, do you want to read?
00:24:18.300Most likely, what at unicorn in KK meant by that term was the tendency, particularly Taylor Swift's, to devote thinly veiled distracts to ex-partners immediately after breaking up with them, or after being broken up with.
00:24:33.880First, that practice would have corresponded exactly to a description of something else, namely call-out culture that was very common at the time.
00:24:41.360And second, Unicorn NKK's verdict was explicitly aesthetic.
00:24:47.120She wasn't worried about freedom of speech.
00:24:49.160She simply didn't want to hear any more songs of this type.
00:24:52.420Talk about cancer culture, like the word cancelling, originated on Black Twitter,
00:24:57.000where it was marshaled in defense of various problematic faves from Jay-Z to R. Kelly
00:25:05.800But it was used as a kind of imminent critique in these fam communities and online spaces.
00:25:11.340When users complained about cancel culture, they indicated that those who criticized these
00:25:16.660stars made it too easy on themselves, were too moralistic, too quick to pass judgment,
00:25:21.060or to declare someone problematic. Importantly, both sides of this debate,
00:25:25.880those who criticized something as problematic and those who claimed that this critique itself
00:25:30.300was problematic, were part of the same discursive space. They were fans, for lack of a better term.
00:25:35.420Blog posts using the word in the summer of 2017 are steeped in the vernacular and preoccupations of Black Twitter and LGBTQ plus bubbles largely on Tumblr and largely address users only in those spaces.
00:25:50.720Up until this point, the diagnosis cancer culture had been part of a larger critique of what is today known as toxic stan Twitter, which is indisputably an unpleasant aspect of online fan cultures, but ultimately something that is true largely of fan cultures.
00:26:06.840This was about users wanting to make their little corner of the internet a little bit of a better place.
00:26:11.580Many tweets from 2016 to 2018 have since been deleted, meaning that it's almost impossible to say anything with any certainty about the Twitter discourse on canceling and cancel culture. Nevertheless, and this was true even before Elon Musk completely fucked up the platform, by the way.
00:26:27.840But nevertheless, until 2018, not a single tweet I could find on the subject, hundreds, if not thousands, in the spring of 2018 alone contained the words campus, university, student, or freedom of speech.
00:26:41.800Cancel Culture's big break came in June and July of 2018 with Kanye West.
00:26:46.720For the first time, a canceled person spoke out about their cancellation, and West also identified a possible second cancellation victim, a man whose ability to present and indeed regard himself as a perpetual victim is perhaps unmatched in the long history of American thin-skinnedness, namely then-President Donald Trump.
00:27:07.540In an interview with the New York Times, rapper Kanye West used the word canceled seven times.
00:27:13.360I'm canceled, West said and added, I'm canceled because I didn't cancel Trump.
00:27:18.700Here it was, the word from hip-hop fandom, from queer Twitter, threatening both a white0.52
00:27:23.960conservative man and his most bizarre and devoted fan.0.62
00:27:27.560The interview appeared on June 25th, and the word was soon everywhere.
00:27:31.540In relation to Roseanne Barr, YouTuber Logan Paul, and Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey.
00:27:36.740Three things are striking about this coming out of the term. First, it seems to have entered the vocabulary of the Trumpists only through the liberal New York Times. Unlike the term political correctness, which was essentially a right-wing psyop that was later adapted by mainstream media, cancel culture was popularized by liberal media. Only in the second step did the right-wingers discover the label as something that they could use.
00:28:01.520Everyone is cancelled, wrote Jonah Bromwich in a long article in the Style section of the New York Times on June 28, 2018, most likely also to explain to readers the specifics of the Kanye West interview, which probably left a few of them dumbfounded.
00:28:18.280Bromwich's article drives home a second point. Early uses in the traditional media did not use
00:28:25.120the term to diagnose anything new. The early coverage did not treat, for instance, Roseanne
00:28:30.640Barr's scandal, the uproar over Logan Paul and Kevin Spacey as anything new. What they treated
00:28:37.000as new was the nomenclature of canceling. Third, the New York Times' early reporting was entirely
00:29:47.540Had things shifted so fundamentally in public discourse between 2018 and 2022 that such
00:29:53.440a redefinition of canceling became necessary, this seems very unlikely, especially since
00:29:59.720the examples offered for cancellation often come from 2017, 2018, or 2019.
00:30:05.400It seems much more likely that in the discursive explosion that followed the first articles about cancer culture in June and July of 2018, the outlines of the alleged phenomenon began to blur.
00:30:18.600Or perhaps better, once alienated from the specific discursive spaces, from the specific users that had developed it, the term could be applied to just about everything and anything, and haphazardly integrated into discourse old and new.
00:30:32.540In some contexts, cancel culture simply replaced the expression political correctness. In others, it reactivated the panic about speech codes or gave new shape to a nearly 40-year-old fear of identity politics.
00:30:46.740Precisely because its origins had become so thoroughly repressed, cancel culture was able to mean many things to many different people.
00:30:54.180It wasn't really a concept anymore. It was a meme. But it was a meme that wasn't allowed to admit that it was a meme. Rather, it had to act as though it still were a highly precise term denoting an acute and clearly defined historic problem.
00:31:09.140Newspaper readers and Twitter users in the United States witnessed this process firsthand.
00:35:37.220And it is about these kind of descriptions that kind of spill over and that the broader culture becomes like convinced, like denote these like really threatening developments to our way of life, our freedom or whatever, or like public decency, public morality, et cetera, et cetera.
00:35:54.860And a couple of things that they have in common is they usually buy young people and they usually don't ask young people, right?
00:36:00.500is a bunch of politicians, journalists, members of Congress, like your local sheriff being like,
00:36:06.720oh, I have heard many of the youths partaking in these kinds of sex parties or these kinds of
00:36:12.460rainbow parties, rainbow parties that we were told in the 2000s was definitely totally happening.
00:36:19.240And do you want to tell the story? I don't know if I want to tell what a rainbow party is. It
00:36:23.360involved oral sex and lipstick and a sex act that cannot possibly be performed, which I0.99
00:36:29.880Like large groups of very serious pundits sort of sat around and debating this without0.97
00:36:34.400anyone ever being like, wait, does this work?
00:41:04.720It's not like you're kind of a little stuck in your ways
00:41:07.080And maybe you should feel sheepish about that. No, you are actually the bold outlier. You're like, not me, wokesters. I will not use your they them pronouns.
00:41:16.720I think what you're describing here is the way that cancel culture goes, at least in the minds of the people who use it as an accusation, from a critique of liberal excess to a defense of liberal values, right?
00:41:32.380It allows liberals to be conservative or to argue for conservative positions while at the same time claiming themselves to be the true liberals or the classical liberals.
00:41:43.620Right. Classical liberals. Exactly. And this is like people who tell me that my book is dangerous
00:41:47.900and that like actually cancer culture is a huge problem. Like nine times out of 10,
00:41:52.200if I click on their bio, it'll be like, neither conservative nor liberal or like
00:41:56.320classical liberal. And you're like, yeah, yeah. Okay. I get it. But no, you're exactly right.
00:42:01.360I don't think of it in terms of positions because I think it's ultimately like more about like
00:42:05.500impulses. It's people who conceive of themselves as liberal, but are starting to have conservative
00:42:13.060impulses on certain things, right? Like their kid came home with pronouns and now they're like,
00:42:18.800whoa, okay. Right. And like, they don't know how to feel about it. And like, basically right,
00:42:22.880they're like at a crossroads. They can either sort of be like, okay, I'm learning a new thing.
00:42:26.980Some of it seems good. Some of it seems strange, but it seems fine. Or they can be like, no,
00:42:33.780it is the children who are wrong. And then cancer culture is there for them. And it'll be there
00:42:39.580to articulate for them why they're not being jerks, but really why they're being, yeah,0.98
00:42:46.420like, yeah, the guardians, they're the new, the latter day Alexis de Tocqueville, right? Like0.98
00:42:51.000they're standing up for the American common wheel at this point. I mean, what they're literally
00:42:56.140doing is being a dick to their kids, but like, no, but like, isn't the most important thing0.99
00:43:01.320to be a dick to your kids for democracy, you know? Right. You're explaining this like kind1.00
00:43:06.500like magnifying feature that it has right because on the one hand cancel culture panic can take
00:43:12.860incidents that are like incredibly banal and don't matter or are like wildly misconstrued
00:43:19.100and blow them up to have you know civilizational consequence and some of this rhetoric but it can
00:43:24.860also take these like gestures of pettiness or like just withholding or like willful
00:43:31.840refusal to understand and blow that up into like grand principled defenses yeah so it it takes these
00:43:39.000interactions that are actually just like really like incredibly low stakes and small like small
00:43:45.480morally small consequentially and then turn them into these grand battles of good evil yeah there
00:43:51.660is a kind of secondary narcissism you get to like enjoy yourself self-portrait at the biggest
00:43:57.480possible scale right like i'll say a thing now i'm gonna have a cancelable opinion something that0.89
00:44:02.920my undergraduates say and do strikes me as dumb and uninteresting there are things that they do0.53
00:44:09.840where i'm like i don't get it it's not for me i'm canceling you adrian i know please yeah i'm being0.94
00:44:15.680bold right now right like which i think drives home the point that like isn't it awfully convenient
00:44:21.200when a discourse allows you to think of a thing that mildly annoys you as also the greatest threat
00:44:26.340to the west since whatever like stalinism or something like that right like that's convenient
00:44:31.480right like i hate people cutting me off in traffic it is now the right like there's there's something
00:44:37.240deeply appealing to like having your own petty gripes be super important right you and i have
00:44:45.560made fun of david sedaris for this a little bit of like being like david sedaris doesn't like to
00:44:49.720use the word queer and he like keeps writing like texts about like oh you'll come for me but i i do
00:44:56.180not believe in the word. I don't want to self-apply the word queer. That's totally fine,
00:44:59.700David Sedaris. Just don't use the word queer. It's really not a big deal. And kind of can't
00:45:05.820help but notice that you keep making it one, right? So that's one thing. The other thing is
00:45:09.680exactly like, it is a way to heighten the texture of everyday life. This is not a cancer culture
00:45:16.000story. It's a cancer culture story of all the letters. It's a political correctness anecdote
00:45:20.620from 1988 from the University of Texas in Austin. I'm not even drawing a blank on who the guy is.
00:45:25.740He was an English professor and he was in a lot of these sort of,
00:45:28.880he was in the time at the big time piece on 1982 thought police,
00:59:10.020In the end, though, it is a deeply community-dependent discourse because it says, hey, remember that power you invested in me 10 years ago? I deserved that. The power they withdrew from me last year, I didn't deserve that, right? So it does become this kind of funny mix of a libertarian conservatism and this kind of heroic individualism.
00:59:31.200uh leah asks what's your take on how these moral panics die or at least subside back down
00:59:39.320to a baseline when funding dries up for barry weiss and peterson type figures or just that each
00:59:45.400term political correctness cancel culture woke etc gets hollowed out and runs out of energy
00:59:52.340that's a great question there's one part i can answer barry weiss and jordan peterson will never
00:59:58.040run out of funds. This is part of what has sustained this panic for so long in its new
01:00:03.420guises. There is right-wing donor money attached to it. And there are people who make their living
01:00:09.660getting paid by that right-wing donor money. I know that sounds a little conspiratorial,
01:00:13.420but all I'm saying is there is someone drawing a paycheck at the Heritage Foundation,
01:00:18.900bundling campus anecdotes. That person is going to keep doing that as long as the checks roll in
01:00:24.940And Heritage has an interest in keeping that going, right?
01:00:28.100So I think that is part of the problem.
01:00:30.420But the other parts of this are more complicated.
01:00:32.740I do think that they run out of steam fairly quickly.
01:00:35.280Stanley Cohen said that basically he thought that moral panics really exhaust themselves
01:00:38.860fairly quickly just because that level of emotional pitch can't be sustained.
01:00:43.620Now, I would say Stanley Cohen, me, Twitter, right?
01:00:45.960Like we can sustain emotional pitch a lot better in the online age, and that's a problem,
01:00:52.780However, I do think what makes Leah's question so interesting is I think that as I'm talking about this moral panic, I think it is running out of steam. I think we're kind of getting to the tail end of it. And you're starting to see kind of attempts to rebrand it. There is already a French candidate for a replacement, right? So cancel culture came to France, didn't succeed very well because the French think culture is a good thing. It's like they don't like the cancel culture. It has to be this canceling.
01:01:20.240And then they got le bochisme. And they're like, yes, le bochisme. And so they have like 40 books
01:01:27.840appeared on le bochisme in like one year. And then they have a new concept and that's
01:01:31.880islamo-gauchisme. So islamo-leftism. And you're starting to see islamo-leftism crop up in like0.84
01:01:37.660the British spectator and like sort of the far right rags in the UK. That might be the next one.0.96
01:01:44.180And you're starting to see the points about like, oh, aren't our university secretly in league
01:01:50.040with Hamas, but you're starting to see that sort of on Bari Weiss's sub stack and that kind of
01:01:55.220thing. So that would be my guess. That's the next one that's kind of warming itself up. It's like
01:02:00.860doing stretches courtside and it's like, put me in coach, right? And like, I wouldn't be shocked
01:02:06.600if that's the next one. DEI was a brief one. It didn't seem to work that well. I'm still not sure
01:02:12.800why some run out of juice faster than others. It's really kind of interesting. And we do have
01:02:18.000the gift of Chris Rufo, who is like narrating, seeding these things and is like, yeah, that
01:02:24.720Like I found this like on the Seattle public something or other like public web and like
01:02:29.960tried that one out for a while, right?
01:02:31.620So Rufo is fantastic and sort of like kind of just talking you through the process, but
01:02:37.180that guy can't make this happen by himself.
01:02:39.240These things work when non-right wingers agree that this is a problem, right?
01:02:44.320So I don't quite know how that spark flies over and how it works.
01:02:48.140I think that there is some element where I can sort of show in the book, like, this is how this works.
01:02:53.600And this kind of ping pong effect where, like, the U.S. provides the examples and the anecdotes and the phrases for some time.
01:03:01.540And then, like, the French can sort of take it over and volley it back.0.52
01:03:04.720Remember when we all got, when, like, American conservatives got freaked out about gender?0.62
01:03:08.760Like, Europe had had that panic for, like, five years prior.
01:03:11.200The Europeans were like, whoa, did you guys just steal our thing? We didn't know that it worked that way. Yeah, it's bidirectional. But then there are other aspects of it that are, frankly, kind of mysterious. My guess is a lot will depend on where the Republican Party goes in the next 12 months.
01:03:29.280But this isn't independent. Just because I isolated in this and just tried to have pins on a map and on a calendar, I understand this doesn't happen in a vacuum. This is deeply entwined with political actors who have their own thing going.
01:03:43.920Rhonda Santos doesn't care about canceling calls. She cares about getting reelected. Other people care about selling newspapers. Other people care about not losing their job at the Heritage Foundation. Other people care about spending their gigantic fortune that they inherited and that they need to blow through somehow.1.00
01:03:59.280Everyone has a different set of priorities they bring to it.
01:04:02.520And as those realign and shift, I mean, one thing I think that could dial these down is
01:04:25.440So I'm sorry that I'm giving kind of a scattered answer.
01:04:27.660But the problem is, there are a lot of things that flow into this. And any of these dials could be determinative in how long these things last, what they get succeeded by, and how the transition looks.
01:04:40.160First of all, thanks. I really appreciated particularly the answer to the questions. I think the sides are clear. I think it's the people in the middle that I wanted you to have a little more empathy with in the conversation.
01:04:52.500polanski woody allen to me they're people i want to talk about that's more confusing like it's not
01:04:58.940as clear-cut as other people yeah i didn't know quite where you were going with i have two daughters
01:05:04.360this issue of pronouns the issue of gender comes up they're at that age how do you have that
01:05:10.340conversation as a parent when you talk about the kind of flippant nature of both left and right
01:05:15.920wing media i think about the power of a movie like tar which i thought was brilliant but like
01:05:21.200actually confused me now based on this conversation was thinking like well that movie really affirmed
01:05:26.500to me that there was an issue in colleges i was thinking it was so well made and it was hollywood
01:05:31.260and someone wrote it and people put money into it so i think where i sit is i i appreciate
01:05:35.800particularly the response to this question and a little bit of the last uh but in the middle ground
01:05:40.960we want to be able to have the conversation about cancel culture because i think i felt you were a
01:05:45.480little flippant earlier you both were cancel culture does exist and i think it's helpful to
01:05:50.940frame it for us a little more like people take advantage of it how much should we be worried
01:05:56.140about it you know and it's very useful this part of the conversation well yeah at the same time
01:06:02.640to go back to another moral panic and this is again sorry i'm keep coming back to this term
01:06:06.980but i think it does help clarify something right like there was in the 80s a moral panic about
01:06:11.820stranger abductions. Now, there were stranger abductions and it was a huge problem. It was not
01:06:16.820a numerically huge problem, but I mean, I have a child and it's the worst thing I could possibly
01:06:21.760imagine, right? That doesn't mean that the discourse about it was helpful, right? Because
01:06:27.360it often directed people's attention towards things that were useless, right? The famous
01:06:32.700strangers with candy or your unmarked white vans and away from things that people should be paying
01:06:40.140more attention to, like weird uncle so-and-so who kind of keeps hanging out with the kids at
01:06:45.440Thanksgiving and the kids don't seem that comfortable with him. So I think we're quibbling
01:06:49.060over definitions here. I'm saying the cases and the difficulties and the awkwardnesses and the
01:06:55.760problems you describe are real. But I think the moment you group them in that way, I think there
01:07:01.560are certain things that fall under the table. It's like a three-card Monty, right? Where you
01:07:04.820make the thing fall behind the table, right? There's something already falling out of the
01:07:09.600discussion by the time you've committed to saying there is this one thing called cancel culture,
01:07:14.840but we can probably say you already gave a good list of things that you feel leery about. And I
01:07:21.780think if you just stick with that list, you're actually much better off because some of these
01:07:25.200things are similar to each other. Some are not, right? Like, as I say, language change is one
01:07:30.120thing, right? Gender is another, right? That can be about language change, but it is not necessarily1.00
01:07:36.540you about language change. The intergenerational aspect, the fact that there's some aspects of our
01:07:41.020children's lives, and I have a three-year-old, I'm not anywhere near in the position you're in,
01:07:46.100I'm guessing in terms of experiencing the alienation of like this person that I knew
01:07:50.980everything about, I now I'm starting to have serious doubts about, like, I don't, there are
01:07:56.280parts of their lives that are just inaccessible to me. Naming that is important and sitting with
01:08:01.840that awkwardness and sitting with the ambiguities of that is very powerful whether or not it gains
01:08:09.080anything by being connected to these other things or whether that moralizes it too much and sort of
01:08:15.560makes it such that one way one side or the other right either you who says cancer culture is real
01:08:20.820or let's say the other side that says like it's not i guess another question like whether or not
01:08:25.420to just sit with hey there's this thing that we find difficult to talk about and maybe we have
01:08:31.700talk about the difficulty, I'm not sure what you gain from saying, and that is indicative of a
01:08:36.400broader thing in this culture, such as Roman Polanski. What Roman Polanski did is entirely
01:08:42.040separate from the difficulty of talking to one's children. So I would say in some way, being open
01:08:47.880and honest about lists and just saying, here's some things I've noticed, let's take them one by
01:08:53.220one is probably more helpful than trying to group them under this kind of modish moniker, I would
01:08:58.580say. To give you one example, there was between 2020 and 2022, a very strange spate of firings at
01:09:06.020Starbucks of people who had served coffee to police officers. And the police officers went
01:09:11.900on Twitter and said, this person wrote pig on my Starbucks cup. And the people invariably got
01:09:18.340fired. Starbucks, being a corporate employer, obviously hates bad publicity. Turns out no one
01:09:24.140wrote pig on someone's Starbucks cup. This didn't happen. There were like 20 cases like this. It's
01:09:29.140not huge, but 20 cases. None of them I've ever seen discussed as cancel culture, even though
01:09:34.860it would fit. And that's what I mean. Being fired from your job at Starbucks sucks. Losing an
01:09:40.620editorship for an academic journal, you're not losing any money, but these people lost their
01:09:45.040livelihood. But it's not discussed as cancel culture because A, the people accusing were
01:09:49.980police we tend to credit police more than we credit an undergraduate who said this person
01:09:54.760said a slur to me and because it sort of didn't fit right it didn't fit the story and that's what
01:10:00.140i mean right the movie tar is about a person who in a brutal way i mean unless i misunderstood the
01:10:07.440movie like abused her power right and drove someone to suicide right like i agree there are
01:10:12.360thorny issues raised by that movie but i wouldn't want to connect it to like not knowing how to use
01:10:18.000pronouns. That person is making a perfectly human mistake. Lydia Tarr in the movie Tarr
01:10:23.060is somewhere beyond a perfectly understandable error. We can still have to say, does she deserve
01:10:28.580what happens to her in the movie? But it's on a different register. So that's what I would plead
01:10:31.980for. Context dependence, specificity, local knowledge, right? Situating it not in this
01:10:39.860international story of cancel culture, but in the very lived experience of what it's like to be in
01:10:45.840an American workplace? What it is to like to be in an American university? What it's like to be
01:10:50.400in an American family, right? And suddenly the empathy, suddenly the knowledge, suddenly the
01:10:56.500context comes back in that I find cancel culture tends to magically make go away. Sorry, it's a
01:11:03.580long answer, but that would be my answer. Be comfortable with lists and saying they feel
01:11:09.060similar to me, but I acknowledge they're not 100% similar, right? I think we have time for one more
01:11:16.600This is going to bring it down a notch.