Part of the reason I'm using this story as an excuse to revisit Tuesday's post is due to a detail I noticed on the show's Wikipedia entry - in 2018, she apparently deflected accusations about "not always being nice to her workers". The fact that nothing seemed to change in the next eighteen months reminded me of my point that the market creates a financial incentive for leaders to ignore problems in the workplace culture. But implied in my point is an uncomfortable reality regarding the way an audience participates in the system - if there is an incentive for organizations to ignore workplace problems, then isn't that incentive created by those of us who pour our time, money, and attention into certain industries? It didn't occur to me earlier this week that as I twiddled my thumbs while searching for my voice, hundreds of thousands of my fellow Americans were making themselves heard in the loudest possible way - silently pushing a button on their remote controls on their way to watch or do something else.
It's not clear what will happen next for the show, if anything, but even someone like me who knows nothing about this industry can tell you that if the show continues to lose viewers at this rate, it will soon be cancelled. A ratings-based cancellation would be a little different from what some commentators had in mind last summer, when references to the show's possible cancellation were used in the sense of "cancel culture". I suppose if you ignore the fact that, almost certainly, years will have passed between last summer and this hypothetical ratings-based cancellation, then you could say that we ended up with the same basic result, demonstrating that a collective response can be an aggregation over time just as much as it can be a one-time mass effort. It is like with our elected officials - when we take back their power, it almost always means voting them out of office, but the collective attention given to election day can obscure how decisions at the ballot box always reflect the months and years that led up to the vote.
I sense now that the script calls for me to tie this thought up into a neat little bow, perhaps invoking an authority such as President Obama as I draw a neat line between healthy activism and cancel culture. I do agree that dragging up someone's past and holding a show trial in the internet court of public opinion is itself a manifestation of a toxic culture, particularly when the accused is an otherwise average person whose transgressions can be forgiven, or whose damage can be repaired. It bothers me when effectively powerless individuals are singled out for past violations of modern standards and punished disproportionately to their place in society, though such treatment is hardly a recent invention. But we must have a higher standard for power, particularly the most influential individuals or major corporate entities. We must have a higher standard for whatever has the capability to define and reinforce the norms that are responsible for so much bigotry, marginalization, and suffering in modern society. We have an older generation who confirmed the poisonous reality of the cigarette industry but allowed those companies to remain in business. They were followed by a generation who preferred to watch their President play a saxophone rather than heed the climate warnings of his Vice-President. My generation invented social media, a fresh hell that almost helped topple our democracy, but we remain its most loyal customers. What made them, what made us, follow when we could have led?
We can say quite a bit about this question but we can't say that we didn't know. We knew more than enough, and we still ended up here. We all knew about the Civil War, it happened one hundred and fifty-six years ago, but we still ended up here, explaining racism to people. There is something about the way things work that doesn't work, which is the surest sign of a toxic culture. The problem with cancel culture is the focus on individuals, and this madness in the method made it hard for me to see the point - cancel culture is about cancelling the culture. It's the culture that builds the incremental structure during the day, then feigns ignorance when the new dawn reveals overnight vandalism. It's the culture that remains loyal to the scribblings of a group of slaveholders rather than confront the reasons why Americans are slaughtered in grocery stores, movie theaters, and elementary schools. It's the culture that must change because it cares more about the ideal than it does about the ideal's effect on people. The aspect of cancel culture that confuses vengeance and justice is in some ways a new version of the same old problem, but at its core it does at least start with the premise that the most important thing about an ideal is the way it affects people.
What the cancel culture phenomenon needs is a refocusing, and not for any better reason than the ineffectiveness of the current method. It must reset itself and focus its sights on the appropriate targets - powerful people and entities who set and reinforce toxic norms, or profit from them. It must ask itself if the collective energy directed against Halloween outfits from the 20th century could be better used, perhaps by challenging the structures that make gun sales a profitable, legal enterprise. It must ask itself how to harness the collective voice when we cannot afford to wait for the next Nielsen ratings, for the next election, or for the next mass shooting. The next iteration of cancel culture, focused correctly, can be a transformational first step toward a better future rather than the latest example of the showmanship that has long passed for change in this country, but it must lead by example and demonstrate that it, too, is capable of the change it demands of us all.
