A reactionary wave surges into power across the pond – does it mean the death of ‘woke’? Editor-in-cheif Morgan Woodfall waves goodbye to cancellation
Have you heard the news? Woke is dead. At least, that’s what Trump, Musk and their cabal of teenage admins would like you to believe. DEI (Diversity, equality and inclusion) has been purged from the high offices of the land, ‘gender ideology’ has been expunged from email signatures, and Canada has been reasonably threatened with annexation for allowing any drugs across a 5-thousand mile border, ever. And now that woke is dead it must re-emerge as a spectre, one haunting Europe even – or is that just the threat of tariffs? What ‘woke’ actually referred to, other than a rebrand of political correctness which was a left-wing in-joke which was a rebrand of cultural Marxism which was a Nazi conspiracy, remains unclear.
One abolished symptom of woke that supporters of our new glorious world leaders might point to was cancel culture. It’s now so dead that you can be reinstated in a US government position after your posts about the supposed horrors of race-mixing have come to light. But was it ever real? The challenge of course is that of the perfect crime. If you steal something and no one ever catches you, did you really steal it? If you get cancelled and no one ever hears from you again, is it part of the culture at all?
I’ve put together a little formula for what cancel culture actually, genuinely might be, at a suitably small scale. As a social phenomena, it’s not brought about by individuals so much as the cumulative effects of a social organism. In particular, it’s when a set of individuals who may associate with you, all make the personal decision that the benefits of bucking the herd and retaining contact in the face of some condemnable action, aren’t worth the hassle. This is even if you regret your behaviour or are at no risk of bringing about similar harms to those ‘cancelling’ you. In other words, you really can’t blame anyone for a cancellation. All of them have made the smart move – if the social momentum pushes against someone’s reputation, it could be suicide to push back.
This is why I think the ‘cancel’ term feels inadequate or euphemistic when applied to serious misconduct like racism or sexual misdemeanour. Those behaviours, especially if recent, can bring about harm in the present to members of a shared community. Cancelling, in particular, happens when the behaviour in question is bad enough to warrant moral condemnation without posing a risk to shared community. And it’s for this reason that I think it has prompted so much debate. People have their morals, sure, but what should they do about them? What decision here brings about a better world?
For one, I don’t know if this idealised scenario has ever really happened. Most supposed cancellations I’ve seen have actually referred to accusations of serious misconduct – if the accusations are more nebulous, there simply isn’t enough weight to carry their momentum around an entire community. As someone who keeps up with a lot of emo and hardcore music, I’ve seen my fair share of X formerly known as Twitter callout posts come and go. And as a rule, people are unwilling to associate with known abusers – but not everything is so clear-cut.
I think a particular problem with the framing of cancel culture is that second word, culture. The emergence of the cancellation phenomena into the world of celebrity posed an interesting question for the concept’s integrity. Namely, could it survive contact with the power structures that already exist to protect mostly white men in the public eye? The obvious answer is no, of course not. To use a quote from author Kurt Vonnegut on the Vietnam war: “…every respectable artist in this country was against the war…. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”
I think cancellations have existed at a small scale, and perhaps they are social phenomena worth documenting for anthropological reasons and sorting under the label ‘cancel culture’. But I contend that there was never really a popular culture of cancellation. Comedians that cross the line get Netflix specials and keep their jobs as the hosts of quiz shows. Accused rapist politicians get re-elected, hire white South Africans who do Nazi salutes in front of thousands and then don’t fire them. What a pitiful attempt at destroying the hearts of Western nations ‘woke’ was. We hardly tore down a few statues before the Daily Mail brigade started having heart palpitations.
Part of the problem is the way existing power structures glommed onto the perpetual resentment machine that is social condemnation. Simply put, it sucks when people don’t like you, and if you’re not a good person, you can weaponise that discomfort for sympathy points and lucrative advertising contracts so long as you’re savvy enough and avoid all introspection. Still, the right-wing anti-culture machine is a beige place if you play your cards wrong. Gina Carano was fired from her role on Disney’s The Mandalorian TV show amidst arguably the height of the supposed woke insurrection – 2021, with Joe Biden in office in the US and a pandemic still visible in humanity’s rearview mirror. Her beliefs about voter fraud and vaccines got her fired and won her support from the deep pockets of Elon Musk. But has she done much acting work since? In TV shows and movies, no, and one might point to this as evidence of actually existing cancel culture – justified, maybe, but certainly real. So long as Carano plays the part of a perpetual victim to the right people, so long as her public displays capture enough clicks, rage-bait or otherwise, on enough platforms, she’ll be paid handsomely. There’s that age old saying: ‘If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life’.
There are so many rich people with bad opinions, and so many grifters vying to be worthy of their legal funds. It’s a machine that produces only bad outcomes. It spirals quickly out of control until the term ‘hate speech’ is itself hate speech and we are asked as members of the public to wonder whether elected officials actually think race-mixing is bad and immigration is an evil virus of Satan. So yes, woke has failed and died. But maybe it was always going to be like this. In trying to fight those entrenched racist patriarchal structures, we didn’t quite realise that they have hands too.
