In defense of cancel culture, a thread:

One of the markers of canceling is that it is crowd action. Being canceled is not being fired, being jailed, being excommunicated. It can lead to these things, but they are separate acts, carried out by agents with official power. 1/10

Canceling can *absolutely* go wrong. The wrong people get canceled, or the right people get canceled for the wrong thing. I wish people were all thoughtful and circumspect, and that no one exaggerated or riled others up into a righteous fury over minor issues. 2/10

But the dangers and abuses of a practice have to be considered in the light of its uses and virtues, and in comparison to alternatives. And in this light, canceling is a salutary practice of democratic power. 3/10

As crowd action, it is essentially not the act of individuals. No one can cancel alone, or in a small group. This makes canceling fundamentally anti-elite. People whose opinions count as those of individuals (officials, leaders) cannot cancel someone. Only the crowd can. 4/10

This is the original version of democracy, as Daniela Cammack has shown: the power of those who can only count en masse to check the proposals and actions of those with individual power and status. 5/10 https://scholar.harvard.edu/dlcammack/publications/original-meaning-d%C3%AAmokratia

The liberal alternative to this power of the crowd is that elites check elites. This is what many (not all!) of the signatories to the Harper's letter want: individuals respond as individuals to speech they don't like, within a liberal culture of debate. 6/10

But in reality, the elites-check-elites strategy has 2 big disadvantages. It keeps in place the big power differentials of a stratified society, and it keeps debate within the narrow bounds of disgreement among elites socialized and educated as peers. 7/10

Cancel culture, by contrast, allows crowds to force into view perspectives absent from elite circles, and challenges the right of elites to exist as elites, or to possess the power they do (whether they use it liberally or not). 8/10

And we have seen that canceling usually goes bad only when elites seek to coopt or deflect its energy by using official sanctions against the cancelled. When Civis fired David Shor, e.g., or when de Blasio commended the prosecution of Amy Cooper. 9/10

So I say: two cheers for cancel culture! Let's cancel people when they fuck up. But let's also cancel the bosses and politicians who turn cancelations into official punishments, and encourage the canceled to make amends by uncanceling them for good works. /fin

P.S., @BueRubner made many similar points earlier and I missed it. Thread starts here: https://twitter.com/BueRubner/status/1280759374659686400?s=19