Cancel culture takes are coming so furiously in the last few days it’s hard to keep track. The good news is that keeping track is not terribly necessary. While many provide useful history (such as that of McCarthyism) none manage to answer why it is that every political group seems to experience and describe something like “cancel culture” while only particular groups opt for that nomenclature.
I claim that this is because the social platform-dominated discursive space, while comprised of multiple platforms, is governed by the same profit strategies. These strategies inform all experiences on the platforms, and then people describe those experiences through popular idioms and assumptions of their ingroup. Because we have allowed these mediating technologies such ubiquity in our political and social lives, we can and should expect to see their business practices reflected in our politics.
What Josh Hawley and Rand Paul on the right call cancel culture is what Jeet Heer of the New Republic calls journalistic cowardice in the face of right wing harassment. One stems from the conservatives’ media victimhood complex, the other from the left’s belief in itself as the guardian of journalistic integrity. These are worldview-tinted ways of describing a basic PR crisis management dynamic that has existed almost as long as social media has existed.
I was hired in 2006 to lead the new viral advertising department of an ad tracking firm based in Long Island City, Queens. Youtube had recently launched, Facebook was just opening membership to people without college email addresses, and Myspace was still huge. Sites like The Huffington Post and Gawker were pioneering the clickbait infotainment celebrity gossip driven monetizing strategies while news sites and brands alike were rolling out their “Web 2.0” redesigns. We’ve all but forgotten that terminology, but back then it was all the rage — especially for brands.
By providing visible metrics such as the like/follow and the share/reblog, corporations saw a potential to involve internet users in bringing visibility to their products. This could have a variety of advantages, from getting loads of free advertising from people who weren’t aware they were advertising to increasing/maintaining brand presence in a crowded field of competitors. My job was to track these developments and describe them to boardroom types who were eager to get in on the action, to understand what was working in the field and why. They also wanted to know what was failing and here’s where I would mark the early history of what is now debated as “cancel culture.” With a musician named Dave Carroll and his Youtube video called “United Breaks Guitars.”
Corporations were eager to adopt user generated content and to encourage customer engagement. They would hope to sell this as their superior intimacy with the customers — a new level of customer service. But they found out quickly that blessings and curses in social media space are not neatly demarcated. After his expensive Taylor Guitars were damaged by United employees, he spent nine months fruitlessly attempting to get some compensation or reimbursement from the company.
Employees to whom he spoke ran him around the “sorry, it’s just company policy” merry-go-round so Dave Carroll did what he knew how to do best: he wrote a song about it. Then he filmed a video and uploaded it to Youtube. It racked up massive view counts, and with that United had gone viral in what was for them a terrible way. Armed with all the tools brands had hoped would encourage customers like Dave to shower them with unsolicited and free attention, one guy created a devastating PR crisis for United.
Since the incident, there’s been a great deal of debate as to what sort of bottom line damage Carroll’s song and video caused to United’s stock price and bottom line. Some put the cost at around a 10% stock devaluation to the tune of 180 million dollars. This is disputed, but what’s important is that United suddenly understood that there was a such thing as bad viral advertising. The amount of unwanted negative attention and the speed at which it multiplied was damaging to United’s bottom line. And here’s the rub: reimbursing Carroll for his lost equipment (something the company eventually got around to) would have been far cheaper than suffering the bad press. The lesson, in other words, was that you should respond quickly and immediately validate the customer, who is always right.
For the record, I take Dave’s side in this. I’m a musician who’s been screwed over by airlines plenty. But there’s a deeper point here that begins to drive at why we must understand cancel culture as something that happens pre-political worldview: it doesn’t really matter whether Dave or United was in the right. Bottom lines suffer for as long as the negative PR persists, and giving in quickly — however it’s spun —preserves profits. This case is now taught in business schools as a classic lesson in crisis management and the dangers of negative online campaigns.
While it may be true that a college or a think tank or a newspaper is not exactly an apples to apples comparison with a major airline, we are at great risk of losing the plot if we overestimate the difference in approaches by each. Growing massively unpopular overnight on the internet usually happens on a few of the same websites that serve people their political news. PR firms hire students that studied the same cases in the same schools, deriving the same lessons from them. The profit incentives of Twitter, Facebook, and United Airlines come to govern the decisions of The New York Times and ivy league universities.
I’ve often described Ryan Holiday’s 2012 book “Trust Me I’m Lying” as an essential canary in this coal mine. Written from a successful PR savant’s point of view, Holiday explained the emerging dynamics of online falsehood, how they can be used to trade your preferred versions of stories up the chain and get them reported in major publications. He saw then the ramifications these features of the social internet could have for politics, so he wrote a tell-all. I’ve recently re-read parts of that book. Some bits, like Holiday’s IDW-adjacent defenses of some truly nasty characters, haven’t aged well. But the parts that have aged the best are the parts where he says, hauntingly, that it won’t matter that he tells you how all this works, because it will still work just as well. Knowing how it works, and telling everyone how it works, cannot stop it from working. The structural features of social tech, scale, and engagement strategy are more powerful than the content we enter into those structures.
It is a mistake, in other words, to grant anyone their ideological and partisan terms. Josh Hawley is just describing Simon & Schuster navigating a PR crisis. Friends of Wil Wilkinson complain about The Niskanen Center’s decisions but the Center is doing the same thing. The lessons of United Breaks Guitars are now with us in ways we all despise. They may sometimes punish people we don’t like and we may cheer. They will also punish people we like.
The bottom-line driven necessity of bowing to harassment campaigns is an outgrowth of information technology’s sheer scope, and of the business models that monetize attention. Cancel culture follows from from the persistent belief that markets are ultimately wise. I suspect that the reason everyone finds the reasons for it always conveniently lodged in their already-existing worldview is because those on the left who are skeptical of market wisdom are most likely to say things like “cancel culture doesn’t exist” (they were clinging only a few years ago to the fantasy of social tech as a subversive and liberating force). Meanwhile the people who won’t shut up about it tend to be the most mindless champions of the moral superiority of capitalism. You can disavow the conservative view that cancel culture only happens to them, or is mainly championed by liberals — but you can’t say it doesn’t exist.
In the end, it’s all just PR. It’s the corporate logic of skin-salvaging. As long as people insist on giving it a name that massages their worldview, it’ll remain misunderstood. It’ll persist as an ideology-tinged bogeyman rather than a nuts-and-bolts function of the new media space. And even if it ever comes to be understood, it won’t matter because it’ll still function the same way for as long as people are secondary to markets. It’ll work for as long as we assent to allowing the entirety of our social and political existence to be dictated by the fusion of Big Tech and capital.
