Cancel culture is the censorship and silencing of anything that can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive, provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint. Alternative and minority views are cancelled out. Information and sharing of thoughts, feelings, and experiences are stifled. Social contributors are cut off; they can no longer participate. The use of loaded terms keep a person constrained into a black-and-white, all-or-nothing world. This controls people through fear and guilt. Cancel culture has resulted in the chilling of free speech and a growing hostility to those who exercise their rights to speak freely. As a result, the most controversial issues of the day — race, religion, sex, sexuality, politics, science, health, government corruption, police brutality etc. — have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support.
The phrase “cancel culture” (and its cognate “cancelling”), which has roots in oral Black vernacular traditions, has suffered a semantic drift. “Cancelling” originally referred to a practice among the disempowered of “calling out” socially unacceptable behaviour and discrimination. “Calling out”, which begat cancelling, was colourfully deployed to name individual transgressions. It has now become a catch-all phrase, imprecisely applied to all manner of people, places and things. It is used to signify everything from vigilante justice, hostile debate, intimidation and harassment, to levelling statues and de-platforming books and lectures in universities and school syllabi.
It developed into a socially mediated phenomenon with origins in queer communities of colour. In the early 2010s, Black Twitter – a meta-network of culturally connected communities – made the language of being “cancelled” into an internet meme.
The term “cancel culture”, however, has become unmoored from its history and its original significations. In its clamorous current form, it has no coherent ideology: cancellations come just as steadily from the right as the left. Reframed by the dominant culture, and amplified by the media, it has come to be used as a term of approbation wielded against minorities to maintain the status quo.
Cancel culture is often conflated with adjacent phenomena such as outrage culture, boycotts and backlashes. It is linked to debates about censorship, free speech, decolonising the curriculum, “wokeness” and “political correctness”. It has invited comparisons by some commentators to ancient, ritualised practices of scapegoating.
The Macquarie Dictionary committee named “cancel culture” Word of the Year in 2019, noting it captured an important aspect of the zeitgeist. According to its definition, it describes community attitudes that call for or bring about the withdrawal of support from/for a public figure, such as cancellation of an acting role, a ban on playing an artist’s music, removal from social media, etc., usually in response to an accusation of a socially unacceptable action or comment.
Cancel culture has become painfully evident is on US college campuses, which have become hotbeds of student-led censorship, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and “red light” speech policies targeting anything that might cause someone to feel uncomfortable, unsafe or offended.
"Cancel culture — political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance — has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies and government watchdogs. This authoritarian intolerance masquerading as tolerance, civility and love (what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners”) is the end result of a politically correct culture that has become radicalized, institutionalized and tyrannical." (The Age of Intolerance: Cancel Culture’s War on Free Speech by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead)
"In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind lest they find themselves ostracized or placed under surveillance. Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned — discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred — inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination and infantilism". (The Age of Intolerance: Cancel Culture’s War on Free Speech by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead)
"We’re developing a new citizenry, one that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think. We’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us. And we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government and its corporate partners to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean.
The result of political correctness and cancel culture is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences. In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears."
It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.