So, “cancel culture” is an umbrella term. The entire point of it is to conflate things which are materially different and blame them on a nebulous “culture” to deflect from discussing specifics of a situation. These are all things which could fall under this umbrella:
A call to action that an executive should be fired for polluting a river
People being mean to a comedian on Twitter after they were paid millions of dollars for their special in which they make a bigoted rant
A local social media thread of people calling out and corroborating the behavior of a local serial abuser
Antifascists doxxing nazis
Google filtering search results
A moderator on any social media platform doing anything ever
This framing is not materialist and therefore not useful to a Marxist. However, I’d argue that framing it based entirely on marginalized identity is an incomplete picture, as much as marginalized people are indeed more prone to this kind of harassment.
Materially, corporate social media platforms operate under an attention economy. Attention operates very similar to capital because that attention is nearly fungible with actual currency. The system for exchanging the two has been built up and automated for decades. Where a firm would have previously isolated and constructed a consumer demographics by hand, social media platforms work by automating the construction of those groups as well as the distribution of attention to them.
Twitter in particular is designed to create, identify, and boost individual influencers. Some people, for a variety of reasons, with multiply the attention given to them. A platform owner is given attention by their platform’s users. They make high-level decisions about how to optimize the algorithm and distribute that attention. Some users, for whatever reason, create content which multiplies the attention it receives. When their content is shown to a user, that user is statistically more likely to continue engaging with the site than if they hadn’t been shown it. These creators are dubbed influencers and prioritized in the algorithm. The more attention is “invested” in them, the higher “returns” they have. This is why clout-seeking is a default behavior. The design of the website and of the algorithm directly influences user behavior in aggregate.
So given all this…
If there were an organized proletarian campaign to doxx and harass executives of war profiteers and government contractors, that could genuinely disrupt the material operations of those contractors. It’s hard to retain a CEO when your last three began receiving credible death threats. And if this were to happen, the marginalized status of any executive would be irrelevant. This is not what happened to Ana.
The “naturally-occuring” (insofar as the existence of Twitter is “natural”) collective act of doxxing and harassing someone is an act which does not further a revolutionary struggle, is done for the emotional catharsis of individual participants, and is easily coopted by capital. This is true even without the consideration that marginalized people are significantly more prone to this sort of harassment due to how the attention economy interacts with other elements of the superstructure.
Do I think Ana should have taken a job with Lockheed Martin? No. Do I think doxxing xer was productive in preventing people from working at Lockheed Martin? Also no. Do I think the narrative of xer being a traitor of some kind would have blown up if he didn’t have a variety of marginalized statuses as well as status within leftist movements? Absolutely not. Show me the time when thousands of Twitter users doxxed and harassed another Lockheed employee who was not trans; who was not disabled. I can’t think of one. This is much more a case of a community dealing with one of their own internally than it is an outside attack, but that becomes compounded when these grievances are aired on public capitalist platforms.
When we do not organize ourselves online along class lines, we will be organized by the owning class along lines which are profitable for them. This is an excellent example of how the base relies on the substructure for reinforcement and if the internet is to be a tool for revolutionary action or even revolutionary inhabitance, we need to act accordingly.
Edit: thanks to the comrade who pointed out the incorrect pronouns and offered some context to the situation. Minor edits in the second to last paragraph, but everything else remains the same.
collective act of doxxing and harassing someone is an act which does not further a revolutionary struggle, is done for the emotional catharsis of individual participants, and is easily coopted by capital. This is true even without the consideration that marginalized people are significantly more prone to this sort of harassment due to how the attention economy interacts with other elements of the superstructure.
So, “cancel culture” is an umbrella term. The entire point of it is to conflate things which are materially different and blame them on a nebulous “culture” to deflect from discussing specifics of a situation. These are all things which could fall under this umbrella:
This framing is not materialist and therefore not useful to a Marxist. However, I’d argue that framing it based entirely on marginalized identity is an incomplete picture, as much as marginalized people are indeed more prone to this kind of harassment.
Materially, corporate social media platforms operate under an attention economy. Attention operates very similar to capital because that attention is nearly fungible with actual currency. The system for exchanging the two has been built up and automated for decades. Where a firm would have previously isolated and constructed a consumer demographics by hand, social media platforms work by automating the construction of those groups as well as the distribution of attention to them.
Twitter in particular is designed to create, identify, and boost individual influencers. Some people, for a variety of reasons, with multiply the attention given to them. A platform owner is given attention by their platform’s users. They make high-level decisions about how to optimize the algorithm and distribute that attention. Some users, for whatever reason, create content which multiplies the attention it receives. When their content is shown to a user, that user is statistically more likely to continue engaging with the site than if they hadn’t been shown it. These creators are dubbed influencers and prioritized in the algorithm. The more attention is “invested” in them, the higher “returns” they have. This is why clout-seeking is a default behavior. The design of the website and of the algorithm directly influences user behavior in aggregate.
So given all this…
If there were an organized proletarian campaign to doxx and harass executives of war profiteers and government contractors, that could genuinely disrupt the material operations of those contractors. It’s hard to retain a CEO when your last three began receiving credible death threats. And if this were to happen, the marginalized status of any executive would be irrelevant. This is not what happened to Ana.
The “naturally-occuring” (insofar as the existence of Twitter is “natural”) collective act of doxxing and harassing someone is an act which does not further a revolutionary struggle, is done for the emotional catharsis of individual participants, and is easily coopted by capital. This is true even without the consideration that marginalized people are significantly more prone to this sort of harassment due to how the attention economy interacts with other elements of the superstructure.
Do I think Ana should have taken a job with Lockheed Martin? No. Do I think doxxing xer was productive in preventing people from working at Lockheed Martin? Also no. Do I think the narrative of xer being a traitor of some kind would have blown up if he didn’t have a variety of marginalized statuses as well as status within leftist movements? Absolutely not. Show me the time when thousands of Twitter users doxxed and harassed another Lockheed employee who was not trans; who was not disabled. I can’t think of one. This is much more a case of a community dealing with one of their own internally than it is an outside attack, but that becomes compounded when these grievances are aired on public capitalist platforms.
When we do not organize ourselves online along class lines, we will be organized by the owning class along lines which are profitable for them. This is an excellent example of how the base relies on the substructure for reinforcement and if the internet is to be a tool for revolutionary action or even revolutionary inhabitance, we need to act accordingly.
Edit: thanks to the comrade who pointed out the incorrect pronouns and offered some context to the situation. Minor edits in the second to last paragraph, but everything else remains the same.
deleted by creator
This is really well put
Great analysis!