Is cancel culture real?

In 98% of cases, when somebody comes out as a Brave, Independent Person Who Courageously Stands Up Against the Censorship and Cancel Culture of Their Contemporaries, the striking thing is the superficiality of the criticism. Usually, these people have never directly talked to the people that they're criticizing, and have no real understanding of (and no interest in) the lives or ideas of the presupposed "extremists". The whole thing is just based on some vague idea of young people nowadays that one develops by reading conservative think pieces.

I was like this for some time, a couple of years ago when I learned that in the English-speaking world, some publishing houses have automatically rejected some books because the author has included a minority character in the story, despite not representing that particular minority group themselves. The reason for this is that supposedly, there are people who think that regardless of how well or intelligently you do it, even if you make sure to educate yourself and consult people who've personally dealt with whatever it is your character's dealing with, writing characters that differ from you in terms of race or gender or other such things is categorically unacceptable. So if you do it, your book and everyone associated with its publication deserve to be "cancelled".

So, that's what I read, and... well, honestly it freaked me out. I could understand the trickiness of the territory. This stuff isn't simple, because the fact is that up to this point, the depictions of marginalized groups, created by people who aren't marginalized themselves, have often been deeply idiotic and harmful. Still, as a writer, I'd like to be able to also imagine and think about lives that aren't exactly like mine. Doing it in a way that doesn't harm people in the real world is of course something one needs to care about. What gave me great frustration was the idea that I would write a Character-Who's-Not-Me and then be seen as stupid and evil by thousands of strangers who haven't even read the book.

So I'd run into Extremely Dogmatic Wokeism: the great, omnipresent boogeyman that many people are running into and battling these days.

You know. The annoyed, powerless feeling you get when you imagine yourself making some relatively harmless mistake that will cause an online mob to destroy your life.

However, that was two years ago. Things look different now.

My thinking has advanced in a lot of ways, but not all of it is relevant here, and besides, other people have already written about these things more wisely than I ever could. (Here and here, for example.) The change in my thinking that I'd like to discuss is: I believe that "Extremely Dogmatic Wokeism", as we know it, is an illusion. It's a kind of phantom, created by the algorithms of certain social media platforms. I'm not saying that there aren't people who think and behave according to the stereotype, but it's not nearly as common as everybody seems to think.

After I'd become seriously spooked by the frightful articles, I started spending more time looking at actual conversations Progressive Activist Types were having online – outside of Twitter –, and pretty soon, I started to wonder: where are all the irrational extremists? It's really strange. In the past couple of years, I've seen hundreds of progressive activist types discuss the extremities of cancel culture, and other such themes, in Reddit threads and YouTube comment sections, and so far, I've seen less than five people defend such extremities. What's surprising is how thoughtful and rational people are, compared to the popular image of the scarily pedantic activist. It seems that for every person who holds a maximally dogmatic position on an issue, there are countless people with a more nuanced way of thinking.

Natalie Wynn, aka ContraPoints, the anti-fascist YouTuber and one of the most sympathetic people on the internet, made a video where she talked critically about cancel culture. Wynn has been the target of cancelling campaigns herself. Apparently, there are some Very Radical People who've repeatedly wanted to punish her for some Relatively Harmless Mistakes she's made, and sometimes these people dominate her Twitter feed. Interestingly, her critical video on cancelling has been watched more than four million times; it has been liked 208 thousand times, and although YouTube doesn't let you see downvote counts anymore, I remember that the number was very small. The comment section is full of people talking about the problems of cancel culture. And these are all Progressive Activist Types! If Extremely Dogmatic Wokeism is so widespread, where is it? How come it isn't standing up for itself?

In its own ways, YouTube can be just as sad and terrible as Twitter. But what's relevant here is that this platform allows people to upvote and downvote comments. (The same if true for Reddit, by the way... Reddit can be sad and terrible, too, but hopefully you get the point.) Comments that you see are the comments with the highest level of approval – so if somebody writes something totally provocative and outrageous, chances are that the comment will be quickly downvoted into oblivion. This is different from the logic of Twitter, where all attention is good attention; the platform rewards people for acting in ways that get others to react, and all reactions are "good" reactions. On Twitter, it makes sense to be provocative and behave badly, because even if 96 out of 100 people find your message deplorable, it will be boosted and promoted by the algorithm simply for being able to get people to react strongly. (What makes things worse is that emotional states are contagious: if you're constantly seeing tweets written by people who are furious all the time, you may find yourself starting to become pretty furious too.)

Imagine if people who use Twitter were able to rate how "reasonable" or "well-argued" or "informative" (or, conversely, how "bad") a tweet they're seeing is. The algorithm would promote tweets according to these ratings. Obviously, a Twitter that functioned like this would be profoundly different from the one we have now. It would be less alluring and addictive, but it would also be a Twitter that would support democracy, instead of tearing it apart. And imagine if it actually were prohibited by law to design social media platforms in ways that create addiction and/or polarization.

So, what I'm trying to say is... If you want other humans to start behaving less badly, the first thing to do is to consider the possibility that your idea of "other humans" may be severely distorted by technology. Probably, people already are much better than you think they are.

People can, and should, and hopefully will, evolve, but it's easier to change technology. So maybe we should start with that.