Cancel culture

Based on Wikipedia: Cancel culture

In 1981, the disco band Chic released an album called Take It Off. Buried in that record was a track called "Your Love Is Cancelled"—a song written by Nile Rodgers after a disastrous date with a woman who expected him to abuse his celebrity status for her benefit. Rodgers, channeling his frustration, compared ending the relationship to a television network pulling a show off the air.

A decade later, screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper saw something in that metaphor. In his 1991 film New Jack City, he included a reference to a woman being "canceled." The phrase seeped into African-American Vernacular English, where it quietly gestated for nearly twenty-five years.

Nobody could have predicted what would happen next.

From Personal Choice to Public Spectacle

By 2015, the concept of "canceling" had found a home on Black Twitter—the influential network of Black users whose cultural commentary frequently shapes broader internet discourse. At first, canceling was a personal declaration. Sometimes serious, sometimes joking, it meant simply deciding to stop supporting something. A musician whose new album disappointed you? Canceled. A TV show that jumped the shark? Canceled. It was about individual consumer choice, nothing more.

Jonah Engel Bromwich of The New York Times later described this early usage as indicating "total disinvestment in something (anything)." The key word there is "something." Not someone. Not yet.

But social media has a way of transforming private decisions into public spectacles. As online shaming incidents gained notoriety—as isolated moments of outrage became patterns, and patterns became expectations—the meaning shifted. "Cancellation" evolved from a quiet personal choice to describe a very loud, very public phenomenon: a widespread, outraged, online response to a single provocative statement or action, directed at a single target.

The mob had discovered its favorite verb.

The Weinstein Watershed

October 2017 marked a turning point. Sexual assault allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein didn't just lead to his professional cancellation—his projects scrapped, his membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revoked. They led to criminal conviction on charges of rape and sexual assault. This was cancellation with teeth.

More importantly, Weinstein's fall catalyzed the #MeToo movement, which encouraged people to share their own allegations of sexual assault. Suddenly, the power to cancel wasn't just about consumer boycotts. It was about bringing down people who had seemed untouchable.

Consider the case of comedian Louis C.K. In November 2017, he admitted to sexual misconduct allegations. His shows were canceled. Distribution deals evaporated. His agency and management dropped him. He seemed finished.

Then something interesting happened: he came back. By 2018, Louis C.K. was performing again. In 2022, he won a Grammy. The cancellation hadn't stuck. But the controversy around whether it should have stuck—whether society should welcome him back or keep him exiled—never really resolved. Many in entertainment insisted it was inappropriate to support his career or give him awards. Others attended his shows anyway.

This paradox sits at the heart of cancel culture: the gap between the severity of the social punishment and the actual, measurable consequences for those punished.

What Cancel Culture Actually Means

The phrase "cancel culture" entered mainstream circulation around 2018, and it arrived already controversial. By the 2020s, it had become what French linguists call a "nom de guerre"—a battle term, deployed by spectators to describe what they perceived as disproportionate reactions to politically incorrect speech.

Media studies scholar Eve Ng offers one of the more precise definitions: cancel culture is "a collective of typically marginalized voices 'calling out' and emphatically expressing their censure of a powerful figure." The key elements here are collective action, marginalized participants, and powerful targets.

Lisa Nakamura, a professor at the University of Michigan, frames it differently. She calls cancellation a "cultural boycott" and describes cancel culture as the "ultimate expression of agency." Her analysis is sympathetic: people have limited power over what algorithms and platforms present to them on social media. Canceling someone is a way to reclaim control, to demand accountability in a decentralized media environment that often lacks any centralized enforcement mechanism.

But here's the complication: "cancel culture" is also a phrase with almost exclusively negative connotations. Those who use it are usually criticizing it. Those who defend the underlying practice—calling out powerful people for harmful behavior—tend to avoid the term entirely, preferring "accountability" or simply "criticism."

The Two Camps

Pippa Norris, a professor at Harvard University, has mapped the controversy. On one side are those who argue cancel culture gives voice to marginalized communities. On the other are those who see it as dangerous—a threat to free speech and open debate.

The critics have high-profile spokespeople. In 2020, former President Barack Obama criticized "call-out culture" and "wokeness" among young activists. He warned against the idea that social change comes from being as judgmental as possible about other people.

That same year, Donald Trump compared cancel culture to totalitarianism, calling it a political weapon used to punish dissenters by driving them from their jobs and demanding submission. Critics immediately pointed out the irony: Trump himself had attempted to cancel numerous people and companies over the years, calling for boycotts of everything from Macy's to the NFL.

Pope Francis weighed in from the Vatican, calling cancel culture "a form of ideological colonization, one that leaves no room for freedom of expression." British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak listed it among the "contemporary dangers of the modern world."

The defenders of cancellation tend to be less famous but equally passionate. Meredith Clark, a professor at the University of Virginia, argues that cancel culture gives power to disenfranchised voices. Osita Nwanevu, writing in The New Republic, suggests that people are threatened by cancel culture precisely because it represents a power shift: a new generation of progressives, minorities, and women have "obtained a seat at the table" and are now debating matters of justice and etiquette on their own terms.

The Philosopher's Concern

Some of the most interesting critiques come from philosophers who see historical echoes in cancel culture. John Stuart Mill, writing in his 1859 essay On Liberty, worried about something that sounds remarkably similar. He warned that society "practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself."

Mill was writing about Victorian England's stifling social conformity. But his words could describe the experience of someone whose old tweets have resurfaced, whose employer is fielding angry phone calls, whose name has become a hashtag.

Contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum picks up this thread, calling cancel culture the "justice of the mob"—justice that is neither deliberative, impartial, nor neutral. The problem isn't accountability itself. The problem is that mob justice lacks due process. There's no formal hearing, no opportunity for defense, no proportionality between offense and punishment, no path to redemption.

That last point matters enormously. Nussbaum uses the phrase "spoiled identity" to describe someone who becomes publicly defined as irredeemable and unwelcome. Once you have a spoiled identity, there's nowhere to go. No apology is sufficient. No changed behavior matters. You are frozen in your worst moment forever.

Slavoj Žižek, the provocative Slovenian philosopher, offers a more caustic analysis. He argues that cancel culture, "with its implicit paranoia, is a desperate and obviously self-defeating attempt to compensate for the very real violence and intolerance that sexual minorities have long suffered." In other words, it's an understandable response to genuine oppression—but one that retreats into "a cultural fortress, a pseudo-'safe space' whose discursive fanaticism merely strengthens the majority's resistance to it."

The Psychological Machinery

Why do these online mobs form so quickly and with such intensity? Communication scholars point to something called the spiral of silence theory. The idea, developed by German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in the 1970s, suggests that people are reluctant to express views they perceive as unpopular. They fear social isolation. So they stay quiet, while those who hold what seems to be the majority view speak louder and more confidently.

Social media supercharges this dynamic. On a platform where likes and retweets are visible metrics of approval, expressing the "wrong" opinion carries measurable social risk. People learn to self-police. Frances E. Lee, a cultural studies scholar, describes this as self-policing of "wrong, oppressive, or inappropriate" opinions. You don't need to be canceled if you've already canceled yourself.

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, and Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (an organization dedicated to defending free speech on college campuses), trace part of the phenomenon to what they call "safetyism." In their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, they argue that call-out culture emerges from a moral framework in which safety—particularly emotional safety—trumps all other values. People become unwilling to make the tradeoffs that productive discourse requires: the discomfort of hearing opposing views, the vulnerability of having your own views challenged.

The Letter Wars

In July 2020, Harper's Magazine published an open letter signed by 153 public figures—writers, academics, journalists, intellectuals. The signatories included Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and J.K. Rowling. The letter warned against "an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty."

Dalvin Brown, writing in USA Today, called the letter a "high point" in the debate over cancel culture. It seemed to crystallize widespread anxiety about the direction of public discourse.

But the response was swift and sharp. Within days, over 160 people in academia and media signed a counter-letter titled "A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate." They argued that the Harper's letter was essentially a plea from successful professionals with enormous platforms who wanted to shield themselves from criticism. The counter-letter accused the original signatories of seeking to silence people who had been "canceled for generations"—meaning those whose voices had never been amplified in the first place.

The exchange crystallized the fundamental disagreement. Is cancel culture a new form of intolerance, threatening open discourse? Or is it a long-overdue reckoning, in which previously marginalized voices finally have the power to hold the powerful accountable?

Does Cancellation Even Work?

Here's an uncomfortable question for both sides: does cancellation actually accomplish anything?

Connor Garel, writing for Vice, argues that cancel culture "rarely has any tangible or meaningful effect on the lives and comfortability of the cancelled." Many of the people described as "canceled" continue their careers with minimal interruption. Louis C.K. is performing comedy. J.K. Rowling's books still sell. Donald Trump, perhaps history's most "canceled" figure, won reelection to the presidency.

Keith Hampton, a professor of media studies at Michigan State University, has studied the political effects. His conclusion: the practice contributes to political polarization but doesn't actually change anyone's opinion. People dig in. Tribes solidify. Nobody is persuaded.

Joshua Knobe, a philosophy professor at Yale, argues that public denunciation is simply ineffective as a tool for changing behavior. Society is too quick to pass judgment, he says, and these actions often have the opposite of their intended effect. Knobe suggests that highlighting positive behavior works better than condemning negative behavior—a finding that aligns with decades of research on motivation and persuasion.

And yet the phenomenon persists. Perhaps, as Lisa Nakamura suggests, the point isn't to change the canceled person's behavior. The point is to exercise agency—to demonstrate that ordinary people, acting collectively, can impose consequences on those who have traditionally escaped them. Whether that's justice or mob rule depends on your perspective.

The Conservative Boycott

One illuminating case study emerged in 2023, when American conservatives and anti-trans activists organized a boycott of Bud Light beer. The company had hired Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender TikTok personality, for a marketing campaign. The backlash was intense and sustained.

The irony was thick: here was cancel culture deployed by the political right, the same faction that most vocally criticizes cancel culture as a leftist phenomenon. The Harvard Business Review analyzed the incident and found that Bud Light's attempt to "resonate with younger, more socially-conscious audiences" had backfired badly. Retailers and distributors made "downstream adjustments" that hurt the product's performance. The incident, the journal noted, made consumer brand marketing departments newly fearful of taking any stand on social issues.

This suggests that cancel culture is less about ideology than about tribalism. The tools are available to anyone. The targets change depending on who's wielding the power at any given moment. Historian David Olusoga has made this point explicitly: the phenomenon of cancellation is not limited to the left.

Is Cancel Culture Even Real?

Some scholars question whether "cancel culture" describes anything coherent at all. Historian C. J. Coventry argues the term is often incorrectly applied, deployed as a shield against legitimate accountability. Pamela Palmater, an Indigenous governance professor and activist, writes that "cancel culture is the dog whistle term used by those in power who don't want to be held accountable for their words and actions—often related to racism, misogyny, homophobia or the abuse and exploitation of others."

There's also the observation that boycotting has existed forever. Consumers have always had the option to stop buying products, attending events, and supporting public figures. What's new isn't the practice—it's the infrastructure. Social media makes coordination instantaneous. Hashtags make movements legible. The speed and scale have changed, but the underlying behavior is ancient.

Danielle Kurtzleben, a political reporter for NPR (that's National Public Radio), noted in 2021 that the phrase itself had become so overused—particularly by Republicans—that it had become "arguably background noise." Linguists would call this semantic bleaching: through repetition, a word loses its precise meaning and becomes a vague gesture toward something the speaker dislikes.

What Comes Next

If there's a way forward, it probably involves what clinical counselor Anna Richards calls "learning to analyze our own motivations when offering criticism." Are we trying to correct harmful behavior, or are we performing virtue for an audience? Are we seeking accountability, or just punishment? Is there a path to redemption, or are we creating spoiled identities?

The ancient philosopher Plato believed shame could be constructive—that the discomfort of social disapproval could motivate moral improvement. Modern defenders of cancel culture make a similar argument: holding people accountable for wrongdoing can be a powerful corrective. But it has to be paired with a genuine belief in the possibility of redemption. Without that, accountability becomes exile, and exile becomes forever.

Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia (son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) made a provocative legal argument in a 2021 Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy article. Cancel culture, he wrote, is itself a form of free speech, protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. You have the right to criticize; you have the right to call for boycotts; you have the right to organize social pressure. These are all expressions of speech.

But Scalia also noted a troubling implication: cancel culture can interfere with the right to counsel. If lawyers fear for their personal and professional reputations, they may decline to represent controversial clients. And in a legal system that depends on everyone having access to representation, that's a problem without an easy solution.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Perhaps the most honest assessment is that cancel culture is neither purely good nor purely evil. It's a tool—a very powerful one—that can be used to topple predators and also to destroy innocent people. It can give voice to the voiceless and amplify mob cruelty. It can enforce accountability and circumvent due process.

The question isn't whether cancel culture exists or whether it's justified. The question is what kind of society we want to build with these new tools of collective action. Do we want a world where anyone can be destroyed for their worst moment? Or do we want a world where the powerful can escape consequences indefinitely?

Neither extreme is acceptable. The challenge is finding something in between—some way to preserve accountability while also preserving grace, some mechanism for consequences that doesn't become a mechanism for cruelty.

Nile Rodgers couldn't have known, back in 1981, that his bitter breakup song would eventually name a phenomenon that would roil politics, entertainment, academia, and everyday life. He just wanted to express that he was done with someone who'd disappointed him.

Four decades later, that simple impulse—to publicly declare that you're done with someone—has become one of the most contested ideas of our time.