"An acquaintance came to me a few weeks ago with the rough draft of a letter about free speech and asked me to sign. I declined, in part because it denounced “cancel culture.” As I wrote in an email, the phrase “‘cancel culture,’ while it describes something real, has been rendered sort of useless because it’s so often used by right-wing whiners like Ivanka Trump who think protests against them violate their free speech.”- Michelle Goldberg, NY Times
“My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. My work and my character are openly demeaned in company-wide Slack channels.”
Awww, boo hoo and hoo, cry me a river. The way this rightist opinionator carries on you'd think the Times and its barbaric "cancel culture" took the poor little Millennial's lunch ticket away permanently. But The (UK) Guardian's Moira Donegan provides a more level-headed insight in her recent piece ('Yes, Social Media Can Be Asinine But 'Canceled' Pundits Like Bari Weiss Aren't The Victims' ) noting:
"Weiss has already moved to enhance her own career by positioning herself as a martyr for free speech and a brave defender of unpopular truths. With this claim, Weiss will have many of her fellow elites nodding along sympathetically: the open letter combined with a pearl-clutchingly offended response to (James) Bennet’s ouster, has made it clear that there is a section of the professional intellectual class – pundits, thinktank operatives and tenured professors – who feel shocked and affronted by the online rudeness of those who disagree with them. This clique has ushered in a creature unique to the era of internet media, whose ascent ironically threatens to plunge our public discourse even further into the realm of bad faith: the professionally cancelled pundit."
The reference to James Bennet's ouster tracks back to the June 7 resignation of New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet after a staff uproar over an op-ed in which Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) advocated sending the military into cities where protests had turned violent, which Bennet later acknowledged he hadn't read before publication and did not meet the paper’s standards. My personal reaction is that Cotton's authoritarian bullshit and Trumpy tone never should have seen daylight in any respectiable paper, far less the "Grey Lady". Anyway, Ms. Donegan continues:
"The professionally cancelled pundit is a genre of primarily center-right contrarian who make their living by deliberately provoking outrage online, and then claiming that the outrage directed at them is evidence of an intolerant left run amok. Usually but not exclusively white millennials or Gen X writers, the cancelled pundit has a sheen of faded patrician prestige, like a stack of unread New Yorkers in a basket beside a toilet. They believe in a creature unique to the era of internet media, and they think themselves brave for complaining when they don’t get it
They’re beloved by white boomers, Romney Republicans and those who use the word “woke” derisively. Their work is meant to appeal to people uncomfortable with social forces that challenge the established hierarchy of power."
Which pretty well sums up their shtick. But wait! Ms. Donegan is not done, pointing out why the assertions of the assorted canceled pundits are misguided, e.g.
"in framing sometimes rude online reaction to their opinions as a first amendment issue, they confuse for a violation of their civic right to free speech a personal discomfort with the tone of those who talk back."
Adding:
"Weiss and her compatriots believe that public discourse has become less decorous because it has moved to the left. But really, it’s because it has moved online."
These are also my main beefs with most of the Right's crybabies blaming the 'left' for "political correctness stifling free speech", canards sounded by WSJ op-ed columnists like Dan Henninger, Holman Jenkins Jr., Kim Strassel et al . Each of whom I have skewered in targeted posts. Briefly, they like to dish it out but can't take it. Ms. Weiss' pique, meanwhile, seems to do with blowback to her articles coming via Twitter and Slacker. But look, if you go galavanting into a wild area where you know wild boars frequent you can't express shock when you get gored by one.
Twitter is essentially a cartoon language medium by which I mean its 280 character limit basically excludes any potential for complex thought, and dispassionate, reasoned debate. Or, I might add, any basis for proper explication of what one is communicating. One is basically reduced to the equivalent of a series of language cartoons - or shouting matches. This also hearkens back to the medium used constituting the basis of the message, as Marshall McLuhan first pointed out in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. One would have thought a journalist and editor like Weiss would have known that, and hence not confused attacks "from the Left" with the normal chaos, disruption and incivility that runs through Twitter like an open sewer line.
In other words, as Ms. Donegan points out, the rudeness Weiss experienced is incentivized and augmented by the specific social media platforms. Technically, if one has any grain of sense and is put off by such rudeness, one avoids Twitter, as one would a dark alley on Nelson Street in Bridgetown after midnight. Nothing good happens there. Ask all the forlorn Peace Corps volunteers in the 70s who thought it would be a hoot to check out every rum shop - and never returned home with their money.
Slate writer Lili Loofbourow pretty well nailed it when she explained in her own Twitter thread. “Disagreement here [online] happens through trolling, sea-lioning, ratios, and dunks. Bad faith is the condition of the modern internet." This is because these media promote the most incendiary content and reward outrage, shock and performative disdain.
Blogs are, or should be, different: Venues for extensive and rational discussion of key issues or opportunities for education. On my blog I strenuously seek to avoid "incendiary content" and "performative disdain", and welcome comments which are intelligent, to the point, factual and totally 180 degree opposite Twitter rants. When I myself go after a Trumpie or Trump himself or any part of his constellation of criminals I always try to back up the attacks or criticism - and only go ballistic when it's called for (as when his administration separated migrant kids from parents and locked them in cages)
Given all the preceding, I find I have to concur with Ms. Donegan when she writes (ibid.):
"Watching the behavior of the professionally cancelled makes the outraged attention they receive seem less like an unfortunate or unfair byproduct of good faith engagement than like a deliberately solicited result, leading me to believe that many these pundits manufacture controversy so as to drive attention to themselves – and, crucially, so as to drive web traffic to their pieces. They want to be cancelled, too, so that they can depict themselves as rebels."
Adding:
"In the digital media sphere, where clicks are revenue and outrage drives clicks, attention is itself a currency, and it holds the same value whether it is laudatory or vexed. Of all people, Weiss should have known this:the New York Times opinion section, where she worked, was such a huge driver of traffic that it became integral to the paper’s revenue model, in no small part because of the outraged online attention that her own articles generated."
And so it is with Bari Weiss, given I know this grievance-filled rebel pundit - so addicted to outrage - will soon find herself another home where she can continue to evoke controversy and blowback.
