Cancel culture strengthens the surveillance state
Cancel culture is a form of ideological policing. Social media has reduced privacy. Simultaneously, trust in the state is being fast eroded. Truth is increasingly elusive in our news, our media and our politics. This crisis of authenticity, and what to believe, means there is no longer a set of agreed upon facts about how to engage with each other, or draw conclusions from what we see. The combination of these two factors has turned us all into informants. In this case, cancel culture is a survival strategy. One built on individual performance of the surveillance state. Proponents include author Kat Rosenfield and key figures in the left wing press including New Republic reporter Osita Nwanevu.
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The Argument
Cancel Culture is harmful to society as it instills fear in those who oppose the masses and has resulted in the forming of a surveillance state.[1]Cancel Culture is the name given to a recent trend in society to shame, verbally attack, and exclude those who either disagree with a certain commonly held belief, or take part in an ethically questionable act. [2]
In an era where social media is many people’s main source of news, and information can be spread to millions in just seconds, many believe that Cancel Culture is growing into a disturbing movement. For fear of becoming a target, many people, regardless of how ignorant they are on the subject, feel they must weigh
[3]. This has turned society into a surveillance state, people will dig through years upon years of tweets, posts, and pictures to find something problematic to display to the world. Cancel Culture has removed all privacy, and denied any forgiveness, it is the relinquishment of power from the hands of individuals, to that of the uninformed mob.
Counter arguments
Many believe that Cancel Culture is not the sign of the declining values of freedom of speech but simply society at large grouping together to exercise their rights, much like a boycott. Anne Charity Hudley, a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara stated that Cancelling was " a way to acknowledge that you don’t have to have the power to change structural inequality...But as an individual, you can still have power beyond measure [online]”. [1] Hudley and many others believe that instead of a thoughtless mob, bent on destroying free speech, Cancel Culture is simply a collective group of progressives exercising their rights over a digital platform.