On the limits of so-called “cancel culture”

This guy thinks we’re not in danger of sinking into a fully cancelled world – a big concern, he notes up front, for him and his friends (let me take a guess on age and race here….). No, cancel culture has limits, he says, pointing to the emerging spaces like Fortnight and TikTok and how they are ensuring careless assholetastic bigotry will always have a platform for teabagging fallen foes and saying “Muricafuckyeah” while surrounded by camera-hungry bunnies dressed in thongs. I mean, besides the presidency. Whew. Thank GOODNESS. Do me a favour: check your blood pressure before you read this and then right after and post the results, k? And if it’s too high, read somethign else, like this Time piece from last year. (PS: PC writing is humourless? I guess I should shut down the site again?)

Here is the fundamental point: With the rise of social media and low-cost communications, virtually everything that can be said, will be said.

It might be said on Twitter rather than on the evening news, or on 4Chan rather than on Facebook. But the sentiments will be out there, and many of them will be disturbing. The world has arrived at a place where just about every politically incorrect statement — and a response to it, not to mention every politically correct statement and a response to that — is published or recorded somewhere.

So the policing of speech may be vastly more common than it was, say, 15 years ago. But the discourse itself is vastly greater in scope. Political correctness has in fact run amok, but so then has everything else.