What is 'Cancel Culture'?
If you have spent a considerable amount of time on the internet we all have seen someone use the term “cancelled”, in reference to someone making a mistake that can be seen as wrong and leads to the internet refusing to acknowledge or support an artist. The term itself has been coined in the last year or two, but the issue arrives in the sense that the culture surrounding this phenomenon is toxic more so than not.
We see these issues in the form of internet virtue-signaling that exists only to bash those for internet brownie points. Many people on the internet speak out on artists not for the standpoint of legitimately caring about the problem, but for pats on the back for “calling out” problematic people. Acknowledging when someone is wrong is not the problem for me, but only doing so because it makes you look good. It especially makes me angry when these same people turn a blind eye to people they like engaging in the same activities with, only to then turn around and lambast others for the same behavior. It leads into the next problem from which Cancel Culture spawns.
Due to the lack of authentic feelings in regards to the actions of some people, you are not causing that person any harm. The famous person will still thrive as you have failed to commit to your word in canceling the person. As a result the person thinks their behavior is acceptable and they continue to engage in the same activities until those activities progressively get worse. Examples are rappers like Kodak Black, who has made some disparaging comments and we all laughed and now Kodak has reached a point where he makes statements that we all deem as disrespectful. If we had emphasized earlier that decisions he was making were leading down a bad path he could have improved, instead what happens is these people sit here and let things play out and then find themselves virtuous for speaking out on it.
Those two complaints are surface issues for what is really wrong with Cancel Culture and the witch-hunts people go on. Over the last year people have found it cool to dig up old tweets from celebrities when they were younger, some date back to a decade ago and no one sees anything wrong with it. These tweets are usually not reflective of the person and only call back to a time to where some these sentiments were cool. Through this uncovering of past tweets they do not seek out that these people simply apologize, instead they hope that these people are punished and ostracized which eventually leads to them losing their career. Normally there would not be anything wrong with shedding light on people's poor actions, but there is no period in which people learn to do better. We also do not see this crowd who brought this up facilitating a larger conservation about what ways we can do better instead of just condemning the individual. The most important part about recognizing the status of fame is realizing that one is in fact just a regular person who makes mistakes just as you do.
Overall we have to come to the realization that just stating how outraged you are does not change anything if you do not seek the opportunity to make this a learning experience.