Mutually Assured Cancellation

I've got an unpleasant case of Déjà Vu

Ever had people petitioning your publisher to pull your book? Check. Ever had people try to get you sacked for your views? Check. Ever had people deluge you with abuse over something you’ve written? Check. And because you don’t frighten easily, you’ve responded to them with the single digit rampant? Check.

I’ve had all the above, and more.

The person in the newspaper article extracted below is Clementine Ford, an Australian feminist and polemicist with whom I happen to share a publisher (or at least did, historically). You could take the screenshot, swap out Ford’s name for mine, and do comparatively little injury to what happened to me in 1995.

Not only does this involve the same publisher, it involves some of the same people.

Of course, there’s always background. The article from which it’s taken¹ discloses an escalating war of words between a writer (Ford) and reviewer (Antonella Gambotto-Burke), something commonplace in the world of belles lettres despite the widespread belief that writers shouldn’t go at each other like this.

However, the pattern—put pressure on publishers, companies, professional associations, employers, etc to shut someone up—is now, as my mother used to say, as common as cat-dirt. I’ve been writing about it since 2015 (starting in The Guardian of all places). Back then, this pattern didn’t have a name.

Clementine Ford, like me, emerged as a commentator from within Australia’s blogosphere. She’s younger than I am and didn’t start with a book—that came later, in 2016. When I first encountered her circa 2006, she was a funny observational writer who went under the pseudonym “Audrey Apple” on her own small blog. I promoted her work publicly and privately and at one point we took a joint public pop at Facebook for its demented booby censorship. Breastfeeding mothers, Facebook? Really?

As should be obvious, however, we disagree, and not just about Hamas. I’m not a feminist (I think it’s pseudoscientific cobblers). I’m one of those irritatingly consistent people who has been somewhere on the pro-free speech centre-right since, well, high school.

And I also think it’s fair to say that my “side” (such as it were) has lost the argument.

Mutually Assured Cancellation

We now live in a world of mutually assured cancellation. Yes, it’s sometimes possible to fight back and undo an attempted cancellation (I managed this), but that’s a separate issue. Cancellation and piled-on abuse have been completely normalised as ways to deal with political or intellectual opponents. Yes, I’m aware that progressives “started it” and built their fealty to Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” on the assumption only one side—theirs—is allowed to play that game.

However, when you’re dealing with two groups in possession of institutional power—as with the Jewish lobby v. Woke Inc—repressive tolerance when only one side is allowed to shoot soon turns into trench warfare when the other lot achieves equality of arms. Each takes turns to mow down people on the other side. Meanwhile, we’re all dragged into an ideological Passchendaele of mud and blood where the truth becomes ever harder to find.

Stephen Fry gets shitcanned and cancelled for his Christmas message. University students get doxxed after signing pro-Palestine petitions. Journalists are sacked over tweets. Jewish-owned restaurants are covered with racist graffiti. Everyone starts contacting everyone else’s professional associations.

On the last point, I’m looking at you, fellow-lawyers. The legal bush telegraph is currently thrumming with cancellation-derived toxicity. If you’re pro-Israel and loud about it, don’t try to get a job in human rights, European Union, or employment law. If you’re pro-Palestine and loud about it, look away now from commercial, corporate, and private client.

In the doxxing incident at Columbia University, the university’s servers were allegedly hacked to obtain photographs of pro-Palestine students so they could be mounted on the side of purpose-hired “doxxing trucks”.

The photographs, according to the protesters, were lifted from a “secure and private” student portal at Columbia’s school of international and public affairs (Sipa).

Speaking as someone who has been embroiled in an incident of this type, I doubt there was any actual hacking involved. Rather, they’ve got a friendly, currently-enrolled student to use his or her student access to get into Blackboard or whatever Columbia uses to manage its students’ online activity and download the pics.

It also means a young person has been induced to break the law in a perverse form of “self-help”. Remember: the legal issue is the data breach, not how the data breach was achieved. There’s a reason why lawyers dislike self-help and have done since Roman jurists first started to potty-train their fellow Romans into going to the cops rather than sending ex-gladiators with chains around to someone’s house to settle a few scores.

Note: I’m not relitigating any of these individual cases. Readers can do that for themselves. I’m describing a pattern.

And, just as with the Cold War’s nuclear weapons and Mutually Assured Destruction, no-one is willing to lay down their arms. Indeed, we’ve all spent nearly two years watching what happens when a country does the honourable peacenik thing and gives up its nuclear missiles.

That country would be Ukraine.

Photo by Javier Miranda on Unsplash

I wouldn’t start from here

Like the tourist asking an Irish farmer how to get to Wicklow and being told, “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you,” we’ve lost our way when it comes to managing public disagreement. The sort of world I prefer—where people speak their minds and are responded to by other people also speaking their minds and everyone just deals with any hurty words—is receding from view at speed. And as with the parlous state of higher education, I don’t have good fixes to offer. All I can say is this is a shite way to organise civil society and yes, it makes everything worse.

I do think

Lorenzo Warby

is right to argue that deranged attempts to control how one is spoken about, thought of, and portrayed are rooted in the entitled victimhood beloved of activists. In that article, Lorenzo gives a short précis of my cancellation story as part of a wider discussion. I’ve also written about it separately. Read those pieces—along with the news story about Clementine Ford—and you’ll note the similarities. About the only difference is that the anti-Ford petition is online. Hey, progress. Science marches on.

Not On Your Team, Again

A few days before the October Declaration went live, one of the organisers contacted me thusly (see below).

Despite the fact that I agree with the contents of the screenshotted message, I didn’t sign it. Given my history—and the fact that I’m still (somewhat) able to talk to people on both sides of an interminable stooshie—I decided to sit this one out.

I’ve learnt something by doing so.

Those who engage in cancellations don’t expect any targets to change their minds. That’s why apologising to them achieves nothing. You’re meant to be first a target, then a sacrifice. The sacrificial element is why—when a cancellation doesn’t succeed, as with Kathleen Stock, or a cancelled person starts to bounce back, as with Graham Linehan—accusations of grifting and complaints at the target’s increased public profile are so long and loud.

Instead, cancellations are undertaken to change the minds of those who watch. And, thanks to the well-known “chilling effect”, it can indeed look like the watchers have changed their minds. After all, they’re not saying anything. However, while watchers are often chilled and do indeed shut up, they also judge the activists doing the cancelling. Part of this process involves collapsing activists into the group they purport to represent. More people in Britain think trans people are prima facie paedophiles because of the way Linehan has been treated than ever was the case before.

Word to cancellers of all stripes: those who watch you also hate you. You are not winning hearts and minds. You’re mistaking the chilling effect for agreement or changed beliefs. You are inducing serious preference falsification. And preference falsification is socially and politically corrosive.

Not very nice, is it, this new world we’ve made.

1. Apologies for the weird headline; it seems to be an artefact of the archiving tool I’ve used. The article text is accurate to the original, as are the photographs.