Is Cancel Culture cancelling itself?

In better days that Apple has seen (of public opinion, not just balance sheet), this one-minute ad has been discussed, dissected, appreciated, lauded and diagnosed, but rarely critiqued despite its ominous tonality. It was aired on broadcast media precisely once, but has been viewed billions of times. It’s become a case study not just in pure academically oriented colleges but also in film schools, creative institutes, management courses, etc. As an anti-establishment ad (read: Big Blue IBM), this metaphorical piece of work found immediate resonance and was the foundation for the ubiquity and multi-trillion market capitalisation of the brand that we see today. Apple didn’t air the ad again by choice.

Cut to 40 years later and another minute of an ominous, metaphorical ad which was also possibly also aired only once on Tim Cook’s X handle has got millions of views, and was briefly in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Universally panned, ironically it’s become a metaphor for Apple now becoming the establishment looking to crush the soul of creatively inclined people that they have assiduously worked on making their core constituency. With the tsunami of online backlash that it faced, this time round the decision to do a limited release on Tim Cook’s X handle was not a matter of choice. A quick apology saying ‘we missed the mark’ and a pull-out from a planned global national TV plan and the ad, and the surrounding ‘controversy’, died a virtual death in less than 24 hours. Will it get discussed threadbare for the next 40 years like its OG predecessor, albeit for diametrically opposite reasons? Only time will tell.

But today’s post is not about the merits and demerits of two pieces of creative communication. It’s more about the times that we live in.

Recent history is littered with examples of people and corporates that have been scarred and taken to task. Cadbury’s (the worm controversy), Maggi (just pure unhealthy creds), milk food drinks (addictive nature due to sugar content), Pepsi & Coke (presence of pesticides), Nike & Apple (callous business practices) are just some examples of corporates that faced massive scrutiny when certain unsavoury details came to light. It made the seemingly unassailable corporates vulnerable and necessitated positive action not just from them, but even from a policy standpoint. At an individual level, so too was the impact of the #MeToo movement a turning point. That movement snowballed quickly from being a one-man-and-his-persistent-transgressions issue into something that found global resonance. It empowered everyone, not just the superior sex, by removing the stigma attached to speaking out. It made otherwise uncomfortable conversations mainstream and part of drawing rooms and board rooms. It resulted in affirmative actions on HR practices.

The abovementioned examples of cases that had a direct impact on a personal and individual level on all of us. The negative effects of having swept the misdemeanours under the carpet for long got too big to ignore. Affirmative action against them helped bring about a socio-cultural change that gave voice to the otherwise largely ignored lot, i.e. the public.

But what it also did is give unbridled powers to the perpetrators of what we know as Cancel Culture.

Macquarie Dictionary defines cancel culture (noun) as “the attitudes within a community which call for or bring about the withdrawal of support from a public figure, such as cancellation of an acting role, a ban on playing an artist's music, removal from social media, etc., usually in response to an accusation of a socially unacceptable action or comment”.

Cancel culture is the act of collective boycotting of something or someone after a perceived wrongdoing. 

From an era of Trial by Fire that happened largely in courtrooms of qualified lawyers, judges and jury who played within the ambit of the law of the land, the unrestricted growth of broadcast media saw the emergence of Trial by Media that played out right in our drawing rooms where TV anchors became judge, jury and executioners. The cardinal rule of trials was that one was innocent until proven guilty. Trial by media turned this dictum on its head – one was guilty until proven innocent. The proliferation of the internet and social media platforms have taken things one step further, and on a global scale.

We now live in a world of Trial by Ire.

No longer is a TV anchor the only judge, jury and executioner. In trials by ire, it’s a collective. Everyone with a smartphone in hand, a point of view and the ability to rouse passions play the three headed role on a daily basis. Trials by ire do not need any kind of expertise on the subject matter at hand. Trials by ire are like murder by numbers, and to quote the lines from the song by The Police of the same name - it’s as easy to learn as your ABC. The power that these trials wield is unparalleled. The retribution and even the eventual redemption doesn’t take too long since the trial and the justice meted out is swift and un-nuanced.

We have regressed into an era of public shaming in the town square, except that the town square is now the screen in your hand and the hollers of the multitudes of shamers are emojis and reposts.

Amanda Koontz, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Central Florida says, “The instant nature of social media means that very large, complicated social issues get condensed into one sentence, one minute for TikTok [videos] or just a photo on Instagram,” Koontz says. “Everything is becoming very succinct, and it both discourages nuanced discussion and encourages all-or-nothing stances. Cancel culture is ‘You’re all good, or you’re all bad,’ but human nature is much more complicated than that.”

Author and academic Eve Ng points this out in her definition of the term in Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis. Ng defines cancelling and cancel culture as both the practice of cancelling someone (an individual, group, organisation, brand or even nation) and the surrounding commentary about their wrongdoing. This means cancelling someone is less like hitting backspace and deleting their name from the page and more like striking through the name and continuing to write about it alongside other people.

The inherent nature of social media ensures that in any call for action against or cancelling someone or something, virality is guaranteed. Choosing your ‘causes’ to vent out your pent up thoughts and feelings has become easy as one can always take comfort in numbers. The simple act of keying in a few words or sentences without giving much thought or without truly comprehending the nuances involved in the ‘cause’ has spawned a generation of keyboard warriors. The anonymity granted by social media gives everyone a licence to say things that maybe we wouldn’t say if we were face to face with someone. The endorphin rush of feeling all-too-powerful and all-too-righteous momentarily is extremely addictive.

By practicing the sagely advice of ‘we must act and speak out, or we are part of the problem’, very little thought is given to thinking about ways in which positive change can be brought about instead of just fuelling negative causes. This has resulted in a society that is largely contradictory in what it espouses and how it actually behaves. So J.K. Rowling gets cancelled for her trans- and homophobic views, but at the same time her books continue to be bought. Tom Cruise got cancelled and scoffed at for the extremities of his religious beliefs, but he is also lauded as being the harbinger of better days for theatre releases of movies post the pandemic. R. Kelly’s disgusting sexual preferences led to #MuteRKelly, which resulted in a 126% increase in on-demand streams of his music. Dave Chappelle is excoriated for his views, and yet continues to do sell-out tours where people pay serious money to get laughs out of those same views. Closer home the likes of Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan are publicly shamed as traitors (?!?), but their movies are lapped up nonetheless. Karan Johar was denigrated for promoting nepotism in the film industry, but his latest release didn’t seem to get affected by it.

In a letter published in Harper’s magazine and signed by no less than 150+ celebrities, authors, intelligentsia, academics, journalists, etc, the co-authors state:

“It is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms … Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal … This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.”

On the one hand social media is ephemeral by nature. And on the other it has long term consequences. What you post on social media has a unique way of worming its way back into public consciousness when you least expect it. People are held responsible and hanged virtually for their posts from another era when sensitivities and sensibilities were different from the current ones. It’s like no one wants to see that the person or institution has changed or kept up with the times. These result in witch-hunts that are completely uncalled for.

Cancel culture doesn’t even spare the dead. Roald Dahl, Pablo Picasso, Michael Jackson, Hergé of Tintin comics, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie are just some examples of cancel culture going to ridiculous depths.

The net outcome of this rampancy is that Cancel Culture in its current avatar seems to have lost all its zing because being cancelled can be such a fleeting moment as people quickly place their outrage on the next person or topic of the day. As Peter Thiel so aptly puts it in his treatise-slash-self-help manual “Zero to One”,

“Perhaps every modern king is just a scapegoat who has managed to delay his own execution”.

Cancel Culture has given birth to new strategies by which those affected are able to claw their way back into the spotlight having publicly washed their ‘sins’ away. While PR has been, and always will be, the time tested and most reliable strategy to drip feed positivity into mass consciousness around the accused, it is too time consuming in today’s times.

The new mantra is to use apology as a strategy.

While difficult to put in practice, an apology has a lot of things going for it.

• An apology is instant, just like the retribution. The faster you say Sorry, the better off you are.

• It conveys, albeit mostly superficially, that ‘concerns’ have been duly noted.

• An apology doesn’t necessarily demand immediate action, it’s just an acknowledgement.

• An apology feeds into the sense of fulfilment / accomplishment / personal achievement that the hordes of cancellers yearn for before they move on to searching for the next unsuspecting entity. It makes them feel heard. It gives them a sense of importance which is far bigger than their reality.

The biggest corporations and the biggest stars have all become masters of the art of the apology. An apology might be ego crushing for the one apologising - and God knows how inflated their egos are - but it makes business sense to nip things in the bud with a five letter word. Once done, it can be quite addictive and can become a vicious cycle - break some rules —> wait for the backlash —> apologise. Repeat. Mark Zuckerberg has made it such a habit ever since launching Facebook that he can write his own treatise on the subject. A few years ago, Shah Rukh Khan appeared on a YouTube podcast where he revealed some tips and suggestions that he got from Amitabh Bachchan on superstardom. Revealing the advice he got from Big B, SRK said ‘(Amit ji said) Now that you have become a big star, whatever you do, you will always be in the wrong. So, whenever you are wrong, haath jodd kar maafi maang lena.’ When SRK interrupted saying, ‘But Amit Ji, agar maine galti na ki ho?’, to which Amitabh replied, ‘This is what I am telling you, just apologise.’ 

By not apologising, one tends to only prolong the pain. Salman Rushdie is a prime and extreme example of the debilitating impact of Cancel Culture and of the cancelled not apologising. With a fatwa on his head he spent decades in hiding. The fatwa was later repealed, but justice wasn’t done in the eyes of a fanatic who attacked him last year at a conference resulting in Rushdie losing vision in one eye. The fact that the attacker wasn’t even present in the gonads of his would be father when the fatwa was first issued in the 80’s didn’t come in the way of his warped beliefs! By not apologising corporations run the risk of stock price upheavals and shareholder confidence. An apology helps buy time to set the record, and actions, straight. In the case of individuals, an instant apology ensures that the follower count on their various social media handles remains unaffected - an important constituency to nurture since social media followers of stars are also a solid source of income, not just of keeping them relevant.

In ‘The Long and Torturous History of Cancel Culture’, the author Ligaya Mishan observes, “It’s instructive that, for all the fear that cancel culture elicits, it hasn’t succeeded in toppling any major figures — high-level politicians, corporate titans — let alone institutions … the more power someone has, the less affected they are.”

Cancelling someone has become as ephemeral as the very medium that is used to unleash the culture. As a result cancelling someone, or something, is now a tick mark on people’s personal virtue signalling boards. It is rarely if ever taken as passionately by the canceller for it to be taken to heart by the cancelled. It is only the serious and passionate ones who truly and genuinely feel for a cause don’t just resort to momentary movements through 140 characters on social media. They follow it up with the long and arduous processes like petitions, litigations, class action suits, etc. Their numbers are not too many because in an age of instancy, the process to truly effect a change and make a difference is long-winded, expensive and rife with potential threats to their lives.

Which explains why powerful corporations and individuals are able to get away lightly. They are too powerful. They are too ubiquitous. And they are too important in our lives at almost every step. In the case of Apple, the very same creative folk who felt aggrieved are also the ones who swear by the brand and the value it adds to their lives. They are also the ones who use the technology that Apple was showcasing in tandem with their respective analogue craft and skills. It will be these same people who will line up outside stores to pick the product on its first day of release. As a result Apple will not get cancelled – I almost said never get cancelled, but as they say ‘never say never’. It will only get chided every once in a while. Just like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and a host of other corporate titans and very very famous people will. At that point they will only open their rule book titled:

Be braver. Be kinder.

PS: Since I have spent a better part of my life in advertising, the iPad Pro ad forced me to think (with my limited creative abilities) if there was some other way the brand could have communicated what it wanted to. Could it have titled it ‘Squeeze’ instead of ‘Crush’? Could it have shown the same tools of creativity being squeezed and miniaturised and being completely at home by happily cohabiting a pad? Would it have been as visually stunning and as impactful that it would make people sit up and take notice? Possibly. Possibly not. One thing is for sure - it would have been a ‘safe’ piece of communication that would pass by like ships sailing in the night. But then again, it could / would have raised the hackles of the keyboard warriors taking up the cause for those who are horizontally and vertically challenged.

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For Keep Watching this time I am sharing reviews of two web series that are about the effects of Cancel Culture - one which is about the power of traditional broadcast media, and the other is about the perils of social media. Excellently developed, they will give you a perspective of the pros and cons of both.

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S1 & S2: The sunny title is quite misleading as things are anything but sunny. The Morning Show is a peek into the world, the machinations, the politics, the superficiality, the Machiavellian schemes and the toxic competitiveness of the world of round-the-clock news and the people and the networks that bring it to us. The show kicks off with the veneer of a superficial goody-goody world of the show cracking when one of the two lead anchors is exposed on me-too charges. Things go through a roller-coaster turbulence from thereon for everyone involved where the lead players are never sure whether they are on the crest or in a knave and are hanging on for, and to, their professional existence. It touches upon all the elements of gender, colour, race equality without getting preachy above it. The stellar star cast of Jennifer Aniston (heavily botoxed, but still has the chops), Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell more than deliver the goods.

S3 continues where S2 left off. This time an Elon Musk-ish character is introduced (John Hamm) who is about to take over the network. It’s a riveting watch as you get an idea of how M&A’s must be happening, the shenanigans of people in the public eye, how truth is obfuscated to an extent that the lie becomes the truth and how tough it must be to still keep a balanced head on you. Superb.

The Morning Show | 3 Seasons (so far) | Apple+ TV

A fast paced series that deals with the havoc that can be wreaked in perfectly normal lives, upending everything that one tends to believe and have faith in. The Brewer family’s life goes into a tailspin with the husband’s video admitting to murder and abuse of women. Along the way the series addresses many issues like media over reach, the fallacy of social media, racism, teen abuse, sexuality and a bunch of others. Superbly developed with multiple twists and turns that keep you guessing, the clickbait of Clickbait is worth falling for.

Clickbait | Limited Series (8 episodes) | Netflix