@philippesaner responds to my post from yesterday:
Here on Tumblr, we know that callouts are usually not about what they claim to be about. The alleged “reasons” that somebody needs to be cancelled are not the actual reasons people want to cancel them.
And that’s as true now as it was in 2013; looking at the i-am-a-fish fiasco, callouts may just have gotten worse.
You say you’re confused by this pattern showing up in the media. But why should you be? Why should the David Shor or Lee Fang cancellation be any more sensible than the John Green or glumshoe callouts?
Did you expect this pattern to remain a Tumblr-ism forever?
In the first part of my post, I talked about 3 different things:
I have heard about several recent nonsensical callouts of high-profile media figures have been happening
It looks to me like these are happening at a greater-than-usual rate (“an upsurge")
This coincided with the protests, and various commentators see them as connected to the protests, perhaps a natural outgrowth of them
#1 doesn’t confuse me, for same reasons it doesn’t confuse you.
#2 confuses me in the trivial way that any change in events surprises me until I can explain it. Your explanation for #1 doesn’t explain #2 (nor does it intend to).
But I’m not too surprised by #2. Social trends often acquire their own momentum without needing external pushes. Especially when it’s a trend like this, where each occurrence is a proof-of-concept for a weapon with broad applicability. If someone rants about their coworker on twitter, and the one who gets hauled into HR and fired over it is the coworker, bystanders are going to think “hmm!” and contemplate the coworkers they hate . . .
#3 is the one that confuses me most, as I said in the post.
It’s easy to imagine mechanisms here, like “protests happen --> corporate world starts making big shows of ally-ship --> some people read the room and decide HR will be more receptive to this kind of thing than usual --> they try it, it works --> others notice it works and try it too.”
That seems plausible, but it’s incompatible with the claim (which I’ve seen frequently in right-wing commentary) that the same “woke” left mindset is behind both the protests and the cancellations. I find explanations like this most plausible, where the protests and cancellations are “connected” maybe by material cause-and-effect but not by anything deeper like the same people or ideology wanting both.
I guess I could have said “I think people are wrong to say they’re connected,” rather than “I’m confused how they are connected,” but I have a habit of saying the latter when I suspect the former but am not too confident.
