Identity and Cancellation

The Twittersphere has been dominated in recent weeks by debates about "cancel culture," illiberalism, and what many view as a chilling effect on the norms of free speech and inquiry. Though its recent catalyst was an open letter published in Harper's Magazine, the debate is an extension of a long conversation about how to adapt democratic norms to digital environments. Many have noticed the insufficiency of our inherited terminology to adequately capture the dispute. Critics of cancel culture bemoan the death of free speech. Others reply that the legal protection of speech does not extend to freedom of reach or freedom from social sanction. The critics point out that "social sanction" takes on a new meaning in the age of online mobbing. And so on.

What does seem clear is that social media has transformed the dynamics of political discourse, democratizing access to information and publication, but also enabling mobs to form more readily and distorting the proportionality of moral response. As in our last newsletter about conspiracy theory, rather than explore the content of the debate, I'd like to explore how social media shapes the terms in which it is cast. What aspects of the conversation become salient in virtue of the platform on which it's held?

The first thing to notice is that the cancel culture debate does not touch all topics equally. Few risk cancellation (or seek to cancel someone) for their views on monetary policy or healthcare. As Ryu Spaeth points out in The New Republic, issues of identity -- of race, gender, and sexuality -- were "the animating ghost of the Harper's letter...even if identity politics is never named explicitly." A recent pre-print adds color to this observation: even where the issue is not tied to identity directly (e.g. gun rights), individuals are more likely to censor opposing viewpoints online when they experience "identity fusion" with their beliefs.

What, then, is the effect of social media platforms on the salience of identity? In a prior newsletter, we argued that the contextless structure of social media undermines the coherence necessary to build a unitary identity. But such a condition is unstable: we cannot live as atomized individuals, connected to one another only by fragmentary interactions. The atomizing effect of social media was long thought to drive its negative impacts on mental health -- impacts which, increasingly, appear to have been overblown. Perhaps one reason for the salience of identity in online political discourse is as a reaction to the naturally atomizing tendencies of the medium.

In an excellent piece titled "Crowds and Technology," the researcher Renee DiResta examines how the natural human tendency to seek solidarity in a crowd has transformed online. Taking Elias Canetti's seminal book Crowds and Power as her starting point, DiResta writes that "people expect encounters with the unknown to be negative. An unknown substance is likely to harm; an unknown being is likely to be dangerous." This tendency is intimately bound up with the developmental formation of identity -- our earliest efforts to distinguish self from other and maintain the boundaries of our person. "But within a crowd," DiResta writes, "this fear dissolves. People no longer fear being touched by strangers, in either a literal or a figurative sense."

These dynamics persist online, even where the threat of physical contact or contagion is diminished. Maintaining the integrity of our person is a psychological as well as a bodily concern. We defend ideas that appear to threaten who we are. But the safety of the crowd also has conditions. DiResta writes:

"All crowds share a few common traits. First, there’s always a common goal — a mission, or direction. Second, there is a sense of persecution; members feel that the crowd is under constant attack from without and within – it’s always 'us' against 'them'. Fighting outsiders reinforces the mission, strengthening the crowd as it unites against the 'other'. Attacks from the inside are actually more dangerous, because they threaten to destroy the crowd’s unity."

Here the resonance with the cancel culture debate may become clear. Each party loathes the other but generally "cancels" from within its own ranks. The threat of a single errant tweet from the "inside" exceeds that of a hundred from the "outside." This is all predictably human. The trouble, DiResta writes, is that "unlike IRL crowds, [digitally transformed crowds] can persist indefinitely. And this changes everything." Online, each of us inhabits an ever-shifting array of crowds, constantly exhorting us to stick to the mission, to defend against the other, and to stifle internal dissent. Self-censorship follows, across the political spectrum.

Confronted with a distressing trend like this, one is tempted to fall back on the mantra that "Twitter is not real life." But the consequences of online trends increasingly spill out into the real world -- to say nothing of online consequences, which can be severe. Indeed, as Sarah Perry writes, "the internet is real to us, now, in part because it obviously has consequences." We've made our online lives real by importing the high-stakes drama of selfhood, purpose, and group membership that provides IRL meaning. It seems we'd rather hate each other than not know who we are.