The Cancel Culture of the Techno Mob
The term is somewhat new, as the first I heard about it was only about a year or two ago, but the practice has been more or less mainstream for more than half a decade by now. In the old days (by which I mean 2015), we used to just call it deplatforming or unpersoning—the later term a clear reference to the treatment of Soviet or Chinese political enemies during the fiercest periods of totalitarian persecution. Of course, in the context of our communist examples, those unpersoned fellows were hauled off by the state to the frozen wastes of Siberia or remote re-education camps, there to be worked to death or reprocessed into quieter citizens. But states aren’t what they used to be, so in our enlightened neoliberal order, we use corporations and the will of the mob, instead.
But we should ask ourselves, what drives the cancel culture? Why is its existence so denied by its own proponents? Does the mob of the twenty-first century differ from the mobs of the past? To understand these issues, we’ll have to see how technology has changed mob behavior, how liberalism understands morality, and how these become means of humiliation for those who refuse the social conditioning.
Techno-Mobism
We talk of the mob as though it has a mind all of its own, and in a certain sense, it does. The behavior of mobs resembles the sort of decentralization you see in schools of fish or flocks of small birds. Outwardly, it appears leaderless, confused, impulsive; it seems to change direction as effortlessly as the wind, reacts quickly but is slow to consider realities, and it has no brakes.
There’s little need to dwell on the mob, as others have written enough on that topic already—and, most of us already understand the mob well enough from sharing the unfortunate personal history of having attended public school. The mob is not what necessarily interests us here; our attention is on its digital counterpart. On one hand, we could could consider this intuitively, and simply assume that mob behavior manifests more or less the same online as it does offline, and that the use of computers, screens, and miles of fiber-optic cable have little part to play. But on the other hand, the alienation of the computer screen, the removal of the man from the spectacle, can’t be overstated.
The entertainment of what unfolds on our computer screen transforms events of real-time into something comparable to a film or a video game, albeit with the conscious recognition that, somewhere, this is happening to real people. Perhaps the elevated platform that supported the guillotine in Paris did the same for a mass of bloodthirsty revolutionaries conditioned by stage productions, cheap theater, and opera. That platform and the carnage it supported resembled, after all a stage and removed from the daily drudgery of the Ancien Regime’s decline. Who could witness so many dignitaries escorted with pomp to their violent beheadings and not find the surreality resemble a particularly distasteful theater production? The necessary dissociation kept the Terror going.
A similar alienation exists here, except on steroids—especially given that most of us have been raised on steady diets of Hollywood entertainment and video games. Growing up, some of my friends even had televisions in their bedrooms, granting them access to the screen and to their gaming consoles with near impunity. Other generations have fared much the same in their own ways—Boomers fell sleep to HSN while Generation Z was raised on Broadband internet, and some of them even had iPads. It would come as no surprise if it turned out that Simulation Theory took off on sites like Reddit specifically because the youth of the country have spent so much time playing in simulations.
Seventy years ago, the results of dizzying rates of technological innovation spurred input by the philosophers of the age. Heidegger famously commented on technology steadily depriving man of his being and purpose, and the dangers that things like typewriters posed to the devaluation of meaning. This may sound absurdly reactionary and hyperbolic, but there’s a method to the madness. For our part, we’ll look at French philosopher Jacques Ellul, as he writes in The Technological Society:
The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. […] He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.1
Ellul, in 1954, was referring to the brave new world that sat at the end of the Industrial Revolution, where living memory witnessed the replacement of the centuries-old mule-drawn plow for diesel-powered tractors, the horse for the car that featured cruise control and air conditioning, and the last vestiges of muzzle-loaded cannonry for inter-continental ballistic missiles. We must remember that unique period in history: a man born in 1884 could very well have lived to see the Apollo space flights; an American who Remembered the Maine could easily have seen his own grandsons or great-grandsons drafted because a different naval false flag in the Gulf of Tonkin.
But as dizzying as the innovations were over those eighty years, the subsequent era would transform social interaction even more. The internet, and the advent of social media in particular, brings Ellul’s prescience into razor-sharp focus. Where the mobs of eighteenth century Paris convened with concrete recognition, and where the guillotine brought the bloody viscera of public execution into the realm of theatrical spectacle, the cyber mobs of social media exist in an entirely different sphere. The units of the mob behave at once totally atomized, cordoned off behind their computer screens in their own homes, and yet with a predictable coordination that gives the impression of centralization.
We know now, of course, there there is some degree of centralization—all the major social media sites massage (or outright fabricate) their trending lists in order to guide public opinion this way or that. Artificial bots, too, in unverifiable numbers, put up Potemkin facades in order to bolster support for narratives that lack authentic grassroots support. When put this way, the internet of the last five years looks increasingly like the old film sets found outside Tuscon, Arizona: an actual Wild West, the days when the internet was something of a free-for-all, was replaced with a California-run operation that exists purely for entertainment. To make the analogy even more apt, the oligarchs of Hollywood and those of Silicon Valley happen to run together in frighteningly close proximity.
No one who uses them is immune to the social programming inflicted by these platforms, but some of us are certainly more susceptible to it than others. We can consider two forms of internet denizens: the anonymous account and the normie. These aren’t wholly distinct categories, of course, as plenty of overlap exists, but they serve as good typesets to start from.
Your anonymous account includes internet operators who use VPNs, ghost accounts, browsers that aren’t Chrome, and track themselves with enough discipline to maintain whatever level of anonymity is possible on the internet. Far gone are the days of trolling message boards using Internet Explorer with impunity. At the end of the day, however, just about everyone can be tracked with the right amount of effort; the point of the exercise is to make it difficult enough to dissuade doxxers. You’re not completely anonymous—thus the ‘faux’.
But this ‘faux’ anonymity affects those clueless enough to use Facebook or Twitter under their own names, as well. Normies. Despite handing over their information without a second thought, there remains the visual impediment of internet activity versus that conducted in person. Those sitting behind VPNs recognize that anonymity is more a deterrent than a guarantee, but those without VPNs, who surrender their privacy over to Big Tech, sit behind a computer screen and all-too-frequently forget that they’re talking to real human beings. The distance that a computer screen puts between authentic human interaction gets forgotten.
Forgetting this distance is what makes the top-down social programming work. Alienation begets dissociation, which opens the person up to direct control. Programming is only effective so long as the subject doesn’t realize he’s been programmed; his attention has to be elsewhere when it slips into his system and when it activates. Although more traditional means of mob behavior could certainly be understood as a form of programming, the current cancel culture trend illustrates an electronic form that is openly and blatantly guided by social engineering. It’s so out in the open, in fact, that it almost makes one question whether it’s all just an elaborate prank—its consequences, however, ranging from doxxing to firings to real-world violence, are well out of hand.
Cancel Culturist Liberalism
Everyone recognizes that “cancel culture” exists, the only issue is whether we come out and admit it or not. Those of us who admit it, who acknowledge it, are usually gaslit into being called delusional. Our more honest critics simply point out that you shouldn’t be allowed to say certain things in public without suffering repercussions. This implies a recognition that certain things are appropriate for certain circumstances, that everything has its place. It’s a hierarchical understanding that, ironically, most proponents of cancel culture probably wouldn’t admit to ascribing to.
The sane among us will recognize that sensible speech does require these sort of unstated regulations. A more obvious one is that you shouldn’t falsely yell “fire!” in a movie theater—illegality aside, it’s immoral on the grounds that it’s a lie and that it only serves to open severe risk of harm. On a more subtle note, most adults recognize that it’s not appropriate to use profanity in the presence of children, whether said children are aware of such words or not. And for a less obnoxious example, most adults recognize that using chemistry jargon in a culinary setting is inappropriate, or using medical jargon in a love letter is very uniquely out of place.
This speaks to a certain autism innate to modernity, where what tradition and custom presented as a general sense of decorum has to be legislated, codified, and regimented into a precise set of rules. Why this is the case probably has to do with liberalism’s insistence on a pluralist society, where custom, norm and tradition cease being the guiding measures of a functioning society; this leaves some sort of overly-legalized set of politics as the only things to fall back on. A pluralized empire can stick to the old dictum, when in Rome, because everyone has their own places. A pluralized society, however, one mixed into being under the impression that somehow everyone would homogenize into a sort of primordial mannish archetype, can’t. When in Rome only makes sense when there’s a Rome to be in.
The latter examples aren’t instances of obvious insult, of course, nor are they cases that should be regulated by some governing body. We all recognize this. Proponents of cancel culture, however, want to take this a step further. They don’t want the government to regulate this speech, either—once it did, they wouldn’t be able to hide behind the first amendment the way that they do. Rather, at least outwardly, they’d prefer harsher social restrictions on certain kinds of now-inflammatory speech or behavior. They want more people ostracized for clinging to beliefs that were completely mainstream less than a decade ago.
Their belief is that society has advanced, that culture has progressed, that we’ve become more enlightened than we were before. Same-sex marriage “equality” passed half a decade ago, which means we’re supposed to be more free culturally than we were before. Transgender recognition is pushing the fold, and now with Bostock v Clayton County, nondiscriminatory policies favoring so-called transgendered people have created another legally-protected class. Times change. Language changes. What’s socially appropriate changes. What’s morally acceptable changes. So they believe.
Of course, this is only partly true. Times and social norms do change, but we call those fads. How the gaslighting begins, and why it works, is that its rhetoric builds on the existence of fads in order to associate morality, truth, and justice with them. Racial narratives involving the legality of discrimination policies are worth a special look here.
The racial discrimination of the past is considered wrong, despite its legality—and, admittedly, the legalized codification that characterized the Jim Crow laws was wrong, even if the legal efforts of forcible integration that took place in the 50s and 60s were also wrong. Fast forward a few decades, however, and affirmative action policies, which ostensibly sought to give disadvantaged communities a leg up in education and the workforce, gradually turned into demands of altered standards and preferential treatment across the board. A reverse sort of discrimination took shape, guided by this ambiguous sense of social standards, and ultimately backed by the power of the US legal system.
What proponents of this phenomenon will argue isn’t that discrimination is inherently good, as they obviously don’t believe discrimination was good in the 1930s. Nor will they argue that discrimination is only good against white people, as most of them aren’t that honest. Instead, they argue that you simply can’t discriminate against whites, even while they champion the end of “whiteness”. A while back, they started touting the argument that racism is only possible from positions of power, but this didn’t serve to win them any friends because no one really believed it. Some now try to argue that whiteness doesn’t really exist, despite apparently knowing it when they see it. They can blather on all they want about systems of power and colonization, but they come across like the autistic kids who liked Star Trek lore a bit too much; those who refuse the programming recognize that the neo-Marxist jargon of these self-styled revolutionaries is all made-up, and that it exists to distract from the main point. It’s all about power. It all comes down to control.
When we consider what racism actually was, the nonsense of their narratives becomes obvious. Discriminatory policies against blacks formed out of the belief of fundamental and irreconcilable differences between those of Europe and those of Africa; louder voices asserted that these differences were best characterized as those between superiors and inferiors. Yet even before the abolition of slavery, Tocqueville noted in the 1820s that practical considerations made relations between blacks and whites in the American South somewhat less discriminatory in practice than modern propaganda will admit. The point here, however, is that the racism of slavery and its aftermath was one founded on distinction and separation.
Anti-white racism, however, takes a different and far less convoluted path to make sensible; it’s by and large the tantrums of people who are told they’re owed something from another group as a result of past injustice. Pockets of black supremacy certainly thrive within the movement, but overt appeals to racial superiority aren’t what drive things like BLM or the takeover of the racialist narrative by liberal ideology. They’re ostensibly driven by an historical narrative, despite that narrative’s inconsistency, and despite the narrative offering no means of understanding when what’s been owed has been paid. Rather than founded on distinctions between race, anti-white narratives are driven by self-important demands of retribution—and worse, they’re blind to any objective measure of what constitutes success.
This same thinking applies also to gender ideology and the sexual revolution. What was an appropriate opinion to hold yesterday is inappropriate to hold today. Morals are opinions. Opinions define a person’s character. Those who hold wrong opinions must be rooted out and made examples of in order to keep the rest of us in line.
Humiliation
Most of us are intuitively aware of this Orwellian groupthink, and the developments of 2020 have made it clearer that those guiding the groupthink—the oligarchs who control the messaging and conditioning—are using it as a means of humiliating the country. The slippery moral relativism that defines these racialist and gender ideologies is absurd on its very face for all those who have an even semi-coherent world view. Reflect on what morality is for just a moment, on who the ostensible allies are supposed to be of these revolutionary movements, and it all falls apart.
This is, of course, the whole point. The Devil is well known for inversion. Turning the natural order upside-down means constructing a reality in which logic doesn’t make the world knowable. And keep in mind, the Devil isn’t doing this all for his own sake, either; perhaps he believes that it’s better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven, but never forget that he wanted—and still wants, given the unchanging nature of angelic wills—to have ruled in Heaven. When you’re dealing with the all-consuming pride of the first revolutionary, second place is is quite literally Hell. He hates it there.
With that in mind, we can see how dragging souls with him into the pit isn’t done for his own self-aggrandizement. He undertakes these efforts to transform the world into a surrealistic nightmare in order to mock and denigrate all those unwilling to embrace his evil alternative to life. The Devil proposes options and uses words like freedom and liberty when he casts the natural order as an oppressive and rigid structure of rules. But there is a natural order, and it’s inescapable—and moreover, it’s fundamentally good. The mere suggestion of deviating from that order is a suggestion to deviate from the best thing in the world.
So when reality is encountered, and when someone stands against you and describes it as the exact inversion of what this reality is, you can know that he’s either delusional or he’s a revolutionary. These aren’t mutually exclusive, either, though most of the vanguard—such as those ideologues engaged in the digital mob—tend to be socially conditioned into accepting delusions more than starting actual revolutions. The more vocal supporters will embrace these delusions, perhaps out of fear; after all, if you’re not clinging to the cutting edge of the revolution, your ticket might be the next one to be canceled. But there’s a deeper motivation at work, as well. In order to embrace self-hatred, in-group hatred, and the grotesque lengths of the sexual revolution, one has to have within him a deep loathing of truth, beauty, and goodness.
The delusional can be convinced, conditioned, or otherwise ideologically coerced out of this kind of thinking, but the genuine vanguard won’t be. Those who truly foster deep loathing for the three transcendentals require transcendental intervention well beyond the means of politics, chemicals, or direct action. This is why recognizing the spiritual element to this culture war is so imperative. There are people who simply cannot be reasoned with, and practical solutions to such problems need not dispense with recognizing that they’re still human beings. Unlike the angelic will, the human will is mutable to a fault—just because we’re incapable of changing someone else’s mind doesn’t mean that his mind is incapable of changing.
This is, perhaps, an appropriate note to enter Lent on, as we celebrate today’s Mardi Gras. Our enemies must be prayed for. Our opposition must be prayed for and reasoned with. And those who believe themselves in the middle must be made aware that there is no middle ground. These next few years are going to mark the next phase of the culture war, and it’s not going to be a comfortable one.
1Ellul, Jacques, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Press, 1964), 325.
