Bachelorarbeit

The Topic

I selected Cancel Culture as my focal point of interest in this thesis, even though I am aware of its controversy. Much time in discussions is spent on the question whether a so called Cancel Culture even exists in the first place, let alone if its dangerous or harmless. To debate its existence is not part of this work. Instead I will utilize a mathematical approach and assume it exists, naïvely (meaning without preconditions) and then develop my analysis. Furthermore, the discussion about its existence: I did not do the thorough research to answer this question undoubtedly, yet the fact that this discussion exists, strikes me as odd. When we do not have words for phenomena, we are less likely to discover them. That is one of the ideas of Structuralism. Denying the existence of a particular things seems counter-intuitive then. To foster better discourse, we have to allow for more possibilities.

To cancel a person is a practice that societies have evoked for ages. It changed labels and methods throughout time, but the idea remained. A person is declared „non-grata“ and therefore removed from society. In George Orwell’s famous book “Nineteen-Eighty-Four” the practice is called “to vaporize” someone or to make someone an “unperson.” Something seemed to have shifted since the last couple of decades and it coincides with the dawn of the internet. The spreading of information accelerated dramatically. Proportional to that we observe, more and more mob-like behaviour in social media. Therefore this thesis discusses not only what it means to cancel a person, but also differentiates between to cancel and Cancel Culture. Lastly we discuss the connection of Cancel Culture and Political Correctness, as Adrian Daub pointed out⁴. Is it merely an old threat, or does the emergence of social media increase the effect of cancellations?

MOTIVATION

Reading about Cancel Culture, the adjective „Orwellian“ is used frequently to label some particular aspect as dystopian or totalitarian.⁵ We will dive into the distinction and the similarities between an Orwellian phenomenon and a Cancel Culture. Will it be possible to infer an Orwellian perspective in all of this? This leads to a clear ethical argument, whose premises this thesis will discuss.

We approach Cancel Culture naively, meaning that we assume its existence. Given this notion, we compare the commonly attributed characteristics to Orwellian criteria and go- ing to argue: Cancel Culture is a threat on freedom of speech, if it can accurately be described as Orwellian. Since it can accurately be described as Orwellian, therefore it is a threat on freedom of speech.

To focus my research, I decided to narrow the range to Academic Cancel Culture, because this appears to be where most of the discourse is happening. Values like freedom of speech or scientific freedom are vividly discussed at universities and appear to have a more secondary role in other parts of society.

Relevance to present day discourse

I admit that the discussion about Political Correctness is roughly thirty years old and had its first publicity during the 1990s. Yet, what sets the 1990s apart from our world today, is the amalgamation of nearly everything with an online-counterpart. Presently we have a multi-faceted array of social-media platforms to share and comment digital content. Information that took a considerable amount of time to traverse the Atlantic during the 1990s is a mere second away. Real-time information made it possible that we perceive the world as smaller, faster and more homogeneous.

Removing personae non-gratae from society has been done practically forever. An individual who was not sentenced to prison or death was sometimes cast out and forced into exile. What is different now is the authority that demands this. The right to judge used to belong to legal authorities (kings, judges, dukes, etc.), not exclusively to a mob. The emergence of the internet shifted this power. As soon as social-media made its way onto every- one‘s smart-phone, the baton was handed over.

Since we discuss the effects and dangers of Cancel Culture quite mercilessly, I think it is time to give it a thorough analysis. I hope to shine a light onto past discourse about its emergence, the connection to Political Correctness, and the implications on our present-day world.