On Cancel Culture and the State of Free Speech

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2022

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Every few weeks, it seems, another example of so-called cancel culture is dominating the headlines and trending on social-media platforms. The refrain “you can’t say anything these days” has become a slogan of cultural politics, particularly on the right. And yet there’s a wide gulf of opinion on what the term “cancelling” means—and whether the phenomenon even exists. In this special episode, we examine the issue with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the YouTube video creator Lindsay Ellis, the comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff, and the writers Jay Caspian Kang and William Deresiewicz.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.8	My name is Lindsay Ellis. Oh, I don't identify as anything right now.
0:19.5	I used to say video essayist, because YouTuber is such a dirty word, but it's also more honest.
0:27.7	Lindsay Ellis was pretty early to YouTube.
0:30.9	She started posting videos in 2008 when she was a film student, and her videos are a form
0:36.9	of pop culture criticism, commentary
0:39.3	on everything from Marvel movies to Broadway musicals.
0:43.3	But anyway, not every musical, even the ones with explicit revolutionary text,
0:47.3	needs to be trying to tear down the system. But what would a revolution look like if it had been included in...
0:53.3	In her online world, and it's a pretty big world,
0:56.4	Ellis was a celebrity, and she had more than a million followers on YouTube.
1:01.7	Then suddenly, last year, in a moment of real uproar and emotion,
1:06.6	Ellis walked away from the career that she'd spent more than a decade building.
1:10.6	And it was just, it's just so, like, just such a nightmare.
1:14.3	And I'm just like this nightmare is never going to end.
1:16.5	Like, I'm leaving. I quit. I give up. You won.
1:20.9	Lindsay Ellis had been, to use the term of the moment, canceled.
1:25.3	You know what I'm talking about.
1:26.4	The idea that people are somehow waiting to
1:28.4	punish anyone who says something that's deemed offensive or mistaken, justified or not.
1:35.5	And social media, in its chaotic way, is the judge and jury. The refrain, if you can't say anything
	...

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