Okay, Fuck It. I'm Going to Talk About It.

Louis C.K. won a Grammy last night for Best Comedy Album. Some people are mad about this.

As we all know, because my fellow liberals keep telling us, “cancel culture” does not exist. Instead, what the right wing refers to as “cancel culture” is simply consequences for bad behavior.

Namely, the consequence of regular folks like us never having to see or hear from you again. Once this has been decided by the mob, it is always your status. There is no road back. Your worst moments, your worst behavior, define you forever.

I don’t care about whether you love or hate Louis C.K., or whether you did like him or didn’t like him before. That’s your business, or it should be. And if you liked him, got mad at him, then forgave him and continued supporting him, that’s also your business. Whatever your position, I don’t care. He’s not a politician. He’s an artist; my support is not about my personal political beliefs, it’s because I like his art. Fucking Period.

Do I give you shit for still listening to Michael Jackson? Will I boycott Safeway unless they stop playing his music? Am I unable to coexist with people who continue to enjoy the art of a person I consider a serial child rapist? No.

What I DO care about is the implication that there’s something immoral about patronizing an artist who has behaved immorally. What I also care about is the apparent modern disinterest in concepts like forgiveness, proportionality, complexity and humility. What I also also care about is this notion that we ought to be judged, in the way we judge people for their politics, for the art we enjoy.

To talk like this, by the way, is to “defend Louis C.K.” in the language of Twitter (yeah but it’s only on twitter, man). Since I am using his Grammy as a jumping off point, I am somehow in favor of whatever he did—or, rather, whatever I say he did.

If I say he committed sexual assault, that’s what he did. Whether his actions factually match the definition of assault is something only a fellow assaulter would wonder about. Or, more specifically, whether his actions would be realistically prosecutable as sexual assault, since it’s not legally assault unless charged and convicted and we’re just speculating.

I am not arguing that you can never give an opinion prior to someone’s conviction of a crime about whether they committed that crime. Sure you can, go for it. Opine away, pal. But something about “social media” (a typically useless jargon phrase—go ahead, define it) has so befouled our discourse that we can no longer profitably disagree without unleashing utter savagery, an uncompromising, zero-sum, scorched-earth response, lest any ambivalence when called to judge others be seen as a ratification of their ceaseless crimes.

Now, maybe the notion of not judging other people, unless you want to also be judged in the same way, is considered these days to be strictly Christian and therefore dangerous bullshit. After all, mainstream America doesn’t know fuck all about the religion on which American culture, such as it exists, is founded, but these days they do know that it’s bad. So, QED, judging others is good. I mean, maybe I’m grasping at straws here, but my personal experience of Facebook, Twitter, InstaGram and other “social media” is one of overwhelming judgement.

To be fair, I am just as guilty of this as anyone. I often go to Twitter so I can yell at assholes. I haven’t identified a great need that the service fulfills—even though, full disclosure, I have personally profited a great deal from the company. And I’m not out here saying we should shut down or otherwise censor social media. But I do not think we have adequately debriefed about what it has done to our culture and if that’s cool, or not.

This is why the cancel culture and free speech controversies of late, even though often driven by the right in recent years, are still of such concern to me. Some of the ways we communicate are technology-created. For example, over time people would write shorter emails. Unlike hand-written letters, which took longer to deliver, email didn’t need to contain as much detail and after people got used to it, did not. Likewise, Facebook and Twitter and other platforms encourage certain types of behavior. It seems clear that these platforms—while not without positive aspects and uses—have some serious negative side effects on our political and cultural discourses.

Among them is the impulse that I think is what we really mean by “cancel culture.” If you are rewarded for simplistic hot takes and snap judgements, it may feel like there’s no time even for the smallest consideration, deliberation, balance, empathy. If this doesn’t work for you—leave the conversation?