Even if Rogan can’t be cancelled, the attempt still matters
The Joe Rogan cancellation campaign continues to smolder. Weeks have passed, there have been new stories just about every day, and the anti-Joe sentiment has corroded liberal faith in Spotify.
This protracted process has produced all sorts of weirdness. Especially, there’s a brutal irony in the left-liberal preoccupation with conservative “book burning” right now. Have you ever noticed how the ritual deletion of an “irresponsible” and “offensive” music app and its content looks a lot like a digital book burning?
Is there not a similar vibe when liberals urge each other to purge their phones of heretical content, and ultimately try to force Spotify to exterminate said content from the web in general?
There’s been an orgy of burning, of incinerating unwanted messages, but it’s happening at both ends of the political spectrum.
I believe terms such as “platforming” obscure what’s really going on. To certain minds, speech that gets a “platform” can never really be banned. It can only be taken down from its platform. The questions of free speech and censorship get pushed to the side, for Rogan and Spotify, because there’s a platform involved. Meanwhile, books in a curriculum have no “platform” newspeak attached, so removal of the books still counts as censorship.
Really, we have both conservative and liberal deplatforming, or book burning. Only the media are different, not the substance of the action. Both kinds deserve the same level of histrionics, or none, depending on one’s inclination. But we’re dealing with similar magnitudes.
Now, there are a couple arguments that still can be made to treat the two phenomena distinctly — claims about the level of danger of what’s being banned, and so on. But there’s one argument that on its face seems more objective and compelling than these, and that is the one that actually — most objectively — is false. It regards the vulnerability of Rogan himself.
The uncancelable, still-platformed Joe Rogan has received a hundred-million dollar offer to leave Spotify altogether, to keep his content uncensored, and to still take advantage of a distribution platform.
That offer comes from Rumble, a free speech, YouTube-esque video service that already hosts a bunch of figures including Glenn Greenwald.
Some people have tried to say the Rumble offer proves that “cancellation” is the wrong word to use for the anti-Rogan campaign. Same goes for “censorship” or really any word that sounds bad.
All of this strikes me as cynical, if not absurd: some people have obviously assumed that Spotify can delete Rogan’s words completely, and many people would definitely torch specific or even all Rogan content from the entire internet if they could.
Still, it is fashionable, these days, to say intent does not matter, and to wrap oneself in one’s presumed political impotence as a sort of security blanket.
Only effects matter, many say, and for some reason it’s extremely common to assume that liberals have no effect on anything whatsoever. Therefore, their every action and idea should be permitted.
This is wrong.
We should note, for instance, how quickly Spotify used its own ongoing censorship as a form of defense against the Joe Rogan complaints.
The company responded to Neil Young’s protest of Spotify by writing (my emphasis), “We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to Covid since the start of the pandemic.”
How many liberals could be appeased with tightened Covid policies that result in many, many more episodes getting removed? How many media outlets and politicians? The answer is “countless,” most likely. And that has to be a calculation that Spotify is making. (The list already includes Joe Biden’s surgeon general, and his press spokesperson, Jen Psaki!)
So the censorship works, only more deeply and more perniciously than most of us realize. The campaigns against platforms make it a political and business risk to allow dissenting views to be aired anywhere online. Content disappears, and new content has to fit narrower parameters in order to be tolerated. Discourse becomes less democratic, because the growing fears of corporate bureaucrats determine which ideas can be disseminated.
Self-censorship grows. New voices are stifled. All of this happens in parallel with Rogan staying put on Spotify. But even Rogan has reportedly self-censored on the platform, pulling down episodes amid new allegations of racism.
And all of this removal of risk, of real stakes, from our discourse has the effect of freezing our culture in place.
Without experimentation, without real challenges to mainstream orthodoxy, there is no room for genuinely new forms of thought to grow. An analogy can be drawn to the demise of what Mark Fisher calls “Really Existing Socialism,” a credible alternative to capitalistic living that forced capitalism itself to innovate and change. Cancellation campaigns demolish alternative, experimental spaces. They squeeze small content platforms, forcing them more and more into simple imitations of their larger corporate counterparts.
And so the pressures (political, advertiser, etc.) that shape allowed opinion for “legacy” media come increasingly to mark new media. The periphery is shaped into a mere afterimage of the core.
Some of us undoubtedly prefer this scenario. But there’s an argument to be made that capitalism itself was more vital and functional while a real “outside” existed. There has been great technological and cultural stagnation, division, despair, and dysfunction following the end of RES. One might even say the great hegemons of capitalism acted irresponsibly when they obliterated alternatives to their system.
Irresponsibility might also be what we’re seeing now, as left-liberals flex their growing cultural hegemony toward the suppression of alternatives. Endless vistas of sameness serve no one. Thus, the liberal impulse to effect this reality in media might amount to a sort of death drive.
If attacking Rogan can’t actually unseat him, then why persist with it anyway? The real victim of the attack is heterodoxy in general, and that is exactly why it matters.
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