day 22 - 23/11/20 : Cancel Culture and how poorly Tobuscus has aged.

Howdy-do folks. Pretty happy with the feedback I got from my blog post yesterday so thank you all very much. We're all entering the last week of this challenge and have so far have raised $1,673. I'm really proud of you, Sean, Tom, Niall and Darragh for everything you've contributed over the space of these past few months, especially Sean for being the real cause for this. While a lot of people wouldn't think less about dropping change into a charity box, it takes a different sort of person to actually act on these sentiments and I want to thank him and all of you that have stuck with us and donated over this time. Moving on from this soppiness.

Today I figured I'd talk about cancel culture. If I'm being perfectly honest, I haven't put any heavy thought into it. While its been a 'thing' for the past 50 or so years, it really rose to fame along with the #MeToo movement. When it came out that celebrities like Harvey Weinstein, Aziz Ansari, and Louis CK were being accused of sexual misconduct, in my eyes it seemed like the logical next step, to put it coldly. In my eyes, I didn't really see an out - I couldn't see how these people didn't do what they were accused to have done. From here on, it wasn't even that I was caught up by the spectacle of #JoeBloggsIsCancelledParty, it was simply that it was so obvious before that there was already such a toxic culture existing in the upper echelons of Hollywood, so to see these celebrities actually facing some scrutiny was like finally scratching that itch on your back that's juuust out of reach. The most satisfying example I can think of recently is Ellen DeGeneres. While you should look it up for yourself, the basic story is that Ellen DeGeneres is a tyrant offscreen to any and every single one of her subordinates. She's a sycophant to her celebrity guests and production managers so they were able to deflect some criticism away from her when shit hit the fan for her, but there were so many reports from her staff on the show about how she was basically an evil cunt. Also, she posted the tweet, "200 years in the future... “Honey, have you seen my iPhone 378? I need it to preorder my PS6.”". I wouldn't say the tweet's problematic or anything, she's just a boring cunt and needs to hire better ghost-writers for her jokes.

So, suffice to say I didn't think much of cancel culture because it became such a given thing for when it's discovered that the celebrity you suspected of being a pretentious twat in real life turned out to be a twat in real life. Although 'cancelling' as we know it existed outside of the social media realm long before we labelled it, I'd say around the time of MeToo, it became absorbed as standard practice for companies trying to maintain a good public image. If an actor was brought into disrepute for whichever reason, they were ditched rather than risk the company's image being brought down with them. This, again, seemed like a given thing. In a lot of ways, cancel culture was actually pretty funny to witness, as if I got some feeling of schadenfreude from watching a once-prominent celebrity desperately trying to reclaim their relevancy and make some grotesque metamorphosis into a discount Conservative pundit. This can't be exemplified better than Toby Turner - or his more well-known name, Tobuscus. He was a Youtuber popular from 2010-2014 who made parodies and songs. I'm not going to lie, I thought this guy was the shit and I know a few of my mates probably had the same fond impression of him. All his songs and parodies were perfectly on target for his audience and he had that energy onscreen that instantly attracted the under-18 market of Youtube. Around 2016, a few ex-girlfriends of his came out and said how he had drugged and raped them and with that, along with some negative character testaments from his Youtubers he had colloborated with to seal the deal, his Youtube career may as well have ended. Tobuscus essentially escaped collective memory, only to occasionally pop up with an overly-dramatised and often thinly veiled misoginist-themed video. I saw a random tweet of his around the US election where he said he was voting Trump to 'reclaim his country' and to 'end cancel culture'. Safety Torch, Nugget in a Biscuit and Assassin's Creed Trailers all relics of a more civilised age.

Throughout all this, I was largely indifferent to cancel culture. I mainly would have been in favour of it for the power it has to act as a check and balance for when criminal justice isn't an option. Obviously, this is by no means a perfect system and the whole 'court of public opinion' can cause a problem for every solution it presents. Main takeaway for you is I'm largely indifferent to it but if you pester me for an answer then it's a unassuming "m'yeah ! Sure, why not." With that said, I was asked in work the other day how I felt about cancel culture and started talking about Johnny Depp's civil case with Amber Heard. Here, I realised my opinion had changed. I'm not going to pretend to be an authority on domestic abuse or who was right or who was wrong, that's not my place. What I was fixated on was how this was a civil case and yet Depp had lost his job as if he was guilty of something. The case hadn't proved that either Heard or Depp were victims of the other, only that The Sun had not committed libel against Depp's character - that they had enough information to make a reasonable assumption. Regardless, Warner Studios dropped Depp but kept on Heard in the Aquaman series. So, to sum my line of thought here: the civil case essentially meant that nothing had changed since 2018 when The Sun made the defamatory article, except that evidence of the two being abusers had come into public knowledge. Despite this, Warner Bros firing Depp seems equivalent to them taking the headline of "wife-beater" as a guilty sentence. This is where I began to see the problem with cancel culture. This is not to say that I'm a Johnny Depp diehard or anything - I think he's an excellent actor but I'm hardly sketching his name on the bathroom walls. I'm more preoccupied by how a business use lines such as, "they do not fit into our company image", to be double-talk for "We think a large part of our audience might think he's guilty, so we'll treat him as guilty." It goes without saying that obviously Warner can hire and fire whoever they want, regardless of guilt, but by having companies become such a key component of cancel culture rattles the pieces on the gameboard.

In the past, I had been relying on the employers of whichever celebrity I disliked to extract the truth from the stories and make a judgement that seemed to always fit in with my biases. This worked for a while but it's clear that I was so desperate to see some modicum of 'justice' that I let my own distrust and disgust of the celebrity get the better of me and blind me to how it could be used in a identical way against my biases. It's very clear to you and me now that I should have a sit down with my biases and tell them to catch themselves on but it's also clear that there are plenty more people like me that are indifferent or even supportive of perpetuating cancel culture and let it become this Frankenstein's Monster that they've lost control of and continues on destroying the careers of people willy-nilly.

So I'm pretty sure I'm opposed to cancel culture. I still think Turner, DeGeneres and the lot of rapists from MeToo are cunts and deserved to have their livelihoods disassemble around them though.