In Defense of (Click to) Cancel Culture
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The ascendancy of free speech absolutist Elon Musk and his transformation of an online platform that once empowered individuals to speak truth to power through “cancellation” into a false-claim free-for-all has rendered the court’s ruling largely moot.
A newly available-in-English book by German literary scholar Adrian Daub contends that the panic over cancel culture was a ginned-up tempest in a teapot, a wolf-crying way for the powerful to silence minority perspectives. Daub’s book says that cancel culture has largely receded as a cultural bogeyman, and cancel-panic-adjacent anti-wokeness has replaced it as the illiberals’ weapon of choice.
In the streaming world, cancel culture is still going strong, although we prefer to call it churn. Subscription cancellation has traditionally been the number-one way viewers voice dissatisfaction, whether in rebellion against Netflix’s periodic “pricing updates” or simply as a way of declaring, “I’ve run out of things to watch.” With scripted TV and film production down a staggering 40% since pre-2023 SAG and writers’ strike levels and premium streamers investing massive sums in one-off high-visibility sports events, the “nothing to see here” problem is going to get worse before it gets better. With the shifting emphasis to sports and the ongoing trend toward ad-supported monetization mod¬els, streaming is looking more like cable TV every day, even if swiftly and reliably delivering sports at scale remains a work in progress.
But for viewers who still yearn to churn—particularly those binge-and-purge users who churn in and out of subscriptions in rhythm with their favorite shows’ release schedules—cancellation may be getting easier, as the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Negative Option, or Click to Cancel, rule announced in October 2024 attempts to cut through the red tape and sidestep the counter-intuitive maze of virtual blind alleys that streaming platforms often deploy to make churning more trouble than it’s worth.