The Long and Tortured History of Cancel Culture (Published 2020) (2024)

IN THE EARLY 21st century — a decade into the experiment of the public internet, which was introduced in 1991, and with Facebook and Twitter not yet glimmers of data on the horizon — a new phrase slipped into Chinese slang: renrou sousuo, literally translated as “human flesh search.” The wording was meant to be whimsical, suggesting the human-powered equivalent of what were then fairly novel computer search engines. (In English, the nuances are lost; no zombie inflection was intended.) A request would go out for wangmin (web citizens), or in this case the more intimate wangyou (web friends, internet users sharing a common passion or cause), to come together as a kind of ad hoc detective agency in order to ferret out information about objects and figures of interest. It was just an outlet for fandom. But soon attention turned toward supposed wrongdoers, those thought to exhibit moral deficiency, from a low-level government official spotted flashing a designer watch far above his pay grade, hinting at corruption, to, more horrifically, a woman in a “crush video” — a fringe genre of erotica that traffics in animal cruelty — wielding stilettos to stomp a kitten to death. Once these offenders were identified and their personal details exposed online, they were hounded, verbally flogged and effectively expelled from the community.

To a Western observer, this was human flesh indeed: a pound of it, exacted. Media coverage in the West framed renrou sousuo as an exotic phenomenon, almost unheard-of outside China. It couldn’t happen here. When The New York Times ran a feature on it in 2010, one commenter wrote, “I am surprised by the intensity of the searches and I think this is an Eastern trait. Most people in the West can’t be bothered, we are too individualistic and well served by existing mechanisms” — even though English already had its own word, “doxxing,” for such online revelations, with roots in 1990s computer hacker discussion boards. Weiwei Shen, a founding editor of the Tsinghua China Law Review, made a similar, if more subtle, argument in a 2016 essay, noting that the human flesh search was a “grass-roots” effort and thus far more likely to arise in “collectivist” China, as opposed to go-it-alone America.

But this is the American way now. We call it cancel culture.

So much has been written about cancel culture in the past year that weariness sets in just reading the words. What it is, what to call it and whether it even exists are all in dispute. The term is shambolically applied to incidents both online and off that range from vigilante justice to hostile debate to stalking, intimidation and harassment. Any of the following might qualify: outcries last summer over cellphone video footage of a white tech executive yelling expletives at a Filipino-American family at a restaurant in California (he reportedly resigned from his company); speculations that a pop star’s father was secretly a C.I.A. agent and thus an accomplice to colonialism and genocide; editors at The New York Times and The New York Review of Books stepping down after running controversial pieces that provoked dissent from their own staff; the suspension of a white professor who used a Chinese word in class that sounded like a racial slur in English; a beauty YouTuber shedding close to three million subscribers in a single weekend after a colleague accused him of betrayal and emotional manipulation (he has since recouped these losses and currently claims an audience of more than 23 million); and far-right conspiracists dredging up an anti-Trump filmmaker’s old, puerilely offensive tweets (he was fired by Disney, then rehired eight months later).