Monday, December 04, 2023

Links - 4th December 2023 (1 - Cancel Culture)

Cancel Culture’s Mental-Health Toll - WSJ - "My psychotherapy patients often ask me why so many children are struggling emotionally. The answer is complicated and multifaceted, but it’s become clear that one important aggravating factor is the inflexible, rigid and vicious cancel culture that has swept across our educational system and the country. Children can’t thrive in environments like this. From a developmental perspective, adolescents are highly susceptible to harsh criticism. This seems to be hard-wired in the brain... School-sanctioned shaming and a social media free-for-all of bullying leave teens and young adults constantly walking on eggshells, afraid to express heterodox opinions in class, among peers or in schoolwork. Making mistakes and learning from them is an important part of young people’s development. It’s how they grow to accept themselves as well as others—if peers and people in authority show them empathy, tolerance, patience and kindness. Terrorizing young people is no way to teach them sensitivity and respect."

Cancel culture is not about the powerful - "Being left-wing used to mean agitating against people losing their jobs. How quaint that feels now. In the culture wars of today, the illiberal left’s primary response to any statement it disagrees with seems to be demanding that the person who said it be immediately sacked and made an example of.    For all these people’s blather about ‘Karens’ – that insufferable meme about entitled lower-middle-class white women who always want to speak to the manager – the ultimate Karens today are to be found on the identitarian left. They’ll go straight to the manager of anyone who dares utter a dissenting thought... A rogues’ gallery of illiberal midwits – many of them veterans of cancellation campaigns themselves – have denied cancel culture is even a thing and valiantly argued with caricatures of their opponents’ arguments. Corbynista Guardian columnist Owen Jones says cancel culture is just ‘public figures being criticised on Twitter for things they’ve said’. Here he is apparently struggling with the distinction between ‘being criticised’ and ‘being faced by demands they be sacked’, which is of course what we’re actually talking about.   That he doesn’t seem to know the difference is a little odd, given he spends a good chunk of time doing the latter nowadays. Just a few weeks ago he was calling on Oxford University to fire its deputy director of external affairs and international strategy over something unpleasant he tweeted about Ash Sarkar.  This braindead take, that the backlash to cancel culture is just rich people complaining about being criticised, has been repeated ad nauseam. Nesrine Malik, of the Guardian (again), accused those behind the Harper’s letter of being influential people ‘unaccustomed to being questioned’.  Given the letter was signed by Salman Rushdie, that take doesn’t even hold water if you glance at the list of signatories – unless you think the fatwa was a devastating Twitter thread. But nor does it hold water if you bother to read the text itself... The mobbing of prominent figures doesn’t only have a chilling effect on debate more broadly, by setting the terms of acceptable debate for everyone else; it also legitimises the cancellation of less powerful people – those less able to fight back.   Critics of the Harper’s letter constantly single out one of its signatories – JK Rowling, who has faced abuse and death and rape threats for expressing trans-sceptical views. The idea that this multimillionaire author, with more than 14million Twitter followers, has been ‘silenced’ is ridiculous, they scoff.  But no one, including Rowling, is saying that she has been silenced or cancelled. Rather, it is the people further down the pecking order, those without hundreds of millions of pounds in the bank, who will ultimately bear the brunt of this silencing dynamic.  In fact, in relation to the Rowling controversy, that’s already happened. Children’s author Gillian Philip was sacked earlier this month for the crime of expressing support for JK Rowling. After 24 hours of abuse and complaints, her publisher caved.  This case was put to activist and songwriter Billy Bragg over the weekend, after he rubbished cancel culture in the Guardian (and again). In response, this alleged socialist declared: ‘I believe that employers have a right to act in such circumstances.’...   Brian Leach, a disabled grandfather, lost his job in an Asda store in Yorkshire last year after he shared a Billy Connolly routine, which took the piss out of jihadists, on his personal Facebook page. Someone else on staff took offence, and he was sacked.  That the bourgeois left has become increasingly shrill and intolerant has been clear for some time. But it’s still worth asking why these supposed radicals are so comfortable handing over the power to police speech to the state, bosses and Silicon Valley.  Part of it has to do with their distance from working people. This is now so vast that they have begun to see corporations as the agents of change and pretty widely held beliefs – like thinking that rushing to put kids on puberty-blockers is probably not a good idea – as unspeakable heresies. But it also speaks to how fundamentally unthreatening their ideas are... deeply disappointed with ordinary people, the bourgeois left has resigned itself to policing their opinions, doing by compulsion and censure what it cannot do by reason and argument, with the assistance of the capitalist class where necessary.  No wonder they cling to cancel culture. It’s all they’ve got. In a way, it is all a bit tragic. But it is also a menace to the free speech of precisely the people the left once aspired to represent."
Of course, if you criticise liberals, this is "harassment" and shows why social media companies need to reveal users' identities

Now they’ve even cancelled John Wayne - "The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts is to remove its John Wayne exhibit due to racist comments the late actor made back in the 1970s...   If we judged all the great film stars by the standards of our time, few people would survive the purge. Laurence Olivier, for example, is widely regarded as one of the greatest actors of all time. But should he be un-personed for his use of blackface, for instance?  Wayne was one of the most iconic actors of the 20th century. It is hard to imagine how a school of cinematic arts could not give some kind of nod towards the hero of so many Westerns"

Conservatives Aren't Cancel Culture Hypocrites, But The Left Is - "The left is the undisputed champion of the craft, having imported its toxic standards into our culture.  There’s really no competition. Leftist cancelers control all our major institutions, and are wreaking consequences for working people, girls, minorities, and the country. While the left throws gasoline on the fire (sometimes literally), the right is engaged in a meaningful effort that most people on the left would probably agree with after throwing back a couple of cabernets in the privacy of their own wine bars... the mounting leftist consensus that conservative criticism of cancel culture is categorically cynical or hypocritical is absurd, reflexive, and facile.  If you’re hired to be a neutral reporter by a purportedly neutral news outlet, you should probably not put “Black Lives Matter” in your Twitter bio and criticize “objectivity.” Wilder could be a great reporter at a leftist outlet, but ideologues operating under the pretense of neutrality is wrong and it’s destroying public trust in media. Good riddance.  Further, while the Very Online know that Hannah-Jones is controversial, she’s a Pulitzer winner whose work ended up in school curricula around the country. It hardly seems unreasonable to imagine some stakeholders at UNC only became aware of her many, obvious journalistic failures after controversy bubbled. Who cares if she’s a leftist? Hannah-Jones is an unprofessional fabulist who has no business teaching students to do journalism.  But, of course, the Enlightened Consensus among Reasonable Observers held that Wilder and Jones were victims of cancel culture. This is a consequence of cancel culture’s inevitable weaponization, its murky definition, and the elite consensus that conservative bad faith is always disproportionate to bad faith on the left...   The purest definition of “cancel culture” refers to unjust consequences for speech, whether it’s bad but years old, whether it’s heterodox but recent. The left wishes to subject even J.K. Rowling to deplatforming over her narrow opposition to trans ideology applied to children. They should just say they love cancel culture and come to terms with it. It’ll save us a lot of time, a lot of bad-faith hackery, and a lot of meta-analysis whenever these stupid controversies erupt."

Cancel Culture Should Look In the Mirror - "Whenever anyone suggests that Cancel Culture might be less than a good thing. That it might, indeed, be bullying, hateful poison which is killing Western culture, the Cancellers screech indignantly. Screeching indignantly is, of course, their default setting, but dare criticise their despicable ideology and they amp the screeching to deafening levels.  With the logical clarity that they’re renowned for, the jowl-quivering land-whales, the flabby, repulsive castratos and the drooling kiddy-diddlers shriek that it’s just the same as any other boycott. Which is arrant nonsense: a boycott is saying, “I won’t buy this”; Cancel Culture says, “You can’t buy, see, or hear this, and you should kill yourself if you do”.  They’re very big on the “kill yourself” thing, the Cancellers. When they’re not threatening to actually do the job for you. Just ask J. K. Rowling, Julie Bindel, Germaine Greer, or Mary Beard, who’ve all been inundated with death threats for questioning transgenderism.   Which is odd, firstly because, if they really believed that “trans women are women”, who “aren’t a threat to women”, then they probably shouldn’t be threatening so many women.  Secondly, a bedrock tenet of Cancel Culture is that “words can kill”.  Which they’re apparently trying to prove by spewing a torrent of words urging people to kill themselves."

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Overgrown babies who say everyone must think like them are invading our bedrooms - "Do you believe in thought crime? In picking people off, one by one, till everybody agrees with just a single point of view? Each week, we see this world come a little closer... Take last week’s attempt to ‘cancel’ the Killing Eve actress Jodie Comer. Her crime? Nothing she has said or thought.   Instead, the online trolls had been enraged to discovered who she is dating. The supposed culprit is an American lacrosse player called James Burke. His crime? Mr Burke is alleged to be a registered Republican and a Donald Trump supporter. Cue an internet meltdown and a demand by activists that Comer be prevented from working again.  It’s ludicrous. How can anyone demand that we restrict ourselves to partners who are in 100 per cent ideological alignment with the views of a Left-wing sect?  The bullying of inoffensive Jodie Comer might be a new low, but I’ve seen it coming for some time.  Two years ago, a 26-year-old racing driver called Conor Daly lost his sponsors because of something said in the 1980s. Daly competes in the full-blooded series run by Nascar – the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing – which is much-loved in the southern USA.  Yet consider this: Daly was not alive at the time of the alleged offence. How had he mis-spoken before he’d even been born?  The answer is he hadn’t. Daly lost his sponsorship because his racing driver father was alleged to have made a racial slur three decades earlier. And there was no reprieve.  This totalitarian instinct has crept up on us with amazing ease. It is the product of a vindictive Leftism which used only to reside on certain US university campuses.  Yet today, boosted hugely by the internet, this half-baked ideology, tribal and dogmatic, obsessed with the language of racial, sexual and gender politics, is running riot... The world these activists are creating is vengeful and vicious, and increasingly dull. Last week, a clip from a recent BBC comedy show, The Mash Report, was posted online. Even for those of us who long ago gave up bothering trying to find anything funny on the BBC, it was jaw-droppingly awful.  It included a segment of two unfunny comedians agreeing with each other in an unfunny manner. At one stage the female comedian declared ‘free speech is now basically a way adult people can say racist stuff without any consequences’. There was no hint of irony... Some people – especially if they are white and male – think the best way to get through this madness is to shut their eyes and swear allegiance to the big lies and presumptions of the time. They have seen how the mob comes for anyone who says something controversial.  Today, charities, public sector bodies and whole corporations are increasingly filled with people who have been told what to say and what to believe. Some have been told by their bosses what books they should read – a sinister development.  Last month I received a leaked letter sent out by an NHS boss in Birmingham. She had told those working under her to read four books on ‘white privilege’ so they could ‘correct’ their attitudes."

Cancel culture comes to the classroom: Professor Deborah Appleman on how teachers are navigating the new culture wars - The Hub - "What we’re not used to is the canceling that’s coming from the Left, canceling because of problematic portrayals, because of use of offensive language, and canceling because someone has made a judgment about the appropriateness of the life of an author, for example, Sherman Alexie, and the degree to which that author’s behaviour should keep us from teaching their books... the purpose of reading literature is to unsettle you, is to hurt you in some ways, and is, maybe, in my opinion, most importantly, giving you the opportunity to feel the hurt of other people. That’s where empathy is built. If we cancel or omit all books from our curriculum that have the potential to create emotional distress, I’m not sure what will be left for reading. We’re leaving aside for young people to learn that important skill of empathy in important works... the first thing that they get wrong is that they decide a priori for the students. If one of our goals in education is to teach students to think critically, we should do what other academic Gerry Graff said a long time ago, “We should teach the controversy.” We should say, for example, let’s just say the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, some low-hanging fruit in a way, this book has come under fire because of its portrayal of people of colour and its use of the N-word... although we want to avoid using any language that essentializes or hurts people, when you’re dealing with an author like James Baldwin, for example, James Baldwin uses the N-word to shock and to demonstrate to his readers what harm is being done to African American people. He doesn’t want his—or I shouldn’t speak for him, I know, but I can’t imagine given his goals of his writing and his proactiveness that he would want his works to be banned because of an offending word. Sometimes we forgot about the intent of the author.  Another problem, and this is the last one I imagine for this particular question, is what I am calling in the book the problem of presentism. What liberals and others are doing is superimposing our 21st-century moral code onto the 17th, 18th, 19th, and even the beginning part of the 20th century. We expect the use of pronouns, the way we deal with women, and the way we deal with other marginalized groups, to be reflective of the hard lessons that we’ve learned about what it means to treat people equally. But I don’t think that you can hold someone hostage who lived centuries ago to what it is that we’ve learned... I think that what our society has done, and this has been exacerbated by the pandemic, is we’ve infantilized them. During the pandemic, I had so many of my college students taking a class from their childhood bedroom with their stuffed animals behind them. It’s hard to be a grown-up thinker in that context. I think, again, partly because of our concern for students’ mental health, we’ve mistaken our students for being what we call snowflakes... if we start doing a moral calibration of artists, writers, composers, our museum walls are going to be empty. Our concert halls are going to be empty... There’s also this argument that I’ve heard from some people like there’s a difference between whether someone that we’re censoring is living or dead because we want to keep them from earning money or something like that. That doesn’t make any sense to me either. I don’t know the answer to that. I know that people should not get away with doing terrible things to other people, but I don’t know what that means about my relationship to their work, and I don’t know who it is who can be an arbiter of moral behaviour in a way that is consistent and fair across centuries, across generations, et cetera."
The left claim that minorities can't empathise with majorities, which is why they keep on demanding representation. Looks like they need to learn more literature

Jacob Rees-Mogg: keep calling out ‘snowflakes’ and ‘remoaners’ to stop cancel culture - "Mr Rees-Mogg also waded into the debate around freedom of speech on university campuses, hailing the Cambridge and Oxford debating societies for their safeguards against censorship.  “The great strength of both Unions is that they are independent of their university authorities,” he said.  “When these authorities have been less supportive of free speech than one might sometimes wish - and that’s been more of a problem at Cambridge than at Oxford - the Unions are free to carry on supporting free speech.”  In May 2019, the Oxford Union voted by a margin of 224 to 49 not to support a policy of “no-platforming”, which would mean controversial speakers could be banned from appearing if students objected to their views.  Proposals that would have required Cambridge University staff and students to be “respectful” of different views were overwhelmingly rejected last December.  An amendment from students concerned about academic freedom instead placed the emphasis on “tolerance” of ideological opponents’ views in the university’s revised policy.  Mr Rees-Mogg went on to describe Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, who branded the Government “Tory scum” at her party’s own conference, as “very spirited”.  “We must then stand up for people on the other side who use their free speech to call us scum or whatever it is,” he added. “I’m not sure mere abuse is the best way, even though I do like the mere abuse. The thing is, the scum always rises to the top, so we’ve nothing much to complain about.”"

GOLDSTEIN: The controversial beliefs of Canada’s ‘Famous Five’ suffragettes - "With the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada assessing Tommy Douglas’ “controversial beliefs and behaviours” in light of his early support of the racist science of eugenics, we should definitely take a look at Canada’s ‘Famous Five’ suffragettes as well. Unlike Douglas, who eventually rejected eugenics — the belief humanity could be improved through planned breeding and the involuntary sterilization of the mentally ill — the Famous Five never abandoned their support of the theory. The Famous Five — Emily Murphy, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney and Irene Parlby — were early advocates for the rights of women and successfully spearheaded the 1929 “persons case” which recognized women as “persons” under British law... the Famous Five were also racists, elitists and their support of eugenics — a popular and widely accepted theory among social reformers at the beginning of the 20th century — meant they advocated the forced sterilization of thousands of people in Canada, many of them Indigenous. Murphy, for example, the first female magistrate in Canada and the British Empire, and the most well-known member of the Famous Five, supported the sterilization of the mentally ill and campaigned against immigration, fearing immigrants from China would get white people addicted to drugs... What is also true is that at the time the Famous Five and Douglas — the father of Canadian medicare, first leader of the federal NDP, premier of Saskatchewan and judged “the greatest Canadian” in a 2004 CBC national survey — supported eugenics, their beliefs were widely accepted by political and social elites of the day and in that sense, were not controversial, in what at the time would have been called polite society. This speaks to the simple reality that human progress does not develop along a straight, pristine, moral line, but by stops and starts and that many historical figures who are rightly admired for their accomplishments and contributions to Canada also held views that today we rightly view as abhorrent... As opposed to simply cancelling people out, I agree with what is at least the stated goal of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada in re-assessing Douglas’ legacy — as first reported by Blacklock’s Reporter — which is to convey the full story of historic figures to Canadians so we can better understand them, and the era in which they lived. Especially so, given that, up to now, the focus on this issue has been almost exclusively on historical figures considered to be “conservative” rather than “progressive” in their views."

Meme - "600 AD
I just saved another Aristotle's work from destruction
Good job, we can't let such a brilliant author die just because he was a pagan
2021 AD
THIS ARTIST SAID THE N WORD WHEN HE WAS 10 WE CAN NO LONGER ENJOY HIS WORK
NOOOOOOOO"

Comedy Central Caves to Cancel Culture, Removes Episode from 'The Office' Line-up - "Ironically, the politically incorrect episode satirizes contemporary corporate "diversity and inclusion" policies. It features the impetuous and chronic jester Michael Scott (Steve Carell) forcing his paper company employees to participate in a racial diversity seminar when, in fact, it's his behavior that necessitates the training. During the seminar, he speaks in an exaggerated Indian accent and reprises Chris Rock's notorious standup routine about different kinds of Black people... It follows previous comedic content taken out of viewing line-ups including episodes from Comedy Central's South Park and NBC's Seinfeld... Outside of comedic content, Disney+ in October 2020 dropped several of its classics featuring stereotypical character portrayals from their Kids Profile. The move meant that children under 7 could no longer watch titles like Dumbo, Peter Pan, Swiss Family Robinson and The AristoCats... classic Looney Tunes characters like Pepe Le Pew and Speedy Gonzales have been cancelled and even re-created due to shifting public attitudes."

Now the supporters of cancel culture are being cancelled - "‘Freeze peach!’ That has long been the mocking, infantile cry of the middle-class left whenever anyone complains about clampdowns on freedom of speech. There is no ‘free-speech crisis’, radicals insist. No Platforming right-wingers on university campuses is not censorship – it’s just students freely choosing not to associate with people who have horrible views. And alt-right types being turfed off Twitter and Facebook is not censorship, either – that’s just private companies enforcing their terms and conditions. (Who knew lefties were so supportive of private property rights?)... Some of the left-wing architects and cheerleaders of contemporary censorship, including Britain’s Socialist Workers Party, which has backed the No Platform policy for decades, are now being No Platformed themselves. ‘This is a disgrace!’, they cry, which would be funny if censorship were not so serious. These people helped to build the infrastructure of modern censorship, with its determination to crush ‘hate speech’ and ‘offensive’ views, and now they’re shocked to find themselves falling victim to it? Have they not read any history books at all?... The SWP has played a key role in promoting No Platform policies on campus, which essentially blacklist certain groups and individuals from speaking to students, whether that’s leaders of actual racist organisations, like Nick Griffin, or decent, liberal securalists like Maryam Namazie (perversely branded ‘Islamophobic’).  What’s more, the ideological justifications that the SWP and other leftists have put forward for these acts of censorship – the idea that ‘hateful’ speech must be suppressed, the idea that offensive ideas are wounding, the nasty patrician notion that minority groups need to be protected from difficult discussion by the authorities – have helped to shape the broader, off-campus culture of censorship... Did these people seriously believe they could nurture a policy of No Platform and that it would only ever be applied to people they dislike? To think in that way shows a grave ignorance of history. It is more than 200 years since the great radical Thomas Paine observed that, ‘He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will one day reach to himself’...   Or surely our friends in the SWP have read some Trotsky. In 1938, he ridiculed leftists in Mexico who were seeking to ‘curb’ reactionary right-wing voices, ‘either by submitting [them] to censorship or by banning [them] completely’. Any leftist who ‘arms the bourgeois state with special means to control public opinion’ is a fool, said Trotsky. Worse, he is a ‘traitor’. Why? Because he should know that powers used against your enemy might one day be used against you. We should know from ‘historic experience’, he said, that ‘any restriction to democracy in bourgeois society is eventually directed against the proletariat’... Left-wingers celebrated the removal of everyone from alt-right loudmouths to principled feminists like Meghan Murphy, from nobodies spouting abuse from their bedrooms to the freely elected president of the United States, never twigging that they were laying the foundations for their own censorship. And it isn’t only the SWP. Many other lovers of cancel culture now find themselves cancelled. Some Antifa pages are being removed from social media. Will Wilkinson, a contributor to the New York Times, was sacked from the think-tank the Niskanen Center after joking on Twitter that ‘If Biden really wanted unity, he’d lynch Mike Pence’. Mr Wilkinson has previously made light of cancel culture; now he is swallowed up by it. Meanwhile, YouTube has taken down the channel of La Marea, a leading left-wing website in Spain, on the grounds that its critiques of anti-refugee campaign groups were ‘inciting hatred’."

Kathryn Marshall: The cancel culture mob could come looking for you, too - "You know it is getting bad when even Mr. Bean is calling you out. In an interview earlier this month, Rowan Atkinson equated cancel culture with a “medieval mob, roaming the streets looking for someone to burn.”... One aspect of cancel culture I find particularly troubling is how the mob goes after people’s jobs. This is no trite matter. It is one thing to call someone out and shame them on online. But to attack a person’s ability to put food on the table is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. It doesn’t take much pressure from the cancel culture mob to cancel someone’s employment contract. Employers, especially large companies, are terrified of bad press and the thought of trending on Twitter for the wrong reasons is the stuff of nightmares. A few angry emails and an unsightly mention in a BuzzFeed article may be all it takes to get you cancelled at work. Forget about an investigation or proper human resources protocols — there isn’t time for that. One of cancel culture’s greatest strengths is its speed. With social media and the 24/7 news cycle, the process of cancelling a human can take mere hours.  In any other scenario where a complaint is made against an employee, there would usually be a proper investigation process undertaken by the employer that could take weeks, maybe months. The employee would be permitted to present a defence and the full context would be examined. Termination for cause, which is the capital offence of employment law, would be a last-resort option...   A friend once asked me, isn’t cancel culture just the product of a free market, like consumer activism? The answer is no. Cancel culture is about power and control. It is a highly effective tool that gives a self-appointed and often small mob the power to control who has and doesn’t have a platform or voice. What it takes to be cancelled is completely fluid and changes almost daily. Cancel culture is the antithesis of free speech and the enemy of due process and fairness. The goal isn’t just to humiliate or to shame. And it certainly isn’t to elicit an apology. The objective is to literally remove a person from every semblance of their life — personal and professional. To destroy that person’s career, influence, respect and render them so radioactive that no company, person or employer will ever want to touch them with a 10-foot pole. In other words, cancelled.   There are always stories of a cancel culture victim months later, where some reporter has dredged up all the facts and evidence and tells the full story in the proper context. You read it and think — that was really unfair. And then you go about your day, while that person has to live the rest of their life with this humiliation plastered all over the internet."

Why you should hold on to your DVDs - "When the idea of digitally removing or replacing Trump’s cameo in Home Alone 2 was put forward, it was meant as a joke. But that joke almost immediately became a serious suggestion. Even Macaulay Culkin, the star of the movie, agreed that Trump should be deleted.  There has already been a version made that edits out Trump’s appearance. That was broadcast on CBC in Canada, although CBC claimed that the edited version was made in 2014, and that there was no political agenda behind it. In this time of hypernormalisation – when satire and reality merge, and the cycle of approved/forbidden accelerates exponentially – you might have need of your DVDs as a reminder of the pre-censored reality of this or that film or TV show... Whether or not a permanent change to Home Alone 2 is made, consumers of pop culture have long been seeing creeping changes made to films, music and TV shows. Darryl Hannah’s backside in Splash was covered by CGI, which digitally extended the actress’s hair. A scene with a girlie magazine was censored in Back to the Future 2. And many Disney products have been edited, altered or suppressed due to changing social sensibilities... Studios and broadcasters have no commitment to artistic integrity. They are staffed by people who believe their principal duty is not to guard a cultural artefact, but to reform society – sometimes by suppressing attitudes, words and incidents they consider harmful.  Pressure groups know this. They realise that they only need a few hundred ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ on social media to push a studio or broadcaster into withdrawing a product for fear of otherwise being branded racist, sexist or some similar slur. In this sense, corporations are utterly complicit with cancel culture. Streaming services are supposedly the future. If so, that should worry us all...   Big Tech loves streaming and digital because it is cheap, efficient and allows corporations to monitor you. It loathes physical copies because they permit independent consumption and sharing of information. Issued DVDs, CDs and books cannot be retrospectively edited or withdrawn. When you put on Blu-Ray, Big Tech cannot compile and sell that data to marketing firms."

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