Should you talk about how you were canceled?

Lindsay Ellis is a popular YouTuber with a focus on in depth video essays about films. I’ve referenced her work before. She also does featurettes for PBS and wrote a best selling novel, Axiom’s End. On March 26th, she would make a controversial tweet that would lead to her being, in her words canceled.

Now the sharp eyed among my readers might have noticed something here--this tweet isn’t offensive. It’s an observation on Raya & The Last Dragon that others have made without controversy. Really the worst you might say of it is that this is a bit of a lackluster commentary for a professional film critic. I’m not going to explain why this tweet was seen as offensive because that would mean the critique had some validity worth discussing, which it didn’t. And if Ellis had ignored the flack, it probably would have blown over quickly. However, she felt the need to defend herself, which just made it worse. Her response only drew more attention, causing the hate she was receiving to snowball until she deactivated her account. This then made her enemies declare victory and Ellis #canceled.

I don’t personally use Twitter because twitter is bad. It takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people on Twitter. And twitter has what's been called a “flattening effect” that works like t

This is the mentality of the people who came after Ellis. The thing is this logic falls apart at the first stage. “This tweet offends me→ tough shit.” Not all offence is equal or valid. Some people are offended by inter-racial marriage, women wearing pants, or the word “moist.” Just because people are offended doesn’t mean that we should accommodate them.

In fact the flattening effect can mean you can be guilty by association. Lindsay already had a target on her back from an earlier scandal that played out like this:

Even if you think what Buck Angel said was totally unacceptable (and it wasn’t great) it seems unfair to be mad at Lindsay Ellis about it. This is what happens on Twitter though, because as I will say again: Twitter is bad.

After a couple weeks of silence Ellis released a 100 minute long video that explains the ordeal to the uninitiated, apologizing past controversies that were dug up when the twitter mob went after her and lashing out at her enemies.

My question is: Lindsay, why would you do this? I get that she needed to process what had happened to her, but doing it so publicly just drags the whole scandal out further. The video comes off as very bitter, which is understandable, but it’s not going to win people over.

Here’s the thing: Being “canceled” is not a real thing. Ellis is still doing YouTube videos, the thing she is famous for. She still has a second novel coming out this fall (and it damn well better include some monster sex this time). She voluntarily deactivated her twitter account. Oh wait, she’s since reactivated her account.

I don’t want to minimize what happened to Ellis. She was the target of a massive harassment campaign. It was likely traumatic. Ellis is in fact the kind of person most vulnerable to this kind of horrid treatment: A woman who seems famous but isn’t really. Most people have never heard of Lindsay Ellis. Her videos are popular, but she’s not a top tier creator. Her book was on the NY times bestseller list, but it only made it to #7. Hence an online mob can think that it’s going after someone powerful when it’s actually going after someone with few defenses.

The point I'm trying to convey is that Ellis should say she was harassed online, because that is a meaningful way of describing what happened. Saying she was canceled is not meaningful.

Ellis has had alt-right trolls come after her for years but says this attack was fueled by leftist scrambling to prove how woke they were by denouncing her. That may be a source of justification, but a stronger motivating factor was probably the desire to see someone on a pedestal knocked off. The thing is, Ellis was never on a pedestal that high or sturdy. Other creators have gone through similar experiences as Ellis. The running theme seems to be Twitter. Because Twitter is bad. Do yourself a favor, everyone, and log off.