Lonely on the left: Am I the only one horrified by cancel culture, online policing and the seeming end of kindness?

“Zionist enablers.”

“I can’t help but laugh.”

“You mention sales of merch going to Palestine and having pro-Palestine artists involved. These two things can be understood as a vain attempt from Soft Centre to obscure their lack of ethics, reminiscent of a fracking company that donates to conservation.”

I rub the sleep from my eyes and sit up straight. It’s July 2024 and I’m doom-scrolling through the comment section on an Instagram post by a local music and arts festival, Soft Centre.

The festival organisers have found themselves between a rock and a hard place. Israel is bombing the living hell out of Gaza and tensions are high at the State Library of Victoria. Rumours have swirled in the media for months that library management are consciously silencing pro-Palestinian voices.

In March last year, the library had abruptly cancelled a series of free writing workshops for teenagers covering playwriting, poetry and non-fiction writing, cryptically citing “child and cultural safety”. The writers contracted to lead the sessions were all vocal in their support of Palestinian sovereignty. Then, in late June, library management banned staff from wearing pins and badges supporting Palestinian independence.

The Soft Centre post announces that the festival is moving from the State Library of Victoria to Trades Hall, an historic hub for the nation’s trade union movement. For some members of the public, this still isn’t good enough, however. They make their feelings plain in the comments section. The thread is a series of accusations and counter-accusations, microscopic examinations of comments, Mount Everest assumptions and pass-agg moralising. Like a pack of hyenas tussling over the scraps from an animal carcass, one provided by a social media network that relies on sensationalism and outrage for comments, we had all caved in to our worst sensibilities. My muscles seize up and I go cross-eyed just reading it all.

My common-sense feels light like a tennis ball, so I peg it off a cliff. I click on the Instagram profile of one of the key cancellers and I’m immediately suffocated by geological layers of text. There are literally hundreds of stories at the top of the profile with paragraphs and paragraphs of text which swing wildly between the energy of a gossip column and the linguistic reach of a PhD thesis. I feel like I’m looking at a text collage painting at The Pompidou Centre in Paris. It’s an unsettling depiction of contemporary online political discourse

It also speaks to the powerlessness that young people feel watching a genocide unfold on the other side of the world. Hearts are probably in the right place, sure. But this kind of spiteful cancel culture is what happens when people lose faith in broader mass movement politics. This is the end result of harsh anti-protest laws and waning trade union power in Australia: highly-publicised tantrums, fragmented echo chambers, chronically-online activism, weeks-long campaigns against local arts events that often run at a loss, personal vendettas against hyper-local artists with 2000 Instagram followers and an expectation of immediate perfection from anyone trying to do, well, anything. In terms of effectiveness, it’s not exactly on par with blockading a port, picketing a factory supplying Israel with war materials and harnessing trade union power to achieve BDS aims.

You’d think we’d have grown out of these modes of communication by now. But it feels as if these behaviours are growing as gen Zs take over the internet. If there’s a concrete theme we can pull out of the virtual wormhole of post-pandemic life, it’s the end of kindness. It’s genuinely a scary time to exist online.

Certainly, call out culture is practical and necessary when it removes an abuser, predator or utterly fried unit from a circle of people. Their presence can trigger volatile responses from victims denied the space and time to work through their trauma. Holding public figures accountable is positive. I take no issue with ostracising people for extreme, toxic behaviour when there’s valid proof.

But when I think of cancel culture in its current form, I think of micro-transgressions and microaggressions. Rumours. Fight versus flight. Tears on bedroom carpets, downward glances in corridors and Twitter warriors emboldened by the poisonous sting of a keyboard. This evangelical head-hunting mission, centred on public humiliation, ostracism and guilt by association, is a liberal phenomenon that often hinders leftist organising. It prioritises symbolic politics over material realities. It jars against prison abolitionist goals. It’s inherently conservative and, I suspect, deeply classist. Let me explain.

*  *  *

“I got cancelled for liking a post on Instagram by someone who is pro-Israel,” a queer friend told me at the pub a few months ago, taking a long swig from his schooner.

“The post wasn’t anything remotely political. It was just a photo of them in the outdoors. But someone screenshotted it and posted on their Instagram that I was supporting Zionism.”

Fuelled by identity politics, the left has adopted in recent times a binary tribal mentality of us/them and good/evil. When we cling to our black and white worldviews, clothed in confirmation bias, we reduce complex human beings to shopfront mannequins. We depersonalise, conflate and lose the ability to think critically. The “other” becomes interchangeable with a broad cross-section of society. Even centrists and (small l) liberals can become “white supremacists” and “literal Nazis”. The goal becomes social annihilation. This is why cancel culture so often involves an invitation to attack not just the supposed problem person or group but anyone who associates with them, anyone who likes their comments or even old posts. It’s the virtual equivalent of a stampeding lynch mob.

Angela Davis’ widely read book Are Prisons Obselete?, a bible for those who envision a world without mass incarceration, must feature as a display item gathering dust on the shelves of this woke elite. The ultimate irony is that cancel culture jars against everything prison abolitionists fight for – rehabilitation, transformative justice, the cessation of solitary confinement. Cancel culture, meanwhile, breeds a mentality of guilty until proven innocent, recreates carceral conditions and entrenches in the left norms surrounding punitive punishment and retribution.

While call out culture obviously has its uses, I get the sense that lately things have gone a little too far and I’ve noticed that, among my own friends, it’s so often those who grew up in public housing, those who have faced homelessness and those who grew up in western Sydney’s tradie hubs, who feel sceptical of this culture.

The reality is that online headhunting campaigns tend to be the preoccupation of those with significant privilege – USyd stu pol hacks, middle class influencers and social movement spokespeople with private school educations and PhDs.

* * *

A friend of mine, a millennial who was the first openly gay kid in his public high school, recently told me that he faced a roundtable grilling at a dinner for excitedly and flamboyantly using the word “faggots” for a group of beloved gays at a live music event months prior. Apparently the gen Z queers and straight girlies from the Inner West felt unsafe around him due to his language. The discussion actually brought him to tears. Of course linguistic nuance was lost in the heat of the moment (many gay people are now reclaiming the word faggot to render it powerless). But the point is not that any particular person is right or wrong. Political staunchness and passion is fantastic. Anger is often warranted – and acceptable within reason. But it seems like we’re losing touch with the importance of an underlying current of respectful communication as we socialise online evermore.

*  *  *

Shifting the focus of Australian arts from the white walls and polished floorboards of exhibition spaces and museums to the visceral euphoria of the rave, Soft Centre has revolutionised the presentation of public art. You won’t find the polite hushed soundscapes of the art world and the static illumination of the traditional gallery at any Soft Centre event. Instead, you’ll usually find a cacophony of discombobulating dance music and heavy band music, and a sci-fi display of immersive lighting installations and performance art pieces. Throw in some panels with music theorists and cultural commentators and it’s like attending a university lecture on acid – strangely profound and a little bit confronting. In short, Soft Centre is an unapologetic freakshow display of outsider art and cyber-punk aesthetics. So it’s always been a risky venture. This is certainly not a festival that rakes in profits.

Soft Centre is a one-of-a-kind festival born out of Sydney’s DIY warehouse rave scene, illegal partying and queer visibility. Publicly the founders are frank about their event management origins. It’s a cliché to say that the number of backroom staff is woefully minimal in the festival industry but this is truer than ever with Soft Centre. The team is tiny, and underfunded. I know for a fact that the organisers enduring weeks of almost no sleep due to the stress induced by the smear campaign. A team that was already barely large enough to sustain a festival at the State Library did the impossible. That they were able to shift their experimental music and arts festival to Trades Hall, a process which involved breaking contracts, is frankly a miracle.  All the while, unknown to the public, they were working closely with unionised staff at the State Library.

The festival’s organisers also reached out to one of the key cancellers and offered the opportunity for in-person dialogue. This canceller refused to talk to the festival’s organisers in person, claiming the internet is a better “open forum” for discourse. So it was simply straight to open warfare. There was no mediation process.

Following the announced change of venue, some of the continuing frustration towards Soft Centre surrounded the choice of Trades Hall as a venue. (I use the word choice loosely as switching venue last minute almost certainly meant there were a limited number of options.) This hostility towards Trades Hall stems from a boycott movement that takes issue with the presence of one particular union office at the site – the office of The Police Association Victoria, the trade union representing Victorian cops. In the weeks before Soft Centre’s announcement, critics had targeted the building, graffing slogans across the sandstone walls on multiple occasions. “ACAB”. “Cops out of Trade Hall”. “Cops defend genocide”.

For some people, Soft Centre using an historic building use by the trade union movement for over 100 years for an event that donated to Palestinian causes and platformed a range of Palestinian artists and agitators is not a cause of celebration.

Again, I’m not here as some voice of reason to declare one side is more right than the other. My point is simply to show that absolutism and moral puritanism tends to be a defining feature of online crusades. You get the sense that some online cancellers will never be satiated. Of course, activists make mistake all the time, which is precisely how people grow and learn. Young vulnerable stressed individuals are especially prone to mistakes.

This is why cancel culture is built upon the smeared reputations of the most vulnerable in society – young activists, people of colour, people without uni degrees, salt-of-the-earth working class folk. As Masrur Joarder has written for Junkee, those with racial privilege, particularly whiteness, tend to be immune from being cancelled in Australia, meaning that cancel culture usually fails in its intended goal of bringing down public figures, celebrities and elites via grassroots justice.

As an anarchist, I am distrustful of anyone replicating the behaviour of ruling classes. Academic writing, weaponised therapy speak and over-intellectualisation leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Forcing readers or listeners to continually decode the meaning of research ensures an intellectual elite remain in control of society and dominate public discourse – albeit an intellectual elite often with their hearts in the right place. This is nonetheless a form of power and hierarchy.

Similarly, punishing and cancelling someone for not championing the latest and most respectful terminology is not always conducive to alliance-building or solidarity. I have two tertiary education degrees and I myself can’t even keep up with what is and what isn’t socially acceptable to say these days. According to Twitter, “neurospicy” is no longer a PC term and “stupid” is now an ableist term.

Critics of cancel culture tend to be flag-waving patriots, balding white boomers and conservative shock jocks. Think Alan Jones. This genre of human tends to confuse freedom of speech with a supposed God-given right to spread hate. But the idea that we cannot critique cancel culture because it is a term weaponised disdainfully by the right is regressive. 

Despite the complete saturation of online spaces with cancel culture behaviour, scepticism of online cancel culture isn’t some fringe view. This isn’t some tragic edgelord take, as one person suggested to me when they learned I was writing about this topic. There’s a rich vein of socialist and anarchist writers who have built this exact case, some well known, some lesser known. Mark Fisher, Slavoj Žižek, Noam Chomsky, Clementine Morrigan, Jay Soleil. None of these examples are unhinged tankies obsessed with North Korea. Moreover, they all have (or had, RIP Mark Fisher) lengthy activist involvement.

A quick trawl through Jacobin, probably the widest-read socialist magazine in the world, reveals a slew of headlines condemning “woke capitalism”. The magazine is filled with content debunking the incorporation of wokeness into the capitalist machine. So maybe, just maybe, the tide is starting to turn.

*  *  *

“If you don’t know what Invasion Day is about, it’s ok,” Amy Taylor reassures the throng at Hordern Pavilion in her distinctive ocker twang.

It’s a Saturday night, 25 January 2025. Amyl and the Sniffers have taken over the stage, Australian punk rock royalty. Distorted guitar reverb dissipates into nothingness. The heaving waters of the mosh pit calm for a moment in this break between songs. Amy spits into the mic, encouraging people to show up for the nationwide protests organised by First Nations groups for Jan 26. Australia Day to some. Invasion Day to others. Survival Day to others yet.  

“They don’t teach this shit at school,” she says. “The media won’t talk about it. They don’t want you knowing this shit.”

Bless her. Her words are obviously directed at the non-Indigneous portion of the crowd. But this is how political mobilisation starts – with an acknowledgement that many people don’t have the choice to go to university, that the systems around us, whether it’s educational curriculums or the mainstream media, work by keeping us in the dark. She doesn’t put the blame on the individual. She places the blame on an omnipotent “they”. It’s an emphatic anti-capitalist statement couched within terms anyone can understand and resonate with. 

*  *  *

The normalisation of cancel culture behaviour breeds a culture of fear, which can be counterproductive, because this fear impacts everyone. It’s not just marginalised communities who feel alienated.

We read a lot about working class communities supporting far right populist leaders such as Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump but there’s a very different segment of the Australian population shifting their politics to one of disengagement. As far as I can tell, few people seem to be talking about this. I’m talking about allies useful to the left: sympathetic male creatives, lawyers, debating coaches, university-educated non-profit workers scarred by the immaturity of student politics. Every social movement needs to harness the power of people working in these professions.

I have friends who work in the arts who are too scared to pop their head up above the parapet, too scared to use their online platform to express any kind of political opinion, too scared to celebrate success online. These behaviours are so extreme in some friends that they verge on psychosis. That’s no exaggeration.

Yes, the world is becoming more politically-engaged. Yes, protests are increasing in size. Yes, people are more educated than ever before. But I’d wager there’s a rising number of highly-educated people out there turning their back on politics. It’s easy to say these people are weak, that they don’t care enough. It’s easy to dismiss them as apolitical. But that’s precisely the problem: no one is trying to win them over. They’re a ready willing cohort of agitators and many of them don’t need any form of re-education.

*  *  *

Cancel culture enforces a homogenisation of views in a world increasingly defined by what political scientists term affective partisan polarisation. That is, animosity between people who do not share political views has increased in recent decades. While political tribalism may be slightly less pronounced in Australia than the US – the jury is still out – fear of expressing non-conformist thoughts is stifling debate and connection between different communities and cultures. Virtue signalling, blind ideological dogma and disengagement are quickly replacing humility, compassion and inclusivity as foundational elements in leftist organising. We love to savage right-wing voices for their obsession with the red herring of cancel culture, but we’re slow to acknowledge that so many of us on the left side of politics weaponise cancel culture on a daily basis. We invent lies to denigrate peers. We trade barbs and pollute the pages of political publications with highly-personal jabs, incessant in-fighting and deep-dive investigations into defunct Twitter accounts. We’re more concerned with whose form of mutual aid is more effective than actually practicing mutual aid.

At its heart, this opinion piece is simply a plea for kindness and political bravery. It pushes back against political careerism and the importance of social capital because too often cancelling someone in political spaces is about clout – that is, furthering one’s own credentials as an activist by highlighting the comparatively poor behaviour of those around you.

I think we should always seek to critique hegemonic leftist thinking. For some, this may simply be limited to internal mental exercises for practice. For others – annoyingly loud-mouthed writers like myself – this may involve publishing a polemical essay.

I hesitated to put this article online more than anything I’ve ever written. It sat on my computer for 6 months, discarded and ignored. But I realised something and I wrote this in the editor’s letter for No Filter’s first print issue: political staunchness means dialogue and introspective self-reflection. It means battling adversaries and our own demons, toe to toe, not running away and insulating ourselves within safe spaces. That doesn’t always mean we have to be polite – let’s throw off the bullshit cloak of sincerity – but we do have to engage and have a yarn. So in the spirit of debate: here goes. 

Just please don’t cancel me for writing this.