To celebrate reaching the end of this year, we asked our reporters to look back on 2019 and pick one thing they thought stood out from the rest of the cultural chaos and cursed images. You can find the complete selection of our choices here.
2019 was the year "cancel culture" lost all meaning.
Though the various scandals this year — influencer drama, blatant racism, botched makeup launches – ended in countless Notes App apologies and comment sections filled with fancams, few had lasting consequences. Sure, 2019 gifted us with plenty of public outrage, but in the end it's the cancel culture discourse that's more memorable than any canceling itself.
The word "cancel" has been been around since late Middle English, but but became a call to stop supporting public figures as the #MeToo movement started gaining traction. Merriam-Webster credits black Twitter users with creating and popularizing the word's new meaning, defining someone cancel-worthy when the person in question expresses an "objectionable opinion" or has "conducted themselves in a way that is unacceptable." To continue supporting them, Merriam-Webster wrote in a "Words We're Watching" post this July, "leaves a bitter taste."
Canceling someone goes beyond public shaming — at its core, the act of canceling is an attempt to take away someone's power and influence.
While earnest, canceling rarely has real world consequences, and the action of canceling tends to be a bit performative. The phrase "cancel culture" — the internet-wide affinity for declaring an individual problematic — has been likened to a digital witch hunt.
Ronan Farrow, the journalist who helped expose Harvey Weinstein for abusing his influence to assault women in the film industry, dismissed cancel culture as "by and large quite silly." During the Obama Foundation summit, President Barack Obama called out call out culture, calling it "not activism." When comedian Shane Gillis was fired from Saturday Night Live after a video of him using racial and homophobic slurs emerged, presidential candidate Andrew Yang denounced his canceling as life altering.
Searches for the phrase "cancel culture" surged in 2019, Google Trends shows. They rose in May, when YouTubers James Charles and Tati Westbrook publicly ended their friendship over a brand deal, and again when the video of Gillis resurfaced. And then they skyrocketed when Obama came out with his unfortunate boomer take on cancel culture.
The notion of canceling is so pervasive, that when the House of Representatives impeached Donald Trump in a historic vote, Twitter users joked he'd been canceled.
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"Cancel culture" was this year's Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year. Last week, Los Angeles comedian Zach Broussard amended his annual Top 1000 Comedians of the Year with an option to "cancel" anyone on the list in an effort to make it "100 percent creep free, asshole free, and weirdo free."
As Andrew Yang told The Hill "Cancel culture has really become sort of a source of fear for many Americans where we live in a culture that you are somehow afraid that if you say the wrong thing that your life could be changed forever." He added, "To me, it's vital that we humanize each other. We humanize the consequences of some of these impulses not just in terms of who hears the expression but who is losing a livelihood as a result."
Yang has a point: Many are afraid of saying the wrong thing. But shouldn't we all be more aware of our words, given the increasingly public nature of the internet? Public figures might as well save themselves the headache and watch their mouths.
Critics of "cancel culture" claim to defend free speech — comedian Dave Chapelle claimed the First Amendment is a "first for a reason" while accepting the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. It's ironic, since nobody is stopping public figures from saying and doing anything problematic, but at the same time, freedom of speech doesn't guarantee freedom from backlash. As the Washington Post wrote earlier this year, cancel culture is democracy at its finest. Yes, the First Amendment protects your right to be a dumbass, but it also protects the right of others to call you a dumbass.
Whether cancel culture really works is debatable — Gillis didn't get the SNL gig, but he's still performing. James Charles lost a few million subscribers but has regained them since the feud. Lizzo, who was lightly canceled for including a Postmates employee's first name and last initial in a complaint on Twitter, was awarded Time's Entertainer of the Year. "Strange Planet" comic creator Nathan Pyle was entangled in a canceling for being pro-life but his book still has rave reviews. Tana Mongeau, the YouTuber who planned an anti-VidCon that ended in Fyre Fest-levels of disaster, was invited to VidCon as a Featured Creator and won the Streamy Creator of the Year award this year.
The parameters for what's cancel-worthy remain fuzzy, which is what makes cancel culture both so hard to define and so persistently controversial.
The example that perhaps sums it all up best is that all 1,000 comedians on Broussard's list were canceled just two hours after the list went live. All 2,000 comedians slated to take their spots in the event of any cancellations were canceled, too. Broussard ended up adding the option to uncancel anyone on the list who had been previously canceled. The list is dynamic, constantly fluctuating between adding comics to the canceled list and then putting them back on the original list when they've been uncanceled.
Getting canceled, uncanceled, and then canceled again is really the most fitting way to close out this decade. 2019 was the year cancel culture took on a gorgeously messy life of its own.
