A Digital Jubilee: Rejection of Cancel Culture

How JD Vance is going to lead the first emergent taboo of the digital era

It’s become apparent that the political and financial class is not going to live forever (as much as they’re trying to). The result of the next generation taking the reigns of power is going to have profound cultural implications. No longer will those in positions of cultural, political, or financial leadership have grown to adulthood in a time before the internet. Every stupid picture from high-school, ever retarded thing they posted during middle school and ever edgy discord chatlog is going to inevitably become public knowledge.

We are about to witness the first popular cultural shift that is consequence of advanced digital technology.

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This type of thing has occurred occasionally before with the elder generation, but it was a rarity and thus made its rounds on the internet and occasionally political headlines. One image that immediately springs to mind is the emo Elon Musk image decades ago. He looks like an edgy teenager trying way too hard to look cool. People have made fun of this image for a long time.

That was a rare instance of humanizing the elites. It was fun to laugh about. A fun way to stick it to an elite who upholds a professional public image. What isn’t normal is when that same sort of schoolyard nonsense makes its way to nearly every single major political or economic elite in the nation. And it’s going to.

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Cancel Culture as Moral Panic

Cancel culture “muh racism” and “muh transphobia” and “muh holocaust” are the product of a moral panic. A moral panic rendered possible through the existence of social media. No longer are individuals subject to the judgement of their peers, rather they’re subject to the judgement of entire swaths of the population. Those who are fundamentally losers with nothing to do (see AntiFa and similar terrorist organizations) will often try to trump up charges as a show of cultural force. They get off on being bullies, they get off on acting like Karens.

The entire world is right now going through a period where accusations are thrown out, chatlogs are leaked, and high-profile careers can go down in flames over nonsense accusations. If you’ve ever seen play The Crucible (and you should) what modern society is experiencing is very similar. A moral panic, only this time fueled by global social media and anti-social mentally ill losers.

Literature about of the 1700s is apt here. The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter are both pieces of fiction applicable to the modern day. We are passing through a period of hyper-orthodox conformity (driven by violent coercive left-wing extremists). The purpose here is not to examine only the prescience of these works… it is to consider parts that tie them to our time now; the epilogues.

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JD Vance is one of the first national-profile politicians who is below the age of 40. That means that JD Vance was in high school when digital cameras were common. There’s pictures of him acting weird and doing things that are not professional floating around the internet from when he was 14/15 years old. The lying legacy media (and much of the internet) are making fun of him and highlighting these images as if they’re relevant to his political campaign 20 years later.

For most of us, this is all in good fun, but woke progressives are behaving as if having fun in your teenage years is some how breaching a major political taboo. Behaving as if dressing up for a Halloween party in your 20s. is some kind of major political faux pas. That is because the modern progressive is a hyper-orthodox and terrified of independent action or thought. In their minds, failing to conform to the air-brushed image of a professional definitionally means that you aren’t one.

JD Vance is the first, but the phenomena is only going to grow more extreme with time. In 15 years you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single major figure for whom there aren’t embarrassing pictures from when they were 17 or who didn’t say something edgy on Xbox Life at some point in his or her life. It’ll be saturated. The new normal.

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Moral Panics Don’t Target Elites

Just like in plays like The Crucible and literature like The Scarlet Letter, this type of blindly zealous moral panic will continue unabated… right up until it effects the elite directly. When it can no longer be wielded as a cudgel against political opponents, the culture is brought to heel by the elites. Targeting the elites with this type of self-righteous dogma kills the momentum of the moralizing movement.

Already we’re beginning to see that at a sociological level. No longer is a mere accusation of racism or sexism enough to end employment. No longer are these silly old pictures of JD Vance enough to sink his political career. The progressive left has lost the cultural zeitgeist and the wind has left their sails. When the elites of society becomes the target, the cultural hammer comes down. This isn’t even by design, this is organic. It is how moral panics have functioned for centuries. First the high-elites become immune, then the low-elites, then the common man.

Even more important is the information contained in the Scarlet Letter… those that survive the derision through to the conclusion of the moral panic are often awarded positions of status in society. Recognized as the brave few who stood against the jeering crowd. Many professionals of the modern far-right are likely to be recognized this way in the coming decade or two.

Moral panics take hold of a civilization for ten or fifteen years and then die down on their own… this can be observed in the Satanic Panic of the 80s and the Red Scare. Both had some very real components to them, and both left a generational impact on the culture of the population. There are now university professors who openly fly communist flags because they were in their 20s during the red scare. There a thousands of satanists in the United States because they were in their 20s during the Satanic Panic and have a chip on their shoulder.

Expect to see a lot of nazis of the same type in another 20 years for the same reason. Probably more as moral panics frequently lend social capital to the targeted groups. What’s new and interesting about this moral panic is that it developed in response to the appearance of social media. Similarly, social media is now used as a cudgel to target individuals by dredging up every piece of that individuals history.

That is going to have significant long-term cultural implications beyond the mere resurgence of a racial identitarianism.

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The Reaction: A Digital Cultural Jubilee

I chose the term “Jubilee” because it is roughly fitting to what’s likely to occur as a reaction to the current trend of digital universalism. A picture from high school broadcasted on national television or calling some one a retard on discord will become the new normal for our political elite. The economic elite will be similarly universalized and humanized. The allure of an untouchable celebrity now made irrelevant when there’s a video floating around of the guy jerking it on chatturbate fifteen years ago.

The cultural reaction will be at first farcical as every 40 year old politician tries to out-do each other with progressively more bizarre dredging of digital history. Then it’ll grow tiresome, then boring, and then irritating. The process is likely to occur over the next 5 to 10 years.

Then it’ll become a taboo… we’ll see a bizarre upwelling of sentiment for Christian ideals of forgiveness combined with Chivalric standards surrounding social warfare.