Cast or Cancel: Digital Social Movements and Coercive-Cultural Industries (CCI).

16 min readDec 8, 2021

Dave Chappelle, one of the renowned comedians, who won the Mark Twain Prize in 2019, was recently denied showing his latest documentary in any theatre or streaming platform. The response from film distributors came as a backlash to his latest Netflix special, “The Closer,” in which he addressed the LGBTQ community’s claims on his earlier Netflix Special “Sticks and Stones.” The LGBTQ had attacked the comedian’s remarks and labeled him Transphobic and Homophobic in a rampage in 2018 over Twitter, the leading microblogging social platform. Chappelle felt compelled to address such comments in the only way he knows best, another Netflix special. “The Closer” started yet another rampage among the Netflix Employees and LGBTQ; the former organized online and offline movements, resulting in Chappelle’s film being canceled by distributors. This example is one of many that appears to pop up in the film industry. Digital movements, powered by online platforms, organize actions and participate in the autonomy of artists.

In some cases, these movements cancel the production and circulation of such work, but in others, they join in casting actors, directors and promoting the work of creative producers. In this paper, I will try to explore the social movement and audience role in culture industries in light of David Hesmondhalgh’s book, The Cultural Industries (2019), whose central theme revolves around continuity and change in the cultural industries.

History of Studying Culture Industries

It is challenging to begin this conversation, especially when dealing with a concept like culture. What is it? And where do I start? Culture is both everything and nothing at the same time. Raymond Williams’ account of culture seems to resonate with various scholars, and it was used in David’s latest edition of the book in his account of cultural industries. “It is a system of meanings” (Williams, 1983) is a denotation that is as simple as it is complex. These meaning systems are constantly evolving and changing (Williams, 1983). In his first book “Culture is Ordinary” (Williams, 1983), Williams addressed that culture is as much a part of the ordinary as the elite.

Nevertheless, how is culture an industry? After fleeing Nazi Germany, Adorno and Horkheimer arrived in the USA. Their experience with media as a tool used on a duped audience marked the beginning of the culture industry (Seymour, 2000; Hesmondhalgh, 2019). True, their account was pessimistic, but later researchers began to coin new terms for the culture industry, such as cultural industries, creative industries, and so forth, even though they did not coin the term themselves (Hesmondhalgh, 2019).

Producing a television show, film, or work of literature can resemble a manufacturing industry (Hesmondhalgh, 2019). Researchers have drawn parallels between the culture industry and other production systems because cultural goods are produced and distributed (Coase, 1947). Even leading politicians in the United States have stated that TV is “a Toaster with pictures” (Eggerton, 2008). There are, however, a few distinctions between culture industries and their industrial counterparts. For example, the culture industry creates meaning and thus contributes to creating knowledge, which sets the cultural industries apart from other industries (Hesmondhalgh, 2019). A ‘hot dog’ example presented in Södertorn course lectures demonstrated how a brand could give a hot dog meaning but would not change the primary utility of its consumption; a hot dog is consumed for nutrition. The example, however, is problematic because, as a result, a brand creates an identity that encapsulates an ideology and meanings. The hot dog consumer consumes the brand’s associations, resulting in a duality of consumption of any physical good. Nevertheless, the primary function of a brand is not the same as the physical good. In this regard, a brand is a text or cultural product, as it produces a text and meaning, but the product itself is not (Belk, 1988).

The consumption term, that I have thrown out there in the last paragraph, is one of the biases of the approach to such a complex industry. That complexity is not novel; as I mentioned before, the culture industry have drawn similarities with other industrial fields; therefore, economics theorists started to analyze the culture industries with an economical approach, i.e., mathematical models, positivist methodologies, and rational methodologies (Hesmondhalgh, 2019). In an attempt to explain its dynamics with an objective lens and realistic ontologies, they had to take the ethical and moral out of their equation, which then was termed the neoclassical in their investigation. Not so long after, the recession in late 1970 drove the market in the developed world and subsequently the world in a state of difficulty. The profits generated from these economies were at their lowest, and the economist resorted to liberating the market (Murdock and Golding, 2016). One argument for such low profits was the pressure from labor movements on the capital holders. The free market and open competition were challenging labor movements (Yeates, 2002). Conservatives adopted this neoliberal view on the economy and were elected to political leadership seats in the USA and UK. At its core, Neoliberalism promoted free market and open competition, but its ideological roots rested on Social Darwinism and hence its political and ethical influence. (Rogers, 1972; Williams, 1983; Tienken, 2013).

Other researchers took a political economy lens in examining the cultural industry, essentially bringing back the moral and ethical dimension and taking into account not only the monetary or materialistic view of complex quantitative and positivist perspective but also the historical aspect, which addressed the relation between capitals enterprise and public intervention (Murdock and Golding, 2011). Later, ‘moral economy’ became a field that seeked to apply ethical questions to an economist lens (Sayer, 2003). Culture industry in this framework was either servicing the wealthy or capitalist market economy (Hesmondhalgh, 2019).The macro-level approach that political economy critiqued for not paying enough attention to the cultural organization’s internal production systems, which was addressed by business management and organizational studies, who produced research that advances those organizations but lacked responsibility towards the society (Hesmondhalgh, 2019).

The above approaches appear to only address a macro view of society (Hesmondhalgh, 2019). A critical sociological approach addressed this gap in the academic research and hence started to work on power relations at micro level; it took a closer look at individual cases and personal accounts with constructivist ontologies (Lampel, Shamsie and Lant, 2005; Gatrell et al., 2009; Grindstaff, Lo and Hall, 2010; Hesmondhalgh, 2019). It was not until the cultural studies discipline influenced the normative lens that “an industry producing culture” shifted to “a culture producing industry” (Negus, 1999). The argument was also put forth by Simon Firth (2000) on the music industry: “the music industry can be treated as apart from the sociology of everyday life, its activities are culturally determined.” This shift balanced and gave accounts to creative industries as a field, studying the labor market and creative workforce and critical cultural studies.

The Inescapable Reductionism

Before I move forward, it is worth noticing that analysis on culture industries have suffered from complex, ambivalent, and interweaving reductionism and simplification. It has taken the shape of culture reductionism, where the center of research on an inquiry takes culture as the only view and discards other possibilities. Or economic and technological reductionism that easily finds its way to give a deterministic answer to how events are related and, if not, caused by nature (Hesmondhalgh, 2019).

Social Darwinism: an Ideological Bedrock

Let’s start with Raymond’s take on the ideology of social relations. Since culture, as Raymond Williams established, is “a way of life” and is the core of many cultural studies scholars. An important concept to note is that one of the chapters Raymond wrote in the same book, “culture and society,” addressed a social Darwinism phenomenon. Herbert Spencer misinterpreted the original Darwinism biological theories and extended it on social relations and hence became a core ideology in social and political schools of thought (Williams, 1983). William’s account characterizes it as the culture of “fitness” (Williams, 1983). One could not imagine the extent to which such theory might lead some of Spencer’s followers to reach a state of eliminating the weakest human variations among society. This is an important point which I will come back to later in the essay. The bottom line is that the term ‘survival of the fittest’ not only wrongfully quotes Darwin, but it also belongs to Spencer, even though it inspired economic, social, ethical, and political domains. Arguably even extends from human to non-human, i.e., animals and planet resources (Rogers, 1972; Williams, 1983; Tienken, 2013).

The Culture Industry is Distinct

It is essential to mention that the cultural industry is argued to be different from a typical industrial or production discipline in a few aspects, even though they share familiar production resemblances that aim at profit and circulation of goods (Hesmondhalgh, 2019). The culture industry, as producers of text and meaning, are participating in knowledge and meaning creation.

More on the differences culture industries have in comparison with regular ones; the creators of “text” are termed “symbolic creators” (Hesmondhalgh, 2019). Those involved in the production of texts are involved in creating symbols of meanings. One would refer to the utilities of these symbols, or works of art, to satisfy entertainment, information, or perhaps an enlightenment utility. Symbol creators aspire to have higher autonomy in creating their text. Additionally, the production cost for cultural products is high, but reproductions and circulations are relatively low. Through the circulation phase, commercial distributors act as a bottleneck to audiences, i.e., consumers of those texts. Besides these, and to name a few: greater risk surrounds culture products, a constant tension between creativity and commerce, a need for scarcity, and to some degree, they are public goods (Hesmondhalgh, 2019).

Marketing Research’s Prestigious Status

The commerce-creativity debate is a feature of culture industries as established. On the one hand, they strive for making a profit contrasted with producing entertaining, informative, beautiful, and enlightening cultural products, which means a dilemma between the autonomy of the symbol creator and the control over the circulation of the created symbols. On the organizational level, marketing played a significant role in this arena, mainly through audience research. It provided a way for the producers to evade some of the risks associated with producing new work. Thus, advertising and marketing budgets increased, and their influence grew from helping circulating products participate in the concepts that symbols creators had autonomy over (Hesmondhalgh, 2019).

Whether the marketing took place after creative work was produced or before, the marketing department’s position in the culture industry increased in its prestigious status. Through an economic dialogue, marketing grew, and with the growth and sophistication of marketing research, its status heightened. However, marketing research came short when it came to innovative products. Wyatt (1994) stated that “Anything innovative is hard for market research to clue in on,” and also Steve Jobs disliked market research as a way to introduce innovative solutions: “We do no market research.” “It is tough to design products by focus groups. Many times, people do not know what they want until you show it to them.” said Steve Jobs. To depend further on audience research, a “rationalization” of audience research, coined by Napoli (P. Napoli, 2008), a prominent audience research scholar within the media industry. Napoli stated that the era of studio executives to produce products with statistical roots replaced the instinctive, subjective, and impressionistic cultural products, thus the tension between commerce and creativi(P. M. Napoli, 2008; Napoli, 2012).

Digital Networks: A Divide

While neoclassical economics aspired to give a quantitative look over culture, in the 1970s, the American market was hit by a loss in profit from its predominantly manufacturing industry, and the world embarked on a new era in economics where a rejuvenation of liberal theories and free-market ideas came back by the hands of the conservatives. They were elected by minorities of eligible voters. The neo-liberalism era started, and hence it had an impact on the economic market dynamics. Cultural industries, as we established, cannot be seen economically; however, neoliberalism was with a significant driving force. Political power, communication technology have seen a considerable increase in research and development, from radio to TV and the internet’s infrastructure. The cultural industries’ mediums increased capacity, which arguably caused a demand in content production to fill (Hesmondhalgh, 2019).

Meanwhile, software developers started to see the optimistic potential for the web and bring democratization and equality. Little that we know, many of those industries conglomerated around the centers of economic power and developed world leaders, i.e., a path dependency. Social media networks gave birth to a digital economy with their fabric of marketplaces, platforms, and economic power. The information economy or knowledge economy (Zhang, 2017), that arguably started earlier in the 1960s, saw the audience not only as a spectator but as a source of income, and at some point, the audience was even termed “inventory” by one of the tech giants, Google (Inventory packages — Display & Video 360 Help, no date).

Digital networks, while they brought optimism, were also criticized for their bias. A digital divide appeared within the same country merely on an access basis. Let along with the skill developed difference and knowledge. Another aspect was the exploitation of labor or free labor; user-generated content fueled many of these social networks; while their content creators did not get paid in some cases, their pay was not symmetrical with their digital host; A form of exploitation occurs (Hesmondhalgh, 2019).

Case Analysis

If we come back to the case of Dave Chappelle, his cultural product, the Netflix special, “The Closer,” which was released by Netflix circulated (Zinoman, 2021). If we apply a political economy lens, we can speculate that Netflix’s ethical and moral values align itself with what David Chappell’s are, besides that both of them aim at producing good content. Based on a comment by Netflix co-CEO, it was stated that the show is not against Netflix’s values, a statement that caused another rampage and was later retracted with an apology (Clark, no date). However, upon the special release, Netflix employees protested digitally and physically against their employer and the artist Chappelle, even causing a Trans Netflix’s employee his job. Signs such as “Hateflex” propagated by the protestors. In this case, the audience appears to cause harm to the circulation of the product by not consuming it and asking others not to do the same.

The LGBTQ community has started to encourage actions such as boycotts and buycotts (Andrew, 2021). In this case, the audience mobilizes their moral values by boycotting the product after it’s release. Hence they are an audience performing active control over the symbolic product and its circulation because it violated the ethical standpoints of their group. Moreover, they are trying to discontinue the product. Hence the social movement tried to cancel Chappelle’s show.

In the case of his documentary film, the online movement surrounding his first project caused a stir in public, which according to the artist’s latest social media video, caused distributors to circulate the product (Franklin, 2021). The audience research acted here as a circulation pre-layer. This was not new to the industry; the activities may have taken place before the shape of focus groups or special screening. The distributors and film producers try to tweak their products to gain more profit and predict financial success. A focus group marketing research arguably will take from the profit of film; hence the social movements here acted as free labor to such distributors and plays back on the digital divide and content creation (Hesmondhalgh, 2019).

If we take an economic lens, the digital movements have saved the film distributors the high cost of hiring focus groups; hence it might benefit them to optimize their circulation costs. However, morally the act comes into question with the free speech values that Western societies hold dear compared to its adversaries, e.g., Russia and China.

If we take a critical cultural approach, the experiences of LGBTQ is understandable since the society at the moment in the USA is still at arm’s length from total acceptance, but at the same time, the freedom of expression is the basis where LGBTQ as a movement marched and now it may form an ethical paradox. If we analyze it from a power perspective, one would say that the power of a group that forces a particular template of views could be termed “coercive liberalism.”(Levin, 2020) A specific template of what values are to be tolerated as liberal and hence address what is called intolerance of intolerance. Ironically this becomes anti-liberalism.

While the employers of netflix are the LGBTQ segment who appear to lead this movement. While Netflix is a global platform, it is not clear if other LGBTQ segments around the world with other languages feel the same. One would argue that film distributors who have decided to not release David’s film, as response to these movements, are exploiting the audience movement as free labor, which aligns with the digital divide and social fragmentation caused by digital networks.

Conclusion

Lately, the Cancel Culture “economy” may also be profitable, influencing all industries (BBC News, 2020). It is also a “Casting” culture, which in this case takes new forms, to name some examples of them: the case where film producers give special access to online creators who have a large following on social media to watch the films and come back to their base with enough details to create a hyper of digital buzz around the project to share their enthusiasm for casting a specific actor or director (Williams, 2018).

The marketing role is invasive and alarming and while the economical view is quantitative, it seems that marketing reliance on data and audience researcher rationalised the culture industry and turned it back to economical and neoclassical form. It can be stated that the cultural perspective is almost non-existent and quantitative economic decision making is the judge and jury. Those movements appear to restore some moral responsibilities but at the same time it is also putting a pressure on culture content and symbolic creators. While many scholars tried to escape the objectivism of economics we also might have fallen into dogmatism.

On a moral level, the debate continues between which kind of free speech would tolerate the other? Stand-up comedy is not something easily performed in authoritarian regimes, nor LGBTQ rights where freedom of expressions is absent. Here it comes to who is powerful to survive such contradictions? Will the loudest, the strongest, and the supreme group variation prevail according to social Darwinism? Fragmentation of online content and audiences fueled by a few powerful voices over the public sphere? Is there even a public sphere anymore? Or should we come to accept we can have multiple public spheres, and if we do? How are we to be respectful to each other’s boundaries in predominantly social Darwinism ethics?

From a technology perspective, it is hard to pin the phenomenon on digital platforms since enormous cases like this happened before digital networks existed. I can recall the Muslim community being offended by a Swedish cartoonist, Lars Vilks, who passed away in a car accident in 2021 (Reuters, 2021). Although his art was allowed and circulated, it still caused much anger. He reportedly lived an isolated social life. Technology, as a medium, was not relevant then however it is sure that digital platforms with its proliferation of content participated in a state of awareness. One might argue that muslim outrage could not be monetized since it came after circulation of the cultural good, but now digital movement may save the marketing department some money before releasing a product.

I believe that a social group who is integrated fully into a society qualifies to be part of its satire and criticisms, hence having a joke about a group is generally accepted, but where should free speech draw the line? With religion, sexuality or race? Who will resolve the matter? One could argue that the judiciary and policy act as an independent body should have a more active role. However, policymaking is not in the scope of this essay.

The “misinterpreted” Darwinism biological theory makes a strong case, and we might find ourselves in a lawless public sphere if there is any. Who survives the harsh environment of a canceled culture economy, the one performed by the corporation or the digital activism?; their wins will take on the evolution and coerce the other weak ones. In the end, one could argue, the influential group coerces their culture powered by technological, political, or economic “fitness.”

In essence, the change in the culture industries may be seen through proliferation of audience movements and hence their role as additional control over circulating culture products. Also, marketing agencies are more and more taking leading symbolic roles and using digital platforms to further slash costs by mitigating risks, saving costs and predicting success. What remains constant is our social relationships where the fittest survives.