There was no question this week so, lucky for you, you get some special insight into the thing that’s been irking me deep into the core of my very being for the last few weeks, which is DIY/emo/whatever Twitter and Facebook liberalism (although by no means is this phenomenon limited to that specific platform). In order to talk about this, we have to talk about the neoliberal co-optation of identity politics, cancel culture (in my opinion, you should watch Natalie Wynn’s most recent video on the subject as a preface to this week’s newsletter, but it’s also not exactly necessary), DIY culture’s obsession with what we’ll call “mandatory positivity,” and the way all of these things intersect.

FIRST DISCLAIMER OF MANY: Although I’ve tried to collect these thoughts in a cohesive manner, I fear it is still a bit disorganized, so I am putting this piece out into the world as a way to kickstart discussion rather than to put in a definitive, final word on the subject. Feel free to debate me in the comments, because I want to consider all perspectives so that my perspective is as well-informed as possible. Also, HUUUGE CONTENT WARNING for discussion of sexual assault among many other icky things. And you’ll notice I don’t name many names in this essay; that’s because I, too, am a coward. As a corollary to this essay, I also highly suggest reading Tom Scocca’s “On Smarm” afterward— it changed my life back in 2013.

My displeasure with the whole “mandatory positivity” culture is nothing new, but it’s only been recently that I’ve been able to pinpoint exactly why DIY is so susceptible to its worst excesses. If you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about, try tweeting something like, say, “Prince Daddy & the Hyena is hot flaming garbage for people who never emotionally left freshman year of college.” DISCLAIMER: I really, really like Prince Daddy & the Hyena. You will undoubtedly be assaulted with that famous and most intellectually lazy of parroted one-liners, “Let people enjoy things!”

“Let people enjoy things” is the rallying cry of people who don’t actually take joy in anything except for ascribing a moral failing to “hating on things.” If you speak ill of a scene darling, you’ll either get creamed with a deluge of “Cold take!” replies or worse, an assertion that you shouldn’t ever shit on things other people like. Thing is, although I don’t mean to imply that no one in DIY actually enjoys music, a large portion of, oh, let’s say, Power Users use their tastes as a way to align themselves with an identity. There are positive and negative aspects to this trend, so let’s take a critical scalpel to, as the centrists say, “both sides.”

The positive: Identity is a powerful thing. Each DIY mini-empire thrives on the fans who associate themselves with each scene; although crossover in listenership obviously occurs, there is something to be gained from a dedicated base of kids who consider themselves “emo kids,” “pop-punk kids,” “screamo kids,” or “hardcore kids” when it comes to developing a healthy, self-sustaining scene. To look at this on a macro level is to understand why identity politics is often necessary for leftist organizing, and especially the organization of labor— in order to restructure the flow of power, you need to look at how that power affects people in different ways. Black people experience a different and inarguably much more extreme type of structural oppression under capitalism than white people, and the same is true of other in-group/out-group dynamics within the context of socially constructed hierarchies. This probably sounds like word salad, but I promise I’m going somewhere with this. Identity politics are necessary because A. everyone engages in identity politics whether they know it or not, which necessitates that B. material solidarity between identities is absolutely imperative to assert the material power of the working class. When DIY fans express solidarity across genre lines (like, say, Full of Hell crowdfunding after all their shit got stolen), it can be a powerful salvo that perhaps we can build our own ecosystem apart from the major label system, as we have in years past. The negative: Identity politics have been warped and twisted by the neoliberal establishment so that representation is seen as an acceptable substitute to power and privilege (which, by the way, are not necessarily the same thing, but that’s a different conversation). Think about the Gillette ad that asserted men can be better; a valuable message in our culture, to be sure, but when it’s packaged to sell razors, its material impact becomes one of cynicism. We’re still giving power to corporations by allowing them to use identity politics in a way that increases commercial viability. I realize that we can’t extricate ourselves from this abhorrent, “woke” version of capitalism while we are currently living under a capitalist system (hence the commonly used phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”) but it can’t be too much to ask that we see through their bullshit. The culture war narrative is fake because culture doesn’t dictate our economic system— it is in fact the other way around. In this context, you can see how late capitalism encourages what Peter Coffin calls the cultivation of identity— when you wrap your identity around the stuff that you buy (something that is nearly unavoidable, regardless of what we tell ourselves), we view attacks on those commodities as attacks on ourselves. Hence, the attack of DIY acts is seen as an attack on fans of those acts because you are attacking a part of their identity that they hold close to themselves.

This brings me to cancel culture. The important thing to keep in mind—

Oh fuck.

While I was writing this, World fucking War III has become imminent. Beyond the initial, rather selfish fear of getting drafted, it’s ghastly to think about the sheer amount of Iranian and other Middle Eastern lives that are about to be lost thanks to the short-sighted intervention of America: World Police. Pardon me while I listen to Neil Young and cry from the gnawing, existential fear of another imperialist war.

Thank you. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

DISCLAIMER: I feel like I should draw a line between what we now call “cancel culture”— the use of social media to ostracize and shame people who have done things the community feels is wrong— and the original usage of callouts and canceling, a practice developed by black women and later other women of color as a tool to warn others in their community of dangerous individuals. While the latter practice is still around and is still very important, more often than not it seems that the former is increasingly used by performative liberals in order to make people they don’t like shut the fuck up. Moving on.

This brings me to cancel culture. The important thing to keep in mind is that I am not excusing the actions of people who have been canceled by the DIY hive mind— far from it. What I am saying is twofold: first, that “accountability” is a buzzword often used by liberals cosplaying as leftists who don’t actually know what restorative justice is; second, that this cycle is perpetuated because of the neoliberal mishandling of identity politics, which encourages identity politics to be weaponized as a reactionary and exclusionary bullying tactic.

Let’s tie it back to mandatory positivity culture— if you can’t simply dislike a band because of their music, you definitely can dislike a band due to taking ideological umbrage with them. This ranges from the truly despicable— rapists and emotional and physical abusers— to the somewhat more specious, like people who make insensitive comments. This is distressing for many reasons, not least of which is that when we mistake personal disagreements, however valid, for character flaws and then make those character flaws irredeemable, we inherently weaken ourselves as a movement. This is true not just for DIY, but for any movement that thrives on ideological consistency.

Now let’s discuss something a lot more serious: the question of what to do when someone in DIY has done something truly horrible. Cam from Old Grey/Sorority Noise and Lou Diamond from JANK are the two most notable examples I can come up with right now. For the record, I think the chasm between Cam’s actions and Lou’s actions is impossibly wide and I don’t mean to conflate them here, but both are good examples of someone being actively and aggressively “canceled.” A lot of people who contributed in canceling these two people like to throw around the term “restorative justice” without actually advocating for it or even seemingly being aware of what restorative justice means. You can literally look up “restorative justice” on Wikipedia and find that it is an established form of justice with its own internally consistent system of logic and rules. It is not up to randoms on Twitter to pick and choose how to approach the situation, and it’s also deeply unhelpful to apply a slash-and-burn policy in favor of rehabilitation (DISCLAIMER: a lot of these are ideas that I have discussed with the person who accused Tiny Moving Parts’ Dylan Matthiesen of rape in Twitter DMs). The information is readily accessible, which is why it’s so upsetting to see ostensibly “woke” people applying the same old punitive bullshit to situations which could easily be resolved with a system that’s already proven successful and which a lot of people who participate in this punitive style of justice in DIY still pay lip service to.

In Dylan’s case, as well as Cam’s case, and in the case of many others, even a non-malicious violation of consent is still a violation of consent, but the difference is that when someone is not a repeat offender and is open to education, that education is key to preventing recidivism. If you want less abuse to happen, education is the path we should be looking to. This is the literal exact opposite of rape or abuse apologism— it’s the desire to start on the path of eradicating rape and abuse.

And listen, I’m also not saying at all that it’s the responsibility of the abused to educate their abuser on how what they did was wrong— in my opinion, that’s not only absurd but actively dangerous. What I am saying is that we need a much more coherent structure in place to combat these things than we do now, where your options are either A. our extremely mismanaged and structurally oppressive justice system or B. isolationist exile that decreases the likelihood of anyone learning from their mistakes, and more than that, bounces them to another community where they can just do the same shit all over again.

Within our current model, it’s not just the people who’ve committed minor offenses who are getting an unfairly short shrift— it’s also the victims of abusers, both past (in that an uneducated abuser is capable of hurting their past victims in ways both direct and indirect) and potential future (which should be self-explanatory). It’s no surprise that we’re seeing a backlash against the current state of cancel culture from within the left itself, with people like Grey Gordon and Heart Attack Man’s Eric Egan articulately voicing valid concerns from a DIY perspective.

And if you want to see an example of the community failing in every regard to make a horrible asshole less of a horrible asshole, look at Lou Diamond’s Fail Better, Heal Faster debacle (DISCLAIMER: I wrote this post along with Claudio from Commander Salamander). Lou is an unrepentant abuser of the worst sort— the kind who positions themself as the one who has been morally wronged in the aftermath of a spotlight being shown on their behavior, and then proceeds to co-opt social justice language in all the “right ways” to make themself seem as if they have grown, before blowing it all up with trademark self-absorption and self-pitying bullshit. Good riddance. But the worst part about all of their bloviating is that it fed on the worst impulses of DIY cancel culture, and Fail Better, Heal Faster actually benefited from the exposure that the people screaming “Fuck Lou Diamond!” were giving it. Not to be self-serving, but I think the Reddit post that Claudio and I wrote was more effective at deterring people from listening to FBHF, purely because the nuance that the larger space in a Reddit post gave us room for was a better way of conveying our grievances than the flash-bang sensationalism of Twitter.

I realize I’m treading in a lot of the same water that Mark Fisher was when he wrote his “Vampire Castle” piece (which he was wrongfully maligned for and which almost certainly contributed to his suicide— READ THIS GODDAMN ESSAY), but one thing I don’t think he addressed there is the cultivation of social capital that is so endemic to DIY Twitter. A big part of the reason that cancel campaigns occur isn’t just, as Natalie has said, to “take people down a peg” (although that is part of it)— it’s also that being the canceler and not the canceled is an enviable power dynamic to be part of. It’s intoxicating to wield that power over another person, and it affects DIY much more acutely than mainstream icons who have also been canceled, like James Franco.

Because DIY performers are not nearly as separated from the audience as movie stars or studio heads, it should in theory be easier to hold dangerous individuals in DIY accountable. However, what ends up happening instead is often much uglier than an accountability process; it’s a wholesale ejection from a culture that many rely on for emotional support, with no opportunities for redemption. It feels powerful to be in control of something like that, and it’s what separates the DIY sphere from the mainstream sphere; a mainstream person being canceled might affect their emotional wellbeing (and it is usually deserved), but it typically does not impact either their career nor their public image (on a long enough timeline). A DIY person being canceled is essentially excommunicated from the same place that should be encouraging their growth.

Again, sometimes it is completely deserved; the world would be a better place if we never had to hear about Lou Diamond ever again, and others like Lou do not deserve to be a part of the community, having shown that they are incapable of being trusted. I just wanted to make that unequivocally clear: sometimes, people have done things that are unforgivable, or display a pattern of behavior that demonstrates their inability to learn and grow. In these cases, it is a net good to remove them from the community so that they can no longer harm others.

In other cases, however, it’s extremely harmful, and an extra-messy dynamic comes in the form of many people who are canceled being members of already-vulnerable groups like trans people and/or people of color and/or sex workers, etc. When already marginalized and vulnerable people are thrown out of the community where they get most of their support, they now have to contend with their material oppression absent of the coping mechanism that they always thought would be there for them, leading to greater susceptibility to being victim to violence from both outside and within.

I can’t help but think of people like Nicole Schoenholz from The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, a person that I myself have been guilty of hopping on the cancel parade for— something I regret now. While I maintain my position that Nicole has done legitimately terrible things and that she needs to do a lot of work to make up for them, upon reflection it is quite creepy that we treat the cancellation of a trans person with such glee, and that we take an ax to every possible route to redemption for her. I don’t want Nicole Schoenholz to kill herself— I do think she has a basic human obligation to improve upon herself, and should be allowed room to do so. The fundamental difference between myself and the author of a disgusting article like “Hot Allostatic Load” is that I don’t believe in emotional manipulation nor making excuses for horrific actions.

So what happens when people in DIY attempt to apply their experience of DIY cancel culture to a mainstream person out of their reach? Predictably, I also think there are some inherent contradictions here.

In-group/out-group thinking in the liberal condition lends itself to a moralistic in-group/out-group dichotomy, which is why people who have exhibited a moral failing are often seen in DIY circles to also have exhibited an aesthetic failure in musical quality. “Separate the art from the artist” arguments aside (god, how trite and cliche), Brand New was a critically acclaimed band, and exhibited a mastery of songwriting that doesn’t fall apart just because Jesse Lacey is a piece of shit. While I do subscribe to the idea that actively dangerous individuals should not have a platform from which to continue being predators, when it comes to bands like Brand New or even the Smiths, there should be more aesthetic distance in the conversation.

It’s kind of like reading the work of Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs (an admitted, proud pedophile/member of NAMBLA, a gross misogynist/open racist/self-loathing homophobe, and a pedophile/misogynist/wife-murderer, respectively)— you can acknowledge the massive aesthetic contributions these works made to the worlds of film, literature, music, etc. while acknowledging that they were terrible people, while also acknowledging that it’s still possible to gain emotional and artistic value from their works, even if you are a member of a community that was directly hurt by their beliefs and actions. H.P. Lovecraft was extremely racist and homophobic, but his stories often resonate greatly with people of color, gay people, etc. because they tap into something that viscerally connects with those peoples’ lived experiences.

I am a queer CSA survivor, and yet the work of the Beat Generation taps into something that feels inextricably part of my personality; I’ve been emotionally abused, and yet the work of comedian George Carlin, a man who was emotionally abusive to his wife, makes me feel seen and heard in many ways; I am a Jew who loves Ice Cube’s music with all my heart; I know people who have been raped who love the work of David Bowie or Expire or Brand New; hell, I know Chinese people who love the Smiths. Denying people the agency of aesthetic distance in these situations because it’s “morally wrong” to enjoy that work feels like, in itself, a moral failing of the highest order. If there truly is no ethical consumption under capitalism, then the “not giving these artists money” point is rendered moot— not because it’s fine and good to give those artists money, but because people who have accrued enough capital to not be ruined by a DIY boycott are going to be fine either way— and the reality is that living a life of material oppression gives one precious few outlets for emotional connection. Stripping that away for the sake of feeling morally superior is narcissism of the highest degree.

On the flipside: In 2017, I made a decision as moderator of /r/emo that we would no longer allow posts promoting Brand New’s music on the subreddit. I still stand by my decision in the moment— and as stated earlier, I think that giving actively dangerous individuals a platform or promotion is a bad, bad idea, and I further think that openly gushing over a terrible person’s work without acknowledging how their terrible actions impacted that work, and other people, is irresponsible at best and disrespectful to victims at worst.

However, I am simultaneously extremely uncomfortable with the concept of there being art that is “immoral” to engage with. Challenging art, whether it is challenging in content or in creator, needs to be engaged with; it’s a beneficial experience for society as a whole. I just think it’s important to engage with it critically, and not to excuse the actions of the person but rather incorporate it into your holistic understanding of their work (I recently, and painfully, had to undergo this reevaluation process with the work of David Foster Wallace, one of my favorite writers of all time, one of the most articulate speakers on the depressed human condition, and also the epitome of white male academic insanity and entitlement). It is literally no exaggeration to say that I have seen people be canceled and abused on the Internet for an infraction as slight as saying that they still listen to Brand New. That’s where the whole “callout culture has gone too far” argument that boomers love to make still has some merit (although that doesn’t excuse the rape apologist bros on /r/brandnew who quickly and with much hostility dismiss all the accusations against their beloved Christ figure Jesse Lacey as “fake news”).

Which finally brings me back to liberal co-optation of identity politics. One of the worst parts of this shit is that DIY Twitter and Facebook, as a friend of mine put it recently, “conflates good intentions with good music.” While there is amazing DIY music being made by people who have really important and thoughtful things to say— Soul Glo, Amygdala, and Foxtails are all excellent examples with releases from this past year— too often I see people acting like just because they said “trans rights” once their opinion is infallible. There is a rather cynical, sneering right-wing CHUD talking point that this is just “virtue signaling,” but I think the truth of the matter cuts much deeper than that.

Let’s look at Twitter, which was initially dominated by people who came from the Fuck You and Die board on Something Awful— a place where people would go to make the edgiest and most ironic of jokes (this is where Weird Twitter came from, in case you were unaware). As the late aughts rolled into the 2010s and message board culture died, to be replaced by the monolith of social media, we also saw a shift in the way people communicated online— with the loss of a truly anonymous and therefore mostly meritocratic form of communication, networking became of the utmost importance. If you were on Twitter and Facebook and you wanted attention (as all humans do), you needed to promote yourself, regardless of if you were an artist or if you were just a regular Joe Schmo. The quickest way to promote yourself is to align yourself with a niche, an identity. This is why I’ve talked so much about neoliberalism’s co-optation of identity politics— it’s simply become a means of accruing social capital. It’s capitalism of a much more sinister and bleakly self-inflicted sort, because you’re not even laboring under it to survive in a material sense— you’re doing it for sheer emotional support. But it’s the hustle, and it looks like we all have to do it, myself included. You don’t have a personal brand? Guess you’re shit outta luck, bud. No friends for you.

Going back to moralistic in-group/out-group thinking and tying this into the condition of identity-as-social-currency, when certain identities are valued above others, this can result in a kind of reactionary and counterproductive cycle wherein people who could make valuable allies are continuously alienated. In many conversations, surely, there are certain identities which should be valued above others: trans voices in discussions on trans issues, the voices of people of color in discussions about racism, the voices of women in discussions of misogyny. This is a basic rule of intersectionality, and it is impossible to understand oppression without understanding the different ways it impacts people within the class-analysis framework.

However, DIY consistently demonizes the identities of the cis, the straight, the white, the man (DISCLAIMER: I am a white— well, I guess that depends on how white you consider the Jews— AMAB non-binary person). Playful ribbing is to be expected and even encouraged— god knows cis straight white dudes should be able to take it. But despite the undeniable fact that someone with all these identities benefits from privilege (and thus is much more capable of attaining some level of institutional power), it is still completely possible that they are oppressed by a variety of other material circumstances— class and, to a lesser degree, mental illness or addiction chief among them.

DIY Twitter and Facebook often does not seek to bring these cis straight white men into the fold, despite the fact that the privilege they benefit from makes them an excellent ally (one whose voice is almost always listened to in mainstream society, one who often has the ability to elevate the voices of those more marginalized than him). Part of being a good ally is knowing that in order to elevate the material conditions of the oppressed and empower them, you need to give up your privilege. Knowing that we currently live in a world where that is not realistically possible (short of, I guess, a Rachel Dolezal situation?), the next-best thing is to use that privilege, and your privileged voice, to make other voices heard.

DIY Twitter and Facebook actively discourages this type of solidarity in their fetishization of oppressed identities. In their quest to show off how they are the absolute wokest, they’ve actually ended up centering the oppressor over the oppressed in their narratives. It’s the most condescending bullshit I’ve ever seen— marginalized people are tip-toed around, as if they are prizes meant to be won, as if diversity in and of itself is the end goal (it’s not— newsflash, the solution to the very real material oppression of, say, lesbians or Muslims, isn’t to have more lesbian Muslim CEOs).

In the world of the Extremely Online DIY Acolyte, the Power Users, it is better for white people to yell about how bad racism is to a basement of twelve other white people who already agree with them rather than supporting bands who are spreading leftist ideals to a broader audience. It is better to talk about how DIY needs more “representation” than it is to actually listen to and give power to those represented. It is better to use marginalized people as tokens of credibility than it is to actually organize to make things better for them, and all of us. It’s not a condemnation, but a basic observation to state that the majority of people in DIY are white— and when they start circlejerking each other over how much white people suck, it comes off like they are trying to negate their privilege (a material impossibility) while still trying to be the loudest voice in the room. That is a narcissistic and self-centering form of “activism,” to say the least.

This is what I mean when I say that the way DIY internet liberals use identity politics is reactionary. It traps us in stasis. They pay lip service to the ideas of progressive values (much in the same way that they pay lip service to many other concepts, as I’ve outlined in this essay already), but they are looking for a status quo with a little bit more hollow, empty diversity. They are averse to radical change, and they are allergic to approaching things in a radical manner. You push any of them into a corner on the beliefs they pretend to espouse and they will inevitably fall back into the same middle-of-the-road bullshit they learned from their parents. That’s not an exaggeration, either.

I’m sure you’ve noticed how when that shitty uncle you see twice a year defends police shooting unarmed black kids, or says the furor over trapping brown children in cages is “an exaggeration,” or thinks that the best punishment a bad man can get is to be raped in prison, at the heart of his disturbing ability to dehumanize these people is the belief that if someone “broke the rule,” the consequences that they face, however harsh or life-altering, are valid. I am NOT saying that the social exile of DIY’s application of cancel culture is anywhere NEAR equivalent to the struggle for their very lives that so many people of color are experiencing on a societal and structural level every day of their lives. What I am saying is that this mindset of “if you fuck up you are doomed to whatever punishment you get and rehabilitation is useless” is poisonous, and if you are a self-described leftist who likes to talk about how much you hate the cops, and yet fall into the patterns that I have described thus far in this essay, you’re a lot closer to the regressive, flawed, liberal view of justice than you’d like to admit.

DIY liberalism has exhibited a fundamental failure to push past smug, performative, well-meaning gestures and into progression, organization and class-consciousness. And it is a particularly Online condition, because the internet is our main mode of communication, and if anyone dares step out of line on the DIY liberal hegemony, or advances any radically leftist critique, they get spanked and told to adhere to the norms, lest they get canceled. This is why the conversations are so big and fast and loud and angry— it’s a bunch of people trying desperately to preserve themselves, always playing on defense, knowing the world is full of bad-faith actors. Social media, while being an extremely valuable tool for DIY, leftism, and various other causes (and I believe it has the potential to continue to be), has become the most toxic roadblock to solidarity— even more toxic because it’s impossible to exist in DIY or leftist spaces in 2020 without it. “Everybody is valid, uwu”— until they’re not.

As the disease of being Terminally Online spreads, all we can really do is try and remember that we are more than our internet persona. We can try to remember that there is another way of dealing with peoples’ mistakes than casting them aside. And we can try to express a little bit of consciousness, not just of class or race or gender (although I think those are imperative), but of human existence in general. We may not all be on the same side, but we can try to be. We can educate, agitate, and organize. We can work for a better world and we don’t have to try to act like we are already living in it without doing any of the necessary work. We don’t have to accept our suffering, roll over, and bitch and moan until we are dead. We’re here, we are alive, and we are all in pain. We can do what we can to ease other peoples’ pain. And we are stronger in solidarity than we are when we are divided by the arbitrary rules the upper class imposes on us.

We are better than we think we are.

-xo, Ellie

If you liked this essay and you’d like to ask a question for future newsletters, consider contributing to my Patreon. If you want to see me making more jokes and in less of a dire mood, follow me on Twitter. If you want more fragmented pieces of my incoherent ramblings, friend me on Facebook. And if you actually want to hear my voice, hit up my podcast the E Word (which you can listen to here, as well as on iTunes and Spotify, and follow on Twitter here). See y’all next week. And yes, this is definitely just a long-winded justification for when I inevitably get caught wearing a “Mics Are for Singing, Not Swinging” shirt.