In the Court of the Skeksis

On cancellations and dying emperors

There’s a scene from the film The Dark Crystal of which I find myself often thinking in regards to the matter of “cancellations.”

If you’ve not seen the film, you really ought to. The story is of an orphaned child (a “gelfling”) raised by a race of beings called the urRu (or just “mystics”). Because of a prophecy foretelling the child’s role in their downfall, another race of beings, the Skeksis, hunt the child to stop him. Oh, and they’re all muppets.

The Skeksis, who you later learn are actually divine twins of the mystics split apart because of the overreach of the initial race from which the two descend, are really foul creatures. They look a bit like reptilian vultures, and they survive by draining the life essence of other beings. There’s a high-urban sense to them, as well, decadent, opulent, gluttonous, and also highly-scientific (they have elaborate laboratories, for instance).

Anyway, the scene that comes to mind is one very early on in the film. They’re all gathered at the death bed of their leader, waiting for him to die so they can contend to his position. They hover exactly like vultures hover, except less patiently. The leader then croaks a barely voiced “I am…sssstilll..emperor” and then finally dies, at which point the other Skeksis immediately try to cannibalize the right to lead. But it is not fully over, because there is then a contest between two Skeksis who claimed the emperor’s power. The loser is not only stripped of its claim, but also stripped naked and exiled from the Skeksis court.

A few days ago, the site editor of the publisher I direct alerted me to an “event” occurring with someone who had once written a short essay for us. This person was being accused of being fascist, and unfortunately, because it was all occurring on Twitter, I had to log back into the site to determine what we should do (if anything).

I’ll not name the person. If you’re part of one of the subcultures I’m tangentially involved in, you already know about it likely. What’s more interesting anyway was the process by which it all happened, a process that has become a kind of set mechanism which each such cancellation follows.

First of all, the person was of course popular. In this case, much, much more popular than anyone else involved in this specific milieu, with hundreds of thousands of views and followers on social media accounts. That’s a key point, because their influence is precisely what is being contended in such moments. No one whips up a mob to dethrone an irrelevant and unheard-of person. The popularity is what everyone’s contending, or rather the person’s “right” to be so popular.

Again, this person was quite popular, and she’d come to that popularity through the very same means by which the crusade occurred: the internet. She is young and pretty, which gives you an immediate ‘in’ to the attention of people. She also had things to say, certainly, but having interesting or even insightful things to say isn’t enough to cut through the inertial weight of social media algorithms. You have to also be good at marketing your appearance and your thoughts, and she was quite good at both of those things.

When you rise to prominence like that (and quickly), you of course draw the attention of others who don’t like you. If everyone’s talking about you, not all that they say will be good. Especially other people who were trying to do what you were doing but didn’t succeed—they might not like you. Especially those with a sense of personal failure, whose repeated attempts to be influential and to say relevant things just never get the same notice, will start to link their own ressentiment to your very existence. Each time one of your popular videos shows up on their social media feeds, their bitterness at your existence will grow.

It’s not just the person’s influence that irritates some people, but also what that influence is used for. Detractors might find themselves thinking that they might use that influence much better, for less self-promotion perhaps, or to advance a moral or political point. They might be angry about the positions the person holds, as for instance a J.K. Rowling, and wish to weaken the person’s influence so to fight the idea.

All these various sentiments played out with this person’s cancellation.

What happened was this: the target was accused of being a fascist. Screenshots and testimonials from rivals (including from an abusive ex-boyfriend) flooded social media to prove the accusation. Those accusations were carried along by the same algorithmic popularity of the person accused, riding along her influence in order to sabotage it like a virus.

The content of those accusations were relatively unsubstantial, but the narrative which cohered them together was convincing to many. It was all based on proximity, a friend of a friend of a friend being a fascist. Comments she’d made in the light of that proximity suddenly looked damning rather than just flippant. And the accused’s “refusal” to answer every single one of her accusers in an immediate fashion (i.e.; subjecting herself to relentless interrogations on Twitter) was further evidence that the accusations “must be true.”

When the influence of a person is contested like that, those who contest it through accusations immediately gain at least a temporary increase in their own influence, because suddenly everyone who knows about the accused is aware of the accusers. In more mainstream examples (as say with the identity of the person behind the Libs of TikTok account), the accuser is often a journalist, a politician, or another celebrity. In more niche subcultures, it’s usually a rival “content creator” (whether that’s a writer, a video maker, a podcaster, or an influencer). Regardless, the initial denouncers of the heretic are suddenly, for at least a little bit, very popular as well.

Others of course soon pile on. In this case, people who have been long irrelevant suddenly found relevancy because they added their own attacks into the situation. Some who had long openly complained about not getting book contracts wrote demands for her book contract to be retracted (a demand which the publisher happily caved to).¹ Still others who have compiled their own lists of supposedly-fascist occult authors (none of who actually are) were eager to trot out their theories to get a hit off of the mass influence rush leaking from the accused so people might finally give them some attention, too.

Eventually, the accused made a statement. It simultaneously convinced her fans while being seen as proof of guilt by her detractors, just like in every other situation. No one is ever actually looking for truth in such matters anyway, they’re just trying to figure out which narrative fits their own worldview best so they can cling to it tighter.

The entire time this was all happening, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Skeksis. Of course, the Skeksis were modeled after the aristocrats in the Court of Versailles, constantly maneuvering and hovering around each other to get as close as possible to influencing the decisions of the monarch. In this rotting decadent court of “democratic” social media, however, the monarch is the masses from whom influence and popularity ultimately derive.

Influence and popularity, but never truth or real power. 10 million followers on an Instagram account might make you an ‘influencer,’ but people always scroll past to the next post from the next account with 10 million followers. You live on in a person’s head for a second, and then someone else does, and then another, and you are forgotten.

What interests me most, though, is how especially the accusation of “fascist” never seems to have any actual basis in political formation any longer. Communists and anarchists both had reason to worry about fascism decades ago, because fascists were rival political actors contending for state power. The problem here is that there are no communists or anarchists actually contending any more either. Instead, it’s now always a question of the dominant liberal order versus anyone who disagrees. The accusation of “fascist” functions exactly as the accusation of “commie” and “heretic” once did. It never actually refers to the political positions of the accused anymore, only to their position as pariah to an imagined center of moral and correct thought. It’s just a whispered slur in the Court of the Skeksis, meant to make sure they are kept as far from the fading emperor’s corpse when his power is finally passed on.

That social media corporations have both mechanized and monetised these processes is really the most frightful bit of it all. So many absurd dirges were sung about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter that it would appear very few people even remember that all these channels of communication are controlled by very rich people. The very rich will always have an interest in making sure the masses feel like they can give expression to their political desires without ever actually doing anything about them, which was Walter Benjamin’s point about mechanised art production and fascism:

Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.

As such, it’s not unreasonable to suspect that these social media mechanisms are precisely the manifestation of the fascism of which Benjamin spoke. That is, the entire circus of cancellations and denouncements in which “fascist” functions as smear are actually the expression fascism offers the masses in lieu of changed property relations.

None of the “cancelled” ever actually have real power or wealth. Those with actual wealth and power cannot successfully be cancelled, because their influence derives from their actual material conditions, not from the amount of followers on their social media accounts. Their power is measured in dollars and euros, not in likes and retweets, and the only way to cancel that power would be a thing that cannot ever occur on social media: revolution.

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1. This wasn’t a “moral” decision by the publisher. The publisher was hoping to profit from the person’s popularity. Once her popularity was contested and became controversial, they made a cost-benefit analysis and dropped her like any other capitalist would.