For years, the first thing I did upon awakening was check Twitter to see if I had been canceled. After a quick name search to ensure that there was only the usual amount of frothing denunciation, I could get on with my day.
Writing that now, it sounds overwrought. But it seemed wise a few years ago, when every day brought a new cancellation attempt. Cancel culture had metastasized from obscure corners of the internet to some of the nation’s most venerable institutions: university campuses, establishment media outlets, nonprofits and Fortune 500 corporations. Someone would say or do something that might have seemed reasonable only a short time before but was now proclaimed to be the vilest sort of bigotry — subject to mass public denunciation, vicious personal attacks and institutional struggle sessions. Often, the furor died down only after someone had been sacked or lost their business.
I had a flashback this week when the Boston Globe published an article on a meltdown at a lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The story had already been broken by the “Blocked and Reported” podcast, but the Globe made it viral. Every detail was eerily reminiscent of the old days, and just like back then, it was suddenly everywhere in my social media feeds.
The difference is that this time, I followed it with great enjoyment, rather than outrage and fear.
For those who missed the news, Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue recently announced that one night a week, it would relax its policy requiring customers to wear KN95 masks. You might think that’s reasonable, given that it is hard to eat or drink with a mask on and dubiously effective to keep pulling one up and down.
A passionate faction in the Last Ditch community didn’t think it was at all reasonable. Those patrons thought it was a “pander” to “capitalism and white supremacy.” You can guess what followed: social media pile-ons and a heated community meeting.
Jackie Matellian, one of three founders, spoke during the meeting. (The other two aren’t involved in the bar any longer; one of them left for clown school.) Matellian explained that the bar was unprofitable, subsidized by her working multiple jobs while living in her truck. The new policy sought to bring in some money. This did not seem to win Matellian much sympathy; she was chastised for crying.
This part is not enjoyable. It takes pluck and grit to build a business, especially when you’re not doing it just to make money (hard enough!) but to serve your ideals and a community you care about. I admire anyone who tries this hard to live out their commitments, and I’m really sorry for what’s happened to her.
But the story itself is a masterpiece, written in exquisite deadpan by Annalisa Quinn. It’s made extra enjoyable by the fact that it matters only to one small town in Massachusetts. In the old days, it would have seemed a harbinger of worse to come. Today, it was merely a pleasant distraction.
The Globe’s article generated a fierce denunciation from the Western Massachusetts branch of the Communist Party USA. Semafor’s Max Tani reports it also generated 1,000 subscriptions for the Globe in one day and is “on pace to shatter all sorts of Globe records,” probably for the reason suggested by podcaster Armand Domalewski: “Basically every left wing person in America has personally experienced some version of this story in their life over the course of the last decade.” And, Domalewski added, they are really sick of it. To which I might add: Now they get to laugh about it. For Woke 1 is dead, and this story is its epitaph. Six years ago, these shame storms were shaking corporate boardrooms to the teakwood paneling. Now they’re convulsing one fledgling bar and a few communist fellow travelers.
Those who remember the old days fondly might see this as an indictment, arguing that under pressure from right-wing reactionaries, including in the government, many companies stopped listening. You can’t really blame this on President Donald Trump; companies began retreating from Woke 1 before Trump took office the second time.
Those institutions had been bullied or fooled into taking controversial stances that appealed mostly to politically active customers. Embracing politics can work as a business strategy, but it’s risky; when you choose one side of a contentious issue, you alienate the other. Before the Great Awokening, political pronouncements tended to come from niche firms that could survive on a modest but fiercely devoted fan base.
But for about a decade, social media dynamics gave larger firms the misimpression that woke was a mass movement rather than a fringe phenomenon. It wasn’t. Moreover, that fringe — the customer base Last Ditch was built for — contains too many people who hate the very idea of running things like a business. They will demand policies that are incompatible with making a profit or running a functional organization, and if you capitulate, they will wreck you.
Organizations got wise, and the fringe retreated to its proper sphere: the radical communities that flourish in any liberal society. Those communities still have to negotiate with the mob (though happily, Last Ditch has so far kept mask-off Saturdays). For the rest of us, however, the Great Awokening is over, because its targets woke up.
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