My New Band Is: Selectively Fettered Capitalism
On Dr. Seuss, antitrust enforcement, "cancel culture", free markets, and conservation
Dr. Seuss! Dr. Seuss!
Lots of opinions, many obtuse!
I have one too, which is not surprising
My opinion muscle is exercising
So here it is, on this very page
To usefully provoke, but not enrage:
I wasn’t going to write about the Seuss Estate* pulling six books from publication (of the over sixty Seuss/Ted Geisel wrote) because it seems straightforward to me--a rational decision by the literary executors to protect the author’s reputation and business in the face of changing norms around race. But this has led to a predictable barrage of right leaning commentators suggesting that Seuss has been “cancelled”, that books are being banned (they are not), and that this a slippery slope that will lead to banning controversial works of all sorts, and is generally bad for authors, who could have their books “cancelled” at any minute. So now I’ve got a burgeoning mental bank of objections and its existence is tormenting me, so I invite you to share in my misery.
If there is ever a Spiers Estate (lol), I would hope that my literary executor (pictured below) would work to pull anything I wrote that would make me look like a giant asshole in the face of changing norms, particularly if what I wrote was somehow helping small children to internalize racist stereotypes. (As far as I know, there are no small children reading my Substack, which is why I can use the more evocative “asshole” instead of “jerk.”)
There is a second discussion, and one that I think is legitimate and not more disingenuous whining about “cancel culture” (which is now apparently defined as any sort of consequences for displays of bigotry that happen to be driven by social opprobrium) about the extent to which monopolistic distribution of speech determines what acceptable speech is. That’s mostly what I want to talk about, but first I think I have to walk through the “cancel culture” hysteria because I think the two issues are politically correlated.
First: what is actually happening to these books?
Depending on the origin of the commentary, terrible things may or may not be happening to books, and not just these books in particular. The continuum runs from “questioned”, to “removed from eBay”, to “banned”, to “burned”, and some of these characterizations are just not factually true, nor do they accurately evoke the potential downside of the estate’s actions. If you read and watch right wing outlets exclusively, for example, you might understand the situation to be that liberals are burning One Fish, Two Fish, in gleeful bonfires in Brooklyn attended exclusively by white coastal elites who went to Oberlin. (Which is patently absurd, because bonfires are illegal in Brooklyn! So are backyard fire pits, which will get you a visit from the FDNY, which I do not at all know from, say, direct experience.)
But the chain of events is not really in dispute: the Seuss Estate decided to discontinue its publication of six (6) books out of the sixty plus Seuss wrote because they contained images that would now be understood to be racist. Seuss/Geisel himself regretted them in later years and said so, so the estate is presumably respecting the wishes of the author as they understand them, and also making a rational business decision not to publish six very minor titles that could alienate Seuss audiences.
In the wake of this, eBay decided to delist re-sales of the six offending titles, and Amazon will no longer distribute them, either.
Is this “cancellation”?
I’m on record saying, endlessly, and probably tediously at this point, that “cancel culture” is not a thing that exists. I think this is true because “culture” implies some sort of systemic phenomenon where being cancelled (which is also apparently defined primarily as losing one’s employment or dominant revenue stream) is happening regularly and universally.
The now infamous Anti Cancel Culture Letter of 2020 alleged that this was a systemic problem and a threat to free speech (in the colloquial sense, not in the First Amendment sense, which is about state intervention) but could not offer any systemic evidence that it was. In the wake of it, people pointed to everything from Bari Weiss’s voluntary resignation from The New York Times to a white woman’s Internet virality because she called the police on a Black man (with coincidentally, the same surname) knowing it would put him at risk for police violence as “evidence”, but none of these cases are about inexplicable firing to stifle speech. The was only one situation that seemed even remotely to fit the supposed definition of suffering unjust professional consequences for reasonable, if unpopular speech. The only example that seemed to fit was the firing of David Shor from Civis Analytics, and I’ll admit, I still don’t understand what happened there. It does seem unreasonable to me.
But there’s a reason people keep bringing up Shor’s case: it’s the only one that really matches the criteria. It’s not even anecdata; it’s anecdatum. Which is a pretty heavy indictment of the idea that this phenomenon is systemic in any way. If something is systemic, it’s something that happens with some regularity, not such a rarity that you can only think of one example that fits the supposed parameters.
Can you cancel … yourself?
And in any case, it’s hard to argue that Dr. Seuss is being cancelled given that the books are being discontinued by his own executors, and only because he’s dead and can’t do it himself. I think it goes without saying that self-cancellation doesn’t happen. (Unless you count resigning from your job in a huff because your colleagues think you’re a jerk and have said so, and then claiming that it’s because you have radically conservative views even though you’re to the left of some of your colleagues who have not experienced this problem, not that I’m thinking of anyone in particular.) Cancellation is involuntary, and if you decide to discontinue distribution of your own speech, well, that’s a decision you make.
There are some people who believe that this is not okay either if they think your ideas still have some value. This idea was expressed indirectly by Conor Friedersdorf, a writer for The Atlantic who is part of a constellation of writers I’ve begun to think of as IDW-adjacent anti-“cancel culture” specialists who believe that progressive pushback on bigotries of all stripes is a de facto stifling of speech:
Some irony here: Friedersdorf thinks publishers who decide to discontinue publication of books (which they do all the time, in the course of normal business, which is why backlist titles are sometimes hard to find in print) should face… professionally damaging social opprobrium. Even though he typically opposes professionally damaging social opprobrium.
Another layer: there’s some Venn diagram overlap between people who oppose what they view as cancel culture and also support the right to be forgotten because they think people shouldn’t be on the receiving end of social opprobrium or professional consequences for things they wrote or said at one point and no longer stand by. The “right to be forgotten” discussion also has some intersection with privacy issues, and varying opinions about what it means to maintain an accurate historical record. But in this context, people objecting to the Seuss Estate’s decision would seem to be arguing that Seuss does not have the right to be forgotten, or more specifically, the right to have certain of his works forgotten.
Friedersdorf is also making an argument (maybe unintentionally) that publishers have an obligation to keep books like the six Seuss titles in print, even to the potential detriment of their business, given evolving social norms and correlative consumer demand. A kind of socialist program for the distribution of bigoted literature, I guess.
It also presumes that publishers are the sole mechanism by which works that are experiencing falling consumer demand (for whatever reason) are preserved. But the reality is, they are not, especially in the digital age.
I grew up in an era where a lot of Greatest Generation grandmas had copies of Little Black Sambo on their children’s bookshelves. If you don’t know what that is, it’s probably because it’s out of print on the basis that it violated explicit social norms around race a long time ago. But if you really must read it, for anthropological purposes or to prove to yourself that it existed or because you just really love racist children’s books, it is available right now, in its entirety on Project Gutenberg—which is potentially wider distribution than it ever got in print.
But what about Amazon?
This is for me, the most interesting and Not Stupid part of this conversation:
I would argue that Amazon is mostly a web services company in the U.S., but Amazon dominates book retail in several areas. It’s responsible for 41% of new book purchases and 64% of all printed books (this includes back list books, used books, textbooks, etc.) What does it mean when Amazon can remove a book. This question was raised by another of the writers I think of in the anti-cancel culture brigade, and an organizer of the original Harper’s Letter, Thomas Chatterton Williams.
Williams’ argument is that Seuss isn’t the only author being removed, though he declined to offer examples when I asked, and the only instance I can imagine he’s thinking about is Amazon’s removal of a book that was transphobic. (Again, does this constitute a systemic phenomenon or an isolated incident? J.K. Rowling is arguably the most high profile author to express transphobic views, and Amazon is still awash in Harry Potter.
He also argues, and I think more compellingly, that this has some implications for writers:
He is correct that Amazon’s distribution can make or break writers. Publishers have to pay for prominent placement (which is called a “co-op” fee) in both physical and online spaces, and having a good relationship with your distributor is important, whether your distributor is Amazon or a bricks and mortar bookstore. And Amazon controls a huge portion of the market. So do the handful of publishers responsible for new books in the U.S., one of the largest of which is now owned by a German conglomerate that had already purchased another large U.S. publisher.
Is it a problem that such a small handful of players are determining what gets published and what doesn’t? I would argue that it is, but not for the reasons Williams states. When Amazon pulls a title because they think it’s too bigoted to stay in their marketplace (and there’s plenty of bigoted stuff on Amazon), they’re making a business decision. They estimate that the cost to their brand is greater than any money they’d have made from whatever they’re pulling.
But publishers decline to publish things—most things, in fact!—all the time, for a variety of reasons, starting with “this book is terrible/unreadable/not publishable/author should keep day job”. One of those reasons might be also because they think a book is immoral. Another might be that it’s not commercially viable. It might even be both. I find it hard to imagine a scenario where a publisher acquires a book from an author and contemporaneously can’t get it distributed by Amazon, when both publishers and Amazon are operating in an environment with the same social norms.
That said…
I believe private monopolistic control is a problem. In fact, I believe private monopolistic control of anything is a problem! This was one of my first breaks with libertarianism, which advocates for a free competitive markets, but is hesitant to get behind anti-trust enforcement because, well, loosely put, government intervention in anything is bad.
And well, I think private monopolies are bad. They prevent competitive markets because they can, by themselves, create barriers to entry for potential competitors; they can entrench mediocrity because they face few or no competitive pressures themselves; they have the market power to influence legislation that further entrenches their market position; they get away with corruption and other kinds of malfeasance because they’re too big for real oversight. This is a scenario libertarians like Peter Thiel actually find desirable, but it’s also at odds with one of the supposed appeals of libertarianism, which is the idea that competitive markets are more efficient and good for the consumer.
The reality is, there are no good market mechanisms for mitigating the effects of real monopolies. But there is a good policy intervention and via a mechanism we already have: antitrust laws.
If people on the right who lean libertarian are worried that Amazon is going to stifle speech (or Facebook, for that matter—another right wing hobbyhorse, despite the fact that Facebook has consistently privileged and not stifled conservative content), then they should probably be in favor of Elizabeth Warren-style antitrust enforcement, which in many cases solves problems that would otherwise demand new regulatory solutions.
But the odd reaction to this that I keep seeing, and not from people who think government intervention is good, is that monopolies like Amazon and Facebook be treated like public utilities, where they have an obligation to function as conduits for speech. Amazon must carry all of the books, and Facebook must allow all of the speech. Maybe we should even nationalize them!
This strikes me as another example of the right twisting itself into pretzels to justify the continued distribution of bigoted speech in particular, at the expense of other principles they supposedly hold dear. There is, I believe, a real case for nationalization if antitrust enforcement isn’t on the table, but it’s very strange to hear the supposed free speech advocates advocate for state intervention with regard to speech, when the state dictating that all speech be distributed no matter what would seem to be a First Amendment violation itself, and an argument for more government rather than less.
Contradictions everywhere, except on one point:
In fact, the only consistent application of principle I’ve seen is the basic essence of conservatism: a determination to conserve a particular value or institution. But what it seeks to conserve isn’t speech in general, or the First Amendment’s orientation toward state interference. It’s a specific type of speech that might reflect bigotries on the part of the author.
The principles the right supposedly holds regarding state intervention, for example, are not being applied with regard to the 1619 Project. Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation to ban schools from using the essay series in school curriculum because they object to the idea that American history be taught as something that happened in the context of white supremacy. But school curriculum has often done the opposite, which is to fraudulently deny that racism is part of our shared collective history at all. I went to a school in the rural South that used textbooks claiming that the Civil War was mostly a conflict over state’s rights and that slavery was very ancillary. If anything American education has a bias toward enforcing a view of history that has little bearing on the actual historicity of its central figures, and tends toward hagiography.
The idea that a consensus view of history should be enforced by the state (you may only ever teach Bailyn and Boorstin, sorry!) should give First Amendment advocates on the right pause, but I don’t see any of them defending the teachers who want to use the 1619 Project to enhance their students’ understanding of factors that have been previously denied or downplayed in discussions of American hegemonic power. This constituency rails against government intervention generally but wants to use it to police anything that suggests that our founding was messy, involved a lot of racists and misogynists, and that not every aspect of it was completely selfless. (Small example: Even by consensus historian standards, Washington’s hostility toward the mother country rose in tandem with his personal debt, and his increasing feeling that he was getting ripped off financially by the British in various ways. It shouldn’t be taboo to acknowledge things like this.)
I also grew up in an area where schools required teachers to teach Creationism alongside evolutionary theory as if they were equivalents. I was a kid, but I don’t remember the Free Speech Right being very vocal about that requirement either, and what they’re objecting to in this case isn’t even the addition of something that defies empirical and scientific realities. But the right is fine with epistemic closure if the conclusions produced by continued discourse might be that we all have responsibilities toward people who’ve been marginalized historically in this country—which is the inevitable implication of the 1619 Project, and one that makes a lot of (white) people uncomfortable. It is not really the one or two lines with which some historians might have quibbles that bother them; it’s the overall theme of the work. What conservatives want to conserve in this case is a view of American history that venerates (sometimes to the point of absurdity) our founding—and founders—and denies that bloody injustices that accompanied it.
What they want to conserve in the case of Dr. Seuss is not unrelated: they do not want social norms around race to be more stringent than what they were in the past. If If I Ran The Zoo was okay fifty years ago, what does it mean that it’s not now?
Deep down conservatives know the answer to this and don’t fully object to it. You don’t see them arguing anymore that publishers resurrect Little Black Sambo. They know there’s a line somewhere.
They just don’t like that other people might determine where that line is.
---