In Defense of (Click to) Cancel Culture
In recent years, “cancel culture” has been accused of enabling everything from the destruction of Confederate statues to the defamation of celebrity rapists to the ruined reputations of down-punching transphobe J.K. Rowling and election-fraud fraudster Mike “My Pillow Guy” Lindell. (All to the good if you ask me.) Although its detractors are loud and legion, arguably, the Supreme Court effectively indirectly ruled in support of cancel culture more than a decade ago in U.S. vs. Alvarez (2012), upholding it as a useful tool for curbing the disinformation or defamatory speech from “false claimants” in the public sphere.
The ascendancy of free speech absolutist Elon Musk and his transformation of an online platform that once empowered individuals to speak truth to power through “cancellation” into a false-claim free-for-all has rendered the court’s ruling largely moot.
A newly available-in-English book by German literary scholar Adrian Daub contends that the panic over cancel culture was a ginned-up tempest in a teapot, a wolf-crying way for the powerful to silence minority perspectives. Daub’s book says that cancel culture has largely receded as a cultural bogeyman, and cancel-panic-adjacent anti-wokeness has replaced it as the illiberals’ weapon of choice.
In the streaming world, cancel culture is still going strong, although we prefer to call it churn. Subscription cancellation has traditionally been the number-one way viewers voice dissatisfaction, whether in rebellion against Netflix’s periodic “pricing updates” or simply as a way of declaring, “I’ve run out of things to watch.” With scripted TV and film production down a staggering 40% since pre-2023 SAG and writers’ strike levels and premium streamers investing massive sums in one-off high-visibility sports events, the “nothing to see here” problem is going to get worse before it gets better. With the shifting emphasis to sports and the ongoing trend toward ad-supported monetization mod¬els, streaming is looking more like cable TV every day, even if swiftly and reliably delivering sports at scale remains a work in progress.
But for viewers who still yearn to churn—particularly those binge-and-purge users who churn in and out of subscriptions in rhythm with their favorite shows’ release schedules—cancellation may be getting easier, as the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Negative Option, or Click to Cancel, rule announced in October 2024 attempts to cut through the red tape and sidestep the counter-intuitive maze of virtual blind alleys that streaming platforms often deploy to make churning more trouble than it’s worth.
Created in response to more than 16,000 consumer complaints specifically regarding glaring subscription cancellation “tricks and traps,” Click to Cancel promises to eliminate the hoop-jumping often required to end a subscription. The new rule requires that businesses make it “at least as easy” to cancel a subscription as to sign up for one, and—this is big for OTT users—prevents services from converting free trials to paid subs without user consent. Violators of the rule can face fines up to $51,744 in civil penalties per violation in addition to having to provide consumer refunds and pay damages.
For all its promise, and despite officially going into effect in mid-January, the rule remains largely in limbo, due in part to its all-deliberate-speed effective compliance date of May 14 and also because of legal and political challenges. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is campaigning to cancel the rule, attacking it hyperbolically as an “abuse of power” designed to “micromanage the economy and undermine American free enterprise.” Such a characterization does make the rule sound like a relic of the pre-Trump II era in which it was passed, when sensible crackdowns on “junk fees” prevailed and commissions like the FTC (now under new corporate-stooge management) could operate like the regulators they were designed to be.
Of course, if streaming keeps embracing the ad-driven monetization that for many of us was the primary motivation for jettisoning cable and real-time viewing, the mechanics of subscriptions and subscription management may come to matter less and less. And in an era of guardrail-free free enterprise and disinformation-deluged free speech absolutism, confronting “tricks and traps” on the way to subscription cancellations will be the least of our problems.
Related Articles
Moving streaming video services from 'serial churn' to 'pause and resume' in today's subscription economy.
16 Sep 2024
On Wednesday, August 21, media and entertainment technology and consumer electronics analyst Paul Erickson will moderate the panel "Subscription Management and the Great Rebundling." With the constant push and pull of market fragmentation and consolidation, streaming services that rely entirely or partly on sustained subscription revenue need more than plentiful content to fight churn and keep subscribers engaged. As consumer budgets tighten, free and ad-supported options multiply and emerge as new norms. More and more, that means bundling and streamlining offerings. This panel of industry experts from Hub Entertainment Research, Fubo, Antenna, Ampere, and Plex will discuss the art and science of making subscriptions smoother, simpler, and churn-proof.
15 Aug 2024