Six Ways of Thinking About Jacob Savage

1.Yes, of course it happened, and pretty much exactly in the way that Savage describes it. Yes, the statistics are nice, the interviews are interesting, but the truth is that we didn’t need any of them. This was a decade of all of our lives. Anybody who was conscious in the period circa 2014-2024 and hasn’t had a self-serving memory kick in (which is a harder ask) knows what Savage is talking about. The drumbeat for diversity — for uplifting women and affirming people of color — was always going to come at the expense of someone, and the most convenient losers were white millennial men, who could simply not be hired as opposed to going to all the trouble of ‘canceling’ some malefactor who was further along in their career. This was never very cogently articulated — the emphasis was on those who would benefit from the social revolution, and there were a few handy labels to wave around (“toxic masculinity,” eventually “white supremacy” and “patriarchy”) that were useful for discrediting white males — but a significant part of the discourse also was that you weren’t supposed to talk about who was losing out in the wave of social changes, just as evincing interest or empathy in anybody who was canceled was, at the height of it, grounds for being canceled yourself.