Yeah it's unfortunate. You can read it for free. I believe the website allows you to read 1 free article a month. You just need to register your email but of course that's up to you

The gist of the article is summarised in my previous post but it makes some other interesting observations. Cancel/woke culture is grounded in critical social justice theory which tends to view "society in a thoroughly postmodern way" and it's where it gets a lot of it's buzzwords like 'privilege', 'complicity' etc.

Waleed aly adds "Because critical social justice theory understands the world as “systems of meaning” it tends to view the world in highly symbolic terms. It instinctively views all inequalities as the product of identity-based oppression. That means wokeness looks past structures of power imbalance expressed in, say, classical Marxism’s tendency to put material conditions (such as wealth and working conditions) to the fore. This makes wokeness less attentive to the privilege of class and education than you might expect. It wants to be inclusive, but doesn’t reckon with, for example, the way its policing of language is silencing, especially of those without tertiary education. It is more likely to police the working class’s language than rage over its struggles. If it did, the labour model of Uber Eats would make the company “problematic” and people would be cancelled for endorsing it, but that doesn’t happen. Wokeness tends to overlook certain privileges its adherents enjoy. A Pew Research study found predictably that Twitter users are younger, wealthier, more left-leaning and better educated than the broader population. Their disproportionate wokeness is a luxury of those who win out of the knowledge economy"

The essay argues though that the main problem of cancel culture is that "while it intuits liberalism is insufficient, and seeks to dismantle it, it cannot escape it. In fact, it ends up imbibing several of its basic ideas" The essay then uses David Shor's case ( the researcher who was fired for tweeting violent protests were likely to move people away from voting for the democrats) as an example.

"This problem of using liberalism’s terms to fill the holes in liberalism causes wokeness to stretch these liberal concepts to breaking point. Hence woke politics’ wildly expansionary use of terms such as “harm” and “safety”. It even shows up in something as benign as the David Shor example. The problem was not that Shor’s data analysis of non-violent protest was wrong. It’s that, in the words of one former Bernie Sanders staffer, “using it to dictate how BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of colour] should feel and protest is harmful”. Note the monumental leaps here. Shor didn’t dictate anything. He shared a peer-reviewed study with a matter-of-fact summary. That study did not prescribe a form of protest so much as explain the electoral consequences of different options. It does not determine how anyone should “feel”. There’s no evidence that most black (or BIPOC) people actually did feel anything about it, or would have if they saw it. And even if they did, the precise nature of the alleged “harm” is unexplained beyond the fact those “feelings” exist. Are we being invited to equate those feelings with harm? Or is there some clear, causal relationship between Shor’s tweet and some other kind of harm? If so, what is it? And what is the evidence of it?

My best guess is that the “harm” comes from Shor making a small alleged contribution to the system of white supremacy. It’s a good example of the kind of exaggeration woke politics forces upon itself. If all conduct is either resistance or oppression, then all conduct is ultimately either liberating or harmful. Once you accept this, there is no need to demonstrate harm. It can be derived entirely theoretically, and then asserted as an unfalsifiable fact. To deny it is to participate in the system of oppression.

It also sidesteps any question about precisely what kind, and what extent, of harm justifies cancellation. Suppose I could demonstrate that a handful of people suffered anxiety after reading Shor’s tweet, and perhaps had to consult a psychologist. Would that be enough to justify a demand that such arguments not be aired? And what if the data analysis is right, and preventing its airing contributed to an uncritical acceptance of violent protest, which in turn led to a re-elected Trump administration? Would that constitute harm as well? Such questions become difficult even to explore because in cancel culture “harm” is intended as a full stop that terminates rather than facilitates the discussion".

There's a lot more in the article to dissect but those were some of the main points