It is undoubtedly cancel culture. But some people will deny it because they benefit from it and/or agree with it. It is a trend that must be stopped before we irreparably damage the free movement of ideas that has enabled America and the rest of the world to flourish. If you cannot speak against the orthodoxy without fear of being forced into poverty, then the orthodoxy will grow unchallenged into a monster that eats even the people who helped create it.
I’m in support of a movement for truly free speech. If we were to achieve that, it would be the first time in modern history where that would be the case.
Those people are not speaking - they are doxxing and actively harrassing employers in order to get the wrongthinkers fired. I am sure you know the difference between speech and cancel culture.
For the most part, cancel culture has been applied to writing letters criticizing people, boycotting people/companies, and other actions consistent with 'speech'.
Of course outright harassment and doxing should be dealt with harshly.
Then it seems we are in agreement. I would guess the one gray area where we do not definitely agree is to what extent deplatforming should be a thing. I am of the view that deplatforming campaigns are a manifestation of cancel culture. What do you think?
I think deplatforming is a mistake in most cases, it make an "US vs THEM", David vs Goliath narrative that people love to follow and identify with. It make people think their opinions are more transgressive and more interesting that they really are.
But this deplatforming and this "cancel culture" is only a manifestation of what millenials heard for years: if you want change, vote with your wallet. Well, we now are able to. I'm not agreeing with everything, but boycott is the only power my generation have right now, and nobody can prevent this. Twitter and the social network allow people to explain why they're boycotting this or that, that's all.
> But this deplatforming and this "cancel culture" is only a manifestation of what millenials heard for years: if you want change, vote with your wallet. Well, we now are able to. I'm not agreeing with everything, but boycott is the only power my generation have right now, and nobody can prevent this. Twitter and the social network allow people to explain why they're boycotting this or that, that's all.
This is a very good explanation of a fair bit of it and if not a lightbulb moment then at least a "wipe the dust of the windshield moment" for me I think.
One of those comments that makes me come back to HN even if I seem to be on the other side from you politically.
Couldn't you make exactly the same argument about trying to get someone killed? Getting someone fired isn't getting them killed, of course, but it's still significant harm. It is the sort of thing that not long ago would have been considered outrageous harassment and mob behavior. It's astonishing how much the goalposts have moved, and how people are pretending or not noticing that this is a major shift in standards.
Speech always has consequences (that's rather the point of both speech in general, and the entire concept of free speech in particular: if it had no consequences, there’d be no reason to protect it), and is always a subset of action. Assembly is inseparable from speech which is why, lest the flimsy excuse that a thing is one rather than the other be used to justify a ban, it's wrapped up along with all the other speech-equivalent expressive rights in the first amendment.
Some speech is not protected, some speech is judged harshly, all along spectrums. Speech doesn't exist in a vacuum and may be criminal, inorderly, trollish, moderated away, unheard, misinterpreted, untruthful, etc. If there are better approaches, people should be steered in better directions. Sometimes a jolt is needed, but continued bullying is usually on the bully. A bully may also be bullied, but the outcome is rarely educational since some people don't bother to care. Besides, bullying works against socializing.
Just action need to follow some due process. Mob rule becomes medieval. Even because modern technology platforms enable despicable behaviour, which speech is part of, does not necessarily protect because of free speech. Freedoms to hurt others need be limited.
When people lose interest in the whole, only to fancy duality, there's no dialogue happening, only escalation.
Speech doesn't imply much consequence beyond enlightenment, when people learn to listen and appreciate diversity.
Speech seems worthless compared to right action. Principles and freedoms mean nothing in isolation.
> Some speech is not protected, some speech is judged harshly, all along spectrum
The claim I was addressing from upthread is not “these people are not engaging in goodspeak” but “these people are not speaking”, so as true as that may be it is not relevant to the discussion.
Seems like you’re making a pointless semantic debate. “Speech” in an ethical philosophical context is “expressing ideas”. Threats are not this because the intent is to intimidate or coerce somebody. To your point, there is a definition of the word “speech” that means something like “any communication at all”, but of course that’s what precisely no one is talking about in a debate about free speech.
Threats aren’t free speech, however veiled. If the speaker is intending to say “I hope this person gets fired”, that’s free speech. If the meaning is “If you continue to employ this person, I’ll take my business elsewhere”, that’s a threat. But both make you an awful person, so steer clear and you’ll be fine.
First, we were discussing speech not some limited subcategory speech.
Second, threats of unlawful violence are not free speech. Threats not to engage in economic transactions that one is under no obligation to engage in in the first place absolutely are free speech.
> Those people are not speaking - they are doxxing and actively harrassing employers in order to get the wrongthinkers fired.
This is not “speech”, this is harassment and coercion.
> Second, threats of unlawful violence are not free speech. Threats not to engage in economic transactions that one is under no obligation to engage in in the first place absolutely are free speech.
Threats are never free speech. The law might not prohibit it or it might simply not prosecute it, but it’s never free speech. It’s the same thing as telling someone she must sleep with you if you are to do business with her—it’s quid pro quo harassment, it’s morally repugnant, and it’s most definitely not free speech.
Please stop posting like this to HN, please don't do tit-for-tat spats, and please don't use the site for ideological battle. This site is for curious conversation. These things are not that, and in fact are destructive of it.
Please stop posting like this to HN, please don't do tit-for-tat spats, and please don't use the site for ideological battle. This site is for curious conversation. These things are not that, and in fact are destructive of it.
Sure you can - it does not work through speech but through actions.
Either it's a big corp that fires the victim to appear more woke or it's a small business that is forced to fire through review bombing. It's only possible because victims cannot sue even though both, and especially the latter, seem like a tort. If I were an entrepreneur I'd make a fund to litigate both kinds of cases. Get money from the big corps, take loss on the review bombers, make the country better for everyone.
Professionals call it 'negative PR', 'slander', 'sabotage', and other such words. Why can't we have 'disagreement culture' or 'better-alternatives suggestionism' instead?
That is not the opposite. That is just the beginnings of what I said - the monster eating the very people who helped create it. Both left and right need to agree that hitting working individuals in the pocketbook over political disagreement is not okay, even if someone says something that is "offensive" to someone else. Obviously there are lines that have to be drawn in the work
place, but the intellectuals signing the Harper letter weren't concerned by non-toxic workplaces. They were talking about something much worse that we can all agree is vile and dangerous.
A lot of the 'canceling' is legitimate expressions of speech, even if you disagree with that expression of speech!
Consider a lot of what gets classified as cancel culture is:
1. Boycotts - OK we should be forced to purchase things (like Goya, or ads on Tucker Carlson's show) that don't share our values? No, that's crazy...
2. Organizational politics - The Pinker thing[1], and the issue with the Poetry society, has more to do with the internals of some organization. Should we restrict those advocating for changes to organizations they belong to?
3. Firing - Either organizations are able to have 'speech' or they're not... And without cultural norms, we're not going to from on high create top-down standards around which values are 'correct' or not.
I have yet to see a PoV neutral definition of 'cancel culture' that doesn't devolve to litigating whether the issues for the canceling are legit or not.
While I agree with all this, I think a lot of the frustration around "cancel culture" is a general frustration about the politicization of everything. Without denying the reality that much of this is just privileged people living in blissful ignorance of an underlying unjust world, we live in a time of unprecedented change, where the rules of society are different on a weekly basis, and there is an emotional / mental health toll to people undergoing rapid change at speed and accidentally making political stands before breakfast.
And there seems to be nobody around to help society navigate these transitions. Quite the contrary, many leaders claim a mandate to sew division, basically. Worse, they may be right: outrage seems like a winning strategy to gather and keep power in a human society. And even those seeking justice have no choice but to seize the customary tools of modern politics in order to accomplish their goals, because their opponents will not bring knives to a gun fight.
I think "cancel culture" cannot be separated from the broader context of the rise of outrage as an efficient source of political capital, both as it relates to the outrage at some person for doing X, and then the outrage against the first outrage for X having some consequences. The details of "what it means" to have consequences (or as you say, "should we be forced to buy things") are I fear a kind of nuance that may be out of date in our political discourse.
You are missing the external and unhinged nature of 'cancel culture'.-
What if I decide to buy Goya black beans, and someone takes a picture of me at the grocery store, and brands me as a affiliate of some certain political mindset of Twitter because of it... When in reality, I bought these beans because I just wanted to eat beans?
It's perfectly reasonable for an employer to fire someone for something they said. But what if they fired them solely due to public outcry; the pressure from people who aren't affiliated with their company at all, never bought any of their products before, etc.
Just because it is speech, doesn't mean it is right.
As people like to say, our speech does have consequences. We should be aware of what those consequences are.
Take for example, the young man who was fired because he was cracking his knuckles. No one did anything illegal, and yet an injustice was performed.
The person who took the photo claimed they didn't want the guy did, yet what did they expect? what was the point of posting the photo? Even if the young man was flashing the WP sign, so what? If he hasn't done anything else that was heinous, there is no need to speak up.
We should be encouraging speech, not discoyraging it.
"I may dislike what you have to say, but I will fight for your right to say it." Not "I dislike what you have to say, so I will do everything in my power to shut you up "
It goes both ways. People have just as much right to post "cancel" posts as they do to post the kinds of posts that get "cancelled".
Society chooses how to react. No one is losing their job because they got caught calling someone out for being racist or sexist. If people actually go too far, or lie about their allegations, they're at just as much risk of having the tide turn against them. This is already built into the system.
> No one is losing their job because they got caught calling someone out for being racist or sexist.
A bit on the side:
Maybe it would help a good deal if people started losing their jobs for clearly false allegations and for not protecting people they are responsible for?
Like:
- if we conservatives got together to pressure whoever employees that person who posted the picture of the Mexican truck driver with his hand out the window and made that persons life a mess: after all it was clearly wrong as admitted by that person him/herself.
- next up: shaming the company who fired him over cracking his knuckles until they fire whoever was responsible for this.
After all we white males are the powerful privileged ones arent we?
Obviously (hopefully) I don't want this, I only want to get people on both sides thinking.
> Maybe it would help a good deal if people started losing their jobs for clearly false allegations and for not protecting people they are responsible for?
I totally agree (with at least this part) and mentioned that in my post.
If someone sent my boss a picture of me buying Chik-Fil-A and he asked if I was supporting anti-gay companies I'd say no I just like the taste of Chik-Fil-A. If people are actually getting fired for things like that, or buying Goya beans, or having something untrue claimed, I would certainly hope most bosses would ask the person about it before indiscriminately firing them. In some cases that may not be happening, but I would argue that anywhere firing people for such small things was probably looking to fire that person anyway (to say nothing about the "not small" things like the guy screaming obscenities at the asian family a few days ago, or all of these people going crazy about having to wear masks). That's why you don't see most people getting fired.
The flaw in the "Firing" argument is that the speech is a call to action, namely to fire someone. At that point, it becomes something like a threat, which is not protected speech. While the threat is not directly aimed at the individual, law does recognize that interference in the business relationship between two parties can be a wrong, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
Well so is a lot of stuff being said by the folks being “cancelled”! I don’t really understand the anti-cancellers perspective, to be honest. They want people to listen silently to their “free speech” and not be able to speak in return? It’s so blatantly hypocritical that it’s kind of funny
> I don’t really understand the anti cancellers perspective, to be honest.
It's about mobbing onto someone online to shame him or her. Large numbers of people pile on top of someone causing great psychological harm. Shaming doesn't work, and especially not at this level. It might work when used in limited fashion to educate children, but public shaming has been abandoned by history as a bad practice.
It's called self-restraint. Just because someone gave me a stick ("social" media), doesn't justify beating people up with it before trying better approaches first.
I agree! High-profile transphobes and “scientific” racists should absolutely exercise self-restraint and avoid using their social media presence as a stick with which to beat minorities.
> 1. Boycotts - OK we should be forced to purchase things (like Goya, or ads on Tucker Carlson's show) that don't share our values? No, that's crazy...
No you should not be forced to purchase anything, but you should not use your economic power to punish speech.
> 2. Organizational politics - The Pinker thing[1], and the issue with the Poetry society, has more to do with the internals of some organization. Should we restrict those advocating for changes to organizations they belong to?
Organizations should serve their purpose, rather then being used to punish dissenting voices.
> 3. Firing - Either organizations are able to have 'speech' or they're not... And without cultural norms, we're not going to from on high create top-down standards around which values are 'correct' or not.
Firing people is speech now? There are substantial restrictions on firing people, most importantly civil rights law. I guess this is also an attack on freedom of speech in your view?
> It [the woke revolution] spends most of its time constructing an impenetrable vocabulary of oppression and seething at the lumpen proles who either don’t get it or don’t like it.
Man, does this resonate. The woke message is just uninspiring and the word play and circular reasoning are just tedious. I've never met a philosophy that depended so strongly on appropriating existing, morally-weighty words.
Taibibi is good at resonating when you are predisposed to agree with him. Mostly because he is good at finding funny sounding insulting but still right below line sentence.
He is good at emotional level, but less good with actual rational arguing.
The logical fallacies with many modern examples of "cancelling" have already been pointed out far and wide. Not every bit of writing needs to be a statistical analysis (and considering the value of quantitative data is overrated, I'm inclined to agree that a well-written passioned analysis is just as welcome).
Also, lol at the very same circular reasoning the above mentioned whereby agreeing with his ideas is wrong because the people his ideas attract are already wrong.
Funny thing, I did not said whether he is wrong or right. I said what literally all his articles are, regardless of whether he is wrong or right.
The only one that I think he really really should not write was one about civility and discourse.
And I am not asking for statistical analysis either. All I am saying is he resonates with those who agree with him, because his whole thing is insulting common ennemy while being funny.
> All I am saying is he resonates with those who agree with him, because his whole thing is insulting common ennemy while being funny.
I think this is a fair point. I’ve noticed this myself as someone who agrees with him. He’s clearly a talented writer; I wish he would wed that talent with reasoned critique instead of being a mere cathartic voice. The primacy of catharsis is a distinguishing feature of cancel culture and moderates getting their own cathartic voices risks creating a moderate counter-mob. Moderates’ strength is reason and tolerance and we should stick with those virtues even if it demands emotional strength and moral courage.
> Taibibi is good at resonating when you are predisposed to agree with him.
That's what "resonates" means. I agree though that he's putting words to collective frustrations and not arguing in a persuasive form. I wish he did more of the latter, but nevertheless, this excerpt resonated for me.
The only evidence I need to see that what the author refers to is very much a serious concern for everyone is that everytime I refresh this comment section another comment agreeing with the author disappears. I used to defend the folks that participated in the doxxing and very real harassment of people they didn't agree with as misguided, but I've become convinced it's nothing more than malicious at this point. Such a grand scale of people can't lack that much self awareness.
Unless I'm mistaken about how this site works, downvotes shouldn't completely delete comments, just fade them. Who is stepping in and removing them entirely without a "[deleted]" marker displaying?
I certainly felt like I got a couple words of meaning at most out of those paragraphs. Lots of volume and platitude as you say... I wasn't getting much beyond that... but then it asked me for $5.
The meat of this article is its last paragraph or two, and particularly in the observation that modern "woke" culture is humorless and incapable of parsing sarcasm. I disagree however that this is peculiar to "woke" culture. Literalism and humorlessness are everywhere.
We are living in a profoundly conservative era whose deep conservatism is masked by the triumph of certain select socially liberal causes such as partial drug decriminalization and LGBT rights. IMHO those few specific victories are on the inertia of a previous era.
I am referring to the 60s through the 90s, the era that created modern rock and roll, techno, hip hop, burning man, and rave culture, some of which is now decidedly retro. Very little culture of this sort -- or of any sort really -- is being created today. Ours is an era of sterility.
You can really see this in how the "alt-right" was able to look hip and edgy with nothing more than shitty memes and ideas like "alternate reality gaming" appropriated from old 90s issues of Mondo 2000. Everything else is so damn sterile and dull that the sorts of aesthetically tone deaf CHUDs that hang out on 4chan /pol could sort of look cool. It doesn't take much color to grab attention in a monochromatic world.
I'm not really that pessimistic. This stuff is very cyclic and the pendulum will swing yet again. I'm thinking COVID marks the end of the post-9/11 era and things will start getting interesting again in the mid-2020s. COVID has also crashed the Trump train, which is significant.
Dig deeper, there are still excellent music and works being published. Maybe they are hard to find because they are flooded with junk, commercial stuff and misinformation, but they exist and grow faster than in the past.
> The act of canceling, also referred to as cancel culture (a variant on the term "callout culture"), describes a form of boycott in which an individual (usually a celebrity) who has acted or spoken in a questionable or controversial manner is boycotted. [1]
I don't this definition is accurate Often times the victim is not a celebrity. And it isn't a "boycott" a simple boycott would be fine. But what happens is people go after the victim's job. Trying to get them fired, kicked out of school, removed from the board, their talk canceled, etc.
Usually I hear this term in context to attempts to doxx or have someone fired, and while the cancellation of celebrities garners more press, it's due to the notoriety of the victim--probably many more non-celebrities are canceled (and usually with worse consequences unless good and decent people intervene). It's the climate of fear, not the criticism, that people take issue with (we're not talking about "criticism culture" after all).
Yeah, but the “climate of fear” arises only because powerful people with prominent platforms are afraid of being criticized. And criticism is protected speech.
Pardon my ignorance but what is the difference between "witch hunt" and "cancel culture?" and do people who are part of "cancel culture" refer to their own actions as such?
2. The ability to grant oneself absolution by implicating others
The implied result is that since there isn't really any wrongful act, the only way to avoid the hunt is to accuse others. And in this way the "investigators" can go after whomever they want.
There's also an implied (3) The investigation is done by someone with traditional authority. The connotation of a witch hunt is therefore a fake investigation for solely political purposes. That is used to implicate more political enemies.
So cancel culture: If I had to, I'd describe this as a movement (or a collection of them) that tries to pressure powerful entities to take acts they deem to be moral by through social and economic pressure. That's really it.
To people who disagree with the moral position, there can be similarities to (1), but (2) certainly isn't present, and the people pressuring for accountability/action/whatever aren't usually traditional authority figures. In fact individual movements may be entirely leaderless and decentralized (so no 3).
Since moral and political lines are correlated, there can also be an appearance of similarity to the politicalized investigation aspect, but beyond the most surface level similarities, there isn't much in common.
I've noticed that discussions about this issue never lead anywhere, and that seems almost by design (don't know if that's ironic or appropriate).
The reason is that apologists of cancel culture are talking about "influential people/powerful corporations being boycotted/yelled at in twitter". Meanwhile, detractors are talking about "normal people without any kind of power or influence being harassed and/or losing their livelihoods because they cracked their knuckles".
So both sides are talking about fundamentally different things, and because of this, discussion on this matter is almost always a lot of people yelling past each other.
This deplatforming and this "cancel culture" is only a manifestation of what millenials heard for years: if you want change, vote with your wallet. Well, we now are able to. I'm not agreeing with everything, but boycott is the only power my generation have right now, and nobody can prevent this.
Twitter and the social network allowed people to have reach to explain why they're boycotting this or that, share their outrage, sometime about really dumb things, but still with their own reasons.
Boycotting has been proposed in previous generations.
In Martin Luther King's last speech before he was cancelled, he suggested boycotting businesses until such time as they were willing to treat all God's children fairly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23414101 "All we say to America is to be true to what you said on paper."
It seems to me that the only powers we have are the ballot box, our wallets, and bullets. And in the USA, I'm not so sure about the former, what with all the corruption.
Want to see real change? General strike. Shut it all down and watch the powers freak out.
I generally favor free expression. I'd rather an ugly, obnoxious and pernicious idea be expressed - so I can or others can be free to dismantle it in the arena of ideas. Obviously there are tremendous shades of nuance here. Free Speech does not mean free speech on private platforms. Still, if most or all major platforms constrain what can be expressed, what we end up with is a functional chilling of speech.
Part of what makes the current debate over cancel culture so difficult is that most of us, even those who love free expression, would not be comfortable with giving space to certain assertions even in places that are meant for intellectual contention. As much as I believe a University should be a space where intellectual debate is welcomed, I don't think any University should give a platform to, say, a holocaust denier. We all draw the line somewhere. Permuting where that line gets drawn is very, very difficult. Especially because morality evolves, and our convictions about certain things are constantly changing the light of new evidence, new understandings, especially re: traditionally disenfranchised peoples.
The real danger of "cancel culture" is rhetorical, I think. People need to be persuaded of an idea to really accept it. They cannot be hectored into acceptance. You can shove them out of platforms, but they will hold their beliefs, and externalize them at the ballot-box, or elsewhere. Moral development takes time, and it takes suasion.
There's a lot more to unpack here. A part of me wonders if cancel culture is just another expression of a kind of acrimoniousness that has always accompanied political life. Or maybe not. I don't have all the answers. But on balance, I still believe in favoring a space for debate.
> most of us, even those who love free expression, would not be comfortable with giving space to certain assertions even in places that are meant for intellectual contention
I think that's the problem. Any condition beyond being not insulting and not threatening leaves a place to drive in a wedge by those opposed to free speech. They say, if you won't let this Nazi speak, you shouldn't let this person I associate with Nazi-ism speak.
Instead we should let the Nazi speak. And the pedophile, human extinction advocate, anti-vaxxer, etc. We don't have to listen, but neither should we punch them, rhetorically or otherwise, as long as they follow some minimal content neutral standard of decorum.
there's currently out on the internet a letter that basically says "cancel culture doesn't exist". it's signed by some ~160 people, mostly from left-wing backgrounds (i don't know all of them to say they are all from left-wing backgrounds).
a lot of those signatures are just "Unsigned, <affiliation>". the reasoning, according to the letter, is:
>Many signatories on our list noted their institutional affiliation but not their name, fearful of professional retaliation. It is a sad fact, and in part why we wrote the letter.
if you can't sign something without putting your name on it, because you fear you're going to get persecuted and fired... isn't that cancel culture?
I appreciate so many of you are willing to crusade for free speech. But the reality is that platforming isn't free, and the process of deciding who gets platforms is political. The first amendment doesn't govern this process, nor can it—no one can reasonably consume every piece of intellectual content, from every angle, and process it.
My point is, cancel culture definitely exists. There has always been, and always will be, political processes for selecting views we consider acceptable discourse. Arguments against cancel culture that don't grapple with this reality are missing the point. Canceling isn't about using the power of the state to crack down on free speech. It's about deciding who gets access to a scarce resource: their platform.
The way this get decided is unavoidably political, since it's about who wields power.
A good example is this website. While most posts are technical, Hacker News hosts a significant amount of discussion regarding social issues. If you read this site using hckrnews.com, which preserves posts flagged off the front page, it's easy to notice that there are political trends in how moderators and users select what posts get prominence. This post, which espouses a more centrist perspective on cancel culture, was briefly flagged, then restored. Many, many other posts espousing more progressive views are systematically downvoted or flagged (search for DEAD on hckrnews.com), many of which are far longer and more carefully developed than Taibbi's piece. Regardless of how you feel about confederate statues, I think it's hard to consider that this 538 post (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate-statues/) isn't comparable to this post in terms of quality, sophistication, and merit to be on the front page of HN.
For those of you who agree with Taibbi... do you think those posts aren't "canceled"?
If you think this example is contrived, because the nature of this cancellation doesn't involve a visible mob, that's because of power differences.
The nature of "cancellation" against minorities looks different. Mob justice isn't necessary when people in power can just fire you. And progressives are fired or otherwise censored for advocating for inclusion, against police violence, for progressive social policy all the time. You don't see mob justice in these cases because this kind of canceling is often enforced by institutions. A mob isn't necessary. The effect is the same: people are regularly censored and excluded from mainstream prominence because their views are considered unacceptable.
The reason this latest wave of (attempted) cancellations (nyt editorial, jk rowling, adam rapaport, countless people resulting from #metoo etc) have garnered attention is twofold:
1. They require popular support. Lots of people support holding rapaport, the founder of crossfit, Tucker Carlson, etc to account. No institution wanted to punish these people, so a popular movement formed.
2. They cancel views formerly considered to be within acceptable bounds. Anti-trans speech, implicitly discriminatory pay practices, military crackdowns on protestors, even if they weren't popular, are believed by many to be "newspaper publishable". It's shocking to people like Taibbi that people who share their views can get fired and singled out on social media—things that happen to people with progressive views on a regular basis.
3. Oftentimes, the people making the speech are civil and ostensibly in good faith, even if their views are onerous.
To understand cancel culture, you need to define cancellation as "people whose views are censored", and you need to look at people who espouse progressive views. That "cancel culture" is prominent today means that our definition of acceptability is changing, that powerful people require mobs to be held accountable, and that we increasingly believe that how you present the argument (good intent, good faith etc) is less important than what you present.
Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that cancellations are sometimes off the mark. Mob justice is often unfair and harmful. It is often disproportionate (the shor incident is the best example I can think of). Holding people accountable for hate speech or discriminatory practices should be the job of institutions. But they're not doing the job—this is what progressives are protesting.
If you want to stop mob culture, change institutions to fairly enforce the injustices that the mob is necessary to enforce today.
It's highly relevant to Tech, culture and the current Zeitgeist.
If you follow the current controversy around tech thought leaders like Robert C. Martin aka Uncle Bob, you can't ignore the current debate, no matter which position you take.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
...
Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
I’m not a high profile writer, so no whines from my side.
But I don’t like Cancel Culture. I don’t like mob justice, I don’t like it being ok for people to express outrage and dismissal of other people’s opinions, even controversial ones, when they are respectfully posed.
To me, key to polite debate is to accept a very wide range of opinions, so long as they are phrased with respect for other people, in particular those who disagree. This is precisely what is missing when you “cancel” someone. At best, it is counterproductive, at worst, actually damaging to societal debate.
People are mad because their livelihoods are being ruined with drive-by character attacks from people whose sole purpose is tilling the data landscape for any scrap they can latch onto to accuse a person of a heinous moral crime. It's as simple as going out and branding someone with the R-word without consequence; even if you're just making shit up you stand to lose nothing whereas even the label towards a person can destroy a person's life. You don't have to demonstrate any sort of credibility or saintly behavior; just toss an oppression monicker at someone and stand back while the mob handles the rest for you.
I opine that "accountability culture" is becoming quite hyperthrophied, and support my opinion with an excerpt from Taibbi`s other article:
"A bizarre echo of North Korea’s “three generations of punishment” doctrine could be seen in the boycotts of Holy Land grocery, a well-known hummus maker in Minneapolis. In recent weeks it’s been abandoned by clients and seen its lease pulled because of racist tweets made by the CEO’s 14 year-old daughter eight years ago."
I agree - unfortunately there is enormously vocal, though predictable, pressure from elements of the opposite extreme to throw the baby out with the bathwater. (I say "extreme", but both extremes seem to account for quite a large share of expressions...)
Honest question: what is the 'baby' in this metaphor? What in your view is the redeeming quality of cancel culture? The idea that certain beliefs are beyond the pale and shouldn't be discussed? How do you get people to agree with you that there should be prohibited beliefs without actually discussing them openly? Presumably we can agree that creating a climate of fear is bad (and that it only drives those views underground where they proliferate unchecked)?
That's unfortunate. Of all the conspiracy one-liners, this is one of the least dramatic, and most often true (whether due to insight or broken-clock style).
The problem is that it's such a defeatist attitude. How are we expected to fix anything if "the system" is "rigged"? If I put my conspiracy theory hat on, I would say that those in power would love it if people kept speaking of things really abstractly like that, because it guarantees nobody would actually do anything about it.
> Accountability culture. The argument that "these people came up during the 60's! they're hip!" holds zero sway with me.
I don't totally disagree. My sympathies are generally stronger with those on the "left" of this issue than their detractors, and "came up during the 60s" doesn't mean a lot to me either.
I do have to ask though: what real substantive victory is being won here?
Is taking Rosanne off the air for tweeting some asinine racist comment actually helping anyone from a marginalized community earn better wages or gain more social acceptance? Or is it an empty symbolic victory whose only real effect is to serve as an opiate for the marginalized and a rallying cry for the forces of political reaction?
From where I'm sitting here on the sidelines the impression I get is that these "cancels" do more to inflame reactionary forces in society than they do to improve things for anyone marginalized.
Marginalizing racism and misogyny won't make it go away. It will just submerge it and make it stealthier and harder to recognize and directly address. Instead of cancelling those who say such things, engage them in debate. Make them look like fools instead of martyrs.
>Instead of cancelling those who say such things, engage them in debate. Make them look like fools instead of martyrs.
I used to believe this was correct 100% of the time, but I think it's been demonstrated over the past ~5-10 years that it's possible for a brand of these folks to emerge that practically thrives on looking like fools, in a twisted sort of underdog way that goes hand-in-hand with the culture of trolling.
... which was a fad that appears to be running its course.
It's too early to call it decisively but it really seems like Pepe the Frog was a one hit wonder and that this isn't going to work nearly as well a second time around. That movement has committed the cardinal sin of defining itself and letting itself be identified with concrete ideas, things, and personalities.
I watched that wave build in the early 20-teens, crest around 2016, and recede. I never went for it and always saw it as mindless and ugly, but I have to admit it did have a certain shimmer of novelty to it. That's gone now. I can recognize 4chan /pol instantly now, and since it has no actual substance the fact that it can be recognized at all renders it inherently banal and un-interesting.
A huge fraction of the popular wing of that meme-complex has also been pulled into the absurd tar pit of the Qanon cult, a brain virus from which I doubt they will recover. They're in the process of becoming right-wing new-agers, which is just hilarious.
Between the never-showered CHUD odor of 4chan /pol and the asinine LARP that is Q, it's now possible to instantly recognize and write off virtually anything even tangentially connected to the meme-complex that helped meme Trump into office. That effectively cleanses the cultural fringe, making way for something genuinely new.
Meta: The forces of enlightenment had to learn how to debate and engage in discourse in the eras of print, radio, and television. Now we have to do it in the era of social media. Canceling didn't even work back then. It definitely won't work now that anyone with a credit card can stand up an alternative forum.
I wish Freud was alive today. I can't help but think that the hysterics manifested in mainstream or social media are not actually real, that people wouldn't make such illogical steps if they were alone in an island. Instead they seem to be reactions , rooted in something deeper somewhere that's causing mass hysterias and delusions. It does manifest in the shifting ways of life too, the lack of sex, the lack of humor and the limited ambition shown by the 1-2 latest generations.
I do love Taibbi's writing, even though i think he spends too much time criticising things that soon won't matter
Freud was wrong with almost everything he said. He had merit from a philosophical point of view, he coined terms extremely well, but he is definitely not a scientific, was dangerous for his patients and his theories are still dangerous (your child is an autist because you, poor mother, did not pay enough attention to him! and other rubbish about children rape fantasy and other). Lacan, at least, was not as dangerous (but still a pseudoscientific).
Psychoanalysis is still very much a pseudoscience and is based on even less that the new psychological trend with microexpression and all that jazz.
> limited ambition shown by the 1-2 latest generations
If this is really a thing, then the generation prior would have shown more entrepreneurship, is this the case in the US? It is really to opposite in Europe anyway, so this should be wrong.
