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I genuinely wonder what cancel culture is going to look like in the next 5-10 years and beyond. Just about everyone I speak to about the subject agrees that can

I genuinely wonder what cancel culture is going to look like in the next 5-10 years and beyond. Just about everyone I speak to about the subject agrees that cancel culture is bad but very few people seem willing to confront it. I sense that people hope the rest of society will come to its senses and we all stop being so judgemental. But as much as I loathe cancel culture and it's chilling effects on the free exchange of ideas, I can't help but admit that it seems to work. From a detached and objective standpoint, an ideology that utilizes cancel culture is really good at stamping out opposition. You are free to think and believe whatever you want in private and then you self-censor in public out of fear. It takes a certain critical mass of people to affect change and cancel culture excels at keeping individuals from speaking out because the consequences have the potential to ruin your life. So all that being said, I genuinely wonder if cancel culture is here to stay, because the next ideology to come along will also realize how powerful of a tool it is.

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runawaybottle 6y ago
Cancel culture scared the ever living shit out of everyone, even everyday people. Whether you like it or not, it got every male in the workplace to not even breathe in the direction of women you work with. The movement permeated through normal life fast. It was extremely efficient in bringing forth the necessary changes. I have no problem with using the chainsaw as needed, but we need to careful about when we use it. Can’t use it for everythig.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  I don't think the "fear of women" thing is real. At least it isn't real in SF where I've worked for the last eight years.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    It's a real thing among the group of guys who exhibit creepy/abusive behavior towards women. They used to be able to get away with it, now they realize they may not be able to anymore. They aren't so much afraid of women, as they are afraid of consequences for their actions.
    - fl0wenol 6y ago
      This, this, this a million times. Anyone you hear complaining about it is the very kind of person who needed to be on notice in the first place.
  - brrristlecone 6y ago
    Quick anecdote under a throwaway, white male for what its worth. New hire, been working a few months at a job out of college. I was on a business trip to another state with some people not on my immediate team. There were like four or five people going in total and I didn't have a hotel room yet, so my supervisor asked me to reach out to some of the others going and see what they were doing. I picked a number from the list at random and called. A woman a good bit older than me answered the phone and I explained the situation. She told me she had gotten a four bedroom house on AirBnB close to the location we were going. Assuming that she had booked the house so we could all stay together, I asked if there was a room left for me. She immediately became very stern and told me that she would never "room alone with a younger man" and that my request was "extremely inappropriate". Sputtering apologies I told her I thought she had gotten the house for everyone from the company going on the trip and she said no, it was just for her. She nastily asked who my supervisor was and I told her the name. Confused as hell I hung up the phone and got a room at a hotel nearby. My immediate first thought was oh fuck, I'm going to be getting a call from HR about sexual harassment, it's all over, fired before I even really started. When we actually got to the client location this woman acted very creepy. She made several comments about how if she was 'ten years younger' this would be a 'memorable trip' while eyeing me up. She asked for my personal cell number. She even invited me to dinner, just the two of us. After that I stopped responding to her texts, cold shouldered her hard in person, and would only send very cordial, short emails to her in response. Some months after she left the project and I haven't talked to her since. After she left I told some other male coworkers about what happened and everyone agreed I was a hair's width away from some sort of sexual harassment case, and also agreed that had it come to that, corporate would have sided with her and I could have been fired for a simple mistake. I now walk on pins and needles around women that I work with, unless I know them well. TL;DR: Accidents happen, women can be creeps, and at least where I work young men are definitely worried about being accused of sexual harassment. I don't think this is a typical case but it does happen.
  - 3np 6y ago
    Honestly, I have it, realized over the years I’ve had it since a teenager and I don’t like it. Subconsciously I keep females at a bit more distance than men. I’m less likely to have personal conversations with them. I watch myself at social situations mostly interacting with other males and less with females. At a bar I’m more likely to end up chatting to guys than girls. I think there’s some subconscious fear of rejection mixed with an assumption that they’re not interested in talking to me, etc. And please don’t assume “oh he falls in the asshole crowd” as I see sibling comments already are. This is Northern Europe though. I’m pretty convinced it exists around you as well, it’s not necessarily visible even to those subject to it.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Cancel culture scared the ever living shit out of everyone, even everyday people. No, I don't think it did, to “everyone”. I think the degree of effect varies a lot, with the two main driving factors being (1) preexisting behavior, and (2) sources of information. > Whether you like it or not, it got every male in the workplace to not even breathe in the direction of women you work with. As an employee male, it's had about zero impact on how I relate to women, at work or in other contexts. I don't think I'm alone. > The movement permeated through normal life fast. I don't think this is any more true than when this complaint started to be made (with “political correctness” in place of “cancel culture”) in the 1980s, or when it saw another resurgence with “sexual harassment” (often with sneer quotes in writing, or just a plain sneer when spoken) in the 1990s. > It was extremely efficient in bringing forth the necessary changes. I think that very much remains to be seen, just as with the previous rounds.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  > Whether you like it or not, it got every male in the workplace to not even breathe in the direction of women you work with. Jesus Christ. No it didn't.
secondcoming 6y ago
The easiest way to confront cancel culture is to embrace it and try to get everything cancelled for the most minor of reasons. Hopefully, people will just get fed up and ignore it. The hardest part will be to stop companies bowing to the twitter mob for fear of bad publicity. Also, twitter needs to go. Humans can't handle it.
- Ekaros 6y ago
  I wonder if cancelling of really big companies start to happen. Make one misstep in advertising or messaging even in past and then have people attack your partners telling them to stop associating with your brand... I wonder if we ever properly reach that level. And if after a few big attempts social media companies would put stop to that...
  - secondcoming 6y ago
    It's starting [0]. Andrew Neil is a guy who DESTROYED Ben Shapiro btw [1] [0] https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/1395314/Andrew-Neil-GB-News-stop-funding-hate-piers-morgan-good-morning-britain-video-latest https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/1395314/Andrew-Ne... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E
  - phendrenad2 6y ago
    It happened to Goya.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      Did it though. How many people actually changed their shopping habits? Closest thing I've done to "canceling" anyone is switching from Autozone to the O'Reily 500yd down the street because the former donated to something I really don't like and the latter had better people working at that particular location anyway.
    - cozuya 6y ago
      Goya's CEO, this weekend, continued to push the lie that Trump was cheated out of the election which directly lead to the 1/6 attacks. Is boycotting Goya in response to that a bad thing? Should #boycottgoya hashtags on social media be deleted, for example?
threwawasy1228 6y ago
History is written by the winners, if Cancel Culture "wins" this will just be seen as a positive embyrotic formation of the dominant culture eradicating and stomping out evil in the world via a superior tactical formation (cancellation). If they win this will be seen as a very primitive form of mob-cancellation whereas in the future it will be cancellation via sophisticated "fair" social-credit scores. If the anti-cancel culture people win out culturally this will be seen as a historic dark age of self-censorship and a period of significantly degraded cultural expression. All history is relative.
- throwaway316943 6y ago
  Both sides could lose and this may only be dimly remembered by a distant culture.
sushisource 6y ago
Eh, I don't think it's here to stay. The political correctness pendulum swings back and forth every 10-20 years it seems to me, the last time it was on the watch-what-you-say spectrum felt like the mid-90s. That said, this feels way, way more extreme than it was then. I'm maybe less worried that it's here to stay than I am worried that the swings are getting more and more extreme
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  If you haven't seen it, check out the movie PCU. It's from 1994 or so but could be written today.. it couldn't be made though.
dahfizz 6y ago
> Just about everyone I speak to about the subject agrees that cancel culture is bad but very few people seem willing to confront it. I sense that people hope the rest of society will come to its senses and we all stop being so judgemental. I found this[1] article very interesting. Basically, only 2% of American adults generate over 80% of all tweets. "Cancel Culture" really is run by a few extremists who have a louder voice than everyone else. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...
- subsubzero 6y ago
  100% this, there is an extremely small, extremely vocal minority which gets amplified by social media and the media tends to report on this small group as its views are outrageous and generate outrage which in turn generate clicks and ad revenue for those outlets. Boring dependable/sensible government is not something that generates huge ad revenue.
- qqn 6y ago
  New slogan: "We are the 98%"
- offtop5 6y ago
  This 2% are the are same folks who will berate you on Reddit for saying you prefer partners with jobs. At the end of the day you can decide to argue with angry people or not. Another perk of being social media free
- jfengel 6y ago
  It's not even clear that those extremists have a louder voice in and of themselves. Nobody really listens to them except their opponents, who amplify them because they think it makes the entire progressive culture look bad.
- mc32 6y ago
  That may be so, but you don’t want to end up being an unwitting victim. One of the first instances early on on Twitter was that young marketing woman going to South Africa making a sarcastic anti-racism tweet before boarding only to learn after landing a brouhaha was brewing leading to her firing because the mob wanted to see it as racist.
jbob2000 6y ago
The problem with cancel culture is much the same as the problem I'm having with my QA department: We have a very small, rock solid front end. Most of our work is simply updating content. It's very straightforward work and you have to try very hard to introduce bugs. But when you staff a team of 6 people and tell them "it's your job to find something wrong with this website", they WILL find something wrong. I have a meeting this afternoon to explain to my Product manager why the content looks different on a mobile screen than it does on desktop because the QA team thinks line breaks are a bug ("the content document didn't break the line here, but the mobile view did, it's a bug"). When you empower people to take others down via subjective rules, then it's always a moving target. You can never reach a point where people are safe and happy. Check out the shuffles deck subreddit for some egregious examples of cancel culture gone wrong, https://www.reddit.com/r/Shuffles_Deck/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Shuffles_Deck/.
- fl0wenol 6y ago
  r/Shuffles_Deck more like r/thathappened and everyone clapped
IAmWorried 6y ago
I don't think it's limited to just what you say in public. Videos and audio recordings have a way of triggering human emotions that writing simply does not. To tell you the truth, I live in perpetual fear that some acquaintance could secretly record me saying some non-PC thing in private, and post it to Twitter to get me cancelled. I have deleted all social media to try to achieve "out of sight, out of mind" but I still feel unsafe. It's truly dystopian. I do feel as if I will go insane if this continues for another 10 years. I worked hard in school and sacrificed so that I could build myself a better life. Now, it seems like the entire thing hangs on a knife's edge. Quite frankly, I would not have tried to work hard for the last 15 years if I had known we were about to go full-blown 1984.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  Deep fakes are coming and with it a tsunami of outrageous videos that have no connection to reality. People will learn to distrust video evidence.
  - IAmWorried 6y ago
    I think this could extend to major public figures, but offers no recourse to the average joe who doesn't have 100 hours of talking footage online. Deepfakes require a lot of data to produce. Anyone who doesn't have this much data, you could reliably assume the content is real.
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      "Deepfakes require a lot of data to produce." I wonder if this is going to hold, especially as 4K video is becoming the norm.
      - belval 6y ago
        It won't, as with everything in DL the models are becoming much better at training on a large amount of data and fine-tuning on very little. I am pretty sure in 1-2 years we will have semi-convincing one-shot learning deepfakes models with 5-10 pictures you could get on the person's Facebook profile.
throw10123213 6y ago
Communism was also like this. People has the public persona, the party tasks, things they had to do and say. Then they went home and listened to Radio Free Europe and talked with select people what they really had on their mind or used coded language to transmit messages. What I hope this achieves is a parallel society and when it's big enough there will be some public battles.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  This. And you only spoke political jokes to really close friends.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    I was 11 when Communism fell in my country. By that time, kids knew perfectly well what to say in school, what to say among close friends and who of their colleagues was a snitch.
    - d1zzy 6y ago
      It was chilling when before the first day of school may parents made it very clear I shouldn't tell anyone (especially not teachers) that they were listening to Radio Free Europe.
- bopbeepboop 6y ago
  This is already happening. In 2016, that silenced group rallied together to elect a disruptive bully as retaliation against the establishment. In 2020, the establishment went full aggression and elected someone who seems to be impaired as a way to backdoor in someone wildly unpopular like Ms Harris. Over this same period, far left media has struggled to find commercial success, with bombs like Star Wars IX. By contrast, films like Joker set records — showing the problem isn’t a lack of demand. In 2021, that same people who elected Trump held a riot at the capitol after nine months of violent rioting by the Democrats. They targeted a point in the process where disruption would force coverage and discussion of their issues. This was called an “insurrection” by the same people who had worked to fund and support the violent rioting, such as Ms Harris or Ms Waters. The capitol is now being permanently fortified and has a permanent military presence. I would say on the communist scale, it’s already to the point they’re afraid — and we’re approaching civil war. They’re really setting the record on speed runnings.
subsubzero 6y ago
I think that in 50 years, maybe even 20 years cancel culture will be looked at a low point in the culture of the US and its adherents will try to disassociate themselves with it by saying thats how people thought/acted back then(popular sentiment). Similar to McCarthyism and its blacklists which ruined actors/directors, that moment is taught in history books as a backwards time, cancel culture will be similar.
- threwawasy1228 6y ago
  The fact that a cancellation I undergo now will be seen as unjust after I'm elderly does nothing for me.
- rossjudson 6y ago
  Yeah, it seems that way to me too. I think it will be viewed as a backwards and sad episode that cost...well, everyone...a great deal. It's 70% power, 20% revenge, and 10% justice. A cri-de-coeur of the bored. If it happened in an elementary school we'd call it bullying.
undefined1 6y ago
moral panics and the resulting witch-hunting/burning is feature of humanity that comes and goes. the mob always thinks it's a good idea in the moment, but history never looks fondly upon it.
Tarq0n 6y ago
Wasn't McCarthy-ism basically proto-cancel culture?
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Moreso super cancel culture. Same for Mao's struggle sessions. And so on forever. Cancel Culture is just a new name for an eternal phenomenon in every society.
  - deleted 6y ago
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colechristensen 6y ago
We're heading towards fascism. This time on two fronts, one horn from each end of the political spectrum. (perhaps a new name for it that isn't fascism because of the history of that word referring to a kind of right wing movement) It feels like we're inside the ramp-up of a major social, political, and national conflict, all the pieces are falling into place. Read The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig to get some ideas about how this kind of thing happened in the early 20th century in Europe and imagine how it might be happening again. Ideology is on the rise and the willingness of people to support their cause with violence is going right along with it. The problem is not a specific ideology, but the practice in itself.
sleepysysadmin 6y ago
>So all that being said, I genuinely wonder if cancel culture is here to stay, because the next ideology to come along will also realize how powerful of a tool it is. Here to stay for sure. There's an active group of people behind it. They are the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left and they still exist today. The problem is that in 1989 when socialism died. They started their rebranding effort. They became Politically Correct, "democratic socialists", culutural marxists, globalists, internationalists. etc. The reason Justin Trudeau can do black face on multiple occasions and still win an election is because he's part of the new-left. Cancel culture is a tool of political silencing opponents. Those in the fold like Trudeau, he'll get away with literally anything. The problem or reason why it has become so much more obvious. Increasingly desperate. What has Biden done for BLM? Absolutely nothing.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The problem is that in 1989 when socialism died. Socialism didn't die in 1989. What is that even supposed to mean? > They started their rebranding effort. They became Politically Correct “Politically Correct” was never part of a rebranding effort on the left, it was originally a pejorative used between different groups in the left, and adopted heavily as a pejorative by the right against the left in about the early 1980s, serving the same purpose as “cancel culture” does today (like, literally, anything the right says about “cancel culture” today can pretty much have that term swapped out for “political correctness” and be a quote from the right in the 1980s-1990s.) > "democratic socialists", “Democratic Socialist” isn't part of a post-1989 rebranding. The DSA itself was founded in 1982, and the “democratic socialist” label is older (one of the DSAs predecessor organizations was the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee.) > culutural marxists, “Cultural Marxism” isn't a post-1989 left-wing rebranding, it's a right-wing conspiracy theory. No one on the left identifies or brands themselves or any movement they are part of as “cultural marxism”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_... > globalists Again, not a left-wing rebranding; pretty much no one identifies/brands with globalism, and globalism is a term used both on the left- and far-right to refer to and critique an aspect of neoliberal capitalism (a center-right ideology). > internationalists Again, not a post-1989 left rebranding. Leftist “internationalism” historically has referred to association with one of the Communist Internationals (though it pretty much fell out of useful use with the overlapping, competing, Stalinist Third and Trotskyite Fourth Internationals before WWII, and the subsequent schism within the Fourth International. More recently, the left has been more prone to use “internationalism” as part of a term of critique with regard to liberal (centrist to center-right) internationalism, though even that negative use has largely been replaced with criticism of neoliberal “globalism”.
phendrenad2 6y ago
Jailing anyone who owns a C++ compiler will stop all hackers, that would also seem to work.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> So all that being said, I genuinely wonder if cancel culture is here to stay Insofar as “cancel culture” describes actual behavior rather than the ideology motivating it, it's been a constant part of society, from all ideological angles, for, approximately, all of human history. Shunning the heterodox is not new. The only thing new is the right’s use of the term “cancel culture” to disparage this when it bites them; this replaces “political correctness”, which served the exact same purpose for the right from the 1980s until “cancel culture” became the new hotness.
commandlinefan 6y ago
The only way we'll ever be able to combat cancel culture is through online anonymity. I fear that we're drifting in the other direction, though - specifically to make cancellation easier.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  I think the real answer is resilience. Enough people, especially those in positions of power (who decide whether to fire someone), must stop giving a shit. There will be some evolutionary pressure there. I don't think Elon Musk would fire his engineer over a doubtful tweet, given that his own Twitter feed is pretty wild. Once some places establish themselves as safe, they will attract "mouthy talent".
  - LegitShady 6y ago
    You will be declared alt right. You will be declared a nazi even if you are jewish. Your employer will get phone calls, tweets, emails, constant harassment until they agree to fire you. They will use other people harassing you as a reason to fire you. Being fired is controversial, and they will use the firing as another weapon against you. "the former x company engineer let go because..." etc They will talk about you in a million places a thousand times a day. People who never knew you existed will only know you as that guy who they said was evil. If you work for Elon Musk, great. If you don't, you might be well and truly screwed. When enough people stopped giving a shit they got lumped in with other enemies. That's the way orthodoxy works.
- prawn 6y ago
  Problem with that is that anonymous content is generally text and that's the easiest to have bots spurt out with little effort. Sometimes reading a basic forum, I wonder whether the future forums will be some percentage bot-generated. Much of it is hardly high-level discourse. Meanwhile, more engaging content is personal - faces, travel, personal action, being physically in a place. That's harder to do anonymously. Obviously there are exceptions in both cases.
mywittyname 6y ago
>I can't help but admit that it seems to work. Really? I see it as a abject failure. - It is universally derided by many different groups. - It is considered a plague on society. - Being "cancelled" is a badge of honor to some. I used to see my society as a place where hate speech was generally taboo. People would only espouse such attitudes in private or, if they did so in public, they'd at least use dog whistles or euphemisms for plausible deniability. Today, Facebook is full of people shouting pretty fucked up shit for everyone to hear. The attitude seems to be that you can't cancel everyone, so everyone should do it as much as possible. I know a lot of people who can't speak to their parents or other close family anymore because the hateful shit they shout on facebook all day. Granted, this is just my person experience. Others might live in a place where people are nicer to each other than they used to be.
prepend 6y ago
I think it will look like it is now. Long running private thread that aren’t open to new people. I stopped using FB years ago, but have messenger groups that are super active and have been private for years. I wonder how new people will “find the others” for how the web was so great. But I’ve met young people who do the same thing with their friends.
jimbokun 6y ago
The concept is not new, see McCarthyism. What's new is social media's ability to amplify the voices of a small number of relatively anonymous people to "cancel" someone. McCarthyism required a Senator to have a serious impact. Now people are cancelled, without there being a clear link back to who, exactly, did the cancelling.
- cwkoss 6y ago
  > the voices of a small number of relatively anonymous people Has someone been cancelled as a purely grassroots effort before? It seems like the seeds of a cancelling may begin this way, but quasi-journalists, pundits and other online personalities are the engine that does the crucial amplification to reach broader public discourse. I think their is an interesting sort of 'laundering' of attribution where social media power brokers can point to the seeds and say "Look at this grassroots movement that is changing the way society views X", and then the issue is broadcast to a much wider audience. However, that small grassroots movement may not have been seriously affected X except for the effects of the power brokers' pointing fingers. It seems like these social media power brokers may not even intend to have this effect in some cases, but they are a crucial step in the cancelling lifecycle.
  - dandersh 6y ago
    The Dixie Chicks. Country stations stopped playing their songs because listeners would call in to complain, threaten boycotts, etc. While I'm struggling to remember exact successes, I know the Parents Television Council would use petitions to cancel programming that they deemed inappropriate.
    - jimbokun 6y ago
      I think the Parents Television Council was largely unsuccessful. They hated the Simpsons, which is now the longest running show in US history, I believe.
- cozuya 6y ago
  What are some examples of people being cancelled by a small amount of anonymous people? I can't think of any. Lets looks at Gina Carano for example. She was "cancelled" (fired from her job) as the direct result of her social media posting things a large number of people found offensive and inappropriate, not a small amount. 10 anonymous people didn't cause it, hundreds of thousands of people thought it was wrong.
jandrese 6y ago
On one hand I worry about this power being abused, but it's hard for me to side with the people being cancelled because they're so repugnant. It is hard to stand up for the rights of the bigots, the white supremacists, the science deniers, the propagandists, and the misogynists. People who spent decades denying other people access and are now finding the shoe on the other foot. Can we find some good examples of people who were "cancelled" who were not peddling conspiracy theories or pontificating about why the white race is the natural rulers of humanity? In some ways this may be seen as a return to the media culture in the Fairness Doctrine era. It used to be that media companies had to seriously consider the viewpoints expressed and wouldn't give crackpots a voice very often. The Internet changed that, allowing everybody a voice regardless of how crazy they might be. Now we're turning back to a more metered experience as it seems that unlimited amplifying the wingnuts is actually damaging to the country. Nobody likes the censor, but they're a necessary evil. Without them trolls will always take over the conversation once the number of participants exceeds a fairly low threshold. Trolls can drive out honest participants, but honest participants can't drive out trolls. Moderation is necessary. It doesn't have to be third party moderation, upvote/downvote systems can do the job although they're tricky to get right and can be gamed.
- t-writescode 6y ago
  Someone being cancelled who shouldn't have been: Monica Lewinsky.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    She's been cancelled? She has a million Twitter followers https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky and 150k on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MonicaLewinsky/ https://www.facebook.com/MonicaLewinsky/ I've found articles about her speaking on college campuses with her anti-bullying campaign. I've not found anything about her being cut off from platforms yet. Can you post a link?
    - t-writescode 6y ago
      In her videos, etc, she talks about how she couldn't get a job because she's Monica Lewinsky, the lady that the president had an affair with in the 90s. It's been nearly 30 years.
int_19h 6y ago
Moral panics can and do get a lot worse. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial In retrospect, this all seems rather insane. But back then, how many people actually risked being painted as apologists of Satanic pedophiles pointing the obvious out?
jokethrowaway 6y ago
I agree with you, nobody will do anything until it's too late. Look on the bright side: If we manage to win against the fourth reich people will remember, maybe for one generation.

deleted 6y ago

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runawaybottle 6y ago

Cancel culture scared the ever living shit out of everyone, even everyday people. Whether you like it or not, it got every male in the workplace to not even breathe in the direction of women you work with. The movement permeated through normal life fast. It was extremely efficient in bringing forth the necessary changes. I have no problem with using the chainsaw as needed, but we need to careful about when we use it. Can’t use it for everythig.

renewiltord 6y ago
I don't think the "fear of women" thing is real. At least it isn't real in SF where I've worked for the last eight years.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  It's a real thing among the group of guys who exhibit creepy/abusive behavior towards women. They used to be able to get away with it, now they realize they may not be able to anymore. They aren't so much afraid of women, as they are afraid of consequences for their actions.
  - fl0wenol 6y ago
    This, this, this a million times. Anyone you hear complaining about it is the very kind of person who needed to be on notice in the first place.
- brrristlecone 6y ago
  Quick anecdote under a throwaway, white male for what its worth. New hire, been working a few months at a job out of college. I was on a business trip to another state with some people not on my immediate team. There were like four or five people going in total and I didn't have a hotel room yet, so my supervisor asked me to reach out to some of the others going and see what they were doing. I picked a number from the list at random and called. A woman a good bit older than me answered the phone and I explained the situation. She told me she had gotten a four bedroom house on AirBnB close to the location we were going. Assuming that she had booked the house so we could all stay together, I asked if there was a room left for me. She immediately became very stern and told me that she would never "room alone with a younger man" and that my request was "extremely inappropriate". Sputtering apologies I told her I thought she had gotten the house for everyone from the company going on the trip and she said no, it was just for her. She nastily asked who my supervisor was and I told her the name. Confused as hell I hung up the phone and got a room at a hotel nearby. My immediate first thought was oh fuck, I'm going to be getting a call from HR about sexual harassment, it's all over, fired before I even really started. When we actually got to the client location this woman acted very creepy. She made several comments about how if she was 'ten years younger' this would be a 'memorable trip' while eyeing me up. She asked for my personal cell number. She even invited me to dinner, just the two of us. After that I stopped responding to her texts, cold shouldered her hard in person, and would only send very cordial, short emails to her in response. Some months after she left the project and I haven't talked to her since. After she left I told some other male coworkers about what happened and everyone agreed I was a hair's width away from some sort of sexual harassment case, and also agreed that had it come to that, corporate would have sided with her and I could have been fired for a simple mistake. I now walk on pins and needles around women that I work with, unless I know them well. TL;DR: Accidents happen, women can be creeps, and at least where I work young men are definitely worried about being accused of sexual harassment. I don't think this is a typical case but it does happen.
- 3np 6y ago
  Honestly, I have it, realized over the years I’ve had it since a teenager and I don’t like it. Subconsciously I keep females at a bit more distance than men. I’m less likely to have personal conversations with them. I watch myself at social situations mostly interacting with other males and less with females. At a bar I’m more likely to end up chatting to guys than girls. I think there’s some subconscious fear of rejection mixed with an assumption that they’re not interested in talking to me, etc. And please don’t assume “oh he falls in the asshole crowd” as I see sibling comments already are. This is Northern Europe though. I’m pretty convinced it exists around you as well, it’s not necessarily visible even to those subject to it.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Cancel culture scared the ever living shit out of everyone, even everyday people. No, I don't think it did, to “everyone”. I think the degree of effect varies a lot, with the two main driving factors being (1) preexisting behavior, and (2) sources of information. > Whether you like it or not, it got every male in the workplace to not even breathe in the direction of women you work with. As an employee male, it's had about zero impact on how I relate to women, at work or in other contexts. I don't think I'm alone. > The movement permeated through normal life fast. I don't think this is any more true than when this complaint started to be made (with “political correctness” in place of “cancel culture”) in the 1980s, or when it saw another resurgence with “sexual harassment” (often with sneer quotes in writing, or just a plain sneer when spoken) in the 1990s. > It was extremely efficient in bringing forth the necessary changes. I think that very much remains to be seen, just as with the previous rounds.
UncleMeat 6y ago
> Whether you like it or not, it got every male in the workplace to not even breathe in the direction of women you work with. Jesus Christ. No it didn't.

secondcoming 6y ago

The easiest way to confront cancel culture is to embrace it and try to get everything cancelled for the most minor of reasons. Hopefully, people will just get fed up and ignore it. The hardest part will be to stop companies bowing to the twitter mob for fear of bad publicity. Also, twitter needs to go. Humans can't handle it.

Ekaros 6y ago
I wonder if cancelling of really big companies start to happen. Make one misstep in advertising or messaging even in past and then have people attack your partners telling them to stop associating with your brand... I wonder if we ever properly reach that level. And if after a few big attempts social media companies would put stop to that...
- secondcoming 6y ago
  It's starting [0]. Andrew Neil is a guy who DESTROYED Ben Shapiro btw [1] [0] https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/1395314/Andrew-Neil-GB-News-stop-funding-hate-piers-morgan-good-morning-britain-video-latest https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/1395314/Andrew-Ne... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  It happened to Goya.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    Did it though. How many people actually changed their shopping habits? Closest thing I've done to "canceling" anyone is switching from Autozone to the O'Reily 500yd down the street because the former donated to something I really don't like and the latter had better people working at that particular location anyway.
  - cozuya 6y ago
    Goya's CEO, this weekend, continued to push the lie that Trump was cheated out of the election which directly lead to the 1/6 attacks. Is boycotting Goya in response to that a bad thing? Should #boycottgoya hashtags on social media be deleted, for example?

threwawasy1228 6y ago

History is written by the winners, if Cancel Culture "wins" this will just be seen as a positive embyrotic formation of the dominant culture eradicating and stomping out evil in the world via a superior tactical formation (cancellation). If they win this will be seen as a very primitive form of mob-cancellation whereas in the future it will be cancellation via sophisticated "fair" social-credit scores. If the anti-cancel culture people win out culturally this will be seen as a historic dark age of self-censorship and a period of significantly degraded cultural expression. All history is relative.

throwaway316943 6y ago
Both sides could lose and this may only be dimly remembered by a distant culture.

sushisource 6y ago

Eh, I don't think it's here to stay. The political correctness pendulum swings back and forth every 10-20 years it seems to me, the last time it was on the watch-what-you-say spectrum felt like the mid-90s. That said, this feels way, way more extreme than it was then. I'm maybe less worried that it's here to stay than I am worried that the swings are getting more and more extreme

caseysoftware 6y ago
If you haven't seen it, check out the movie PCU. It's from 1994 or so but could be written today.. it couldn't be made though.

dahfizz 6y ago

> Just about everyone I speak to about the subject agrees that cancel culture is bad but very few people seem willing to confront it. I sense that people hope the rest of society will come to its senses and we all stop being so judgemental. I found this[1] article very interesting. Basically, only 2% of American adults generate over 80% of all tweets. "Cancel Culture" really is run by a few extremists who have a louder voice than everyone else. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...

subsubzero 6y ago
100% this, there is an extremely small, extremely vocal minority which gets amplified by social media and the media tends to report on this small group as its views are outrageous and generate outrage which in turn generate clicks and ad revenue for those outlets. Boring dependable/sensible government is not something that generates huge ad revenue.
qqn 6y ago
New slogan: "We are the 98%"
offtop5 6y ago
This 2% are the are same folks who will berate you on Reddit for saying you prefer partners with jobs. At the end of the day you can decide to argue with angry people or not. Another perk of being social media free
jfengel 6y ago
It's not even clear that those extremists have a louder voice in and of themselves. Nobody really listens to them except their opponents, who amplify them because they think it makes the entire progressive culture look bad.
mc32 6y ago
That may be so, but you don’t want to end up being an unwitting victim. One of the first instances early on on Twitter was that young marketing woman going to South Africa making a sarcastic anti-racism tweet before boarding only to learn after landing a brouhaha was brewing leading to her firing because the mob wanted to see it as racist.

jbob2000 6y ago

The problem with cancel culture is much the same as the problem I'm having with my QA department: We have a very small, rock solid front end. Most of our work is simply updating content. It's very straightforward work and you have to try very hard to introduce bugs. But when you staff a team of 6 people and tell them "it's your job to find something wrong with this website", they WILL find something wrong. I have a meeting this afternoon to explain to my Product manager why the content looks different on a mobile screen than it does on desktop because the QA team thinks line breaks are a bug ("the content document didn't break the line here, but the mobile view did, it's a bug"). When you empower people to take others down via subjective rules, then it's always a moving target. You can never reach a point where people are safe and happy. Check out the shuffles deck subreddit for some egregious examples of cancel culture gone wrong, https://www.reddit.com/r/Shuffles_Deck/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Shuffles_Deck/.

fl0wenol 6y ago
r/Shuffles_Deck more like r/thathappened and everyone clapped

IAmWorried 6y ago

I don't think it's limited to just what you say in public. Videos and audio recordings have a way of triggering human emotions that writing simply does not. To tell you the truth, I live in perpetual fear that some acquaintance could secretly record me saying some non-PC thing in private, and post it to Twitter to get me cancelled. I have deleted all social media to try to achieve "out of sight, out of mind" but I still feel unsafe. It's truly dystopian. I do feel as if I will go insane if this continues for another 10 years. I worked hard in school and sacrificed so that I could build myself a better life. Now, it seems like the entire thing hangs on a knife's edge. Quite frankly, I would not have tried to work hard for the last 15 years if I had known we were about to go full-blown 1984.

inglor_cz 6y ago
Deep fakes are coming and with it a tsunami of outrageous videos that have no connection to reality. People will learn to distrust video evidence.
- IAmWorried 6y ago
  I think this could extend to major public figures, but offers no recourse to the average joe who doesn't have 100 hours of talking footage online. Deepfakes require a lot of data to produce. Anyone who doesn't have this much data, you could reliably assume the content is real.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    "Deepfakes require a lot of data to produce." I wonder if this is going to hold, especially as 4K video is becoming the norm.
    - belval 6y ago
      It won't, as with everything in DL the models are becoming much better at training on a large amount of data and fine-tuning on very little. I am pretty sure in 1-2 years we will have semi-convincing one-shot learning deepfakes models with 5-10 pictures you could get on the person's Facebook profile.

throw10123213 6y ago

Communism was also like this. People has the public persona, the party tasks, things they had to do and say. Then they went home and listened to Radio Free Europe and talked with select people what they really had on their mind or used coded language to transmit messages. What I hope this achieves is a parallel society and when it's big enough there will be some public battles.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
This. And you only spoke political jokes to really close friends.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  I was 11 when Communism fell in my country. By that time, kids knew perfectly well what to say in school, what to say among close friends and who of their colleagues was a snitch.
  - d1zzy 6y ago
    It was chilling when before the first day of school may parents made it very clear I shouldn't tell anyone (especially not teachers) that they were listening to Radio Free Europe.
bopbeepboop 6y ago
This is already happening. In 2016, that silenced group rallied together to elect a disruptive bully as retaliation against the establishment. In 2020, the establishment went full aggression and elected someone who seems to be impaired as a way to backdoor in someone wildly unpopular like Ms Harris. Over this same period, far left media has struggled to find commercial success, with bombs like Star Wars IX. By contrast, films like Joker set records — showing the problem isn’t a lack of demand. In 2021, that same people who elected Trump held a riot at the capitol after nine months of violent rioting by the Democrats. They targeted a point in the process where disruption would force coverage and discussion of their issues. This was called an “insurrection” by the same people who had worked to fund and support the violent rioting, such as Ms Harris or Ms Waters. The capitol is now being permanently fortified and has a permanent military presence. I would say on the communist scale, it’s already to the point they’re afraid — and we’re approaching civil war. They’re really setting the record on speed runnings.

subsubzero 6y ago

I think that in 50 years, maybe even 20 years cancel culture will be looked at a low point in the culture of the US and its adherents will try to disassociate themselves with it by saying thats how people thought/acted back then(popular sentiment). Similar to McCarthyism and its blacklists which ruined actors/directors, that moment is taught in history books as a backwards time, cancel culture will be similar.

threwawasy1228 6y ago
The fact that a cancellation I undergo now will be seen as unjust after I'm elderly does nothing for me.
rossjudson 6y ago
Yeah, it seems that way to me too. I think it will be viewed as a backwards and sad episode that cost...well, everyone...a great deal. It's 70% power, 20% revenge, and 10% justice. A cri-de-coeur of the bored. If it happened in an elementary school we'd call it bullying.

undefined1 6y ago

moral panics and the resulting witch-hunting/burning is feature of humanity that comes and goes. the mob always thinks it's a good idea in the moment, but history never looks fondly upon it.

Tarq0n 6y ago

Wasn't McCarthy-ism basically proto-cancel culture?

sudosysgen 6y ago
Moreso super cancel culture. Same for Mao's struggle sessions. And so on forever. Cancel Culture is just a new name for an eternal phenomenon in every society.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

colechristensen 6y ago

We're heading towards fascism. This time on two fronts, one horn from each end of the political spectrum. (perhaps a new name for it that isn't fascism because of the history of that word referring to a kind of right wing movement) It feels like we're inside the ramp-up of a major social, political, and national conflict, all the pieces are falling into place. Read The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig to get some ideas about how this kind of thing happened in the early 20th century in Europe and imagine how it might be happening again. Ideology is on the rise and the willingness of people to support their cause with violence is going right along with it. The problem is not a specific ideology, but the practice in itself.

sleepysysadmin 6y ago

>So all that being said, I genuinely wonder if cancel culture is here to stay, because the next ideology to come along will also realize how powerful of a tool it is. Here to stay for sure. There's an active group of people behind it. They are the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left and they still exist today. The problem is that in 1989 when socialism died. They started their rebranding effort. They became Politically Correct, "democratic socialists", culutural marxists, globalists, internationalists. etc. The reason Justin Trudeau can do black face on multiple occasions and still win an election is because he's part of the new-left. Cancel culture is a tool of political silencing opponents. Those in the fold like Trudeau, he'll get away with literally anything. The problem or reason why it has become so much more obvious. Increasingly desperate. What has Biden done for BLM? Absolutely nothing.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> The problem is that in 1989 when socialism died. Socialism didn't die in 1989. What is that even supposed to mean? > They started their rebranding effort. They became Politically Correct “Politically Correct” was never part of a rebranding effort on the left, it was originally a pejorative used between different groups in the left, and adopted heavily as a pejorative by the right against the left in about the early 1980s, serving the same purpose as “cancel culture” does today (like, literally, anything the right says about “cancel culture” today can pretty much have that term swapped out for “political correctness” and be a quote from the right in the 1980s-1990s.) > "democratic socialists", “Democratic Socialist” isn't part of a post-1989 rebranding. The DSA itself was founded in 1982, and the “democratic socialist” label is older (one of the DSAs predecessor organizations was the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee.) > culutural marxists, “Cultural Marxism” isn't a post-1989 left-wing rebranding, it's a right-wing conspiracy theory. No one on the left identifies or brands themselves or any movement they are part of as “cultural marxism”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_... > globalists Again, not a left-wing rebranding; pretty much no one identifies/brands with globalism, and globalism is a term used both on the left- and far-right to refer to and critique an aspect of neoliberal capitalism (a center-right ideology). > internationalists Again, not a post-1989 left rebranding. Leftist “internationalism” historically has referred to association with one of the Communist Internationals (though it pretty much fell out of useful use with the overlapping, competing, Stalinist Third and Trotskyite Fourth Internationals before WWII, and the subsequent schism within the Fourth International. More recently, the left has been more prone to use “internationalism” as part of a term of critique with regard to liberal (centrist to center-right) internationalism, though even that negative use has largely been replaced with criticism of neoliberal “globalism”.

phendrenad2 6y ago

Jailing anyone who owns a C++ compiler will stop all hackers, that would also seem to work.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> So all that being said, I genuinely wonder if cancel culture is here to stay Insofar as “cancel culture” describes actual behavior rather than the ideology motivating it, it's been a constant part of society, from all ideological angles, for, approximately, all of human history. Shunning the heterodox is not new. The only thing new is the right’s use of the term “cancel culture” to disparage this when it bites them; this replaces “political correctness”, which served the exact same purpose for the right from the 1980s until “cancel culture” became the new hotness.

commandlinefan 6y ago

The only way we'll ever be able to combat cancel culture is through online anonymity. I fear that we're drifting in the other direction, though - specifically to make cancellation easier.

inglor_cz 6y ago
I think the real answer is resilience. Enough people, especially those in positions of power (who decide whether to fire someone), must stop giving a shit. There will be some evolutionary pressure there. I don't think Elon Musk would fire his engineer over a doubtful tweet, given that his own Twitter feed is pretty wild. Once some places establish themselves as safe, they will attract "mouthy talent".
- LegitShady 6y ago
  You will be declared alt right. You will be declared a nazi even if you are jewish. Your employer will get phone calls, tweets, emails, constant harassment until they agree to fire you. They will use other people harassing you as a reason to fire you. Being fired is controversial, and they will use the firing as another weapon against you. "the former x company engineer let go because..." etc They will talk about you in a million places a thousand times a day. People who never knew you existed will only know you as that guy who they said was evil. If you work for Elon Musk, great. If you don't, you might be well and truly screwed. When enough people stopped giving a shit they got lumped in with other enemies. That's the way orthodoxy works.
prawn 6y ago
Problem with that is that anonymous content is generally text and that's the easiest to have bots spurt out with little effort. Sometimes reading a basic forum, I wonder whether the future forums will be some percentage bot-generated. Much of it is hardly high-level discourse. Meanwhile, more engaging content is personal - faces, travel, personal action, being physically in a place. That's harder to do anonymously. Obviously there are exceptions in both cases.

mywittyname 6y ago

>I can't help but admit that it seems to work. Really? I see it as a abject failure. - It is universally derided by many different groups. - It is considered a plague on society. - Being "cancelled" is a badge of honor to some. I used to see my society as a place where hate speech was generally taboo. People would only espouse such attitudes in private or, if they did so in public, they'd at least use dog whistles or euphemisms for plausible deniability. Today, Facebook is full of people shouting pretty fucked up shit for everyone to hear. The attitude seems to be that you can't cancel everyone, so everyone should do it as much as possible. I know a lot of people who can't speak to their parents or other close family anymore because the hateful shit they shout on facebook all day. Granted, this is just my person experience. Others might live in a place where people are nicer to each other than they used to be.

prepend 6y ago

I think it will look like it is now. Long running private thread that aren’t open to new people. I stopped using FB years ago, but have messenger groups that are super active and have been private for years. I wonder how new people will “find the others” for how the web was so great. But I’ve met young people who do the same thing with their friends.

jimbokun 6y ago

The concept is not new, see McCarthyism. What's new is social media's ability to amplify the voices of a small number of relatively anonymous people to "cancel" someone. McCarthyism required a Senator to have a serious impact. Now people are cancelled, without there being a clear link back to who, exactly, did the cancelling.

cwkoss 6y ago
> the voices of a small number of relatively anonymous people Has someone been cancelled as a purely grassroots effort before? It seems like the seeds of a cancelling may begin this way, but quasi-journalists, pundits and other online personalities are the engine that does the crucial amplification to reach broader public discourse. I think their is an interesting sort of 'laundering' of attribution where social media power brokers can point to the seeds and say "Look at this grassroots movement that is changing the way society views X", and then the issue is broadcast to a much wider audience. However, that small grassroots movement may not have been seriously affected X except for the effects of the power brokers' pointing fingers. It seems like these social media power brokers may not even intend to have this effect in some cases, but they are a crucial step in the cancelling lifecycle.
- dandersh 6y ago
  The Dixie Chicks. Country stations stopped playing their songs because listeners would call in to complain, threaten boycotts, etc. While I'm struggling to remember exact successes, I know the Parents Television Council would use petitions to cancel programming that they deemed inappropriate.
  - jimbokun 6y ago
    I think the Parents Television Council was largely unsuccessful. They hated the Simpsons, which is now the longest running show in US history, I believe.
cozuya 6y ago
What are some examples of people being cancelled by a small amount of anonymous people? I can't think of any. Lets looks at Gina Carano for example. She was "cancelled" (fired from her job) as the direct result of her social media posting things a large number of people found offensive and inappropriate, not a small amount. 10 anonymous people didn't cause it, hundreds of thousands of people thought it was wrong.

jandrese 6y ago

On one hand I worry about this power being abused, but it's hard for me to side with the people being cancelled because they're so repugnant. It is hard to stand up for the rights of the bigots, the white supremacists, the science deniers, the propagandists, and the misogynists. People who spent decades denying other people access and are now finding the shoe on the other foot. Can we find some good examples of people who were "cancelled" who were not peddling conspiracy theories or pontificating about why the white race is the natural rulers of humanity? In some ways this may be seen as a return to the media culture in the Fairness Doctrine era. It used to be that media companies had to seriously consider the viewpoints expressed and wouldn't give crackpots a voice very often. The Internet changed that, allowing everybody a voice regardless of how crazy they might be. Now we're turning back to a more metered experience as it seems that unlimited amplifying the wingnuts is actually damaging to the country. Nobody likes the censor, but they're a necessary evil. Without them trolls will always take over the conversation once the number of participants exceeds a fairly low threshold. Trolls can drive out honest participants, but honest participants can't drive out trolls. Moderation is necessary. It doesn't have to be third party moderation, upvote/downvote systems can do the job although they're tricky to get right and can be gamed.

t-writescode 6y ago
Someone being cancelled who shouldn't have been: Monica Lewinsky.
- jandrese 6y ago
  She's been cancelled? She has a million Twitter followers https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky and 150k on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MonicaLewinsky/ https://www.facebook.com/MonicaLewinsky/ I've found articles about her speaking on college campuses with her anti-bullying campaign. I've not found anything about her being cut off from platforms yet. Can you post a link?
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    In her videos, etc, she talks about how she couldn't get a job because she's Monica Lewinsky, the lady that the president had an affair with in the 90s. It's been nearly 30 years.

int_19h 6y ago

Moral panics can and do get a lot worse. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial In retrospect, this all seems rather insane. But back then, how many people actually risked being painted as apologists of Satanic pedophiles pointing the obvious out?

jokethrowaway 6y ago

I agree with you, nobody will do anything until it's too late. Look on the bright side: If we manage to win against the fourth reich people will remember, maybe for one generation.