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> Publicly espousing an unpopular opinion now can be career suicide Let's not pretend this is new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist https://en

> Publicly espousing an unpopular opinion now can be career suicide Let's not pretend this is new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist The difference now is that visibility is more uniformly distributed across the population.

mc32 5y ago
No normal person will deny this. But there is no comparison to a small population being affected (ironically in the USSR, lots of artists and authors got not only blacklisted but sent to the Gulags --gee, I wonder if they wrote to Stalin on behalf of their brethren) to potentially anyone and everyone being a potential subject at any moment for something otherwise innocuous. What’s more this is much worse. It’s not about a singular subject (communist sympathizer) but just about anything at any moment. It's a shifting landscape so much so that there is internecine sniping among all groups. Today you can’t even make a genuine faux pas without the risk of someone coming down on you and risking your livelihood. That’s quite different. If Pelosi said off handedly, you know Trump did a couple of things right, or you know I don’t agree 100% with everything BLM she’ll be in trouble and she’s the top politician outside the president. Imagine a school teacher…
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Modern bidirectional communications tools make it easy to wide-cast a message and then have that message responded to by potentially millions of receivers. I think we don't respect the power we wield often enough. That's a terrible capability to provide via a system that also encourages you to blurt something out in 280 characters or less. Every single tweet is a shout from a mountaintop (and since it's time-stamped and on the timeline forever, that shout echoes perpetually). Additionally, that infrastructure incentivizes gravitation towards some flat-mass-"centroid" of acceptable cultural practice, and there's no particular guarantee that such a thing across the bulk of humanity is either possible or desirable.
- klyrs 5y ago
  > But there is no comparison to a small population being affected to potentially anyone and everyone being a potential subject. If I may paraphrase... there's no comparison between oppressing a minority I don't belong to, and the entire population being subjected to the same risk.
  - mc32 5y ago
    It doesn't matter how you put it. If you say "tax the rich 95%." That's bad. "Tax everyone 95%" That's really bad. I don't understand how you cannot see that. The fewer people affected by something, the less evil it is even if it's evil. I mean, what are you saying, H-wood blacklisting was bad, therefore what we see in social media ostracizing is acceptable? That seems... strange. Of course not all sympathizers of communism also agreed with death camps, re-education, stifling of progress, etc., etc., but they tacitly contributed to to those bad things. A young person, or someone who thinks they are being funny or whatever caught in a bad moment is different from someone who knowingly supports tyrannical forms of government.
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ta1234567890 5y ago
YC has a blacklist of people and companies. Not sure what will land you there, but I know they have it and use it.
- onion2k 5y ago
  If there's an actual blacklist where YC employees can just arbitrarily ban founders from working with certain companies that's quite surprising and maybe pretty bad for YC's reputation. If you mean YC has a strong community of founders who share war stories of how people and companies were difficult to work with, and the other YC founders pay attention to those stories though, well, that's not a blacklist.
  - ta1234567890 5y ago
    There’s both. About the blacklist, I don’t know exactly how it works, who specifically has access to it or who can add entries to it, but I know it exists, I know people who have been affected by it, know people who have been told explicitly about it and know that at least some partners have access to it.
- yepthetruth 5y ago
  Yep. If you say anything bad about Paul Graham or any YC people/companies, you’ll end up on this list. YC companies can and do also sic the network on rivals. There are also some YC partners with personal grudges and hurt egos that go out of their way to fight with people. Some will even pivot teams to compete with people who have bested them in the past. YC is a super shady org.
  - dang 5y ago
    I'm giving ta1234567890 the benefit of the doubt upthread, but this comment is definitely a false, substanceless smear.
    - youlyingsack 5y ago
      You're lying. Next time you nuke one of my friends Show HNs off the front page, I'll send them a link to this comment so they can call you out publicly. YC partners don't hold grudges and work their network against people who have damaged their ego??? Bull fucking shit. I know YC companies call in hits all the time on people as they brag about it relentlessly. You have all kinds of levers to pull here and you pull them without hesitation. The YC network spreads false information about competitors all the time. They kill deals, focus companies against those they don't like and generally are one of the least ethical group of people operating in the tech space (and that's saying a lot). That you'll get on here and make an outright brazen lie saying that this doesn't happen is very par for the course.
BobbyJo 5y ago
> The difference now is that visibility is more uniformly distributed across the population. And that you don't necessarily have to chase said visibility. Before, visibility was a goal very few people could attain. Now it's a bomb that can be thrown at you without warning.
inglor_cz 5y ago
I think the extent matters as well. I am not sure if humans can exist without blacklists. Some people definitely have the instinct to create them. But nowadays it is fairly easy for every employer out there to check out whether there is a 'controversy' in your past or not, even if you are not a traditional celebrity. Being less employable in Miami is one thing. Being less employable in the entire Anglosphere is another.
spectramax 5y ago
This is a distraction and diversion from the original comment. Hollywood is not at the scale of the internet. Some privileged people got cancelled in Hollywood, who cares. When a hard working person gets cancelled by saying something stupid, the consequences are back breaking.
- standardUser 5y ago
  Forget Hollywood. Imagine trying to build the career of your choice as a black person, or a woman or an out gay person in that same era. Society was casually blacklisting the literal majority of Americans from most professional realms.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    Yes, but that was the case for most of history, and America (and the world) at the time did it progressively less and less (first the abolition of slavery, then women right to vote, civil rights, de-seggregation, and so on). Whereas today it's a new phenomenon, that gets progressively worse even though the problems you've mentioned (regarding blacks, women, gays, etc) are at their historical lower point. So while America was progressing then, this is a regression now. And it also affects blacks, women, gays, lesbians, republicans, demoracts, old-style lefties, and so on -- all of those categories have had members cancelled or mob-attacked for wrong opinions... (even someone like Dave Chappelle, who is a comedian of all things, has been attacked on such grounds).
    - InitialLastName 5y ago
      > (even someone like Dave Chappelle, who is a comedian of all things, has been attacked on such grounds). Dave Chappelle, with his recent $8-figure deal with a prominent pop-culture/FAANG company, who keep publishing and promoting his specials, seems like he's actually a counter-argument to your point.
      - coldtea 5y ago
        Not for lack of trying.
everdrive 5y ago
Except that I never had a chance of being on a hollywood blacklist in the first place. I don't even use social media, and it's still possible I could say something off-color somewhere and find myself canceled.
- treeman79 5y ago
  Or not say something. Refusing to join in can be an offense. Sort of a “join us or die” accept killing is not usually needed to shut someone down. Shunning is usually enough these days.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    "Silence is violence" and "In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist".
    - treeman79 5y ago
      Logical fallacy that leads to oppression and genocide.
bingohbangoh 5y ago
Poor kids couldn't get a job in Hollywood. Oh the humanity! What's going on now is being blacklisted by multiple industries. People who get marked as such never work in "normal" companies again and have to move continents to find work. You are comparing being blacklisted by a group of people to being blacklisted by society at large.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  > People who get marked as such never work in "normal" companies again and have to move continents to find work. Who? Maybe I'm just not paying attention to the news, but I somewhere missed the great wave of American software developers migrating to Europe for a better life for their families.
coldtea 5y ago
>Let's not pretend this is new Let's not pretend the scale of the phenomenon today and mass surveillance capacity of today plus mass exposure and permanent public record of social media, web forums, even public spaces and events (e.g. with someone recording a video) is in any way comparable to the McCarthy era. Or the the "offenses" people get social-mob-attacked, pilloried, and fired are in any way comparable to the offenses (even if BS) people were prosecuted for in that day: being considered an enemy of the state working to overthrow the government.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  Most of the people I'm seeing get actually cancelled are... being considered "an enemy of the state working to overthrow the government". I'm also seeing a lot of base-rate fallacy and availability bias issues (surprisingly, from many of the same people who complain about other people falling prey to the base rate fallacy w.r.t. Covid). That you can think of a few instances where people were loudly pilloried for, say, weaponizing the state use of force to racist ends, doesn't mean that it happens that often.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    The detrimental effect doesn't lie with thousands of people getting cancelled, it lies with thousands of people not speaking up anymore.

mc32 5y ago

No normal person will deny this. But there is no comparison to a small population being affected (ironically in the USSR, lots of artists and authors got not only blacklisted but sent to the Gulags --gee, I wonder if they wrote to Stalin on behalf of their brethren) to potentially anyone and everyone being a potential subject at any moment for something otherwise innocuous. What’s more this is much worse. It’s not about a singular subject (communist sympathizer) but just about anything at any moment. It's a shifting landscape so much so that there is internecine sniping among all groups. Today you can’t even make a genuine faux pas without the risk of someone coming down on you and risking your livelihood. That’s quite different. If Pelosi said off handedly, you know Trump did a couple of things right, or you know I don’t agree 100% with everything BLM she’ll be in trouble and she’s the top politician outside the president. Imagine a school teacher…

shadowgovt 5y ago
Modern bidirectional communications tools make it easy to wide-cast a message and then have that message responded to by potentially millions of receivers. I think we don't respect the power we wield often enough. That's a terrible capability to provide via a system that also encourages you to blurt something out in 280 characters or less. Every single tweet is a shout from a mountaintop (and since it's time-stamped and on the timeline forever, that shout echoes perpetually). Additionally, that infrastructure incentivizes gravitation towards some flat-mass-"centroid" of acceptable cultural practice, and there's no particular guarantee that such a thing across the bulk of humanity is either possible or desirable.
klyrs 5y ago
> But there is no comparison to a small population being affected to potentially anyone and everyone being a potential subject. If I may paraphrase... there's no comparison between oppressing a minority I don't belong to, and the entire population being subjected to the same risk.
- mc32 5y ago
  It doesn't matter how you put it. If you say "tax the rich 95%." That's bad. "Tax everyone 95%" That's really bad. I don't understand how you cannot see that. The fewer people affected by something, the less evil it is even if it's evil. I mean, what are you saying, H-wood blacklisting was bad, therefore what we see in social media ostracizing is acceptable? That seems... strange. Of course not all sympathizers of communism also agreed with death camps, re-education, stifling of progress, etc., etc., but they tacitly contributed to to those bad things. A young person, or someone who thinks they are being funny or whatever caught in a bad moment is different from someone who knowingly supports tyrannical forms of government.
  - deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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ta1234567890 5y ago

YC has a blacklist of people and companies. Not sure what will land you there, but I know they have it and use it.

onion2k 5y ago
If there's an actual blacklist where YC employees can just arbitrarily ban founders from working with certain companies that's quite surprising and maybe pretty bad for YC's reputation. If you mean YC has a strong community of founders who share war stories of how people and companies were difficult to work with, and the other YC founders pay attention to those stories though, well, that's not a blacklist.
- ta1234567890 5y ago
  There’s both. About the blacklist, I don’t know exactly how it works, who specifically has access to it or who can add entries to it, but I know it exists, I know people who have been affected by it, know people who have been told explicitly about it and know that at least some partners have access to it.
yepthetruth 5y ago
Yep. If you say anything bad about Paul Graham or any YC people/companies, you’ll end up on this list. YC companies can and do also sic the network on rivals. There are also some YC partners with personal grudges and hurt egos that go out of their way to fight with people. Some will even pivot teams to compete with people who have bested them in the past. YC is a super shady org.
- dang 5y ago
  I'm giving ta1234567890 the benefit of the doubt upthread, but this comment is definitely a false, substanceless smear.
  - youlyingsack 5y ago
    You're lying. Next time you nuke one of my friends Show HNs off the front page, I'll send them a link to this comment so they can call you out publicly. YC partners don't hold grudges and work their network against people who have damaged their ego??? Bull fucking shit. I know YC companies call in hits all the time on people as they brag about it relentlessly. You have all kinds of levers to pull here and you pull them without hesitation. The YC network spreads false information about competitors all the time. They kill deals, focus companies against those they don't like and generally are one of the least ethical group of people operating in the tech space (and that's saying a lot). That you'll get on here and make an outright brazen lie saying that this doesn't happen is very par for the course.

BobbyJo 5y ago

> The difference now is that visibility is more uniformly distributed across the population. And that you don't necessarily have to chase said visibility. Before, visibility was a goal very few people could attain. Now it's a bomb that can be thrown at you without warning.

inglor_cz 5y ago

I think the extent matters as well. I am not sure if humans can exist without blacklists. Some people definitely have the instinct to create them. But nowadays it is fairly easy for every employer out there to check out whether there is a 'controversy' in your past or not, even if you are not a traditional celebrity. Being less employable in Miami is one thing. Being less employable in the entire Anglosphere is another.

spectramax 5y ago

This is a distraction and diversion from the original comment. Hollywood is not at the scale of the internet. Some privileged people got cancelled in Hollywood, who cares. When a hard working person gets cancelled by saying something stupid, the consequences are back breaking.

standardUser 5y ago
Forget Hollywood. Imagine trying to build the career of your choice as a black person, or a woman or an out gay person in that same era. Society was casually blacklisting the literal majority of Americans from most professional realms.
- coldtea 5y ago
  Yes, but that was the case for most of history, and America (and the world) at the time did it progressively less and less (first the abolition of slavery, then women right to vote, civil rights, de-seggregation, and so on). Whereas today it's a new phenomenon, that gets progressively worse even though the problems you've mentioned (regarding blacks, women, gays, etc) are at their historical lower point. So while America was progressing then, this is a regression now. And it also affects blacks, women, gays, lesbians, republicans, demoracts, old-style lefties, and so on -- all of those categories have had members cancelled or mob-attacked for wrong opinions... (even someone like Dave Chappelle, who is a comedian of all things, has been attacked on such grounds).
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    > (even someone like Dave Chappelle, who is a comedian of all things, has been attacked on such grounds). Dave Chappelle, with his recent $8-figure deal with a prominent pop-culture/FAANG company, who keep publishing and promoting his specials, seems like he's actually a counter-argument to your point.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      Not for lack of trying.

everdrive 5y ago

Except that I never had a chance of being on a hollywood blacklist in the first place. I don't even use social media, and it's still possible I could say something off-color somewhere and find myself canceled.

treeman79 5y ago
Or not say something. Refusing to join in can be an offense. Sort of a “join us or die” accept killing is not usually needed to shut someone down. Shunning is usually enough these days.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  "Silence is violence" and "In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist".
  - treeman79 5y ago
    Logical fallacy that leads to oppression and genocide.

bingohbangoh 5y ago

Poor kids couldn't get a job in Hollywood. Oh the humanity! What's going on now is being blacklisted by multiple industries. People who get marked as such never work in "normal" companies again and have to move continents to find work. You are comparing being blacklisted by a group of people to being blacklisted by society at large.

InitialLastName 5y ago
> People who get marked as such never work in "normal" companies again and have to move continents to find work. Who? Maybe I'm just not paying attention to the news, but I somewhere missed the great wave of American software developers migrating to Europe for a better life for their families.

coldtea 5y ago

>Let's not pretend this is new Let's not pretend the scale of the phenomenon today and mass surveillance capacity of today plus mass exposure and permanent public record of social media, web forums, even public spaces and events (e.g. with someone recording a video) is in any way comparable to the McCarthy era. Or the the "offenses" people get social-mob-attacked, pilloried, and fired are in any way comparable to the offenses (even if BS) people were prosecuted for in that day: being considered an enemy of the state working to overthrow the government.

InitialLastName 5y ago
Most of the people I'm seeing get actually cancelled are... being considered "an enemy of the state working to overthrow the government". I'm also seeing a lot of base-rate fallacy and availability bias issues (surprisingly, from many of the same people who complain about other people falling prey to the base rate fallacy w.r.t. Covid). That you can think of a few instances where people were loudly pilloried for, say, weaponizing the state use of force to racist ends, doesn't mean that it happens that often.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  The detrimental effect doesn't lie with thousands of people getting cancelled, it lies with thousands of people not speaking up anymore.