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That was, for many of us, our ability to be heard. Our ability to speak was not hindered by fear of having our lives ruined for holding an unpopular opinion or

That was, for many of us, our ability to be heard. Our ability to speak was not hindered by fear of having our lives ruined for holding an unpopular opinion or asking an incorrectly phrased question.

tptacek 5y ago
The most common battlefield on which these "cancellation" debates happen is people's access to Twitter, a service that did not exist in the 1990s (you could, obviously, get banned off a BBS for any or no reason). You see it in this very thread: people writing appeals to the amount of control tech companies have over speech, and how unprecedented that is.
- jimbokun 5y ago
  Another commonly cited consequence of cancel culture is losing your job or ability to earn money.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    Sure. And there are certainly disproportionate social and economical responses to speech, such as Colin Kaepernick finding himself unable to sign anywhere as a free agent after Donald Trump called for him to be fired for kneeling during the National Anthem, or David Shor losing his job at Civis Analytics after questioning the political effectiveness of violent riots protesting police misconduct. I'm sure if we dig, we can also find economic responses to speech that we'll agree aren't disproportionate. The point isn't that these processes are never abused, or even that they're rarely abused. The point is that the problem we're trying to nail down isn't "there can be economic consequences for unpopular speech", but rather "there can be disproportionate consequences for speech". People on the right and the left are scrambling to find a simple bright-line rule, such as "speech should never cost you your job". But push to shove, almost nobody really believes that; we can all generally think of viewpoints you can loudly advocate for that will rightly make you difficult to employ. I could write more, but I'd just be relaying my own personal beliefs about what speech is or isn't OK. Instead, I'll note that Ken White was pretty careful not to do that, or really to try to resolve this dilemma at all. Again: he's just pointing out that the NYT editorial's effort to resolve this was poorly reasoned, and itself a threat to free expression. As for what I wrote upthread, I'm just pointing out: one major impetus for this debate is people losing their Twitter accounts. That seems germane, since you yourself brought up that one issue at play here is the enormous influence tech companies have on access to audiences for speech. My point was, of course, that the access you're talking about didn't exist at all as recently as 20 years ago. What access there was at the time was governed by... large corporations, who (for example) deplatformed Bill Maher when he questioned the orthodoxy around the moral weight of terrorism compared to US military interventions.
- noduerme 5y ago
  I consider Twitter just a very successful BBS, and I'm all for them banning the shit out of most of their idiot users. It's ridiculous that people who couldn't figure out how to set up a modem in 1993 now think they have a right to post and be heard as if God stepped down and gave them a megaphone. I don't have any sympathy for their complaints about being banned. What I do have a problem with is services allowing people to be brigaded and have their families and jobs threatened, which as a sysop I would have shut down the brigaders for, not the asshole who wrote the inflammatory thread, even if I disagreed with him.

That was, for many of us, our ability to be heard. Our ability to speak was not hindered by fear of having our lives ruined for holding an unpopular opinion or asking an incorrectly phrased question.

tptacek 5y ago

The most common battlefield on which these "cancellation" debates happen is people's access to Twitter, a service that did not exist in the 1990s (you could, obviously, get banned off a BBS for any or no reason). You see it in this very thread: people writing appeals to the amount of control tech companies have over speech, and how unprecedented that is.

jimbokun 5y ago
Another commonly cited consequence of cancel culture is losing your job or ability to earn money.
- tptacek 5y ago
  Sure. And there are certainly disproportionate social and economical responses to speech, such as Colin Kaepernick finding himself unable to sign anywhere as a free agent after Donald Trump called for him to be fired for kneeling during the National Anthem, or David Shor losing his job at Civis Analytics after questioning the political effectiveness of violent riots protesting police misconduct. I'm sure if we dig, we can also find economic responses to speech that we'll agree aren't disproportionate. The point isn't that these processes are never abused, or even that they're rarely abused. The point is that the problem we're trying to nail down isn't "there can be economic consequences for unpopular speech", but rather "there can be disproportionate consequences for speech". People on the right and the left are scrambling to find a simple bright-line rule, such as "speech should never cost you your job". But push to shove, almost nobody really believes that; we can all generally think of viewpoints you can loudly advocate for that will rightly make you difficult to employ. I could write more, but I'd just be relaying my own personal beliefs about what speech is or isn't OK. Instead, I'll note that Ken White was pretty careful not to do that, or really to try to resolve this dilemma at all. Again: he's just pointing out that the NYT editorial's effort to resolve this was poorly reasoned, and itself a threat to free expression. As for what I wrote upthread, I'm just pointing out: one major impetus for this debate is people losing their Twitter accounts. That seems germane, since you yourself brought up that one issue at play here is the enormous influence tech companies have on access to audiences for speech. My point was, of course, that the access you're talking about didn't exist at all as recently as 20 years ago. What access there was at the time was governed by... large corporations, who (for example) deplatformed Bill Maher when he questioned the orthodoxy around the moral weight of terrorism compared to US military interventions.
noduerme 5y ago
I consider Twitter just a very successful BBS, and I'm all for them banning the shit out of most of their idiot users. It's ridiculous that people who couldn't figure out how to set up a modem in 1993 now think they have a right to post and be heard as if God stepped down and gave them a megaphone. I don't have any sympathy for their complaints about being banned. What I do have a problem with is services allowing people to be brigaded and have their families and jobs threatened, which as a sysop I would have shut down the brigaders for, not the asshole who wrote the inflammatory thread, even if I disagreed with him.