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I agree with this except that > "cancel culture" is simply culture There are 2 types of cancel culture: society "cancelling" people when we discover they are

I agree with this except that > "cancel culture" is simply culture There are 2 types of cancel culture: society "cancelling" people when we discover they are extremely toxic and/or sexual predators, and private citizens getting doxxed, slandered, and sometimes fired from their jobs because of a racist tweet or off-putting remark. The latter is a by-product of social networks, especially Twitter, and it's a real problem with real consequences. Saying or doing something racist or rude is bad, it should and would probably get you kicked out of a bar or event. But prior to social media, it would not get your entire reputation ruined, and you wouldn't get 50,000 random people to start harassing you. I hope most would agree that this is a disproportionate punishment. But IMO the larger issue of cancel culture, is it makes people less likely to say edgy jokes or borderline politically-incorrect statements for fear they will also get "cancelled". Then the definition of "borderline" politically-incorrect shifts further left, more and more becomes taboo, and people start to deny facts because they don't agree to societal norms. When reality is taboo, you get real consequences. We need a grey area, where you can say something which isn't "accepted by society", but it doesn't get you effectively blacklisted everywhere, and it doesn't affect things like job offers. I'm too young to confirm but I assume we had something like this before social media took off. But with everyone connected and very scrutinizing/critical it's starting to go away.

Retric 5y ago
Saying the wrong thing in a private setting and getting fired has been a thing before computers existed. Cancel culture is just a new name for an ancient practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Brown_(loyalist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Brown_(loyalist) > Brown soon found himself embroiled in the coming revolution. On 2 August 1775 a crowd of 130 Sons of Liberty confronted him at his house and demanded he pledge himself to the Patriot cause. Brown requested the liberty to hold his own opinions, saying that he could "never enter into an Engagement to take up arms against the Country which gave him being", and finally met their demands with pistol and sword. The crowd seized him and struck him with the butt of a musket, fracturing his skull. Taken prisoner, he was tied to a tree where he was roasted by fire and scalped before being tarred and feathered. Brown was then carted through a number of nearby settlements and forced to verbally pledge himself to the Patriot cause before being released. This mistreatment resulted in the loss of two toes and lifelong headaches. Cancel culture has been with us since the beginning. Hell, other primates kick bad actors out of the social group; it's been a thing before language existed.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    The new trend of sticking it to the cons by comparing 2022 to 18th century mobs or early 20th century speech codes is something I didn’t have on my bingo card.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      It's being widely claimed that "cancel culture" is some kind of new and different phenomenon; it hardly takes much historical knowledge to know it's not. Examples abound, in nature, antiquity (go tell Socrates about being "canceled"), etc.
      - rayiner 5y ago
        As a conservative I’m not even a big believer in the perfectability of man. I just find it funny that people are copping to being the latest generation of John Ashcroft throwing curtains over naked statues.
      - Msw242 5y ago
        Is that the comparison you really want to draw?
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        Yes. Today’s supposed “cancel culture” is substantially gentler than any time in history. We enjoy rights to free speech broader and stronger than ever. Socrates would be jealous.
        Tao331 5y ago
        Socrates wasn't cancelled. Insofar as we can trust Plato and Xenophon, we know who he was and the things he said. Athens may have executed him, but they didn't deplatform him. > Socrates would be jealous. I doubt that very much. Your examples are bad enough to be considered trolling.
- elpakal 5y ago
  Yes but it wasnt as easy to find out about and there weren’t as many companies who profited from making these kind of things easy to hear about.
- armchairhacker 5y ago
  Yes, people have been much worse than "cancelled" for much more "borderline" taboo opinions. But spread of information today is definitely an issue. Back then you could be more comfortable saying stuff in private. Now with a lot of communications online, proof* of private conversations can affect you in public. * There's also the issue of people framing things out of context but that's a separate topic.
- da_chicken 5y ago
  In John Stuart Mill's seminal work On Liberty, he explicitly calls out the tyranny and power of social consequences and their ability to chill free speech. He notes that social consequences for minority opinions can be even more severely chilling than even state consequences. Of course, as I recall he also basically offered no solutions. Social consequences are both necessary and cause problems. It's really a very complicated thing. People should be free to explore ideas that turn out to be bad without losing their livelihoods. We need to hold people accountable for their actions, but we also need to allow people to make mistakes and learn. If I think about what happened with Lindsay Ellis, that seems like a gross overreaction. If I think about how people on Twitter sharply criticize Chris Pratt because of the church he attends (which is also attended by other Hollywood stars) then that seems like an overreaction, too. On the other hand, the response to Kevin Spacey seems like it might be more appropriate. The real issue is that "being cancelled" is only a problem for people who are famous and not powerful. If you're powerful, being cancelled really doesn't do anything at all. Indeed, if you're powerful, being cancelled can just get people to agree with you more even if you have actually done the awful things you are cancelled for. Nevertheless, there is so much pearl clutching, clout chasing, outrage Olympics, victim identity politics, and manufactured wedge issues on social media that it's just one big rat's nest. Worse, it all overshadows the real problems like actual political issues and misinformation being spread to manipulate opinion.
  - utbabya 5y ago
    Saw this comment before I slept and I think I woke up with a solution! The problem is incentive based, cancelling others gains one social power. So the solution is simple, use the same weapon, and we are getting at step 1 already. 1) Being "woke" about how cruel cancelling other is, collectively. 2) Cancel the cancellors by naming and shaming every single participant, instead of the cancellee, for reason 1). Script it if necessary. 3) The balance of power is restored, just as Jesus intended, armchair judges get judged. (Doesn't it sound like the beginining of just any other cultural shift?) 4) ... 5) profit!
TameAntelope 5y ago
Society is expressing its collective free speech when it "cancels" someone, for whatever reason. When you support "free speech", you support all of it or none of it.
- sjg007 5y ago
  >When you support "free speech", you support all of it or none of it. Free speech is not tautological.
- endominus 5y ago
  It's these types of absolutist statements that drive people away from activist causes. Even a staunch proponent of free speech might have some types of speech they object to; - Advertising dangerous and addictive substances, particularly to children [0] - Lying about the contents or efficacy of a commercial product, especially medicine or food [1] - Publishing private details about someone in an effort to inflict real world harm [2] - Publishing private work against the will of its creator, as might have happened with Sir Terry Pratchett's unfinished books after his death. [3] (I distinctly remember a commenter I had an argument with stating that after his death, his wishes in that regard were irrelevant compared to the living's desire to actually read said work. Fortunately, such callousness is not the norm) Collective free speech is an interesting idea, in any case. I'm always wary of the term "collective." It brings to mind collective justice. It's not unthinkably terrible, after all, to throw a single stone at a sinner. And if my neighbor has the right to, so do I. And his neighbor, and her neighbor, and soon enough the sinner is stoned to death and none of us are responsible. All each of us did was throw a single stone, after all. It's a strange dissonance to state that censorship is free speech. But that's what people seem to often mean when they talk about cancelling or deplatforming people. [0]: https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/rules-regulations-and-guidance/family-smoking-prevention-and-tobacco-control-act-overview https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/rules-regulations-and-g... [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nestle-baby-milk-scandal-food-industry-standards https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nestle-baby... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/30/terry-pratchett-unfinished-novels-destroyed-streamroller https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/30/terry-pratchet...
slg 5y ago
>But IMO the larger issue of cancel culture, is it makes people less likely to say edgy jokes or borderline politically-incorrect statements for fear they will also get "cancelled". This comes up all the time that "you can't make edgy jokes anymore", but it isn't true. Just look up someone like Anthony Jessolnik. Here is his most recent joke on Twitter[1]. Mocking both pedophilia and the death of a 4-year-old. This guy has 1.2m followers and plenty of those are liberals. A talented comedian can joke about anything. I think this narrative comes from the fact that many people don't see a difference between a joke about racism and a racist joke. They see someone "canceled" for a transphobic joke and take it to mean we can't joke about trans people. It isn't the case. I have seen comedians kill with material about trans people in front of young leftist crowds. It is possible. I see the value in joking about these issues. I don't see the value in making a racist, sexist, transphobic, or overall bigoted joke made at the expense of innocent people simply trying to live their life. [1] - https://twitter.com/anthonyjeselnik/status/1504683841595719681 https://twitter.com/anthonyjeselnik/status/15046838415957196...
- ungamedplayer 5y ago
  No skin in this race. Perspective is the mechanism that changes the perception of a joke, that's not something the joke teller can influence. Anyone can take offense to anything. Only when it gains critical mass will it be cared about.
- javajosh 5y ago
  And I'm so tired of people responding "nope, there's nothing to see here, [good] people aren't being cancelled, and no-one is afraid to speak their mind." It's dehumanizing. Or maybe gaslighting. You're telling them that they aren't seeing and feeling the thing they are seeing and feeling. You're not arguing against their take, just denying their experience. Cancel culture exists. It hurts people, and it generates fear. Heresy exists and it is punished. Most people are self-censuring heavily now. I have experienced it myself in personal and professional contexts, and I am a moderate liberal. The OP mentions the fact that both sides always have truthful anecdotes to support their positions, and use it to attack the other. And that is what you've done here. Regardless of the details of cancel culture, how could you think a system like that could ever possibly work? When there is status to be gained from making an allegation then they'll be made, true or not. When allegation is enough to generate a mob, which affects your employer, your friends and family, you're entire life, this is a disproportionate punishment even if the allegation were true. But the accused rarely, if ever, even gets to speak in their own defense. It's called "social justice" but it's not a court, there are no rules, and the judge jury and executioner feels just fine if they never take a dispassionate look at facts. This system, applied to anything, is the opposite of justice. To believe otherwise is to reveal a deeply flawed understanding of how human beings respond to incentives. (Of course, one way to get around this problem is to redefine "guilt" to require only that the victim feel bad. But again, this incentivizes victims to feel bad, and somehow everyone forgets that people feel bad for all sorts of reasons, sometimes having nothing to do with the accused.)
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
The "best" part of the toxic Twitter cancel culture is the "if you're not actively fighting for our cause, you're the devil and need to be cancelled". There can be no neutral ground, you're either fervently for them, or the enemy to be destroyed.
- cwillu 5y ago
  “A guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it.”
- mrslave 5y ago
  Remember how mad everyone got when George W. Bush said, "You are either with us, or with the terrorists"?
- 1270018080 5y ago
  By "enemy to be destroyed" you mean a few people mocking you after you say something stupid right? Assuming you have the thousands of followers needed get the visibility? It might be worth reflecting on the cancel culture boogeyman you are terrified of, and how much of it is in your imagination. That goes to anyone reading this too. It could help you out.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  That take loses a ton of nuance. This is probably talking about anti-racism. When the status quo is actively discriminating and harmful, doing nothing is enabling oppression.
  - Siira 5y ago
    No one has a duty to fight for your political ideology. What you’re proposing is called fundamentalism. It’s what inspires terrorists. Reminds me of forcing people to cry in funerals of dictators, honestly. Pure bullying, hiding behind a facade of righteousness.
    - 5y ago
imilk 5y ago
> sometimes fired from their jobs because of a racist tweet or off-putting remark I don't know about you, but I sure as hell am firing someone who is says racist things. Keeping them around is not good for your company, for the other employees, for your vendors/clients, or anyone else associated with your company.
tambourine_man 5y ago
> I hope most would agree that this is a disproportionate punishment. Racism is a crime in any reasonable society. If anything, being yelled at on Twitter is too little punishment.
- prepend 5y ago
  I’m not aware of any society where racism is a crime. In the US discrimination due to racism is a crime. Those are different things.
  - tambourine_man 5y ago
    How’s that any different? The US is very far from reasonable in many respects, which is why white supremacists, antivaxxers, etc, flourish. You should get familiar other societies, particularly in the European Union or South Africa. In Brazil, you’ll go to jail for making racist claims. As you should. How could that be polemic in the 21st century?
    - Georgelemental 5y ago
      The US is much more stable and prosperous than Brazil or South Africa.
      - katamarimambo 5y ago
        Irrelevant. In regards to dealing with racism, Brazil is better than USA.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I could accept that if every race was treated equally and racism against any race would lead to same consequences.
  - tambourine_man 5y ago
    If every race was treated equally there would be no racism. I think that’s pretty self evident. Also, no one is asking you to accept it, it’s the law in many countries.
deanCommie 5y ago
> Saying or doing something racist or rude is bad, it should and would probably get you kicked out of a bar or event. But prior to social media, it would not get your entire reputation ruined, and you wouldn't get 50,000 random people to start harassing you. I hope most would agree that this is a disproportionate punishment. If someone says something racist or sexist enough to get thrown out a bar, then I absolutely don't want to employ this person. In the olden days there would be rumors and people would skate by. Hell, even the folks in first group of cancellation that you deem acceptable - the Weinsteins, Spaceys and Cosbys: everyone around them knew. FOR DECADES. And nothing happened. It took until the same technological leaps that we are talking about for their victims to find each other, gather safety in numbers, and facilitate punishment. This is of course going to be very unpopular with the "we are not racist/sexist - we are just asking questions" crowd.
- ResearchCode 5y ago
  Disagree, the concept of witch trials predates the technological "leaps" you mentioned.
  - deanCommie 5y ago
    Witch trials are overtly situation where someone is convicted of something they didn't do. In all discussions of "cancel culture" there is no debate or disagreement that the person actually did the things they did - the only debate is whether the crime fits the consequences.
    - ResearchCode 5y ago
      Sure there is. On your theme, say Woody Allen.
linspace 5y ago
> I'm too young to confirm but I assume we had something like this before social media took off. The period after most people moved to big cities and before internet was widespread was the golden age of privacy.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Yes! I'm glad someone remembers. You could walk into a different bar, cafe, park and be a different person. It was a great way to find yourself as a young adult. Now social media makes everything permanent.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
afiori 5y ago
More than disincentivizing the borderline ideas of today (something that has always happened everywhere) it also disincentive the borderline ideas of tomorrow (something that is generally correlated with oppressive regimes) something fun happened a few weeks back: someone made a compilation of all the time Joe Rogan said the n-word; the Young Turks made a segment how inexcusable it was to say it "so many times"; someone made a compilation of all the time the Young Turks; some time later on an unrelated topic regarding dwarfism the Young Turks went on a rant about it being impossible to know whether the word dwarf was a slur or not and worrying about a new d-word compilation in 5 years the particular details of what is cancel culture elude me, I am not smart enough to define it. but I find this future-based self-censoring (not based on visible trends but hypothetical ones) to be corrosive
ehnto 5y ago
> We need a grey area, where you can say something which isn't "accepted by society", but it doesn't get you effectively blacklisted everywhere, and it doesn't affect things like job offers. I am still thinking about all this, but I feel it is an unsolveable aspect of the global soapbox style social media platforms. You also can't get away with risque jokes in big crowds when public speaking or with people you don't know. With your friends, there is a lot of nuance occuring, like them knowing you are a good person and have good intentions. To a crowd it's not necessarily obvious, and the range of people you could offend is way larger. You know you can grill your friend about their moustache because he knows you mean no harm. You know you can make a joke about bald heads because you know none of present company will be offended, you just can't achieve that in bigger groups. The internet is that issue but on a global scale. The idea that you can say anything on the net without consequences is the wrong idea I think, because you can't even do that off the net. The solution is better community building and social tools for groups I think.
- FFRefresh 5y ago
  +1 on communities/social tools for groups. I think one of the great challenges with the internet is that global broadcasting aspect of it. Knowing that something you say could spread across the world, and potentially hurt your prospects in the real world, is chilling and moderating. Our online identities/communication becomes more artificial in this environment. We feel the urge to broadcast what we think the world will think is acceptable/desirable, as opposed to what we truly think. I feel like increased privacy, more localized online communities, and increased ephemerality of our content could all help towards making the internet a better place. How to do that is obviously a huge challenge.
EndBlkAntiAznH8 5y ago
As a society, we have not developed appropriate, constructive, non-permanent repercussions for minor transgressions like an offensive online post or an off-color comment. Our culture hasn't caught up with technology which can broadcast minor transgressions to millions of people and save them in perpetuity. What is the modern equivalent of getting kicked out of a bar? Anti-social or bigoted behavior should have consequences but not permanent or life-ruining. This is assuming the behavior was actually bad. The other problem with cancel culture is 1. Many of the "transgressions" were not transgressions at all; sometimes just an opposing opinion. 2. It is selectively applied according to identity. 3. No checks and balances. Easy for a mistaken identity or simple misunderstanding go viral. Once the mob is ignited, it's extremely difficult to issue a correction or walk back an accusation.
mnd999 5y ago
> We need a grey area Absolutely, life is shades of grey and never black and white. Unfortunately the noisiest people on the internet either can only think in black and white, or choose to do so to (to get note ‘engagement’ etc.)
wowokay 5y ago
See but this is a big flaw in the way most people view free speech. No one wants to hear it, but some views considered extreme or “bad” are considered “bad” based on your point of view. Currently the majority of our culture feels acting on racist motives are bad. An individual who internally is racist, posts racist things on the internet is only bad when they act racist towards someone. If a platform blocks someone from posting a non individual targeting racist post and it gets blocked on Facebook, that is similar to someone posting something against a religion and it getting blocked because the moderator is religious, or posting something anti American and the site moderated by an American blocks it because they disagree with the content. As much as we might all hate it, the lobbying for an open free internet means giving everyone the freedom to post their thoughts without backlash. Imagine If the civil rights movement took place during the Information Age, Amit of people would have compared promoting anti slavery content on posts to anti vax information today.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  > As much as we might all hate it, the lobbying for an open free internet means giving everyone the freedom to post their thoughts without backlash. Imagine If the civil rights movement took place during the Information Age The civil rights movement experienced a lot of backlash. I mean… Malcom X and Dr. King aren’t exactly alive today. People in those movements were beaten by police and arrested for expressing their view. I don’t recall any police beatings or murders of anti-vaxxers. Freedom of expression never meant freedom from backlash. (well... ostensibly it means free from state backlash but that's never really been entirely true)
  - ThrowawayR2 5y ago
    The parent post invokes two famous names but, if social media had existed back then, effectively no one would even have heard of them. They would have been deplatformed for having extremist views (by the standards of their era) and their followers would have been fired for voicing support for them with the illiberal mainstream piously saying "Freedom of speech isn't freedom from backlash." about it.
dav_Oz 5y ago
>I'm too young to confirm but I assume we had something like this before social media took off. But with everyone connected and very scrutinizing/critical it's starting to go away. As you correctly pointed out "open societies" need rituals/safe places in which a free flow of exchanges can emerge without stifling "artificial constraints" (= courtesies) which at some point just effectivley dissipates any drive for exchange/communication attaining maximum entropy within its boundaries devoid of any discernible "meaning" (other than our "box" has the highest moral value (i.e. tightly closed) compared to other "boxes"). Some examples of "safe open spaces": jesters (modern: comedians), interpreting dreams (modern: psychotherapy), ecstacy/dionysian rituals (modern: going out drinking) ... I don't see Twitter in its actual form up to this challenge. And it's actually fine to admit that they have long reached a limit to reasonably scale up something resembling the first amendment. Fair enough: the 1st refers to the role of the government. But then in a world of the WWW (with its current tech monopolies) and increasing PPPs: What exactly can be/is the role of governments and that of corporations in the 21st century? Most certainly not a recursion to an 18th/19th century understanding of social contracts (with "high-tech" movable types at their disposal).
bnralt 5y ago
> private citizens getting doxxed, slandered, and sometimes fired from their jobs because of a racist tweet or off-putting remark. I think even more concerning for most people is a mob going after and firing people who didn't do these things. David Shor getting fired because he Tweeted that rioting was a bad political tactic, causing angry Twitter users to successfully press his employers to fire him. The case of the guy who got fired because someone thought he made an "OK" sign while driving and whipped up an angry Twitter mob (both cases are discussed here[1]). Here's a random case I had stumbled upon a few years back that's now been forgotten[2] - man posts video of Chipotle telling him he has to pay for his burrito first because they say he's taken burritos without paying for them, accuses Chipotle workers of racism, and whips up a Twitter mob. Chipotle immediately apologizes and fires the manager. Then people notice old Tweets from the same guy bragging about stealing burritos from Chipotle. This leads Chipotle to rehire the person. If a random person decides to lie about you and whip of a Twitter mob, you have to hope that they've been so sloppy as to brag about their crimes on Twitter beforehand, because a simple unverified accusation from any random person is enough to get you fired. And even after many cases like this, Twitter still let's people try to create Twitter mobs to get revenge on private citizens (particularly jarring when Yishan is arguing that the reason news articles are censored is to avoid angry mobs). However, they'll ban people who politely state heterodox opinions on controversial subjects (even if they are relatively common positions among the public). And since Yishan brings up Reddit, it's worth noting that they have a similar approach as well (whipping up angry mobs is fine, heterodox positions are not). This culture on these sites is a result of the choices that social media companies have made (and not just the choices mentioned above, but others like the efforts made to push engagement). We see the results of that choice by the state of these sites. And the people involved, instead of taking responsibility for what they've created, decide to dump all the blame on the users. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chipotle-rehires-manager-viral-video-incident-labeled-racist-n938141 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chipotle-rehires-manage...
kgwxd 5y ago
The internet gives everyone a loud, personally branded, indestructible PA system and a wide choice of busy street corners to play whatever messages they want, on loop, 24/7. If someone decides to use that power in a way they already know is going piss off many passers by, well, pissed off mobs are going to do what they do. Mob mentality isn’t going anywhere unless humans go extinct. Speak your mind but read the room, the room is the entire world.

Retric 5y ago

Saying the wrong thing in a private setting and getting fired has been a thing before computers existed. Cancel culture is just a new name for an ancient practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning

ceejayoz 5y ago
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Brown_(loyalist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Brown_(loyalist) > Brown soon found himself embroiled in the coming revolution. On 2 August 1775 a crowd of 130 Sons of Liberty confronted him at his house and demanded he pledge himself to the Patriot cause. Brown requested the liberty to hold his own opinions, saying that he could "never enter into an Engagement to take up arms against the Country which gave him being", and finally met their demands with pistol and sword. The crowd seized him and struck him with the butt of a musket, fracturing his skull. Taken prisoner, he was tied to a tree where he was roasted by fire and scalped before being tarred and feathered. Brown was then carted through a number of nearby settlements and forced to verbally pledge himself to the Patriot cause before being released. This mistreatment resulted in the loss of two toes and lifelong headaches. Cancel culture has been with us since the beginning. Hell, other primates kick bad actors out of the social group; it's been a thing before language existed.
- rayiner 5y ago
  The new trend of sticking it to the cons by comparing 2022 to 18th century mobs or early 20th century speech codes is something I didn’t have on my bingo card.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    It's being widely claimed that "cancel culture" is some kind of new and different phenomenon; it hardly takes much historical knowledge to know it's not. Examples abound, in nature, antiquity (go tell Socrates about being "canceled"), etc.
    - rayiner 5y ago
      As a conservative I’m not even a big believer in the perfectability of man. I just find it funny that people are copping to being the latest generation of John Ashcroft throwing curtains over naked statues.
    - Msw242 5y ago
      Is that the comparison you really want to draw?
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        Yes. Today’s supposed “cancel culture” is substantially gentler than any time in history. We enjoy rights to free speech broader and stronger than ever. Socrates would be jealous.
        Tao331 5y ago
        Socrates wasn't cancelled. Insofar as we can trust Plato and Xenophon, we know who he was and the things he said. Athens may have executed him, but they didn't deplatform him. > Socrates would be jealous. I doubt that very much. Your examples are bad enough to be considered trolling.
elpakal 5y ago
Yes but it wasnt as easy to find out about and there weren’t as many companies who profited from making these kind of things easy to hear about.
armchairhacker 5y ago
Yes, people have been much worse than "cancelled" for much more "borderline" taboo opinions. But spread of information today is definitely an issue. Back then you could be more comfortable saying stuff in private. Now with a lot of communications online, proof* of private conversations can affect you in public. * There's also the issue of people framing things out of context but that's a separate topic.
da_chicken 5y ago
In John Stuart Mill's seminal work On Liberty, he explicitly calls out the tyranny and power of social consequences and their ability to chill free speech. He notes that social consequences for minority opinions can be even more severely chilling than even state consequences. Of course, as I recall he also basically offered no solutions. Social consequences are both necessary and cause problems. It's really a very complicated thing. People should be free to explore ideas that turn out to be bad without losing their livelihoods. We need to hold people accountable for their actions, but we also need to allow people to make mistakes and learn. If I think about what happened with Lindsay Ellis, that seems like a gross overreaction. If I think about how people on Twitter sharply criticize Chris Pratt because of the church he attends (which is also attended by other Hollywood stars) then that seems like an overreaction, too. On the other hand, the response to Kevin Spacey seems like it might be more appropriate. The real issue is that "being cancelled" is only a problem for people who are famous and not powerful. If you're powerful, being cancelled really doesn't do anything at all. Indeed, if you're powerful, being cancelled can just get people to agree with you more even if you have actually done the awful things you are cancelled for. Nevertheless, there is so much pearl clutching, clout chasing, outrage Olympics, victim identity politics, and manufactured wedge issues on social media that it's just one big rat's nest. Worse, it all overshadows the real problems like actual political issues and misinformation being spread to manipulate opinion.
- utbabya 5y ago
  Saw this comment before I slept and I think I woke up with a solution! The problem is incentive based, cancelling others gains one social power. So the solution is simple, use the same weapon, and we are getting at step 1 already. 1) Being "woke" about how cruel cancelling other is, collectively. 2) Cancel the cancellors by naming and shaming every single participant, instead of the cancellee, for reason 1). Script it if necessary. 3) The balance of power is restored, just as Jesus intended, armchair judges get judged. (Doesn't it sound like the beginining of just any other cultural shift?) 4) ... 5) profit!

TameAntelope 5y ago

Society is expressing its collective free speech when it "cancels" someone, for whatever reason. When you support "free speech", you support all of it or none of it.

sjg007 5y ago
>When you support "free speech", you support all of it or none of it. Free speech is not tautological.
endominus 5y ago
It's these types of absolutist statements that drive people away from activist causes. Even a staunch proponent of free speech might have some types of speech they object to; - Advertising dangerous and addictive substances, particularly to children [0] - Lying about the contents or efficacy of a commercial product, especially medicine or food [1] - Publishing private details about someone in an effort to inflict real world harm [2] - Publishing private work against the will of its creator, as might have happened with Sir Terry Pratchett's unfinished books after his death. [3] (I distinctly remember a commenter I had an argument with stating that after his death, his wishes in that regard were irrelevant compared to the living's desire to actually read said work. Fortunately, such callousness is not the norm) Collective free speech is an interesting idea, in any case. I'm always wary of the term "collective." It brings to mind collective justice. It's not unthinkably terrible, after all, to throw a single stone at a sinner. And if my neighbor has the right to, so do I. And his neighbor, and her neighbor, and soon enough the sinner is stoned to death and none of us are responsible. All each of us did was throw a single stone, after all. It's a strange dissonance to state that censorship is free speech. But that's what people seem to often mean when they talk about cancelling or deplatforming people. [0]: https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/rules-regulations-and-guidance/family-smoking-prevention-and-tobacco-control-act-overview https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/rules-regulations-and-g... [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nestle-baby-milk-scandal-food-industry-standards https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nestle-baby... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/30/terry-pratchett-unfinished-novels-destroyed-streamroller https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/30/terry-pratchet...

slg 5y ago

>But IMO the larger issue of cancel culture, is it makes people less likely to say edgy jokes or borderline politically-incorrect statements for fear they will also get "cancelled". This comes up all the time that "you can't make edgy jokes anymore", but it isn't true. Just look up someone like Anthony Jessolnik. Here is his most recent joke on Twitter[1]. Mocking both pedophilia and the death of a 4-year-old. This guy has 1.2m followers and plenty of those are liberals. A talented comedian can joke about anything. I think this narrative comes from the fact that many people don't see a difference between a joke about racism and a racist joke. They see someone "canceled" for a transphobic joke and take it to mean we can't joke about trans people. It isn't the case. I have seen comedians kill with material about trans people in front of young leftist crowds. It is possible. I see the value in joking about these issues. I don't see the value in making a racist, sexist, transphobic, or overall bigoted joke made at the expense of innocent people simply trying to live their life. [1] - https://twitter.com/anthonyjeselnik/status/1504683841595719681 https://twitter.com/anthonyjeselnik/status/15046838415957196...

ungamedplayer 5y ago
No skin in this race. Perspective is the mechanism that changes the perception of a joke, that's not something the joke teller can influence. Anyone can take offense to anything. Only when it gains critical mass will it be cared about.
javajosh 5y ago
And I'm so tired of people responding "nope, there's nothing to see here, [good] people aren't being cancelled, and no-one is afraid to speak their mind." It's dehumanizing. Or maybe gaslighting. You're telling them that they aren't seeing and feeling the thing they are seeing and feeling. You're not arguing against their take, just denying their experience. Cancel culture exists. It hurts people, and it generates fear. Heresy exists and it is punished. Most people are self-censuring heavily now. I have experienced it myself in personal and professional contexts, and I am a moderate liberal. The OP mentions the fact that both sides always have truthful anecdotes to support their positions, and use it to attack the other. And that is what you've done here. Regardless of the details of cancel culture, how could you think a system like that could ever possibly work? When there is status to be gained from making an allegation then they'll be made, true or not. When allegation is enough to generate a mob, which affects your employer, your friends and family, you're entire life, this is a disproportionate punishment even if the allegation were true. But the accused rarely, if ever, even gets to speak in their own defense. It's called "social justice" but it's not a court, there are no rules, and the judge jury and executioner feels just fine if they never take a dispassionate look at facts. This system, applied to anything, is the opposite of justice. To believe otherwise is to reveal a deeply flawed understanding of how human beings respond to incentives. (Of course, one way to get around this problem is to redefine "guilt" to require only that the victim feel bad. But again, this incentivizes victims to feel bad, and somehow everyone forgets that people feel bad for all sorts of reasons, sometimes having nothing to do with the accused.)

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

The "best" part of the toxic Twitter cancel culture is the "if you're not actively fighting for our cause, you're the devil and need to be cancelled". There can be no neutral ground, you're either fervently for them, or the enemy to be destroyed.

cwillu 5y ago
“A guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it.”
mrslave 5y ago
Remember how mad everyone got when George W. Bush said, "You are either with us, or with the terrorists"?
1270018080 5y ago
By "enemy to be destroyed" you mean a few people mocking you after you say something stupid right? Assuming you have the thousands of followers needed get the visibility? It might be worth reflecting on the cancel culture boogeyman you are terrified of, and how much of it is in your imagination. That goes to anyone reading this too. It could help you out.
dillondoyle 5y ago
That take loses a ton of nuance. This is probably talking about anti-racism. When the status quo is actively discriminating and harmful, doing nothing is enabling oppression.
- Siira 5y ago
  No one has a duty to fight for your political ideology. What you’re proposing is called fundamentalism. It’s what inspires terrorists. Reminds me of forcing people to cry in funerals of dictators, honestly. Pure bullying, hiding behind a facade of righteousness.
  - 5y ago

imilk 5y ago

> sometimes fired from their jobs because of a racist tweet or off-putting remark I don't know about you, but I sure as hell am firing someone who is says racist things. Keeping them around is not good for your company, for the other employees, for your vendors/clients, or anyone else associated with your company.

tambourine_man 5y ago

> I hope most would agree that this is a disproportionate punishment. Racism is a crime in any reasonable society. If anything, being yelled at on Twitter is too little punishment.

prepend 5y ago
I’m not aware of any society where racism is a crime. In the US discrimination due to racism is a crime. Those are different things.
- tambourine_man 5y ago
  How’s that any different? The US is very far from reasonable in many respects, which is why white supremacists, antivaxxers, etc, flourish. You should get familiar other societies, particularly in the European Union or South Africa. In Brazil, you’ll go to jail for making racist claims. As you should. How could that be polemic in the 21st century?
  - Georgelemental 5y ago
    The US is much more stable and prosperous than Brazil or South Africa.
    - katamarimambo 5y ago
      Irrelevant. In regards to dealing with racism, Brazil is better than USA.
Ekaros 5y ago
I could accept that if every race was treated equally and racism against any race would lead to same consequences.
- tambourine_man 5y ago
  If every race was treated equally there would be no racism. I think that’s pretty self evident. Also, no one is asking you to accept it, it’s the law in many countries.

deanCommie 5y ago

> Saying or doing something racist or rude is bad, it should and would probably get you kicked out of a bar or event. But prior to social media, it would not get your entire reputation ruined, and you wouldn't get 50,000 random people to start harassing you. I hope most would agree that this is a disproportionate punishment. If someone says something racist or sexist enough to get thrown out a bar, then I absolutely don't want to employ this person. In the olden days there would be rumors and people would skate by. Hell, even the folks in first group of cancellation that you deem acceptable - the Weinsteins, Spaceys and Cosbys: everyone around them knew. FOR DECADES. And nothing happened. It took until the same technological leaps that we are talking about for their victims to find each other, gather safety in numbers, and facilitate punishment. This is of course going to be very unpopular with the "we are not racist/sexist - we are just asking questions" crowd.

ResearchCode 5y ago
Disagree, the concept of witch trials predates the technological "leaps" you mentioned.
- deanCommie 5y ago
  Witch trials are overtly situation where someone is convicted of something they didn't do. In all discussions of "cancel culture" there is no debate or disagreement that the person actually did the things they did - the only debate is whether the crime fits the consequences.
  - ResearchCode 5y ago
    Sure there is. On your theme, say Woody Allen.

linspace 5y ago

> I'm too young to confirm but I assume we had something like this before social media took off. The period after most people moved to big cities and before internet was widespread was the golden age of privacy.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Yes! I'm glad someone remembers. You could walk into a different bar, cafe, park and be a different person. It was a great way to find yourself as a young adult. Now social media makes everything permanent.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

afiori 5y ago

More than disincentivizing the borderline ideas of today (something that has always happened everywhere) it also disincentive the borderline ideas of tomorrow (something that is generally correlated with oppressive regimes) something fun happened a few weeks back: someone made a compilation of all the time Joe Rogan said the n-word; the Young Turks made a segment how inexcusable it was to say it "so many times"; someone made a compilation of all the time the Young Turks; some time later on an unrelated topic regarding dwarfism the Young Turks went on a rant about it being impossible to know whether the word dwarf was a slur or not and worrying about a new d-word compilation in 5 years the particular details of what is cancel culture elude me, I am not smart enough to define it. but I find this future-based self-censoring (not based on visible trends but hypothetical ones) to be corrosive

ehnto 5y ago

> We need a grey area, where you can say something which isn't "accepted by society", but it doesn't get you effectively blacklisted everywhere, and it doesn't affect things like job offers. I am still thinking about all this, but I feel it is an unsolveable aspect of the global soapbox style social media platforms. You also can't get away with risque jokes in big crowds when public speaking or with people you don't know. With your friends, there is a lot of nuance occuring, like them knowing you are a good person and have good intentions. To a crowd it's not necessarily obvious, and the range of people you could offend is way larger. You know you can grill your friend about their moustache because he knows you mean no harm. You know you can make a joke about bald heads because you know none of present company will be offended, you just can't achieve that in bigger groups. The internet is that issue but on a global scale. The idea that you can say anything on the net without consequences is the wrong idea I think, because you can't even do that off the net. The solution is better community building and social tools for groups I think.

FFRefresh 5y ago
+1 on communities/social tools for groups. I think one of the great challenges with the internet is that global broadcasting aspect of it. Knowing that something you say could spread across the world, and potentially hurt your prospects in the real world, is chilling and moderating. Our online identities/communication becomes more artificial in this environment. We feel the urge to broadcast what we think the world will think is acceptable/desirable, as opposed to what we truly think. I feel like increased privacy, more localized online communities, and increased ephemerality of our content could all help towards making the internet a better place. How to do that is obviously a huge challenge.

EndBlkAntiAznH8 5y ago

As a society, we have not developed appropriate, constructive, non-permanent repercussions for minor transgressions like an offensive online post or an off-color comment. Our culture hasn't caught up with technology which can broadcast minor transgressions to millions of people and save them in perpetuity. What is the modern equivalent of getting kicked out of a bar? Anti-social or bigoted behavior should have consequences but not permanent or life-ruining. This is assuming the behavior was actually bad. The other problem with cancel culture is 1. Many of the "transgressions" were not transgressions at all; sometimes just an opposing opinion. 2. It is selectively applied according to identity. 3. No checks and balances. Easy for a mistaken identity or simple misunderstanding go viral. Once the mob is ignited, it's extremely difficult to issue a correction or walk back an accusation.

mnd999 5y ago

> We need a grey area Absolutely, life is shades of grey and never black and white. Unfortunately the noisiest people on the internet either can only think in black and white, or choose to do so to (to get note ‘engagement’ etc.)

wowokay 5y ago

See but this is a big flaw in the way most people view free speech. No one wants to hear it, but some views considered extreme or “bad” are considered “bad” based on your point of view. Currently the majority of our culture feels acting on racist motives are bad. An individual who internally is racist, posts racist things on the internet is only bad when they act racist towards someone. If a platform blocks someone from posting a non individual targeting racist post and it gets blocked on Facebook, that is similar to someone posting something against a religion and it getting blocked because the moderator is religious, or posting something anti American and the site moderated by an American blocks it because they disagree with the content. As much as we might all hate it, the lobbying for an open free internet means giving everyone the freedom to post their thoughts without backlash. Imagine If the civil rights movement took place during the Information Age, Amit of people would have compared promoting anti slavery content on posts to anti vax information today.

ModernMech 5y ago
> As much as we might all hate it, the lobbying for an open free internet means giving everyone the freedom to post their thoughts without backlash. Imagine If the civil rights movement took place during the Information Age The civil rights movement experienced a lot of backlash. I mean… Malcom X and Dr. King aren’t exactly alive today. People in those movements were beaten by police and arrested for expressing their view. I don’t recall any police beatings or murders of anti-vaxxers. Freedom of expression never meant freedom from backlash. (well... ostensibly it means free from state backlash but that's never really been entirely true)
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
  The parent post invokes two famous names but, if social media had existed back then, effectively no one would even have heard of them. They would have been deplatformed for having extremist views (by the standards of their era) and their followers would have been fired for voicing support for them with the illiberal mainstream piously saying "Freedom of speech isn't freedom from backlash." about it.

dav_Oz 5y ago

>I'm too young to confirm but I assume we had something like this before social media took off. But with everyone connected and very scrutinizing/critical it's starting to go away. As you correctly pointed out "open societies" need rituals/safe places in which a free flow of exchanges can emerge without stifling "artificial constraints" (= courtesies) which at some point just effectivley dissipates any drive for exchange/communication attaining maximum entropy within its boundaries devoid of any discernible "meaning" (other than our "box" has the highest moral value (i.e. tightly closed) compared to other "boxes"). Some examples of "safe open spaces": jesters (modern: comedians), interpreting dreams (modern: psychotherapy), ecstacy/dionysian rituals (modern: going out drinking) ... I don't see Twitter in its actual form up to this challenge. And it's actually fine to admit that they have long reached a limit to reasonably scale up something resembling the first amendment. Fair enough: the 1st refers to the role of the government. But then in a world of the WWW (with its current tech monopolies) and increasing PPPs: What exactly can be/is the role of governments and that of corporations in the 21st century? Most certainly not a recursion to an 18th/19th century understanding of social contracts (with "high-tech" movable types at their disposal).

bnralt 5y ago

> private citizens getting doxxed, slandered, and sometimes fired from their jobs because of a racist tweet or off-putting remark. I think even more concerning for most people is a mob going after and firing people who didn't do these things. David Shor getting fired because he Tweeted that rioting was a bad political tactic, causing angry Twitter users to successfully press his employers to fire him. The case of the guy who got fired because someone thought he made an "OK" sign while driving and whipped up an angry Twitter mob (both cases are discussed here[1]). Here's a random case I had stumbled upon a few years back that's now been forgotten[2] - man posts video of Chipotle telling him he has to pay for his burrito first because they say he's taken burritos without paying for them, accuses Chipotle workers of racism, and whips up a Twitter mob. Chipotle immediately apologizes and fires the manager. Then people notice old Tweets from the same guy bragging about stealing burritos from Chipotle. This leads Chipotle to rehire the person. If a random person decides to lie about you and whip of a Twitter mob, you have to hope that they've been so sloppy as to brag about their crimes on Twitter beforehand, because a simple unverified accusation from any random person is enough to get you fired. And even after many cases like this, Twitter still let's people try to create Twitter mobs to get revenge on private citizens (particularly jarring when Yishan is arguing that the reason news articles are censored is to avoid angry mobs). However, they'll ban people who politely state heterodox opinions on controversial subjects (even if they are relatively common positions among the public). And since Yishan brings up Reddit, it's worth noting that they have a similar approach as well (whipping up angry mobs is fine, heterodox positions are not). This culture on these sites is a result of the choices that social media companies have made (and not just the choices mentioned above, but others like the efforts made to push engagement). We see the results of that choice by the state of these sites. And the people involved, instead of taking responsibility for what they've created, decide to dump all the blame on the users. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chipotle-rehires-manager-viral-video-incident-labeled-racist-n938141 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chipotle-rehires-manage...

kgwxd 5y ago

The internet gives everyone a loud, personally branded, indestructible PA system and a wide choice of busy street corners to play whatever messages they want, on loop, 24/7. If someone decides to use that power in a way they already know is going piss off many passers by, well, pissed off mobs are going to do what they do. Mob mentality isn’t going anywhere unless humans go extinct. Speak your mind but read the room, the room is the entire world.