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Legitimate question. Why are people afraid of cancel culture? Who's in charge of "cancelling" exactly? Is it just fear of losing your job, and who makes that ca

• sdwr 4y ago
  Losing job, sure, but more broadly it's about people who work in entertainment or the public sphere - their job, to some degree, is based on public approval.
• grogenaut 4y ago
  In chatgpts case it'd be losing customers. It's a no win game. You just piss every group off and the anger and loss of users way out weighs the gain of customers on the other side. So just try and piss no one off on things that are politicized.
  • smsm42 4y ago
    Most big businesses aren't afraid to piss certain people off. But are afraid to piss others off. There was a time when businesses avoided politics. Not anymore - now Big Business is eagerly embracing politics and is not afraid to push political agenda and partisan preferences. It looks like they think some people are worth to be afraid of, and some people's opinion doesn't really matter. We'll see if they are right.
    • d_e_solomon 4y ago
      I don't think big businesses have ever avoided politics. Try being openly gay and get hired in the 80s or being a woman trying to be an executive in the 80s. Businesses did openly discriminate. And that is political. The shift happened because businesses became dependent on more and more talent for continued growth. Suddenly having a large contingent of your workforce threaten to quit because some dude wants to spout off about women not being as naturally smart as men is really bad business; and it's not surprising that businesses respond to the incentives and axe the dude spouting off.
• asdf123wtf 4y ago
  It's a media-driven moral panic, more or less. There's a whole cottage industry of media orgs and personalities making lucrative livings by selling cancel-culture moral-panic content to audiences who are addicted to it (e.g. Bari Weiss, Brett Weinstein, etc). Not that there aren't legitimate free speech issues that we still wrestle with and don't get right or real injustices out there, but it's mostly a bugaboo.
  • smitty1e 4y ago
    Concern about a tyranny of the majority is neither novel nor imagined. The Information Age has had a catalytic effect on the calls for ousters of any number of people for the merest hint of thoughtcrime.
  • smsm42 4y ago
    You are using the term "moral panic" wrongly. Cancel culture is the moral panic, only enabled and amplified by modern information technologies.
    • jghn 4y ago
      > only enabled and amplified by modern information technologies I'll take it a step further. "cancel culture" is the same moral panic that's always existed. But now the power is put in the hands of the masses instead of the elite.
      • hutzlibu 4y ago
        Lynch mobs have always existed.
        • freejazz 4y ago
          Yeah, but the internet didn't.
    • asdf123wtf 4y ago
      One possible reaction to a moral panic is another moral panic and that's exactly where I think we are here. Cancel-culture panic is a largely anecdote and feelings-driven. There's no real data to show that firings or social consequences for speech are more numerous or more severe or more unjust (or even more "left-wing") today than they have been at any point in the past. And in many of these anecdotes that seem to drive the discourse, nothing of note actually happens to the person who was "cancelled" - they are the subject of an investigation or social media dust-up for a news cycle. Then life carries on.
• Kuinox 4y ago
  It's the justice job's to make justice. Cancel culture is mostly witch hunting.
• smsm42 4y ago
  Depends on what you mean by "making that call". Imagine the situation: you work in a restaurant and somebody (falsely) published on the Internet that you have a highly communicable infectious disease. People are calling your restaurant owner and demanding to fire you. Inspectors come to the restaurant to test you (after a week, test comes clean, but in the meantime the restaurant must be kept closed, just in case). Local politicians publish interviews in local newspapers and TV demanding to create legislation against people like you who do not care about public health (they don't care about you or whether or not it's true, they have an election coming in). The local bank demands from the restaurant owner to fix the situation, in any way of form, or they won't be providing credit to them anymore since it's become too risky and their regulatory profile does not allow them to credit institutions with high level of risk. Some idiot puts a brick through the restaurant window at night. Insurance pays it off and raises the premium, because it might happen again. Eventually, the owner takes you aside and tells you: "Dude, I know you are a good worker. I know all this internet stuff is complete lies. I have nothing against you. But I have a family to feed. I have loans. I spent decades building my business. Let's just part as friends?" In this situation, who took the decision to fire you? The owner? The bank? The bank regulators? The politicians? The people who called the restaurant, in fear for their health? The people who published the initial lie? Everyone participated a little, and by the end of it, there wasn't really any other possible choice. That's how it usually works.
  • mongol 4y ago
    This is an enlightning example but not how I have seen most cases play out. I am thinking of the brick through the window, the regulatory closure etc. Your example takes it further than "just" cancelling although taken to its extreme it can probably go this far. Most cases I have seen have more been about loss of business and fear of loss of reputation. Basically, in your example, the manager would have the talk with the employee after just the social media storm. Perhaps the manager's fear are all the other things, but the cancelling happens before it ever goes that far.
    • TeMPOraL 4y ago
      > Perhaps the manager's fear are all the other things, but the cancelling happens before it ever goes that far. As expected. If you find yourself at risk of something bad happening to you, you'll make steps to mitigate that risk before it materializes. The question of how real is that risk extends beyond "cancel culture" - it sits at the core of the public relations and reputation management industries. Whether it makes sense or not, companies tend to be quite aggressive at protecting their reputation in certain contexts. This is an empirical fact. Cancelling someone is mostly about exploiting that - it's an art of causing harm to a person by making them a target of their employers' PR immune system, which starts acting before any real harm comes to the company itself. It's been demonstrated to work, the mechanism of action is clear and obvious, and it's quite easy to use. When done properly, there isn't a single person or group that could be specifically blamed for destroying the victim's life. You can't fine the company for trying to proactively protect their business deals or shield themselves from potential liability. You can't fine the crowd for being idiots. The original instigators have plausible deniability. And everything happens so fast that it doesn't matter whether the allegations about the victim are true, or complete fabrication. That's why people are so afraid of it.
• nicky0 4y ago
  "Cancelling" is more about people in the public eye. Pressure groups use bullying and boycotts as a way to keep celebrities and companies saying the right thing and demonstrating the right virtues (however shallowly). If you don't have a public profile you don't really need to worry about it. That said I think it does have a bleed on effect to regular people. It creates an atmosphere of fear around exploring certain topics in any meaningful way. Most people just want an easy life so will parrot the "correct" opinions whether they have really though about it or not.
• visarga 4y ago
  Here is an example - a respected AI professor and director at NVIDIA drawing up a cancellation list with students who made the mistake of opposing her views. https://archive.ph/20201214175330/https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/1338282250614411264 https://archive.ph/20201214175330/https://twitter.com/AnimaA... Anima Anandkumar holds dual positions in academia and industry. She is a Bren professor at Caltech CMS department and a director of machine learning research at NVIDIA. At NVIDIA, she is leading the research group that develops next-generation AI algorithms. At Caltech, she is the co-director of Dolcit and co-leads the AI4science initiative, along with Yisong Yue.
  • tomp 4y ago
    Wow, what a vile human being!
  • ribosometronome 4y ago
    How is encouraging people to engage with others, in any way, cancellation?
    • visarga 4y ago
      A professor-activist like Anima making a public shame list of students, referring to them as "fanatics", and requesting the help of her woke army to reeducate them is normal debating in your book? Debate is 1-on-1, not army-on-one. And you don't call your opponents fanatics, if you want to have a real debate. In reality the list is intended to intimidate them.
      • ribosometronome 4y ago
        My book is expansive and includes many descriptions for behavior past "classical debate" and "cancellation". She doesn't appear to be suggesting they should be boycott or deplatformed in any way. Even taking the most negative view, which i think would be something like she was trying to get her 'woke army' to harass these guys, that's not what cancellation is/cancel culture is. That wouldn't mean trying to send your followers to attack folk isn't gross behavior. >if you want to have a real debate It's easy to make a list of things that you take away from how earnestly you can take people, especially online. I'm not sure why someone would balk at "fanatic" but think "woke army" is a particularly earnest discussion stimulating term. Of the two, I've heard woke used disparagingly, with political motivations, far more often than the other in recent times. Similarly, calling people you disagree with your opponents, or suggesting that when they talk to you about a topic, it's re-education while when you do it, it's debate.
• esolyt 4y ago
  It's a term that describes how people feel to pressure to conform to a certain popular view and they are hesitant of speaking their opinions. Depending on the context, they might be worried about being excluded from a social group, losing friends, losing social status, or getting literally cancelled (in the case of a celebrity in the entertainment industry). The term "cancel culture" broadly describes this feeling and it's not related to actual consequences (if any). At least this is how people use it. You could argue it's an inaccurate term since there are no actual cancellations in most case. But the prevalence of this sentiment is still noteworthy imo.
• chrismcb 4y ago
  I'm thinking the guy that lost his job for cracking his knuckles is afraid of cancel culture. After someone claimed he was flashing a white supremacy symbol. A lot of people who don't have the same views as cancel culture are afraid of cancel culture.
• raarts 4y ago
  I'd say it's not specifically great of losing your job, but fear of losing your livelihood. Slander can make it nearly impossible to find something new. Seen that happen multiple times.
• bitwize 4y ago
  Far-right assholes are afraid of cancel culture. It's a bogeyman conjured by the right whenever the rest of us hinder them from what they want to do, like "be racist in public" or "take women's reproductive rights away".
• donkeyd 4y ago
  Well, there's the PyCon story [0], where two guys ended up getting fired because they made an 'inappropriate' joke among each other in a public space that was overheard by someone else. And there are more stories like this. So saying anything that might be even remotely offensive to anyone can end up with you losing your job. Based on stories like this, I'm personally afraid of cancel culture. Because this joke is the sort of joke I could've made. 0: https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spiraled-way-out-of-control/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spirale...
  • rabuse 4y ago
    My question is more geared towards the "who" is actually calling the shots? Is it just HR, or does it escalate up?
  • Faark 4y ago
    Yeah, posting that picture of them wouldn't be legal here. But the US seems to value freedom of speech a lot more than e.g. personal rights. That obviously facilitates cancel culture.
• pelasaco 4y ago
  probably the sponsors wont invest money on that project anymore.. Microsoft for example..
• matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > Why are people afraid of cancel culture? They cause massive damage to other people's lives over what's essentially wrongthink. > Who's in charge of "cancelling" exactly? Organized internet mobs, often from Twitter. Look up Sleeping Giants for an example. > Is it just fear of losing your job "Just" losing your job? That's a major life-changing punishment by itself. They can ruin your reputation and essentially blacklist you. These people essentially run a denial of service on your life and that of your family by denying you income for the crime of offending them with your thoughts. In a way, they're a self-righteous Kiwi Farms. > who makes that call? HR? Executives? Whoever's in charge. They will be intimidated into firing you for your offensive conduct or suffer the same consequences for supporting and aligning themselves with such an abominable wrongthinker.
• ripe 4y ago
  It seems the people who complain most loudly about "cancel culture" are the ones who have never had this done to them historically and cannot imagine a life where you're constantly under real threat from social norms defined by others. In other words, these complainers have never had to endure or think about: - anti-black housing discrimination (e.g., redlining) - misogynistic sidelining and glass ceilings - anti-Jewish admissions policies at major universities etc., etc. Guess what, in all these cases, socially coordinated groups could cause you to lose your job, or not be able to buy a house, or lose your career, etc. It was never fair. Employers in the US could in general terminate you for no cause at all. It's just that these people who complain about cancel culture now have never had to worry about this stuff before, and it seems like something new and pisses them off.
  • jocaal 4y ago
    This seems a little backwards though. On our path to being a more accepting society, we put more people down instead of lifting people up.
    • ripe 4y ago
      Not defending cancel culture. But those who are complaining about it would be more credible if they didn’t themselves try to keep marginalized groups down themselves. Example: pretty much any opinion host on Fox News.