4 ms·

I would argue that in the social media space, trends in "cancel culture" and just generally shaming people for saying something not supported by whatever is the

I would argue that in the social media space, trends in "cancel culture" and just generally shaming people for saying something not supported by whatever is the current "woke" / "social justice" viewpoint du jour are a relatively recent phenomenon. At least in my experience, conversations online were more open 10 years ago than they are today.

slg 4y ago
>whatever is the current "woke" / "social justice" viewpoint du jour The verbiage in this bit is exactly what I was talking about. Your objection was not simply that there are forbidden topics, you are specifically complaining about what topics are forbidden. And to be clear, the "cancelling" of people existed before either social media or the internet. Yes, the internet and social media can act as a multiplier on this behavior, like they do for all sorts of other human behavior, but they didn't create it.
kurthr 4y ago
Yes, but now it's also really trendy to complain about woke social justice cancel culture while spewing fascist tropes. When did the internet become garbage? I'd say Facebook and Gamergate, but news groups were really cool until they got trashed by trolls, or was it when you needed to set up a special eggdrop to protect your irc, and that was a long time ago. Is Ham radio cool again?
- worthless-trash 4y ago
  Ham radio was always cool.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  > When did the internet become garbage? September 1993. Now get off my lawn!
samtp 4y ago
> trends in "cancel culture" and just generally shaming people for saying something not supported by whatever is the current "woke" / "social justice" viewpoint du jour are a relatively recent phenomenon What happened to bands/athletes who spoke out against American wars in the past? What happened to atheists for the last few decades/centuries? Or women who were accused of being witches? What happened to people who thought that women could participate in professional life? How about people who thought that it was ok to be gay or love someone outside of your race? How about people who thought that native peoples we not savages or subhuman? To think this is a anything new or has anything to do with "wokeness" (whatever the hell that means) is to take an extremely short-sighted view of the world. > At least in my experience, conversations online were more open 10 years ago than they are today. I'd argue the exact opposite. 10 years ago there were a lot less people online. And those who were online engaged in more niche and closed off platforms/forums. It's only been in the last 10 years that general discussions with huge numbers of people from all around the world on any and every topic have been combined into a singular feeds on a small number of platforms.
- steve76 4y ago
  [dead]
sircastor 4y ago
I suspect that people used to just have smaller, more homogeneous social groups. So saying something terrible wasn’t an issue because all of one’s associates either engaged in the same behavior or considered it too risky to speak up. As for social justice being a recent phenomenon, it isn’t. It being on the web is, but the web is still relatively young and it finally became intertwined with our offline selves that your online behavior is just your behavior. And social consequences for that behavior can be executed online.
bmelton 4y ago
I think if it's anything, it's McCarthyism for a new generation. We've done worse, and with more rigor than today's cancel culture, but for however much I might find it distasteful, the stigma borne of cancel culture at least doesn't have the full weight of the law behind it.
- scns 4y ago
  I'd say it's our monkey genes at work. When Chimps meet a male that is not their brother, they get theirs and kill him. Killing another community completely has been observed in the seventies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War?wprov=sfl...
  - bmelton 4y ago
    I think that's definitely a part of it. Our monkey brains process that there is danger, and (naively) find ways to amliorate it in peer groups. We associate in-groups with safety and out-groups with dangers, and both infinitely large and infinitesimally small in (or out) groups would require the brain to do the much bigger work of individual threat analysis. Delegated decision-making.
seanhunter 4y ago
Perhaps true in your experience but not true in general. In the 90s and 2000s for example people would talk about how they couldn't make certain jokes/comments they would like to make because of "Political correctness gone mad"[1]. That wasn't even new then, for example Allan Bloom's bestselling book "The Closing of the American Mind" from 1987[2] where he claims that cultural relativism and political correctness in academia stifles open debate about ideas. Sounds like something you could literally just republish today as the conversation hasn't really changed much. [1] Here's an article from 2016 chronicling the rise of the phrase over 25 years before that. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-co... . If you search for that phrase you will find a treasure trove of exactly the same sorts of outrage we see today, only now the phrase "political correctness" is replaced with "cancel culture" or "wokeness". [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mi...
greedo 4y ago
1968 - Gold and Bronze medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos protest against poverty, for black pride, and in solidarity with workers. Received death threats and were called "a couple of black-skinned storm troopers." 2016 - Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem and never played another game after the end of the season. It's easy for CIS-het white men to feel threatened by their loss of supremacy in American society. And to take it out on everyone outside their group.
- bmelton 4y ago
  To be fair, Colin Kaepernick had lost his job as a starter (to Blaine Gabbert, a career backup no less) well before he started protesting. There may or may not have been collusion to keep him quiet, but the post hoc ergo propter hoc explanation you've given is wildly incomplete.
  - greedo 4y ago
    The idea that Kaepernick wasn't better than Gabbert, nor starter quality for at least 50% of the NFL at the time doesn't hold water.
    - bmelton 4y ago
      That's not really at issue. There are a lot of factors involved there -- if he had QB1 salary demands, but didn't have QB1 talent, then it's hard to say that he was better than QBs he wanted to start ahead of. I'm happy to concede that he was starting caliber, because I think he was. I don't think you can realistically consider a player who was 1 for 11 in his last season a top QB, but he was definitely ahead of guys like Deshone Kizer, Brett Hundley, CJ Beathard. Looking at the list of QBs who started in 2017, I'd tentatively (and very subjectively) rank him ~21st -- but without knowing his salary demands, it's hard to say that what he wanted was commensurate with his ability to win games. The best player I'd put him clearly ahead of was making $4-4.5 million that year. He wanted $9-10 million and a chance to start. It was reported that he wanted $20 million to play in the AAFL. Beyond that, he had a chance to play in Baltimore, which I was excited for, before his girlfriend called the team's owner a slavemaster and the most iconic player associated with the city, a slave. So, while we can debate the merits of whether or not he deserves to play football, he's turned down offers of $4-5 million to play in the CFL, had exorbitant salary demands to the AAFL, and ducked out of an opportunity to play in the offense best suited to his talents. Other players who knelt at the same time and in support of him still had careers well after Kaepernick. Summing up, "Colin knelt and never played another game of football" misses not only a lot of context, but ignores the fact that he actually did play after kneeling, as have lots of other players.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> a relatively recent phenomenon I don't think it's recent, it's just done a complete 180. You could absolutely be cancelled for holding the wrong opinion in the 80's when I was a teenager, but the "wrong opinions" were anti-conservative opinions back then.
- antod 4y ago
  Yup, an incomplete list going backwards in time: Dixie Chicks, French Fries, PMRC, McCarthy Typically the shoe was on the other foot.

slg 4y ago

>whatever is the current "woke" / "social justice" viewpoint du jour The verbiage in this bit is exactly what I was talking about. Your objection was not simply that there are forbidden topics, you are specifically complaining about what topics are forbidden. And to be clear, the "cancelling" of people existed before either social media or the internet. Yes, the internet and social media can act as a multiplier on this behavior, like they do for all sorts of other human behavior, but they didn't create it.

kurthr 4y ago

Yes, but now it's also really trendy to complain about woke social justice cancel culture while spewing fascist tropes. When did the internet become garbage? I'd say Facebook and Gamergate, but news groups were really cool until they got trashed by trolls, or was it when you needed to set up a special eggdrop to protect your irc, and that was a long time ago. Is Ham radio cool again?

worthless-trash 4y ago
Ham radio was always cool.
mr_toad 4y ago
> When did the internet become garbage? September 1993. Now get off my lawn!

samtp 4y ago

> trends in "cancel culture" and just generally shaming people for saying something not supported by whatever is the current "woke" / "social justice" viewpoint du jour are a relatively recent phenomenon What happened to bands/athletes who spoke out against American wars in the past? What happened to atheists for the last few decades/centuries? Or women who were accused of being witches? What happened to people who thought that women could participate in professional life? How about people who thought that it was ok to be gay or love someone outside of your race? How about people who thought that native peoples we not savages or subhuman? To think this is a anything new or has anything to do with "wokeness" (whatever the hell that means) is to take an extremely short-sighted view of the world. > At least in my experience, conversations online were more open 10 years ago than they are today. I'd argue the exact opposite. 10 years ago there were a lot less people online. And those who were online engaged in more niche and closed off platforms/forums. It's only been in the last 10 years that general discussions with huge numbers of people from all around the world on any and every topic have been combined into a singular feeds on a small number of platforms.

steve76 4y ago
[dead]

sircastor 4y ago

I suspect that people used to just have smaller, more homogeneous social groups. So saying something terrible wasn’t an issue because all of one’s associates either engaged in the same behavior or considered it too risky to speak up. As for social justice being a recent phenomenon, it isn’t. It being on the web is, but the web is still relatively young and it finally became intertwined with our offline selves that your online behavior is just your behavior. And social consequences for that behavior can be executed online.

bmelton 4y ago

I think if it's anything, it's McCarthyism for a new generation. We've done worse, and with more rigor than today's cancel culture, but for however much I might find it distasteful, the stigma borne of cancel culture at least doesn't have the full weight of the law behind it.

scns 4y ago
I'd say it's our monkey genes at work. When Chimps meet a male that is not their brother, they get theirs and kill him. Killing another community completely has been observed in the seventies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War?wprov=sfl...
- bmelton 4y ago
  I think that's definitely a part of it. Our monkey brains process that there is danger, and (naively) find ways to amliorate it in peer groups. We associate in-groups with safety and out-groups with dangers, and both infinitely large and infinitesimally small in (or out) groups would require the brain to do the much bigger work of individual threat analysis. Delegated decision-making.

seanhunter 4y ago

Perhaps true in your experience but not true in general. In the 90s and 2000s for example people would talk about how they couldn't make certain jokes/comments they would like to make because of "Political correctness gone mad"[1]. That wasn't even new then, for example Allan Bloom's bestselling book "The Closing of the American Mind" from 1987[2] where he claims that cultural relativism and political correctness in academia stifles open debate about ideas. Sounds like something you could literally just republish today as the conversation hasn't really changed much. [1] Here's an article from 2016 chronicling the rise of the phrase over 25 years before that. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-co... . If you search for that phrase you will find a treasure trove of exactly the same sorts of outrage we see today, only now the phrase "political correctness" is replaced with "cancel culture" or "wokeness". [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mi...

greedo 4y ago

1968 - Gold and Bronze medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos protest against poverty, for black pride, and in solidarity with workers. Received death threats and were called "a couple of black-skinned storm troopers." 2016 - Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem and never played another game after the end of the season. It's easy for CIS-het white men to feel threatened by their loss of supremacy in American society. And to take it out on everyone outside their group.

bmelton 4y ago
To be fair, Colin Kaepernick had lost his job as a starter (to Blaine Gabbert, a career backup no less) well before he started protesting. There may or may not have been collusion to keep him quiet, but the post hoc ergo propter hoc explanation you've given is wildly incomplete.
- greedo 4y ago
  The idea that Kaepernick wasn't better than Gabbert, nor starter quality for at least 50% of the NFL at the time doesn't hold water.
  - bmelton 4y ago
    That's not really at issue. There are a lot of factors involved there -- if he had QB1 salary demands, but didn't have QB1 talent, then it's hard to say that he was better than QBs he wanted to start ahead of. I'm happy to concede that he was starting caliber, because I think he was. I don't think you can realistically consider a player who was 1 for 11 in his last season a top QB, but he was definitely ahead of guys like Deshone Kizer, Brett Hundley, CJ Beathard. Looking at the list of QBs who started in 2017, I'd tentatively (and very subjectively) rank him ~21st -- but without knowing his salary demands, it's hard to say that what he wanted was commensurate with his ability to win games. The best player I'd put him clearly ahead of was making $4-4.5 million that year. He wanted $9-10 million and a chance to start. It was reported that he wanted $20 million to play in the AAFL. Beyond that, he had a chance to play in Baltimore, which I was excited for, before his girlfriend called the team's owner a slavemaster and the most iconic player associated with the city, a slave. So, while we can debate the merits of whether or not he deserves to play football, he's turned down offers of $4-5 million to play in the CFL, had exorbitant salary demands to the AAFL, and ducked out of an opportunity to play in the offense best suited to his talents. Other players who knelt at the same time and in support of him still had careers well after Kaepernick. Summing up, "Colin knelt and never played another game of football" misses not only a lot of context, but ignores the fact that he actually did play after kneeling, as have lots of other players.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> a relatively recent phenomenon I don't think it's recent, it's just done a complete 180. You could absolutely be cancelled for holding the wrong opinion in the 80's when I was a teenager, but the "wrong opinions" were anti-conservative opinions back then.

antod 4y ago
Yup, an incomplete list going backwards in time: Dixie Chicks, French Fries, PMRC, McCarthy Typically the shoe was on the other foot.