Blog Anonymously
uglyduck.ca
uglyduck.ca
To a large degree, I think a lot of the challenges around nuance and offense-taking online are just a consequence of how communications being mediated by the Internet dehumanizes people. My experience has been that having a deep conversation over a drink in person generally leads to more positive outcomes, even with irreconcilable disagreements, than writing something online which can be excoriated on social media.
This article seems more focused on situations in which you are concerned about government action, but I think here in the West we've found that "cancel culture" and the like is more insidious and far-reaching in its own way.
And in many cases, the same celebrities are still able to have a career that is sometimes even boosted by their ability to campaign against "cancel culture" generally.
Do you have any books/articles/resources for thinking about "cancel culture" as it would relate to an ordinary person writing an ordinary blog?
I was specifically thinking of how "cancel" is used as a verb to mean "boycott a cultural product from an entertainer", "boycott a product from a company", or something like that.
Also think about this: people who were not in the limelight and were "cancelled" would never appear on your radar simply because they were not in the limelight.
- David Shor
- Justine Sacco
- James Damore
- Adria Richards
A full list would be a mile long
"Cancellation" is a democratization of power. It allows the little guy to push back effectively against the bigger guy. Saying "look there's the possibility that it might eventually have bad consequences" rings hollow when it's also actively having good consequences right now.
If your argument is that powerful people land on their feet even when they face accountability, then yes that's true. But at least they're facing accountability and the value of powerful people actually having to face consequences when they do bad things can't be understated. It changes the culture of power.
Of course the same argument could be applied to anything, such as covid back in March. "What's all the fuss about? Things are trending in a bad direction, but they're not that bad yet so naturally they will not get worse in the future." I hope the fallacy here is obvious.
> the concern conceals a disregard for actual harm happening now
I could hazard a guess as to what you're alluding to here, but it hardly matters--if you have some concern about some actual harm that's happening right now that you'd like to express, free-speech has your back with respect to your right to express it.
> "Cancellation" is a democratization of power. It allows the little guy to push back effectively against the bigger guy.
You have it completely backwards. You can't cancel someone without power over them, and many of the targets of cancellation have had little power and were cancelled by people with literal, explicit power over them (e.g., Lindsay Shepherd).
> Saying "look there's the possibility that it might eventually have bad consequences" rings hollow when it's also actively having good consequences right now.
"Good" is in the eye of the beholder, and you're observing the fleeting convenience of authoritarianism.
It is not. We know how viruses work. We also know how they don't do good things. Are you willing to provide specific falsifiable predictions on the harms that Cancel Culture will cause in 6 months or a year and how it will be so great?
Trying to explain away a slippery slope fallacy by comparing it to the well documented and well understood exponential growth of a communicable disease isn't good reasoning.
> if you have some concern about some actual harm that's happening right now that you'd like to express, free-speech has your back with respect to your right to express it.
Exactly! To allude to anther example: someone tweeting "@FSF, you should fire Richard Stallman because he is a bad man" is simply exercising their right to free expression. Why are you criticizing that?
> You can't cancel someone without power over them, and many of the targets of cancellation have had little power and were cancelled by people with literal, explicit power over them (e.g., Lindsay Shepherd).
Lindsay Shephard doesn't fit the definition of cancellation. There was no social media, there was an anonymous complaint to her university, who did something, and when the public was involved the university reversed course. "Cancel Culture" is characterized by a boycott or threat of boycott, or at least distributed criticism. Imagine that instead the members of her class had taken to twitter to urge the university to remove her from her position, and encouraged others to stop donating to the school if they didn't do so. That's cancellation.
What you described is a bad thing, but it's also a non sequitur.
And note the difference: her pupils (the non-authority) pulling in popular support to provide consequences to the authority figure when normal channels of feedback failed.
> "Good" is in the eye of the beholder, and you're observing the fleeting convenience of authoritarianism.
You're going to have to elaborate on how decentralized movements are authoritarian in nature, that's a relatively unique claim.
Large groups of people taking action you dislike isn't mob rule. Mob rule is characterized by violence. Is large groups of people expressing their disagreement with you violence now?
The danger of "mob rule" is that it endangers minority groups. It's really, really difficult for me to square movements that are often minority lead and exist to hold the relatively powerful accountable as being dangerous mobs in the classic sense.
Again, you're welcome to actually support that assertion, but drawing the metaphor without backing it up appears to be more of a veiled attack at my morals than any attempt to discuss the merits (or lack thereof) of these movements.
> Again, you're welcome to actually support that assertion, but drawing the metaphor without backing it up appears to be more of a veiled attack at my morals than any attempt to discuss the merits (or lack thereof) of these movements.
I mean, it really sounded like that's where you were going. Even now it sounds like you only disagree on the issue of violence, but that harm to one's livelihood and psychological well-being are all well and good. I'm happy that you draw the line somewhere before violence, but I would take more comfort knowing that you took issue with the "mobs are terrible at justice and always end up perpetrating more injustice" aspect.
Lastly, I invite you to have some empathy for the people who are being targeted, even if only for those who aren't powerful. Imagine if you felt as though the prevailing public debate was avoiding obvious questions or being framed in a very limited scope that disenfranchised you and people like you; imagine that you wanted to raise those questions, but were told your views had been determined in advance to be racist and hateful (and then being told to go read a book which purports to "take down" your views, but really only takes down a straw man). Imagine going so far out of your way to avoid offending anyone in a social media post, but a colleague gets whiff of it and begins a campaign to ruin your reputation in the company and the broader industry--you know you'll bounce back, but the sheer trauma of being targeted by strangers and acquaintances, to have work friends avoid you for their own personal preservation. You rationalize with yourself that you'll bounce back economically, but you're just so shaken to think that there are people out there who don't know you but have such an intense hatred that they'll spend their time and resources to ruin your reputation. Now imagine the same thing except you don't make a cushy 6-figure salary at an in-demand job and you have a family to feed and clothe.
Cancel culture isn't a theoretical debate for some people; it's a reality. Consider those people when you're tempted to tell yourself that it's just the rich and powerful who are affected.
As a result of that, I want to push back on your use of "mob rule" in this conversation entirely. There's nothing that related mob rule and cancel culture. You can argue that cancellations are mobs, but the existence of mobs doesn't "mob rule" make. So yes, the entire reason that we moved from mob rule was to protect minorities in a society. Otherwise the majority is able to repress the minority or minorities with no way for the minorities to defend themselves.
The liberal ideal of free speech is one such protection for the minority: the ability to speak out against injustice without fear of government silencing people. (https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1280992197404491777, https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1281002990002769920)
> Mobs also lack any sense of proportionality in their "sentencing"--it's always as severe as the mob can get away with.
I disagree with this: Look at the super smash bros and gaming community over the past week. Tons of people have been kicked out of the community, many of whom made their living by playing the game, but at the same time those who did bad, but not unforgivable, things have been offered the opportunity, or even apologized without prompt (https://twitter.com/dizzkidboogie/status/1280566816801124352) and faced no consequences. There's a sort of fatalistic argument that the outcome is always the most the mob could have gotten because it is ultimately a democratic movement, but I don't think that's the argument you're making, nor is it really useful (it's circular).
Or even the example of the truck driver, where the "mob" actually backpedaled and apologized, but the authority figure didn't. You can fault the "mob" for acting quickly, yes, but you can't fault it for aiming to sentence people unjustly. To the extent possible, the mob tried to fix the issue, it just couldn't.
> but that harm to one's livelihood and psychological well-being are all well and good.
To be clear, I think there should be more restrictions on free expression than exist today (or in other words, I don't support the level of 1A protection that exists today). However, if you do, you must apply that justly. Much as a KKK demonstration can (and have) caused harm to people's psychological well being, so too can cancellation. If you want to support free expression, you have to come to terms with the fact that some of that expression will harm people. It's unavoidable (https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1280994817305018369, https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1280995368738516992).
A common thread among classical liberals is the belief that speech can't harm people, it's just speech and it isn't real, or somesuch. More progressive groups have long realized this wasn't true. The conversation about cancel culture is forcing a reckoning about that among liberals, and instead of facing it head on and accepting that yeah, this is the cost of free speech, people are doing what you yourself have done elsewhere: try to slice the aspects of cancel culture that they dislike into a box of "not just speech". This is something that progressive groups have said for a while ("hate speech isn't free speech"), but have faced criticism for.
The idea that a threat or a boycott isn't just speech is an interesting thought. I personally am fully on board with there being no difference in theory between "a speech" and "an act", and that we should protect various acts on a gradient. But the liberal idea that speech is unique doesn't have that nuance. Speech is protected, whether it be hate speech or threats. Yet you yourself elsewhere expressed that the threat to boycott isn't protected speech, it's something else. That's decidedly illiberal.
Threatening to boycott something on moral grounds is absolutely speech. And trying to frame it as a threat that isn't protected speech is horribly problematic: how do we differentiate between the unprotected threat "I will not contract with you if you hire this individual" and what is presumably a completely reasonable threat: "I will not contract with you if you don't give me your product at below this price"? Or perhaps the even more ambiguous "I will not contract with you if you employ child laborers to help build your product".
> Lastly, I invite you to have some empathy for the people who are being targeted
I'm quite aware. I've been the target of online harassment (although not "cancellation" specifically) before. It's not, at all, fun. I didn't enjoy it.
> Imagine if you felt as though the prevailing public debate was avoiding obvious questions or being framed in a very limited scope that disenfranchised you and people like you
I often do. But I enter those conversations with curiosity and the intent to learn, not to fight.
> imagine that you wanted to raise those questions, but were told your views had been determined in advance to be racist and hateful (and then being told to go read a book which purports to "take down" your views, but really only takes down a straw man)
I've had exactly this happen to me. I read the book. I still do read books when people suggest them. Not every one, but some. I've yet to find one of these recommendations that I didn't come away from having learned something, both about empathy and about history or politics or society. But perhaps this is because I engage to learn, not to fight. So I read this more as a condemnation of the reader than the book.
> Imagine going so far out of your way to avoid offending anyone in a social media post, but a colleague gets whiff of it and begins a campaign to ruin your reputation in the company and the broader industry--you know you'll bounce back, but the sheer trauma of being targeted by strangers and acquaintances, to have work friends avoid you for their own personal preservation.
I don't think this happens, or at least not as often as you seem to think. It's not endemic. And to a large extend, I think many of the people who do this are overreacting: they're reacting to the perceived danger that's larger than the actual danger, and believe that it will be impossible to stop. If you have any sense of social capital with people, this usually is possible (https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/12754857362597928..., and again the car driver) as long as you don't respond like an asshole.
> Consider those people when you're tempted to tell yourself that it's just the rich and powerful who are affected.
I don't believe I've made that argument. I've said it was a tool that could be applied to the powerful in cases where no tool existed before. Please don't construct strawmen, yeah ;)
There are specific cases of "cancellation" that I disagree with and think were bad. There are likely some that you also disagree with. But I can say that certain cases were bad while also believing that the net impact of the culture that did bad things is good, or is moving us forward.
Much the same way that someone might, for example, believe that the justice system in America is a net positive despite clear problems.
If you want to have the conversation about how we put "guardrails" on cancellation, I think that's an interesting conversation to have, and a valuable conversation to have, and it's in fact one that I have been having with others, and one that I know other progressives are having privately.
But that conversation can't be had publicly, and it cannot be had constructively with people who want to destroy cancel culture entirely. Interesting corollary, and I'll leave it to you to figure out why?
But those conversations have to come from one of two places: either you start from the liberal position that cancellation is just speech, and deserves exactly as much protection as any other speech. Then the question is how do we control and interact with these groups? How do we minimize the harms? If everyone has a stronger social safety net, does cancellation matter as much? What about the ideal of restorative, instead of punitive justice? Can we improve the existing power structures and justice systems so that we don't need to resort to cancellation?
Or you come from the progressive mindset: speech isn't holy, and stronger regulations on speech in general should be acceptable. But then if cancellation is unprotected, you should probably be willing to give on hate symbols or slurs and similar forms of harassment that are so often directed at the people who are forced to resort to cancelling to achieve justice today.
I don't see how any other starting point can be productive. It's ultimately a free speech for me but not for thee discussion at that point, and that's not interesting or helpful (https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1281004327327240192).
There are such things as mobs that arise during or after sporting events, you know. (What's the majority/minority balance there?) So Twitter mobs, too, are very much a thing—no need for a stretch of the imagination. The threats both of these pose are squarely in the category of things to be concerned about wrt the dangers of mobs. And to argue about things like the "classical liberal [...] belief that speech can't harm people" (i.e. that the belief is wrong) while asserting that there is no threat of harm posed by clear-cut examples of mobs on Twitter is to talk out of both sides of the mouth.
> You can argue that cancellations are mobs, but the existence of mobs doesn't "mob rule" make.
With the ability to rationalize thoughts like this, is there even any point of trying to approach this with reason?
> Or even the example of the truck driver, where the "mob" actually backpedaled and apologized, but the authority figure didn't. You can fault the "mob" for acting quickly, yes, but you can't fault it for aiming to sentence people unjustly.
Sorry, the obvious attempt to sidestep here is too obvious. Reddit may have the best of intentions in trying to find the Boston bombers, but that doesn't make it any less exemplary of a mob in action.
The whole attempt to narrowly recognize mobs only when a minority is threatened is stultifying, and your entire line of reasoning is just begging the question. Tyranny of the majority is a thing, but they're definitions that overlap in their examples; they're not synonymous, even if the overlap is significant.
In a prison, the inmates outnumber the guards, but that doesn't preclude a mob mentality taking hold if the guards' behavior turned mob-like (or, say, police behavior e.g. during in a protest where outnumbered by prostestors). At the same time, mob rule remains a possibility in the scenario involving the reverse. The numbers stay the same, but in each there's a plausible picture of mobs and mob rule. Majority/minority is not only not the defining factor, it's a footnote.
The actual key to understanding mobs, mob rule, and the dangers they pose comes from recognizing the parallels between the bystander effect (where the undesirable outcome is most commonly inaction) to mob mentality (where the undesirable outcome is most commonly action)—it's diffusion of responsibility/accountability, mixed with other things, case-specific.
> But I can say that certain cases were bad while also believing that the net impact of the culture that did bad things is good, or is moving us forward.
This is just another attempt to make an illegal move, like the sidestepping above. This time, it's implicit false dichotomy. Keep the good while eliminating the bad—that's what's in the argument to handle this without the chilling effect that cancel culture has.
> either you start from the liberal position that cancellation is just speech, and deserves exactly as much protection as any other speech
All right, so you don't accurately characterize the totality of diversity on your opponents' side and now it's come to strawmanning, then (or at least a failure to steelman—opting to attack the weakest of ones' opponents positions instead). There's a (possibily majority [hah!]) position among those speaking against cancellation culture that doesn't involve removing these protections of the speech. Yascha Mounk can float the idea of various things that involve the law being used to enforce drastic changes to the permissibility of cancellation efforts, but it doesn't mean everyone with a like mind about the dangers of cancellation culture agrees with it. Present an argument against those who acknowledge that the speech/actions are protected but should voluntarily be avoided rather than wielded.
Popehat may be widely cited, but the arguments on this topic never fail to not be facile.
I agree. I never said mobs don't exist. I said mobs and mob rule are different things. That's true. You don't think that sports mobs are "mob rule" do you?
> but that doesn't make it any less exemplary of a mob in action.
I agree.
> The whole attempt to narrowly recognize mobs only when a minority is threatened is stultifying, and your entire line of reasoning is just begging the question.
I want to reiterate: I've never claimed twitter "mobs" aren't a thing. Nor have I claimed that mobs exist only when I minority is threatened.
I have claimed that twitter "mobs" aren't evidence of "mob rule". Mob rule is characterized by the failure of the government in the face of the mob. And mob rule is a concern because of it's inability to protect minorities. Please do not construct strawmen.
If you want to talk about the danger of a mob, let's talk about mobs, but don't talk about "mob rule" unless you really mean "mob rule", which you probably don't unless you're claiming that cancel culture represents an imminent threat to democracy in the united states.
> In a prison, the inmates outnumber the guards, but that doesn't preclude a mob mentality taking hold if the guards' behavior turned mob-like
Indeed, this would be due to power imbalances. But it doesn't mean that the guards running would constitute "mob rule". In fact, just the opposite. The guards in a prison are the people conventionally considered to have power in the situation. Them being in charge is expected. Them acting unjustly isn't mob rule, it's authoritarianism.
Please stop conflating the existence of a mob with the existence of "mob rule". They are not the same thing. Cancellation is not anything akin to mob rule. Once more: unless you believe that cancel culture is a literal threat to democracy, it is not comparable to mob rule.
> This is just another attempt to make an illegal move, like the sidestepping above. This time, it's implicit false dichotomy. Keep the good while eliminating the bad—that's what's in the argument to handle this without the chilling effect that cancel culture has.
I'm not clear on what you're saying. I'm saying that the value of cancel culture is greater than the flaws. So regressing is overall worse than reforming. There's no flaw or false dichotomy.
> Present an argument against those who acknowledge that the speech/actions are protected but should voluntarily be avoided rather than wielded.
Present an argument that acknowledges that they are protected but that they they should still be voluntarily avoided.
Sure, here: They are protected, but they should still be voluntarily avoided. I'm not sure what you're looking for here. (To walk into a grocery store and say something rude to the first person you see is protected. It's also to be avoided.)
> You don't think that sports mobs are "mob rule" do you?
Well, yeah. If this is something that we can't agree on, then that seems like a strong signal that we are going to be unable to agree on much of anything. (Maybe there's some confusion. I'm not talking about the mere existence of crowds at a sporting event. I'm referring to the instances of mob rule, resulting in violence, theft, sexual assault, etc.)
> Mob rule is characterized by the failure of the government in the face of the mob. And mob rule is a concern because of it's inability to protect minorities.
Sorry, this is just not an honest approach. I realize there's a little bit of "A implies B does not mean that A can't also imply C", but there's a rhetorical trick you're using to your benefit here whether you mean to or not. Mob rule is a concern for the reasons people find it concerning—e.g. instances of violence, theft, sexual assault, etc. Whether it's perpetrated on a minority or not isn't useful or interesting—it's the injustice that's of interest. To repeat: there's of course plenty of overlap between mob rule and the tyranny of the majority, but mob rule does not necessarily imply such a majority acting on a minority, and whether it does or not is the least remarkable thing about them, generally, because the observation about what it allows the majorities to do is trivial; it's well known.
And it looks like you're discounting instances of "mob rule" by simply defining "mob rule" to exclude the things you want excluded. That's where the begging the question comes in. Even if we grant that "mob rule" means what you want it to mean, and it excludes certain things, it's just not a very useful distinction to make wrt the context where the conversation began. (In any case, we're only talking about "mob rule" at this point because those are words you used in the comment I replied to.) Clearly the excluded referents are worth talking about, even if your definition of "mob rule" doesn't include them and they have no name. We can call them "glarck" for all it matters—and let's do if this conversation is going to continue, in order to avoid the pointless wordplay.
This is not a moral argument, it is a personal preference. We have moral arguments as for why you shouldn't insult people randomly (rule utilitarianism provides some good ones), but "hold people accountable when they do bad things" is usually considered to be laudable, so you're arguing from the other side: what is so unique about this form of speech that using it to hold people accountable when they do bad things should be voluntarily avoided?
> Well, yeah. If this is something that we can't agree on, then that seems like a strong signal that we are going to be unable to agree on much of anything. (Maybe there's some confusion. I'm not talking about the mere existence of crowds at a sporting event. I'm referring to the instances of mob rule, resulting in violence, theft, sexual assault, etc.)
No, you're talking about mobs, not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy, which is a form of government. For the 17th time, a mob is not the same as mob rule, they are distinct concepts. If you don't want to discuss mob rule, then you are free to just not mention it and talk about mobs but please stop trying to conflate a mob and mob rule, unless you actually mean mob rule. This is the point I was trying to get across to the prior person, and they didn't seem to understand. And the semantic distinction matters, because like I said, they aren't the same concept.
1. You're trying to bake bad things into the premise, without accounting for not-bad things that the mob considers (even temporarily) nonetheless to be something to speak up about
2. Even for bad things, proportionality matters. (I really, really think this is the disconnect, and is linked to your views on mob rule only being able to exist in certain configurations of majority/minority [i.e. set size], rather than it varying along imbalances of power, i.e. dealing with group strength.)
> No, you're talking about mobs, not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy
I don't consider this to be canonical, and even if we did consider it to be, my comments addressed this in depth. We're so far off into the weeds on a distraction in terminology at this point that I'm not going to say more about it. The subject here is supposed to be cancel culture and speech.
Not really, "insults" are something which, for the purposes of discussion, we agree are bad things. But for the purposes of cancel culture there's usually a disagreement about whether or not the thing was bad.
So some person does some act. I believe this act to be morally bad. You do not (or you do). Given this, you need to convince me that the danger of me speaking out is greater than the harm from the act going uncountered. This is fundamentally distinct from the question of whether or not insulting someone for no reason is moral. Relatively simple analysis would say that it's a net negative.
I'm not going to try to cancel someone over a thing that I don't think was bad, you don't need to try and convince me to not take part in that thing, so we can in fact bake a bad thing into the premise, because based on my moral frameworks, you can assume that I believe the thing someone has done to deserve cancellation is a bad thing.
> Even for bad things, proportionality matters.
I agree.
The Cafferty example is a good one.
Also, agree or disagree regarding the "tone deaf" part of the comment from https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1268542647318261769?
(From your previous https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1268542647318261769 — sorry, no direct reference for where the "tone deaf" advice/lesson actually came from instead of the paraphrasing, but the conversation would be helped greatly if that stance could actually be nailed down on your end.)
> This is fundamentally distinct from the question of whether or not insulting someone for no reason is moral.
My grocery store quip was not about the morality of the insult. It was squarely on this topic. It was a statement about both the limits of protection and whole-picture pragmatism. An insult (or rebuke) that is not undeserved doesn't differ here wrt these two considerations.
Right, I'm not denying that there have been specific instances where cancellation has led to bad results. As far as I can tell, you're arguing that cancellation is never moral and should always be avoided but my prior comparison to policing is relevant.
To be consistent here, if you believe that the police sometimes act unjustly, you would necessarily support abolishing the police. Or even more broadly, if the US government ever acted unjustly that we should destroy the government.
So there's something more subtle at play than "it did a bad thing once", you seem to believe that the outcomes of cancellation are more often bad than good, and I disagree with that from what I've seen.
> Also, agree or disagree regarding the "tone deaf" part of the comment from https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1268542647318261769?
Yes, I broadly agree that Jeff originally retweeting that was a bad take, when I first saw that he retweeted it I cringed a little. His immediate defensiveness didn't help, but ultimately the outcome was fine. I think everyone is better off for him having gotten feedback.
(as an aside, even the apology didn't age super well, https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1268544712895614976 and the responses are amusing, Erika Shields has since stepped down due to her department's mishandling of the events in Atlanta, but I can't blame Jeff for that, I had the same reaction to the original videos of her, I've since learned a bit more).
> An insult (or rebuke) that is not undeserved doesn't differ here wrt these two considerations.
But (whether you agree or not) a large part of cancel culture is about forms of accountability. Either accountability to oneself (in the form of self reflection and learning, as in the case of Jeff above) or accountability to the larger community (as in the case of Cafferty, if we for the moment pretend it wasn't a mistake).
In the modern era, I'd argue that there are three broad categories for which people seek justice. There's punitive justice (or retributive justice), where you punish the bad person for the bad act (this also acts as a disincentive for future bad acts). There's restorative justice, where the goal is to repair the harm done by the bad act. Then there's "protective" justice, where the goal is to protect the good parts of society from the bad people.
Insulting someone when they deserve it is punitive, and maybe it disincentivizes future people, but it's a weak disincentive.
"Cancellation" can do all three: it clearly has punitive aspects (which are effective enough that people are concerned that it goes too far punitively), it has protective aspects, by which you can take a dangerous person and reduce their sphere of influence (removing them from positions of authority, publishing that they are a bad person so that people are aware, etc.), and it can even have restorative aspects (see Jeff Dean). Personally, I find punitive justice to be the least compelling.
So in terms of how justice may be reached, an insult and a "cancellation" are different.
But back to the police. So I think we both agree that cancelling someone can have false positives (Cafferty). So can other systems of justice in the US. And there are many. For some acts there's the police, for some acts there's civil cases, and in other cases there's other methods (for example in contexts like a job or a university there are formal and informal tribunals).
These systems have always existed. HR departments and such have been around for ages. They have flaws. The criminal justice system has a horrifying rate of false positives for certain crimes and demographics, and a horrifying rate of false negatives for others. I'd argue that these are systemic failures of the US criminal justice system.
You can't really address the false positives with cancellation. I mean maybe in some cases you get a situation where a bad judge is recalled (but is it cancellation if it's an elected representative, or is it just political engagement?) But systems do naturally develop to address the false negatives. They start as whisper networks and then grow once you have enough whispers.
And because of things that started as a "cancellation", Harvey Weinstein and arguably Bill Cosby are behind bars. And the #MeToo movement was born. I think those are undoubtedly good things. I'd prefer it if the justice system didn't need a patchwork of whisper networks and activism to achieve justice for people, but it's apparent to me that it does.
So do you take the tradeoff: Cafferty remains employed but so does Weinstein?
I mean, Blackstone's ratio would sort of say yes, although some research on that statement will reveal that the ratio was really only mentioned in the context of capital crimes. And I certainly agree that we should not kill innocent people (in fact I'm so against it that I don't support the death penalty). But while there are pragmatic issues with redefining our criminal justice system to ignore Blackstone's ratio, there are not as many to allowing us to do so extrajudicially (but legally!).
And without something like Blackstone's ratio guiding us, I think I would take the tradeoff. Cafferty's life won't be ruined, he'll be able to get a new job, and while it is, yes, undeniably shitty what happened to him his life isn't ruined. But Weinstein and Cosby's accusers were able to find justice for the same reason, and I don't see a system under which Hannibal Buress is able to say his joke about Cosby, or where the Shitty Media Men list could be published but that prevents the harm to Cafferty.
Ultimately I'm okay with that. Any way of achieving justice is going to have some harms. It will either let some people free, or harm people who were innocent. As long as our criminal justice system continues to hold the biases it does, there's a need for other systems to hold powerful people accountable when they commit crimes that go unpunished, and when they do bad things that aren't criminal.
The cost of any such system is that some people will be wrongly punished, but that's already the case with the justice systems today (both the criminal one, and the civil and ad-hoc ones I mentioned), its just that those systems favor the powerful far more than cancellation does, so I see cancellation as something that ultimately reduces the power differential.
Yeah, it's not fair. But it's fairer, and ultimately that's what I value.
If you want to minimize the harms against the weakest, let's talk about stuff like UBI and strong social protections. Or workers rights and unions.
Or if you want to get really radical, I can point you to people who want to completely reimagine the economy so that employment isn't necessary. Those people are crazy, but I get the sentiment: if comfort wasn't tied to employment, the "danger" of cancellation is far reduced, since it can only cause the powerful to fall. But don't tell me that I shouldn't seek justice, or worse that it is unethical for me to speak up when I see someone doing a bad thing. You need an incredibly compelling reason to make that argument stick, and 'one guy got hurt unfairly', while tragic, isn't compelling enough.
Cancel culture exists as an alternative tool that, in my opinion is generally only used when normal power structures break down. It's not really comparable to mob rule because it isn't "rule".
Before I give a partial answer, I'd ask what you're trying to gain from this: I touched on this, but I don't think "cancel culture rule" is a thing. So I can't draw similarities between them in that vein. I can draw similarities between "cancel culture" and "mob rule", but because of the differences I don't know that those matter much. I'm suspicious of this question because mob rule is ultimately considered to be a bad thing, so much as I said to the parent, I can't see how this won't be used to, as I said before, attack my morals.
Like if I say that they're both ultimately democratic movements (which I believe to be true) whereas others might highlight that both involve aspects (though imo not the same aspects) of anarchism.
I'd turn this around: what are the aspects of mob rule that concern you, and what are the similarities to cancel culture that worry you. I doubt that you're concerned by the fact that both are at their core, democratic, so what does?
To answer your questions about concerning similarities between physical and virtual mobs, they both use fear and intimidation to get their way. Neither are concerned about due process and they are happy to persecute innocent people (“scapegoats”)—of course legal courts are imperfect, but there imperfection is a big whereas with mobs (of any kind) it’s a feature. Both kinds of mobs are as happy to persecute the powerless and the powerful alike (or in the case of cancellers culture, they’ll pretend that the high schooler they’re targeting is “powerful” because of his race and that the mob speaks for minorities who the mob regarded as uniformly powerless—astute readers will note the racism here). Further, mobs have no sense of proportionality—the current cancel culture mob is notorious for its utter inability to distinguish between actual Nazis and progressives who fail to adequately toe the line (or anyone in between) and they are all punished as severely as the mob can muster. Since mobs are happy to target anyone who they decide they don’t like on a given day with the severest treatment they feel they can get away with, fear is imposed on everyone, not just those who have actually been targeted.
Note also that there are groups like antifa who openly profess a belief that violence is justified in order to “suppress fascists” (wherein their definition of “fascist” is so broad and arbitrary that it’s indistinguishable from “anyone they don’t like”) and they occasionally do perpetrate violence on these grounds. Note also that many (probably most) of the people who engage in cancellation also applaud Antifa’s violence or else they rationalize and justify it and very rarely condemn it (certainly they would never dream of cancelling people who engage in political violence which is apparently much less abhorrent than wrongthink). There is also a tiny minority of cancellers who are right-wing, and they also have their antifa-like physical violence groups who they applaud. So “cancel culture” and “physical mob” seem to be adjacent points on a continuum, and the only thing that keeps the majority of cancellers on the “cancellation-but-not-violence” side of the line is that as a society we have strong (but rapidly eroding) values of law-and-order and nonviolence and cancellers are usually rightly (though decreasingly) afraid of running afoul of those values. I take little consolation in the idea that our eroding social values are keeping most of the cancellers from using physical violence in their fear campaigns, and there’s nothing noble about cancelling someone because you’re afraid of the consequences of physical violence.
Lastly, if these mobs are allowed to continue, people will lose faith in the criminal justice system’s ability or will to keep their injustice in check, and counter-mobs will form (and to a degree already have formed). The mobs and the counter-mobs will go back and forth, continually escalating.
Cancel culture has no redeeming qualities.
As for mobs, I disagree with your opinion on mobs and due process and proportionality, and have explained that at length elsewhere.
> astute readers will note the racism here
This is only racism if you deny critical theory. You should be explicit about that.
Bringing antifa into this conversation is a non-sequitor. I've yet to see antifa hurt anyone outside of like actual neonazi rallies where two groups of armed people beat the shit out of each other. It has nothing to do with cancellation, and the fact that you feel the need to bring it up is because your fears are based entirely on a slippery slope, as I've stated already. That because someone will criticize you on twitter the "antifa thugs" will beat you up. It's not a fear based in reality. The idea that "law and order" values are eroding is a right wing talking point used to stoke racial fear. It's again, not grounded in reality.
> if these mobs are allowed to continue, people will lose faith in the criminal justice system’s ability or will to keep their injustice in check
No, that's why these mobs exist. Which is my point. You're ignoring the viewpoint of the groups who are forced to take this action because the existing systems systematically fail to provide them justice. That is, ultimately a "justice and safety for me but not for thee" argument and it is a tool to perpetuate injustice.
If you want the things that frighten you to stop, you need to have answers on how to fix the existing injustice, because as long as the systems we have fail large groups of people, they will feel the need to get justice extrajudicially. That need isn't going to disappear if you oppress them more.
Finally, I note that the "counter" mob thing has been happening since forever. "Right wing" mobs are known to harass significantly more than left wing ones. We don't see people who are "cancelled" having to leave their homes for personal safety. But the Sandy Hook parents did.
Even if I grant you that cancel culture has no redeeming qualities, you want to make it illegal to participate in. I claim that any way to do that will be more harmful to society and to open expression than cancel culture itself.
Anyway, we're quickly running into politically fraught territory, so I'm going to disengage.
I don’t know what I’d do if it happened to me, but I know it would leave me in an even worse state mentally than I am in, because I know how it feels like to feel that other people don’t want you around.
Presumably something to the effect of "It can't [currently] be a especially horrible problem if all the listed consequences were quickly fixed.". On the other hand, see (https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2278).
Justine Sacco still suffers from severe PTSD and has to attend regular counselling.
Adria Richards fell off the face of the planet, was chronically unemployed for a while, then finally ended up at a no name company, probably making peanuts compared to where she was.
James Damore was also similarly unemployed for a while, was in several lawsuits with Google, and claims to be working at a start-up, but he may also just be freelancing since he's effectively unemployable.
Those are all long term consequences, so, you're effectively wrong here.
I can't see the people who are today concerned about Cancellation standing up for Adria Richards were that to happen again today. See the recent argument between Yann LeCun and Timnit Gebru for a somewhat analogous situation.
The backlash against the person perceived as trying to cancel someone else was much greater than the initial "lash", so to speak.
> James Damore was also similarly unemployed for a while
Not a very long time though. And the lawsuits were ones he chose to file.
It was for a long time. He may actually still be unemployed.
>And the lawsuits were ones he chose to file.
No one said otherwise.
Why is there sympathy for this man?
Settled out of court for a non-disclosed amount. That's somewhere, so, you're wrong.
>Why is there sympathy for this man?
Data-driven adults place a high value on facts and truth. Virtue signalers don't.
James damore's memo was created and went nowhere within google. It's some people fretting over the consequences who took it, spread it among the company and got a good engineer fired, sowing distrust in the community. Should have just left the memo to be forgotten in somebody's email account somewhere. A deontological ethic will come to bite back if you are determined to ignore the fact that sometimes you have to do the right thing regardless of the consequences.
I'm not sure what your mean here, but this applies most readily to James himself. He posted the memo to larger and larger mailing lists until finally it spread.
>"There was no outcry or charge of misogyny. I engaged in reasoned discussion with some of my peers on these issues, but mostly I was ignored," he wrote, of the initial response to his document.
It went viral later on.
It was specifically because of the "mostly ignored" that he chose to escalate to a larger group where he felt he'd get more feedback and response (and agreement).
Regardless of what your beliefs are, harassing your coworkers about them isn't going to make your coworkers, or bosses, happy.
For a second, forget about the content. "Hey coworkers, your decision to use a NoSQL database is stupid, you VPs should change the way you're doing things" when not asked for comment and when the decision is well outside of your role is always risky, and can quite often lead to conversations where the targets of your rant can say "I can't deal with this person anymore, I'm ready to quit over this."
The most controversial part of cancel culture is the blurred lines - is something in your private life grounds for you losing your job, is a tweet outside of the context of your job grounds for losing your job, etc.
If someone wants to boycott sellers of JK Rowling's books for her tweets about transgendered people, that is reasonably called cancel culture.
If someone wants to boycott sellers of JK Rowling's books based on hypothetical comments about transgendered people within the books themselves, that is something quite different.
You did mention harassment though?
HN is filled with people who are hardly ever on the receiving end of abuse bemoaning "cancel culture". Yeah yeah, cry me a river.
People are really out here using Justine Sacco, who spoke about going to a country and getting AIDS and got rightfully attacked by the citizens of that country, as a poster child.
Lol it seems like a lot of you have lived lives without consequences for your actions and are suddenly surprised that this is how the real world works. I personally wouldn't cancel anyone but I hope cancel culture lives forever.
However, look at it this way: ideological battle is when people use HN to smite enemies rather than for curious exchange. Particularly, to smite enemies on hot topics. Those sorts of threads are predictable, tedious, and quickly turn nasty. They not only crowd out the quieter, more curious conversation this site is supposed to be for—they burn it to a crisp. For that reason we have no choice but to moderate it [2].
It always feels like the mods are against you; whoever your enemies are, I guarantee they feel just as strongly that we're against them [3]. This seems to be some sort of hard-wired bias. In reality people on both sides of the ideological divide get the same moderation messages. If someone was breaking the rules and we didn't moderate it, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here [4].
Accounts that have been created primarily for ideological battle are against the rules here and we ban them [5], so I banned this one. Please don't do that. As I said, it will eventually get your main account banned also.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part30
[1] notably, what I would call "picking on hegemons" looks incredibly biased because the last two have been the US and the UK, and so Orwell would file it under "anglophobia". I need to broaden my criticism to the dutch, the spaniards and portuguese, the romans, etc. Unfortunately all of my lifetime, and most of recent history, has been under those first two...
Regular as compared to a celebrity (well, I suppose he is a celebrity now on HN and tech places on Reddit), but being regular is no panacea agaianst criticism.
This massively understates the problem. One could easily put together a list of non-celebrities who have had their lives ruined after making some completely anodyne comment.
There have been a number of incidents where people have gone after individuals, only for it to be very clear later on they'd done nothing wrong.
read an article fully, then
give it due consideration, then
read the entire HN comment thread, and then
add thoughtful comments in the HN thread
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait."
Your first point does remind me of an early xkcd though[1], ironic in that it was about radically being yourself, come what may, and clearly identifying with what was then the underdog. It could be interpreted differently today, especially without an understanding of what the early 00s Internet was like.
[0]https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-problem-with-wokene..., also available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-WimRb2jXs but ironically censored
In addition, she used two more quotes that I wrote down: "If you understood everything I said, you’d be me," (Miles Davis) and "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." (F. Scott Fitzgerald). This is just the first half of what he said though, the rest being: "One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise." I think that's nice too.
Yes, exactly right. Unfortunately however even the meat space domain seem to be getting infected with this. I was recently in a hotel lobby waiting for an Uber and heard a conversation between two strangers. It started out fine but then one person said something mildly political. Almost immediately it seemed like a switch flipped in the other person and he began preaching and talking over. He clearly wasn't even hearing what the first person was saying, but was hearing what he thought that person would say (and was not accurate). It was demoralizing to say the least. We're getting so conditioned with outrage and hatred for people online that it's moving into "real life."
Nicholas Carr argues in his book, The Shallows, how technology literally shapes our brains on a fundamental, cognitive level. To the degree that it is accurate, I would expect our "meat-space" interactions to reflect.
https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/7/1/21308153/the-ezra-klei...
Can you expand on that? What do you think are the factors that are causing this dehumanisation?
I am giving it a try: it has become easier to band togather, now groups often need an enemy - as a unifying tool and as a means of defining the group (us vs. them). If this is true then any improvements in communication will inevitably lead to greater polarization
When you're online, you don't even know if you're talking to a person who is being sincere in their beliefs or a troll trying to get a rise out of you, or perhaps an advanced bot intended to drive discussion in a particular direction. There's no indication of the motivations, the sincerity, or even the reality of another human being when you interact online. I can't imagine how a conversation intended to be deep and nuanced couldn't be dehumanized by the Internet?
Why should someone interact with something that the author doesn't throw his/her/their name into?
I only have one example of why; I'm a genuinely curious and open person and I like having my beliefs tested, some of my beliefs are nuanced enough that I sometimes break down my current beliefs and my reasons into blog posts.
Things that I think are dangerous or damaging especially so, and those are usually the most controversial things so it's more difficult for people to engage with a nuanced opinion.
In one case in a job interview I had a person bring up a blog post (I believe it was "On the Merits of Meritocracy" where I actually gave good arguments pro and against) and he spent the entire time telling me why I was wrong and that meritocracy was bad, citing Caroline Ada Ehmke's piece(s).[0]
Which, ironically I had cited extensively and was the impetus for the discussion. Nonetheless the experience left me feeling icky, the interviewer had ascribed a set of beliefs to me which I did not hold because he disengaged completely with the article and read only the headline.
This is a good reason to blog anonymously in my limited opinion; you're free to engage openly.
My cynical side says that this is a way of preventing journalists who work there from accumulating a fanbase which would give them leverage over the magazine (since they could then viably threaten to take to different publications). It fits in with their neoliberalish philosophy.
It could be simple selection bias - perhaps better quality outlets tend to operate under pseudonyms, rather than pseudonyms themselves improving the quality of the publication.
But I speculate that operating under one's real name might increase the propensity to craft and cling to an "identity". That horrible concept of a "personal brand", if you will. You want people to remember you - which means constant soundbites, hammering the same dumbed-down points from the same angles.
There's no respite - it's under your real name, after all - so you slowly subsume yourself into this talking head that you've created. One day, you wake up, and you've completely lost any capacity for impartiality or objectivity.
Pseudonyms also allow multiple people to write the same column. I've long wondered if the Economist engages in this practice (not that I would be critical if they did, it's out of sheer curiosity).
* blogging from an oppressive regime
* to isolate yourself from online mobs
If you write something controversial these days, sometimes it catches a wider audience and you can find yourself under a lot of attention. A minority of those poeple will not be nice, and may send death threats or worse. Your experience is a tiny fraction of what this can be like. Being anonymous takes out some of the sting.
I can't think of a better illustration of the latter than https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/04/last-us-2-voice-actor-shares-....
for example, double-blind peer review.
If you post something in your real name, your colleagues WILL find it out and your boss WILL read it and your neighbors WILL scrutinize it no matter how woke your post may read. There WILL be consequences from being pointed at to losing your job and pension.
People using real names for app reviews, online comments, those are completely insane to me. Including shorthands like “John D.” Unless you are paid to do so that is.
He also goes into detail in this podcast about the benefits of writing with your real name too: https://player.fm/series/north-star-podcast/patrick-mckenzie...
Funnily enough, he also lives in japan!
> [2:] to isolate yourself from online mobs
If we're talking about common, I'll add:
3: to normalize anonymity so that people in groups 1 and 2 stand out less, have less peer pressure to compromise themselves, and so that attackers have to spend more resources than if they could focus their attacks on the few people they actually want to target (compare HTTPS Everywhere and other "Encrypt all the things!" efforts).
> you're free to engage openly
This is what I was going to answer.
Sometimes I disagree with my own writing later. It's easier to distance from this writing when I have released it through a pseudonym so that when that old self dies because of a life event or transformation/initiation, I am able to more easily close that chapter of my life, instead of having this old self be connected to my new self.
I also don't think we've reached this stage of the awareness of 'evolving selves' yet in internet culture. That's why taking precautions, like using a pseudonym, go a long way for my personal peace of mind. I do treat most corporate services as compromised because of excessive surveillance/Snowden's NSA leaks, but I think individual data leaks will start happening (where these pseudonyms would be revealed through NSA [and thus Google, FB, Google] metadata) after the current power structures topple, and a Commons-based peer production paradigm emerges.
At the same time, my reluctance to embrace my old selves and their viewpoints also comes from a lifetime of having been told I was not 'smart' (i.e. in school). Now I am learning that my delayed development was actually due to insecure attachments to primary caregivers. Together with frequent moves around the world which disturbed the possibility of forming secure attachments to other adults, this hindered my cognitive development. This means I am behind in some areas, yet it also surprisingly drives my immense interest in adult education/lifelong learning, as well as Sudbury schools etc.
Once again: Who is harmed by a "Real Names" policy?
https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re...
Cancels occurring to a normal, well paid, stable person into jobless of even into suicide aren’t negligible events. In fact isn’t it happening to university professors right now?
Identities without mob support is a universal weakness no matter your social protectedness/minority statuses.
Cancel culture.
People lose jobs for things said 30 years ago, and that were completely acceptable 30 years ago.
> Niel Golightly stepped down after an employee complained about an article he wrote in 1987 that said women should not serve in combat. He said those views do not reflect his opinion today.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/business/boeing-resignati...
You want to be insured against that.
I agree that the whole concept is unfair. I disagree that this instance is particularly unfair - in fact I like the "new" cancel culture, because its very fair in the sense that it applies the same standards to public figures that are applied to everyone else. As the old saw goes "the best way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it strongly".
In what country were public figures ever above the law?
Pre-employment checks search for drug use and crimes, a facebook post should never be a firable or arrestable offence (outside of the 3.3k arrested in the UK).
Is it considered to be “above the law” if victims never report violations, intimidated by abuser’s social capital?
All the issues with cancel culture, wokeness et al. considered, there are upsides to living in a culture where it is possible to call out a very public person who has used their publicity to cause harm to someone and not be ridiculed.
You can make justice for victims more or less easy, more or less private if you so wish, but seeking retribution for percieved slights against victims that aren't even you, has personal power written all over it.
You don't describe the reasoning of someone who wants to help victims, you describe the reasoning of someone who wants retribution. What you like is social capital and punishment of disagreement. I dont want to live your way, it leads to horrific outcomes. Turn the other cheek to criticism.
If it never happens to you (perhaps thanks to cancel culture serving as a sort of deterrent now?), all the better.
Do downsides of cancel culture outweigh the upsides? Up for a debate, but unless all participants are willing to acknowledge those upsides in the first place I don’t see how such a debate could have a point.
The point is I don't want your help, I expect ridicule and opposition, it's part of the west. I don't even argue the downsides and upsides of cancel culture because it's attacking an unassailable problem with the mask of compassion.
This is exactly why victims would choose to conceal abuse, thus enabling more of it and making public figures sometimes effectively above the law.
As a result of recent developments, knowing that they will receive support and compassion helps people who suffered through this in silence come out, raise public awareness and prevent a powerful person from perpetuating abuse.
I agree with the poster upthread that society is probably fairer and playing field is more level this way.
There are still quite some monarchies around in which you go to prison for speaking up against the rulers (in most you will be convicted for unrelated, made up charges).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudonyms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pen_names
Few people know who Jean Baptiste Poquelin or François-Marie Arouet were. But Molière and Voltaire should ring a bell, right?
Ironically, here, we don't use our own name, but a digital handle when posting comments. This allows us to create this persona on HN which doesn't really have to converge with our real selves.
Are you talking about opinion pieces? Because, if something is well-cited objective+factual content that doesn't bother to express any opinions, I wouldn't care about (or even look for) authorship.
If, for example, someone posts a video of human body parts being ground up to make sausage at Mr. Fred's Delicious Sausage factory, I would really like to know that before I make my breakfast selection at the grocery store. But Mr. Fred probably does not want me to know that, which is why it's likely to be posted anonymously to pretect the author from retaliation.
In a world where some powerful groups are happy to have harm come to others, anonymity is a critical tool to fight back.
> extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
We're already in a society where it is easy to control narratives and manipulate viewpoints. You don't need CGI or ML to do that.
Unfortunately it feels like we're in the habit that we apply scrutiny when things are simple and take at face when things are absurd.
Certainly, knowing the author is a useful part of evaluating some information. But, of course, authorship can be faked too. There's no escape from the need to apply critical reasoning to the information you encounter.
I think there are plenty of reasons why. But if someone's arguments are good, it does not matter who they are. If someone doesn't want the limelight, that is fine. I mean look here, my handle isn't my name. Though I wouldn't call it exactly anonymous/secret either.
> it's more difficult for people to engage with a nuanced opinion.
It is more difficult, but recognize that a common fallacy is "my opinion is nuanced, and yours is simple."
Which you experience here
> ascribed a set of beliefs to me which I did not hold
There's a tactic that I've found that has a decent success rate. The key comes down to that language is messy and that it is difficult to capture someone's nuanced position quickly. Your brain fills in missing information and does the best it can to figure out what the other person is trying to say. There's three parts to communication: what you mean, what you say, and what is heard. So if you don't know that these things are different and that your brain is filling in stuff (that this goes both ways) you're going to have a difficult time communicating, especially in a divided time with extra tribalism. This is essentially why divide and rule/conquer tactics work, because we are actually unable to communicate with one another.
So if you recognize this and when it is happening, stop the conversation. Divert and establish a foundation. "Hey, I think we're having some miscommunication. When you mean x do you mean f(x) or g(x)?" Then you listen carefully and don't interrupt (I bet they will develop nuance, if not they will add more later). At some point it is natural for you to speak again and address the misunderstanding and explain your nuanced point. If they start interrupting calmly explain "Hey, I have a nuanced point and I do not feel like I'm being able to finish an idea and thus we won't be on the same page and both be frustrated. I would like to finish the idea first." Because you listened to them carefully before and gave them time they now feel obliged to do this. The whole conversation has slowed down but everyone is now speaking the same language and hostility is gone. The pace will naturally pick back up.
As an example I was talking with my roommate the other night and we were getting heated. I had to apply this method and basically say "Hey, we're throwing in too many things at once. I don't feel like I can finish an idea before I address a specific issue. It is impossible to for me to talk about 30 different and nuanced subjects at once." He did slow down. Mind you he also said "Well that's how <insert nationality> people speak, I guess we can just handle that many topics." Don't let that kind of thing phase you, because if you want to have a real conversation you have the be the better person. This is probably the hardest part (let someone make themselves the asshole and let them realize it, you don't always have to point it out).
tldr: disengage, slow down, reestablish definitions, reengage.
But if you want to fight, win, or get one up on the other person, these techniques will not help you accomplish that.
so interesting, for me "throwing one's name" into things is definitely a negative. It's the content which matters, not the person :-) and hopefully I'm able to judge whether the content is good or not (else does it really matter that I read it anyways if I'm not even able to do that / fact check / etc. ?).
But then I come from a culture where the word "individualist" is an insult so maybe that has some influence.
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...
It seems that the expectation is increasingly that the only evidence people should need to overturn their personal opinions is the fact that they are not in the majority.
Similarly, it seems that very little leeway is given to those who changed their minds, even before their controversial opinions came to light.
Mounk indicates oh, American dream ruined because of spoiled daughter, while actual journalism exposes systematic pay disparities and unequal treatment of customers. Huh.
I hope that Holy Land can repair relationships with the community, change its ways, and do better going forward! If it can do that, then this was in fact a net positive for our community. Don't know whether that argues for or against blogging anonymously.
Not to defend the article too much, but does that really matter (I would say it depends on the timeline)? Whether the person persecuted is eventually found to have some reasons why some persecution may have been justified, that does not justify the original persecution. All it does is make people feel better about their past actions, even if those actions were not justified.
Punching a random person on the street is not justified because you later find out they are a horrible person. It may make you feel worse about punching the random person... but it really shouldn't.
A friend of mine is a teacher who has written a couple of books. He likes to publish them under a pseudonym because if a parent took exception with part of the story it could create an issue for him professionally.
In today’s climate, it’s hard to avoid offending somebody.
And importantly, offending someone today is much more likely to have serious consequences than it was 10 years ago (that's my perception, anyway). A decade ago if you wrote something innocuous (especially while having the wrong immutable characteristics) and someone wrote your employer demanding your termination on the grounds that your innocuous thing could be interpreted as 'hate' by virtue of some absurd mental gymnastics ("well if we change the definition of 'hate' in such a way as to encompass innocuous offenses, then voila, your employee is guilty of 'hate' and should be fired!"), your employer would likely have told that person to piss off.
Note also that a common use case for pen names was to establish credibility when one's identity (gender, race, etc) would be used against them. I don't know that many anonymous writers are trying to conceal their gender or race these days, but I certainly see many, many more rebuttals that are some variation of "the author is wrong because of their identity" or rather "the author is not only wrong but evil/hateful/racist/otherwise-deserving-of-cancelation because of their identity" than I did 10 or 20 years ago.
Nitpick: this is not about the author's identity[1][2], but about incidental physical characteristics[0] or (charitably) aesthetic preferences[3].
0: ie, the person making the 'rebuttal' is themselves racist/sexist/etc.
1: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
2: http://web.archive.org/web/20200623015648_/https://slatestar...
3: see [2] and search for "Tribe is most classically typified by" and "code word for the Red Tribe".
1: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-...
The claim is that elites have instituted a caste system, more or less, with enormous inequality and very little social mobility, all under the guise of meritocracy which serves to legitimise it.
[1] https://samharris.org/podcasts/205-failure-meritocracy/
[2] link at the end here: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20919030/...
This is a misconception. Using a VPN with TOR makes you less anonymous, not more.
https://write.privacytools.io/my-thoughts-on-security/slicin...
ISP -> Tor -> VPN is generally extremely stupid, as tor is doing absolutely nothing for you if your VPN subscription is tied to your true identity. If, on the other hand, your VPN subscription is completely isolated from your true identity, then this can be a good way to bypass restrictions imposed by sites that block Tor. I'm not aware of tor-friendly VPN services, but I am aware of at least one tor-friendly VPS provider, which should be just as good given that your VPS subscription would not be tied to your true identity. Would not recommend using this method more than absolutely necessary, because although you can keep your true identity secret if you're very careful, it does become substantially easier to track you and ultimately unveil you by studying correlations (for one example, if your VPN is only active on the network while your home internet is connected to a Tor relay, over time you could be singled out as the most like source of that traffic).
One way to do this is to get a Mullvad subscription, and to pay for it with bitcoin.
They don't even require an email address.
A comical example is when a Stanford student used Tor to call in a bomb threat to get out of an exam. Turns out he was one of two people on the entire campus network using Tor. The police talked to him and he admitted to it.
(Side note: if you're going to do crimes don't admit to them when asked.)
https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Tunnels/Introduction
TLDR tho is that you're right. Don't do it unless you have to, and you don't have to.
I wasn't planning to write anything that could be perceived as illegal or close (eg, no inciting hate/violence/treason).
So I thought of a pen name, created a Gmail for it, then a Twitter with that, and a Medium account with that. I blogged on Medium.
I wasn't too worried about pissing off a rogue Medium/Twitter employee enough for them to try to doxx me, though it was the only thing to give me pause - and honestly, a run-of-the-mill VPN I only and always use for that probably would have been enough.
Ultimately, if an internet mob was going to get me, it'd be because of my writing style or facts of my life I allude to in my posts. But even there, plausible deniability is likely good enough unless I really piss a lot of people off and drop a lot of personally identifying hints - which would be my own damn fault.
Meanwhile, for people worried about nation state actors, using a free blogging service is probably not enough, since it's damn hard these days to sign up for popular services that don't eventually link back to you.
I guess it depends on your threat model though.
> Snagging a cheap or used device is a good option
Cheap devices may well phone home and a used device may be tampered with. I was surprised when reflashing a burner Xiaomi device to see the bootloader contained a nod to the CCP.
> Navigate to WordPress.com and setup a free account with that new email address.
Certainly Wordpress is not an ideal platform here from a security standpoint. You want a blogging platform that is overwhelmingly dumb - raw html files with minimal formatting would be perfect.
> Feel free to use a VPN
Don't use a VPN without knowing who it is owned by and seeing audit reports and even then be skeptical.
That is in the list of things the article is saying it is not for.
Anyone is concerned about privacy should never use a Chinese made product, hardware or software.
Yet I'm likely to write about all of those interests. De-anonymizing me from that is probably not terribly difficult. The intersection of the RSCDS, IGKT, and IEEE member directories probably doesn't contain many people, so even knowing that is likely enough to narrow it down to a handful, if not be outright unique.
This was just something that was unheard of back then. It was an extension of "Stranger Danger" that you did not reveal who you were to the wide internet, sure some of your close friends may have known your online name but it was not openly broadcasted
Fast forward to face book and their failed attempt to "Real names" under the assumption that it would make discourse less extreme we now know that was 100% wrong, and had the polar opposite effect
I dont know if everyone needs to go to the extreme of protecting their ID from State Actors, though maybe we do. Everyone however should at minimum end the concept of "Real names" policy
What if a student wants to not associate his/her political thoughts lest they create a hindrance for a future employer digging through the candidate's social media history. The solution offered was simple - never post anything remotely political on your 'real' profiles. But, we were asked to create them regardless and were told to be mildly active. A ghost profile seems a red flag, as such a non-existent one. Which to many people raises concerns about an individual.
We were simply asked to bifurcate our online personas into two - one that was professional and one that was like you mentioned - anonymous.
I guess my future is going to be limited then, because I have never, and will never have a "real" social media presence. Ever.
That is a hard, never going to happen, even if I have live under a bridge
> This was just something that was unheard of back then.
This is not entirely true. I remember many people using their real names on Usenet, or on mailing lists.
Like I could post under the name JosephDotson, that could be a real name but it is not my real name
Real names, or a version of them, weren't unheard of, but were usually at least somewhat indirected. Of current HN users, I can think of two somewhat notable accounts using the same names now as in the 1990s. One is a nickname, the other first initial + last name. Neither is impenetrable.
I became distinctly uncomfortable with Real Name use by the late noughts, and have used a set of pseudonyms (some more than others) since.
"Privacy and anonymity have been eroded to the point of non-existence in recent years. Our personal, private information is stockpiled and sold to the highest bidder like so much inventory at a warehouse."
The fact that such a trove of knowledge is published anonymously makes the work itself even more mysterious and compelling. This is the kind of WWW experience I want more of. Imagine all the countless other products of mad geniuses lurking out there beyond the meticulously maintained facades of social media and Medium-style blog platforms, styled with base HTML without a script, ad, or tracker in sight.
Very sad that we have reached that stage.
Wait, why ask Google, they probably can just look in their own surveillance database.
Geez, if Google Translate queries are logged, that's... a lot of information.
Pretty sure it would obscure the original writer although possibly at the cost of obscuring the original meaning.
(I have no clue)
In other words: the blog should find a way to obscure linguistic style offline.
- The first is that, as someone else pointed out, Google is almost certainly logging your translation queries.
- Secondly, even if you do it offline (as someone else suggested) the approach itself might not work. Success in linguistic forensics isn't based (as we might naively assume) on catching obscure words that a particular individual has a tendency to overuse. It's based on subtle shifts in the relative frequency of functional words. Depending on the proximity of the source and target language, round-trip machine translation might not change this.
Upcoming changes to history
Translation history will soon only be available when you are signed in and will be centrally managed within My Activity. Past history will be cleared during this upgrade, so make sure to save translations you want to remember for ease of access later.
I got interested in forensic linguistics many years ago when an article in a somewhat shady publication mentioned me. I got curious and started reading anything I could find on the topic. I was eventually able to identify the author, but mostly by tricking him to admit it after I had a ranked list of candidates. He was second on a list of about 4-5 people (out of a candidate set of perhaps 300). Not half bad for the rather crude methods I used. I was rather pleased with myself.
I've used similar techniques later to look at influence networks in companies.
ps. Regarding censorship resistant hosting, the rabbit hole regarding e.g. Freenet is very deep and frankly leads to a hive of villainy.
Just as a mental exercise, it seems going to a local coffee shop would make me easily spottable on CCTV, especially if they can correlate visits and posting times...
You could schedule posts so times will not correlate. Tumblr has a queue which you can use to post at regular intervals throughout the day.
I guess they could try using a blogging service hosted in a "non-cooperative" country. E.g. Russia, unless you want to blog about Putin.
We could keep playing this game forever. Really you'd want a self-hosted site running from an anonymous VPS paid using a cryptocurrency like Monero (these exist) and your domain would use a similar service (say Njalla) or be TOR-exclusive. Alternatively you could go a more classic route and host with SDF (à la http://voidnull.sdf.org/).
Or, if you're really paranoid, you'd give up on the whole thing. Maybe you'd still write but you'd keep it to yourself. As I see it, any interaction is a risk of exposure even if very small.
Depends if Tor has done its job and concealed the IP address you're posting from.
Right now it's 10:30am in Iceland and 10:30pm in New Zealand so the fact you're posting at this time of day, and drinking coffee at this time of day, probably doesn't uniquely identify you.
Indeed, I'd say always post at the same time of day, rather than posting at random times when coffee shops are open, as the former does a better job of concealing your timezone.
(Obviously, if you're some Dread Pirate Roberts type and Tor doesn't do its job, it's game over.)
Not just law enforcement, shady companies like FB all try to get their greasy hands on that info. Panopticon is one closed circle.
Sounds like a good opportunity for a tool that will do this for you -- send it through a bunch of different converters in a feed pipeline. Would be fun to see the results.
I just watched The Outrage Machine, which is a short (12mins) documentary that can help us learn.
It talks about trolling, the yearning to judge, public shaming, cancel culture, mob mentality, moral superiority, harassment, abuse.
For instance the text above became:
Avhenger av hvilke språkpar du prøver. Google gjør en veldig god jobb med flere europeiske språk. Engelsk til norsk og tilbake returnerer ofte nesten det samme som originalen.
Which returned this English text:
Depends on which language pair you are trying. Google does a very good job with several European languages. English to Norwegian and back often returns almost the same as the original.
(Disclaimer: I am not a spy, take advice from real spies before me.)
Of course, not the same applies to my twitter and facebook accounts. I've never posted anything really controversial, but there are some political posts. I remain optimistic, though, maybe I won't have to delete them. Hopefully.
Human social pattens and behaviors have led humans to correct bad social behavior through a mechanism based on reputation. If you say/do terrible things (what the group disagrees with), your reputation suffers, which discourages saying/doing those things. However, with anonymity, we become victim to the dopamine feedback loops available in online patterns. In the case of anonymous blogs, the stronger signal will be traffic on the blog, regardless of why that traffic is there. Unfortunately, saying inflammatory (prejudiced) things will generate traffic. Othering will generate traffic. Being reasonable and nuanced with drive traffic away in an online environment that provides dopamine hits for much less effort than understanding a complex topic.
This means online anonymity for the masses is largely a bad thing for society as a whole, which is evident with a cursory glance at the anonymous parts of the internet (4chan, for example). It's also evident in less anonymous, but still anonymous places like Reddit, which sees nearly as much trolling as 4chan, but reputation is part of the Reddit system, and Hacker News system as well (just the reputation of your account instead of your real identity).
I should qualify my opinion here: I don't think anonymity is always bad, but in aggregate online, I think it's causing more damage to our society than good. People in a functional society need to be help accountable to the society for their actions, and anonymity removes that social accountability.
Being inflammatory doesn't mean being prejudiced or wrong. There was a time when speaking for trans rights was "inflammatory".
We currently live in a "there is only one correct opinion, all others must be canceled" culture. They've already come for anyone who showed even the faintest trace of dissent from the mindlessly woke mob's narrative. Next they'll come for those who have stayed silent. Failure to project virtue signaling will soon be used to deny employment and participation in other aspects of society. Just you wait.
Anonymity is a risk mitigation technique that speaks to the very real desire to keep speech free. If speech has consequences that are administered outside the law, then it's not really free.
I fully blame twitter (and the medias obsession with it) for this.
The last generation of control freaks had figured out how to use religion as a medium for their desires. They were caught flat-footed by new internet media like everyone else.
The next generation have now learned how to use twitter. The basic tactics probably haven't changed that much but the details of the message are new. I doubt education was a driving issue as this is more an issue of personality types.
Secularism vs religion is a red herring. Society became freer because people began to value (classically) liberal ideals--i.e., people came to value freedom as a principle. Liberalism is secular but secularism isn't liberal (nor is it inherently illiberal), and there have been many illiberal secular ideologies not only in theory, but in practice (e.g., practical communism of the 20th century wherein people were literally executed, imprisoned, exiled, etc for their free speech). And of course what we see today.
Secularism isn't a virtue, liberalism is.
If you said something controversial 40 years ago at a grocery shop, shop owner might be mad and refuse to service you, and might even put a bad word for you across the town. In the worst and rarest case, you might have had to leave town.
Now, anyone can record the interaction, put it in front of more people on twitter than the front-page of a big newspaper. And this amplifies things. Not to mention that it remains there forever for the whole wide world.
At this point in many places, you will be more quickly forgiven for taking cash from a shop's register than saying something which is not the prevalent opinion.
Platforms like Twitter and Facebook don't make for constructive debate, discussions. There is an option to shore up support through likes, but not much the other way around. I think this explains the diaspora from the latter to the former, and says a lot about the future of Twitter itself (hint: people will move on.)
I do believe one day people will be more rational in handling beliefs and opinions positioned against them, and there are a multitude of valid reasons for one to assume anonymity, but we'd all benefit if we confronted the deeper problem instead, I feel.
> They've already come for anyone who showed even the faintest trace of dissent from the mindlessly woke mob's narrative
They did? Who won?
Nor was he suppressed: he's still speaking, on the same subject! Hell, he's surely making more now as a right wing martyr than he ever was as a low level hacker for Google.
[1] I mean, people get fired for this all the time, like those folks Amazon canned a few months back for union organizing with employer resources. You only care about this one guy because he happens to play for Your Team.
Again, I can't help but think what you people really want is the inalienable right, not to "free speech", but to be Offensive Without Consequence. And again, Damore is a genuine celebrity now, he's a very bad example of the kind of repressive woke hegemony you're invoking.
But we care not only about whether debate is suppressed. We also care about the quality of debate, the culture, values and practices through which we engage with one another in the public sphere.
The concern over 'cancel culture' would be, I think:
(1) certain arguments are beyond the pale of legitimate debate
(2) those arguments should not be engaged with, or their proponents persuaded, but should be met with opprobrium and abuse
(3) we can safely infer that someone has a malignant character if they make an individual statement which is considered illegitimate
(4) if someone makes an illegitimate statement then we should ostracise them, deplatform them, and agitate their employer to fire them
It is also worth asking whether cancel culture is more of a problem online that it is offline because it is encouraged by the design of several platforms, most egregiously Twitter.
Where's the middle ground. If we can't fire, say, violent racists, and we can't escape their words, and we can't avoid them socially, what can we do?
I think the answer to that, if you look at it carefully, is going to be pretty much isomorphic to what we're already doing. There are excesses and mistakes (David Shor shouldn't have been fired), but that's true of all things.
What I don't see is a definition of "cancel culture" as a "problem" that isn't basically a defense of conservative opinions.
Should we value debate and engage with those we disagree with or ignore their arguments and ostracise them? Should we persuade those we disagree with or tell them they're horrible people? Should we address ourselves to the causes of prejudice and small-mindedness, or retributively punish those who misstep? Debate, persuasion, and opposition to retributive justice - those are scarcely values that are the monopoly of the right, and indeed, the last one runs counter to the right.
You are focusing on 'easy cases'. You write, 'you're saying that we need to welcome, broadcast and hire people who we genuinely think are vile and awful?' But that presupposes the precise crux of the debate: whether most people targeted by 'cancel culture' really are, as you say, 'vile and awful'.
You say we should encourage the firing of 'violent racists'. I think that's a reasonable option, depending on the context. But that's an easy case. The kind of problems I highlighted are found arrayed against people of all political stripes, often for minor offences or errors.
I was reading a large number of people abuse a Guardian journalist this morning for including the owner of a Pizzeria in a write-up of how working-class life has been affected by COVID - a mistake, for sure, even a humorous one, but not one that should be met by abuse. The owner in question was being doxxed, and his restaurant down-voted on review sites. To me, this kind of case is entirely typical of cancel culture, not anti-fascism.
If I'm an employer, should I be forced to hire people who I personally find unpersuadably vile? That's the "anti-cancel" position, right? I can't fire you, even if you're an asshole.
If I run a forum (like HN, or Reddit), I can't ban people even if they're "debating" in a way that is disruptive and driving off users? That too, is the "anti-cancel" position as far as I can see.
How do you square this? Be specific. Tell me the rule you want to enforce so that no one gets "cancelled" but we aren't swamped by garbage in online forums.
> But that presupposes the precise crux of the debate: whether most people targeted by 'cancel culture' really are, as you say, 'vile and awful'.
It absolutely does. Because if you can't cite me[1] someone who got "cancelled" who isn't "vile and awful", then doesn't it mean the whole "problem" doesn't exist?
Your position is that all my woke buddies are wrong and need to change. So show me the evidence.
[1] And let's be real: you can't, except for a tiny handful of notable cases. No one gets "canceled" here on HN (good grief, just look at the downvotes I'm quite sucessfully enduring!). No one gets "canceled" for being a republican. And most importantly: being argued with is not the same thing as being "canceled" no matter how hard you try to make that case.
So you agree with the criticisms I made of cancel culture?
> 'If I'm an employer, should I be forced to hire people who I personally find unpersuadably vile?'
I don't think this is a helpful example, for two reasons. First, it is generally accepted that employers should have more latitude in the grounds on which they hire, than the grounds on which they fire. This reflects the fact that we are generally more concerned with actions of commission (e.g. killing someone) than omission (e.g. failing to give someone life-saving drugs). If we ask instead, 'Should you fire someone because they believe transgender women shouldn't be admitted into female sports', or 'Should you fire someone because they believe in the aggressive extradition of illegal immigrants', or 'Should you fire someone because they watch Fox news', it's much less clear-cut.
Secondly, and more to the point, what is at issue is rarely cancel culture among employers, but the way in which cancel culture pressures employers to fire people.
> 'If I run a forum (like HN, or Reddit), I can't ban people even if they're "debating" in a way that is disruptive and driving off users? That too, is the "anti-cancel" position as far as I can see. How do you square this? Be specific. Tell me the rule you want to enforce so that no one gets "cancelled" but we aren't swamped by garbage in online forums.'
I haven't thought about it, but my initial answer: I think the rules on large community websites like Reddit and HN should be to sanction abuse, hate speech (understood roughly along the lines of current British law), and various activities which undermine the aim of the website - e.g. persistent trolling, systematic lying, spamming adverts.
> 'It absolutely does. Because if you can't cite me[1] someone who got "cancelled" who isn't "vile and awful", then doesn't it mean the whole "problem" doesn't exist?'
You seem to think that the only evidence of cancel culture is the complete destruction of the lives of individuals. But those only the most extreme of cases. I just gave you a less extreme but far more representative case: the Guardian journalist that I read being harassed this morning (her name is Helen Pidd). Every time I go on Twitter I see a constant stream of tribalism, abuse and retributivism - these are not rare occurrences, they are omnipresent.
Take a more prominent case: J.K. Rowling's post on transgenderism. I disagree with 90% of what she wrote in that post. But I think her arguments should be engaged with, people should try and persuade her and those like her, that we should not abuse and deplatform her, and I don't think she is evil or malignant because of what she wrote.
So I can't tell what you're arguing against. If "cancel culture" isn't the giant problem you originally jumped into argue against, and our existing protections are already in place... what are you arguing against?
I'm not saying that people aren't jerks on the internet. I'm saying that (1) it does happen at anything like the scale people like to think of (i.e. there is not Great and Terrible Woke Conspiracy), and (2) the excesses that are happening, at the scale they're happening at, are just not something we can "fix" via any remedy.
And the Rowling thing seems like a complete misinterpretation on your part. HUGE quantities of ink have been spilled at this point (including on this very site) explaining why the trans-exclusionary position is hurtful and counterproductive to modern feminism. Don't tell me she wasn't engaged with productive discourse. Rowling herself did like half a dozen interviews on the subject! You're acting like no one was willing to listen to her, when that's absolutely not the case.
You're saying that because someone was an asshole that means the rest of us are too? J. K. Rowling wasn't "canceled" in any way that matters. She was just wrong.
Nothing I said in my last post with inconsistent with the letter or spirit of my foregoing posts.
I didn't set out any 'remedies'. You asked me about about two relatively narrow issues. As I have repeated, I take 'cancel culture' to be, in the first instance, a cultural problem. The fundamental remedy is, therefore, cultural. Abolishing Twitter would help, though I don't see that happening.
If you don't know what I'm arguing against, return to my first post.
> 'And the Rowling thing seems like a complete misinterpretation on your part.'
You seem to be implying someone can only be negatively affected by cancel culture when: (i) their lives are destroyed; (ii) everyone who engages with them is participating in cancel culture. Why?
Obviously not everyone who engaged with Rowling disagreed, and not everyone who disagreed exhibited the pathologies that I attributed to cancel culture. But there was a very large -certainly the majority of voices on Twitter - contingent of people who didn't engage with Rowling's arguments, had no interest in persuading Rowling or those who sympathised with her, castigated her as evil and hateful, and called for a boycott of her books, and on authors writing for her publishing house to terminate their contracts.
'In any way that matters'. Rowling's entire profile has been shaped by the debate. This will define her life and career, and how she is remembered for the rest of history. Of course, she is a billionaire, and lives comfortably. But the point is that this is merely one (prominent) case representative of the very tendencies you deny exist.
The consequences are the degradation of the conversation in the public sphere, and of the willingness and ability of people to debate and think for themselves. Given that I share many of the broad goals of 'cancel culture' - i.e. curbing prejudicial and exclusionary discourses - I also worry that this kind of toxic approach will preclude the coalition-building and persuasion necessary to long-term hegemonic change. It also creates an avoidable blowback, i.e. most people feel condescended to, others take up the same style of politics on the right.
Read the Atlantic piece linked to above - there are many less prominent cases of individuals have been 'cancelled', often with little cause. I see this happening every time I log on to Twitter, in all directions.
Basically, this is what I keep hearing: "OK, these people weren't harmed, exactly. But countless others were who I haven't named. And why do you demand evidence of "harm" anyway? Aren't there other ways of being harmed?"
I mean... people are jerks. We can't fix that. Twitter surely can't fix that. If employers are routinely firing people[1] based on what jerks say on Twitter, then that's a problem. But it's something employers are going to have to address on a case-by-case basis.
[1] They aren't. Seriously, they aren't. It's happened in the past. It's not "happening". Far more people get fired for far worse reasons and we don't freak out at HN over it.
You say 'I'm not denying people are mean on the internet. I'm denying people get harmed by it'.
There are two simple problems here. The first is that we are not talking about whether people are 'mean', we're talking about the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour of a specific subculture: 'cancel culture'. I have set out what I take to be the pathologies of that subculture. Why are you ignoring those pathologies, and talking as if 'cancel culture' didn't exist, and if this was just people being generically mean?
The second is that you protest that cancel culture is harmless. I just set out why I take it to be harmful: it degrades the public sphere, inhibits thought and debate, undermines hegemonic change, and threatens a blowback. Why have you not engaged with any of those arguments?
Finally, you raise the issue of 'employers' again. I have already said I take this to be peripheral to cancel culture. The main harm of cancel culture, as I see it, is on the public sphere. A few extreme cases end in firing - and that's significant for those people - but it's a relatively small harm compared to the effect it has on the public sphere.
Yeah. This is the disconnect. You're asserting without evidence that "cancel culture" exists as "a thing" worth discussing. I assert it doesn't, it's just a bunch of jerks, and ask for evidence about its impact.
And you don't want to engage on that. Which tells me that maybe this isn't really "a thing" worth discussing, just something that you're personally upset about.
Your original response was that the listed pathologies 'were not that bad', but that they were only found in response to people who were genuinely 'vile and awful'. Now you're saying those pathologies are invented. Which is it?
You say I haven't provided evidence of its impact. In three of the four responses since my original post, I've given examples: Helen Pidd, J.K. Rowling, and The Atlantic piece linked to upthread. I could go on citing endless individual cases, but as I have tried to emphasise, the problem as I see it is a collective one: a culture degrading the public sphere.
You write in another of your replies: 'If you want to talk about individual instances of injustice, I'm there with you. If you want to paint a whole culture of internet progressives on the basis of a tiny handful of spiteful retributions, I think you aren't arguing in good faith.'
If individual cases can't prove anything, what evidence will you accept?
> 'Just something that you're personally upset about'.
I have to tell you, I am not the only person to notice the existence of a new 'cancel' culture, or to object to it. There was a prominent Harper's letter circulated on exactly this subject just a few days ago:
Read that, and you tell me: was Blake Neff canceled? Sure seems like it. Mainstream journalists found "vile" material in his online history, showed it to his employer, he's canned (well, resigned it seems like, technically).
So are you going to defend Neff? Please do. Or if you won't, please tell me why your carefully curated worries about "cancel culture" somehow don't apply to this case.
Because I can tell you why: because "vile".
So now tell me why your personal, entirely subjective definition of "vile" is more important that those of other people with different priorities. Because that's the only difference here.
If you want to talk about individual instances of injustice, I'm there with you. If you want to paint a whole culture of internet progressives on the basis of a tiny handful of spiteful retributions, I think you aren't arguing in good faith.
[1] FWIW: it's been half reported and intimated that maybe he was really fired because the rest of the staff already hated him and this was an excuse. We don't know. But the public reason given for his termination was garbage.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/perils-us-...
What you're talking about isn't freedom of speech, it's freedom FROM responsibility. I don't think you're going to find very many people that want to sign up for: HNThrowaway262 can do whatever he wants and you just have to take it. That's a dictatorship or a monarchy, you might want to live in that society but I don't.
Your words and actions have consequences and SHOULD.
That's not true, it doesn't even really make sense. Freedom of anything is freedom from consequences for it. If I say I believe in freedom to have an abortion, noone would reasonably be said to agree if they said they also believe in freedom to have an abortion, and then immediate execution by the state afterwards.
Freedom of speech in the constitution is freedom from reprisal by the government
Freedom of speech as used idiomatically in speech generally means a certain level of freedom of reprisals from employers and society.
Directed racial slurs is a straw man, almost noone believes in absolutist freedom of speech when it comes to directed harrassment, they normally believe in freedom to discuss topics in the abstract.
It's not a monarchy if someone has the freedom to speak, that doesn't make them a king just a citizen.
I've noticed a trend with the woke side of the debate to get into like high-school level semantics - redefining words or misinterpreting statements in a nakedly disingenuous way - does anyone understand why this seems to be a trend?
"a certain level" implies the existence of an acceptable level of consequence, unless by that you mean "absolute." If so, why not simply state that?
>Directed racial slurs is a straw man, almost noone believes in absolutist freedom of speech when it comes to directed harrassment, they normally believe in freedom to discuss topics in the abstract.
You're just moving the goalposts around the definition of "speech" so that it conveniently doesn't include the contradictions to your premise. Racial slurs and directed harassment are obviously speech. If you believe there should be consequences for that, then you believe freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
Where most people who say they support free speech are, is this statement: "support free speech without reprisals, excluding directed harrassment, with some level of acceptable reprisals in employment and socially, depending on the context, but at a much lower level than is currently the case, with less arbitrary application of mob justice and employer discrimination"
It's not catchy but nor is it inherently contradictory. It's what I imagine JK Rowling, Chomsky et al would say if you spoke to them about their letter.
I really think it would be useful if the anti-free-speech side of the debate stopped with this semantics and straw men about freedom from reprisals, monarchies, directed racism. I think that a person should be free to discuss eg. spaces for trans vs non-trans women and where to draw the line on sports etc, to what level the BLM is a useful movement, the relative weight of cultural vs economic vs discrimination in explaining different outcomes across ethicities and genders, positive discrimination, without being fired, cancelled or becoming unemployable. That's what most free speech people think, and all these semantic points, false definitions and straw men are kind of a waste of time
Your own counterclaim, however, that "freedom from anything means freedom from the consequences of that thing" does not even allow for the reasonable, non-arbitrary consequences you're supporting, here.
You, I and tw04 are actually in violent agreement, but it seems your politics doesn't allow you to concede the possibility that the "other side" can hold a reasonable opinion.
For a lot of us here, the phrase "free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" comes across (not unreasonably) as support for firing trump supporters or people who question system racism (etc.) which is both unjust and foolish for a number of reasons.
We also need to consider whether it is just to fire someone for something offensive (but not illegal) they did offline that was surreptitiously recorded and uploaded to the Internet to feed mob outrage.
I actually would agree with that, but I disagree that any consequence is always excessive.
>For a lot of us here, the phrase "free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" comes across (not unreasonably) as support for firing trump supporters or people who question system racism (etc.) which is both unjust and foolish for a number of reasons.
I think it is unreasonable, or at least uncharitable, to assume the most extreme interpretation possible of a phrase simply because you disagree with the politics of the people using it.
That's exactly the sort of thing "a lot of us here" accuse progressives or "the left" of doing to them.
Fair enough.
> I think it is unreasonable, or at least uncharitable, to assume the most extreme interpretation possible of a phrase simply because you disagree with the politics of the people using it.
I disagree that it was unreasonable or extreme. "Free speech doesn't mean freedom of consequences" is mutually exclusive of the statement "free speech does mean freedom from at least some consequences". You cannot logically support both statements.
It's also the slogan that is very commonly used to justify these cancellations. I think it's worth point out that the initial comment by wGeF7H8Z59y985y (not zimablue) was clearly framing things in the context of people losing their jobs over their political opinions.
I mean, that's literally what not voting for someone is - choosing to not hire them. But that's semantics.
I'm not sure how you draw the lines on all this - if someone is spending all day tell their Jewish co-worker they need to stop the "international bankers", is that OK? Is speaking hatefully in the abstract about a group of people acceptable?
If you attack a person or a race by accusing them of misbehaviors, that doesn't mean it's wrong to oppese misbehaviors!
The lines will always be a little blurred, but international bankers isn’t a synonym for Jews, it might be a dog whistle but it would only be a problem for me if they know the colleague is Jewish and do this day in day out after being asked to stop.
I think so much of this discussion is wasted, and we’d be more productive just to pick a few examples and argue on them about whether we shift the line.
Eg. For me Damore shouldn’t have been fired and that’s when I realized that the woke thing wasn’t a right wing straw man, it really was running big Corp America
What I'm really afraid of is reaching an audience of hundreds of millions, and having them potentially inadvertently take my words out of context. Doxing is a hard problem to solve, but I'd really prefer a SWAT team not show up at my door. Statistically, you're much more likely to reach those few bad apples with an internet-sized megaphone.
I think disagreements are fantastic to work through and how we better ourselves, but some people react pretty horribly to them.
You don't. That's why the cancel culture is ridiculous and needs to end.
For example, if someone feels me up, should I be allowed to post on Facebook detailing the encounter? Am I allowed to name them? Can I tag their employers?
If I read about someone claiming that they've been felt up, can I forward it to my friends? Can I notify my employer if they're working at the same company as me?
Essentially, can you determine a line where my freedom to speak ends?
Why should I avoid talking about something because it pertains to a criminal proceeding? If I get sexually assaulted, should I avoid reaching out to anyone for support? If a person cheated me out of money during a business transaction, should I avoid calling them out on it? If someone punches me, and the police decide not to press charges, do I avoid warning anyone?
As of now, we're so afraid of stopping people from coming forward that we've allowed those with evil intentions to weaponize our empathy.
False speech isn't protected. Also, the parent comment made no claim that the statements made were true or false, just that there were accusation. I don't think that "people shouldn't knowingly lie" is a particularly hard stance on free speech.
It is to the extent that it isn't prosecuted as a matter of policy.
> Also, the parent comment made no claim that the statements made were true or false, just that there were accusation
And I'm saying "No, I think we ought to appropriately punish people who do make false claims" in response to the original question Would you like to judge how limited my speech should be?
> And I'm saying "No, I think we ought to appropriately punish people who do make false claims" in response to the original question "Would you like to judge how limited my speech should be?"
Okay, but then you aren't disagreeing with me; just posting a tangential point. In the example posted:
> If an unknown woman issues a public twitter statement that she's been abused, is it OK to get the alleged offender cancelled before a court trial?
There's no indication that the claims are false, and if they are false, that the people making the claims aren't punished. All it asks is "is it okay to share information about an accusation, even if you aren't certain it's true?"
I wasn't trying to disagree with you. I just think the issue is oversimplified into forum sized bites and needs to be approached holistically.
> If you want to have a separate conversation on whether false speech is prosecuted in the United States, we can do that. But this isn't really relevant to the discussion at hand, which is how is "cancel culture" at odds with "free speech."
False speech being 'protected' in the sense that it doesn't result in any harm to person committing the act is, in my opinion, extremely relevant. Free speech isn't free if those who would cause you harm are free to do so at the slightest provocation, and without fear of punishment.
> All it asks is "is it okay to share information about an accusation, even if you aren't certain it's true?"
My answer is "Yes, if you're willing to accept an appropriate punishment for libel/slander/defamation in the event you were wrong." One added thought though, what if the person accused can no longer afford a decent lawyer because they got canceled? That could result in catastrophic harm to an innocent person, just like the [0]4% of death row inmates that are supposedly innocent.
It seems like what you're going for is that freedom of speech requires responsibility for consequences of speech, which I'm all for. I'm more worried about understanding how far those consequences stretch; if you share an article about race statistics that prompts a riot, are you responsible?
> My answer is "Yes, if you're willing to accept an appropriate punishment for libel/slander/defamation in the event you were wrong."
Do you believe that if someone unknowingly published something that turns out to be false, they should be held legally liable for it? For example, if I share a news article that turns out to be false, I should bear liability?
> One added thought though, what if the person accused can no longer afford a decent lawyer because they got canceled? That could result in catastrophic harm to an innocent person, just like the [0]4% of death row inmates that are supposedly innocent.
That would be a causality of free speech. At some point, some group of people are going to be hurt by speech or lack thereof, and it's more a matter of deciding what tradeoffs we'll make.
Entirely depends on if the statistics and any stated conclusions are true, and to what extent the article actually prompted the riot vs other factors.
> Do you believe that if someone unknowingly published something that turns out to be false, they should be held legally liable for it? For example, if I share a news article that turns out to be false, I should bear liability?
If you unknowingly repeat that someone is a pedophile just because it seems popular, it seems reasonable that you share some portion of the blame for whatever harm befalls that person.
In the news article example it is the publication and/or the author that is responsible. Of course this gets into a grey area regarding the content of the article and whether it's possible to know the content is false or defamatory.
> At some point, some group of people are going to be hurt by speech or lack thereof, and it's more a matter of deciding what tradeoffs we'll make.
In my (based on the downvotes I'm receiving) unpopular opinion, I don't think we should give up any speech whatsoever under any circumstances. If people say evil things that cause harm (go kill this person, this person is a nazi, let's get this guy fired, etc), go after them for the harm.
You'll need to define what an "evil thing" is. For example, in the race statistic example, you make it clear that depending on exactly what was said, you may or may not be responsible for the harm.
You'll also need to define "cause." In cancel culture, no one "forces" companies to fire people, they just put companies under economic pressure, much like boycotting.
I think the key issue is what you mentioned earlier:
> whether it's possible to know the content is false
Where there's some threshold of belief whether something is true or not; for example, it might be fair game to share a New York Times article, knowing that they're generally true. But someone on Twitter?
Also thanks for talking in good faith, it's refreshing to talk to someone who genuinely engages in discussion as opposed to trying to win.
If someone says something false with the intent of harming someone (getting them fired, ostracized in their community, harming their personal relationships, etc) I would say that's a reasonable definition of evil.
A good example is when some people try to call Joe Rogan, a liberal comedian who liked Bernie for president, a Nazi or alt-right. It's clearly untrue and it's intended to de-platform him because they don't like the politics or message of some of his guests.
> You'll also need to define "cause."
I look at this from a rather extreme perspective. If I put a gun to someone's head and tell them to do something, it's coerced. I didn't 'make them' do the thing. They did it willingly to avoid harm.
The same is true when a horde of people call someone's boss and say 'X is a Nazi so either fire him or we'll organize a boycott and you'll go out of business'
> Where there's some threshold of belief whether something is true or not
This is the hardest part to sort out. Hitting like or retweet on something isn't the same as publishing an article yourself. That said, intentionally signal boosting 'X is a nazi' or similar does cause harm. I think this requires a case-by-case review.
> Also thanks for talking in good faith, it's refreshing to talk to someone who genuinely engages in discussion as opposed to trying to win.
Likewise! Although it does seem that public opinion doesn't like my point of view much, I'm glad there's still folks willing try working through a topic together rather than jumping into a jousting match.
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
No one is forcing you to listen to anything. I'm sure you've never been forced to read r/TheDonald, or watch Alex Jones talk. If any friends on social media links you to a paper on psychological differences between the sexes being rooted in biology, you are free to ignore the link or block them all-together. If a coworker or employee starts talking about immigration restriction in a way that sounds vaguely xenophobic, you're free to ask them to keep that kind of political talk out of the workplace.
This is about the freedom that the rest of us have to choose to listen to others' speech, and to be free to engage with it and come to our own conclusion about it.
> If you tell your wife she looks fat, she's probably not having sex with you that evening. If you call someone a racial slur, they're probably both going to tell everyone they know about what you said, and refuse to interact with you unless forced to.
Those are not relevant examples.
It is though, it's just that we as a society define which consequences you are free from as the speaker (ex. some legal consequences). The internet, and social media in particular, has profoundly changed how we think about the topic. In my opinion we'd be better off as a whole if we reevaluated our perspectives when presented with new information rather than avoiding discourse entirely in favour of dogma.
>and then not "punish" you for it? If you tell your wife she looks fat, she's probably not having sex with you that evening
This isn't a punitive action, it's a personal choice of your wife. AFAIK you are not entitled to sex with your wife whenever you so choose. A scenario in which a contract is terminated based on something said on social media (when there's no clause in the contract covering that particular thing) is fundamentally different, for example.
Yes, it does, actually. That is, in fact, the definition of freedom of speech.
100% agree with the author.
Think of how many racists didn't want to hear about social justice and would have gladly used any means possible to ostracize those challenging the status-quo. Some civil-rights activists lives might have been saved had they been able to work anonymously.
We should all be talking about how we can better manage our emotions in the face of trolls and opposing ideas -- rather than how to make all such discomfort disappear from view.