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?
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.
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
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.
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.
- 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.