If It’s Not “Cancel Culture,” What Kind of Culture Is It?
taibbi.substack.com
taibbi.substack.com
Of course outright harassment and doxing should be dealt with harshly.
But this deplatforming and this "cancel culture" is only a manifestation of what millenials heard for years: if you want change, vote with your wallet. Well, we now are able to. I'm not agreeing with everything, but boycott is the only power my generation have right now, and nobody can prevent this. Twitter and the social network allow people to explain why they're boycotting this or that, that's all.
This is a very good explanation of a fair bit of it and if not a lightbulb moment then at least a "wipe the dust of the windshield moment" for me I think.
One of those comments that makes me come back to HN even if I seem to be on the other side from you politically.
So they are both speaking true facts about people and speaking their desired outcome to people positioned to realize them. How is that not speaking?
Just action need to follow some due process. Mob rule becomes medieval. Even because modern technology platforms enable despicable behaviour, which speech is part of, does not necessarily protect because of free speech. Freedoms to hurt others need be limited.
When people lose interest in the whole, only to fancy duality, there's no dialogue happening, only escalation.
Speech doesn't imply much consequence beyond enlightenment, when people learn to listen and appreciate diversity.
Speech seems worthless compared to right action. Principles and freedoms mean nothing in isolation.
The claim I was addressing from upthread is not “these people are not engaging in goodspeak” but “these people are not speaking”, so as true as that may be it is not relevant to the discussion.
First, we were discussing speech not some limited subcategory speech.
Second, threats of unlawful violence are not free speech. Threats not to engage in economic transactions that one is under no obligation to engage in in the first place absolutely are free speech.
This is not “speech”, this is harassment and coercion.
> Second, threats of unlawful violence are not free speech. Threats not to engage in economic transactions that one is under no obligation to engage in in the first place absolutely are free speech.
Threats are never free speech. The law might not prohibit it or it might simply not prosecute it, but it’s never free speech. It’s the same thing as telling someone she must sleep with you if you are to do business with her—it’s quid pro quo harassment, it’s morally repugnant, and it’s most definitely not free speech.
Consider a lot of what gets classified as cancel culture is:
1. Boycotts - OK we should be forced to purchase things (like Goya, or ads on Tucker Carlson's show) that don't share our values? No, that's crazy...
2. Organizational politics - The Pinker thing[1], and the issue with the Poetry society, has more to do with the internals of some organization. Should we restrict those advocating for changes to organizations they belong to?
3. Firing - Either organizations are able to have 'speech' or they're not... And without cultural norms, we're not going to from on high create top-down standards around which values are 'correct' or not.
I have yet to see a PoV neutral definition of 'cancel culture' that doesn't devolve to litigating whether the issues for the canceling are legit or not.
[1] The Linguistics Society did NOT remove Pinker https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1280950807819628546
It's kind of self-sabotage in the end, ruining potential for good arguments to flourish.
It's about mobbing onto someone online to shame him or her. Large numbers of people pile on top of someone causing great psychological harm. Shaming doesn't work, and especially not at this level. It might work when used in limited fashion to educate children, but public shaming has been abandoned by history as a bad practice.
What if I decide to buy Goya black beans, and someone takes a picture of me at the grocery store, and brands me as a affiliate of some certain political mindset of Twitter because of it... When in reality, I bought these beans because I just wanted to eat beans?
It's perfectly reasonable for an employer to fire someone for something they said. But what if they fired them solely due to public outcry; the pressure from people who aren't affiliated with their company at all, never bought any of their products before, etc.
It's interesting to me that this is always put on the outcrier and not the company itself.
(I'm told that won't work in the sister post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23802578 )
And there seems to be nobody around to help society navigate these transitions. Quite the contrary, many leaders claim a mandate to sew division, basically. Worse, they may be right: outrage seems like a winning strategy to gather and keep power in a human society. And even those seeking justice have no choice but to seize the customary tools of modern politics in order to accomplish their goals, because their opponents will not bring knives to a gun fight.
I think "cancel culture" cannot be separated from the broader context of the rise of outrage as an efficient source of political capital, both as it relates to the outrage at some person for doing X, and then the outrage against the first outrage for X having some consequences. The details of "what it means" to have consequences (or as you say, "should we be forced to buy things") are I fear a kind of nuance that may be out of date in our political discourse.
Society chooses how to react. No one is losing their job because they got caught calling someone out for being racist or sexist. If people actually go too far, or lie about their allegations, they're at just as much risk of having the tide turn against them. This is already built into the system.
A bit on the side:
Maybe it would help a good deal if people started losing their jobs for clearly false allegations and for not protecting people they are responsible for?
Like:
- if we conservatives got together to pressure whoever employees that person who posted the picture of the Mexican truck driver with his hand out the window and made that persons life a mess: after all it was clearly wrong as admitted by that person him/herself.
- next up: shaming the company who fired him over cracking his knuckles until they fire whoever was responsible for this.
After all we white males are the powerful privileged ones arent we?
Obviously (hopefully) I don't want this, I only want to get people on both sides thinking.
I totally agree (with at least this part) and mentioned that in my post.
If someone sent my boss a picture of me buying Chik-Fil-A and he asked if I was supporting anti-gay companies I'd say no I just like the taste of Chik-Fil-A. If people are actually getting fired for things like that, or buying Goya beans, or having something untrue claimed, I would certainly hope most bosses would ask the person about it before indiscriminately firing them. In some cases that may not be happening, but I would argue that anywhere firing people for such small things was probably looking to fire that person anyway (to say nothing about the "not small" things like the guy screaming obscenities at the asian family a few days ago, or all of these people going crazy about having to wear masks). That's why you don't see most people getting fired.
No you should not be forced to purchase anything, but you should not use your economic power to punish speech.
> 2. Organizational politics - The Pinker thing[1], and the issue with the Poetry society, has more to do with the internals of some organization. Should we restrict those advocating for changes to organizations they belong to?
Organizations should serve their purpose, rather then being used to punish dissenting voices.
> 3. Firing - Either organizations are able to have 'speech' or they're not... And without cultural norms, we're not going to from on high create top-down standards around which values are 'correct' or not.
Firing people is speech now? There are substantial restrictions on firing people, most importantly civil rights law. I guess this is also an attack on freedom of speech in your view?
Man, does this resonate. The woke message is just uninspiring and the word play and circular reasoning are just tedious. I've never met a philosophy that depended so strongly on appropriating existing, morally-weighty words.
He is good at emotional level, but less good with actual rational arguing.
That's what "resonates" means. I agree though that he's putting words to collective frustrations and not arguing in a persuasive form. I wish he did more of the latter, but nevertheless, this excerpt resonated for me.
Also, lol at the very same circular reasoning the above mentioned whereby agreeing with his ideas is wrong because the people his ideas attract are already wrong.
The only one that I think he really really should not write was one about civility and discourse.
And I am not asking for statistical analysis either. All I am saying is he resonates with those who agree with him, because his whole thing is insulting common ennemy while being funny.
I think this is a fair point. I’ve noticed this myself as someone who agrees with him. He’s clearly a talented writer; I wish he would wed that talent with reasoned critique instead of being a mere cathartic voice. The primacy of catharsis is a distinguishing feature of cancel culture and moderates getting their own cathartic voices risks creating a moderate counter-mob. Moderates’ strength is reason and tolerance and we should stick with those virtues even if it demands emotional strength and moral courage.
On “White Fragility”, A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i...
I guess that makes sense then why I felt like I didn't get anything out of it.
>To read the entire post and get full access to the archives, you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year.
Oh I see... that's disappointing. At least with the WSJ right up front I know I'm not going to get anything out of it without a subscription.
Definitely not worth a post on HN
We are living in a profoundly conservative era whose deep conservatism is masked by the triumph of certain select socially liberal causes such as partial drug decriminalization and LGBT rights. IMHO those few specific victories are on the inertia of a previous era.
I am referring to the 60s through the 90s, the era that created modern rock and roll, techno, hip hop, burning man, and rave culture, some of which is now decidedly retro. Very little culture of this sort -- or of any sort really -- is being created today. Ours is an era of sterility.
You can really see this in how the "alt-right" was able to look hip and edgy with nothing more than shitty memes and ideas like "alternate reality gaming" appropriated from old 90s issues of Mondo 2000. Everything else is so damn sterile and dull that the sorts of aesthetically tone deaf CHUDs that hang out on 4chan /pol could sort of look cool. It doesn't take much color to grab attention in a monochromatic world.
I'm not really that pessimistic. This stuff is very cyclic and the pendulum will swing yet again. I'm thinking COVID marks the end of the post-9/11 era and things will start getting interesting again in the mid-2020s. COVID has also crashed the Trump train, which is significant.
> The act of canceling, also referred to as cancel culture (a variant on the term "callout culture"), describes a form of boycott in which an individual (usually a celebrity) who has acted or spoken in a questionable or controversial manner is boycotted. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Call-outs_and_c...
Anyways, this article doesn't even try to say anything other than that Kids These Days are different than they used to be.
Not even a red herring, but just gesturing at red herrings somewhere.
1. Either no wrongdoing, or minimal wrongdoing.
2. The ability to grant oneself absolution by implicating others
The implied result is that since there isn't really any wrongful act, the only way to avoid the hunt is to accuse others. And in this way the "investigators" can go after whomever they want.
There's also an implied (3) The investigation is done by someone with traditional authority. The connotation of a witch hunt is therefore a fake investigation for solely political purposes. That is used to implicate more political enemies.
So cancel culture: If I had to, I'd describe this as a movement (or a collection of them) that tries to pressure powerful entities to take acts they deem to be moral by through social and economic pressure. That's really it.
To people who disagree with the moral position, there can be similarities to (1), but (2) certainly isn't present, and the people pressuring for accountability/action/whatever aren't usually traditional authority figures. In fact individual movements may be entirely leaderless and decentralized (so no 3).
Since moral and political lines are correlated, there can also be an appearance of similarity to the politicalized investigation aspect, but beyond the most surface level similarities, there isn't much in common.
The reason is that apologists of cancel culture are talking about "influential people/powerful corporations being boycotted/yelled at in twitter". Meanwhile, detractors are talking about "normal people without any kind of power or influence being harassed and/or losing their livelihoods because they cracked their knuckles".
So both sides are talking about fundamentally different things, and because of this, discussion on this matter is almost always a lot of people yelling past each other.
It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.
Twitter and the social network allowed people to have reach to explain why they're boycotting this or that, share their outrage, sometime about really dumb things, but still with their own reasons.
Want to see real change? General strike. Shut it all down and watch the powers freak out.
In Martin Luther King's last speech before he was cancelled, he suggested boycotting businesses until such time as they were willing to treat all God's children fairly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23414101 "All we say to America is to be true to what you said on paper."
Part of what makes the current debate over cancel culture so difficult is that most of us, even those who love free expression, would not be comfortable with giving space to certain assertions even in places that are meant for intellectual contention. As much as I believe a University should be a space where intellectual debate is welcomed, I don't think any University should give a platform to, say, a holocaust denier. We all draw the line somewhere. Permuting where that line gets drawn is very, very difficult. Especially because morality evolves, and our convictions about certain things are constantly changing the light of new evidence, new understandings, especially re: traditionally disenfranchised peoples.
The real danger of "cancel culture" is rhetorical, I think. People need to be persuaded of an idea to really accept it. They cannot be hectored into acceptance. You can shove them out of platforms, but they will hold their beliefs, and externalize them at the ballot-box, or elsewhere. Moral development takes time, and it takes suasion.
There's a lot more to unpack here. A part of me wonders if cancel culture is just another expression of a kind of acrimoniousness that has always accompanied political life. Or maybe not. I don't have all the answers. But on balance, I still believe in favoring a space for debate.
I think that's the problem. Any condition beyond being not insulting and not threatening leaves a place to drive in a wedge by those opposed to free speech. They say, if you won't let this Nazi speak, you shouldn't let this person I associate with Nazi-ism speak.
Instead we should let the Nazi speak. And the pedophile, human extinction advocate, anti-vaxxer, etc. We don't have to listen, but neither should we punch them, rhetorically or otherwise, as long as they follow some minimal content neutral standard of decorum.
a lot of those signatures are just "Unsigned, <affiliation>". the reasoning, according to the letter, is:
>Many signatories on our list noted their institutional affiliation but not their name, fearful of professional retaliation. It is a sad fact, and in part why we wrote the letter.
if you can't sign something without putting your name on it, because you fear you're going to get persecuted and fired... isn't that cancel culture?
My point is, cancel culture definitely exists. There has always been, and always will be, political processes for selecting views we consider acceptable discourse. Arguments against cancel culture that don't grapple with this reality are missing the point. Canceling isn't about using the power of the state to crack down on free speech. It's about deciding who gets access to a scarce resource: their platform.
The way this get decided is unavoidably political, since it's about who wields power.
A good example is this website. While most posts are technical, Hacker News hosts a significant amount of discussion regarding social issues. If you read this site using hckrnews.com, which preserves posts flagged off the front page, it's easy to notice that there are political trends in how moderators and users select what posts get prominence. This post, which espouses a more centrist perspective on cancel culture, was briefly flagged, then restored. Many, many other posts espousing more progressive views are systematically downvoted or flagged (search for DEAD on hckrnews.com), many of which are far longer and more carefully developed than Taibbi's piece. Regardless of how you feel about confederate statues, I think it's hard to consider that this 538 post (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate-statues/) isn't comparable to this post in terms of quality, sophistication, and merit to be on the front page of HN.
For those of you who agree with Taibbi... do you think those posts aren't "canceled"?
If you think this example is contrived, because the nature of this cancellation doesn't involve a visible mob, that's because of power differences.
The nature of "cancellation" against minorities looks different. Mob justice isn't necessary when people in power can just fire you. And progressives are fired or otherwise censored for advocating for inclusion, against police violence, for progressive social policy all the time. You don't see mob justice in these cases because this kind of canceling is often enforced by institutions. A mob isn't necessary. The effect is the same: people are regularly censored and excluded from mainstream prominence because their views are considered unacceptable.
The reason this latest wave of (attempted) cancellations (nyt editorial, jk rowling, adam rapaport, countless people resulting from #metoo etc) have garnered attention is twofold:
1. They require popular support. Lots of people support holding rapaport, the founder of crossfit, Tucker Carlson, etc to account. No institution wanted to punish these people, so a popular movement formed.
2. They cancel views formerly considered to be within acceptable bounds. Anti-trans speech, implicitly discriminatory pay practices, military crackdowns on protestors, even if they weren't popular, are believed by many to be "newspaper publishable". It's shocking to people like Taibbi that people who share their views can get fired and singled out on social media—things that happen to people with progressive views on a regular basis.
3. Oftentimes, the people making the speech are civil and ostensibly in good faith, even if their views are onerous.
To understand cancel culture, you need to define cancellation as "people whose views are censored", and you need to look at people who espouse progressive views. That "cancel culture" is prominent today means that our definition of acceptability is changing, that powerful people require mobs to be held accountable, and that we increasingly believe that how you present the argument (good intent, good faith etc) is less important than what you present.
Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that cancellations are sometimes off the mark. Mob justice is often unfair and harmful. It is often disproportionate (the shor incident is the best example I can think of). Holding people accountable for hate speech or discriminatory practices should be the job of institutions. But they're not doing the job—this is what progressives are protesting.
If you want to stop mob culture, change institutions to fairly enforce the injustices that the mob is necessary to enforce today.
I do love Taibbi's writing, even though i think he spends too much time criticising things that soon won't matter
Psychoanalysis is still very much a pseudoscience and is based on even less that the new psychological trend with microexpression and all that jazz.
> limited ambition shown by the 1-2 latest generations If this is really a thing, then the generation prior would have shown more entrepreneurship, is this the case in the US? It is really to opposite in Europe anyway, so this should be wrong.