Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture

theatlantic.com

37 pointsnabla938 comments

> In the United States, diversity training is worth $8 billion a year

That explains a lot.

Otherwise, great article tackling in a very thoughtful manner a delicate topic. But still preaching to the choir. Nobody who should learn anything from this will because as the article itself explains, it goes against their motives.

Edit: to be clear, not saying the article is pointless, it gives a voice to those who might be too afraid to speak the facts these days. And it serves as a "you are not alone, nor crazy".

I've gone to an executive leadership training on gender equality (a cause I fully endorse) that was lead by women mostly sidestepping the structural causes to gender oppression.

I find this kinds of activity more damaging than silence since they give a false sense of progressiveness.

This is especially damaging with race issues, most places I worked at people were happy to discuss sexism but literally sighed at racism.

"Preaching to the choir to make it sing better"

Dicing and slicing society into groups based on sex, gender and race and then creating a hierarchy amongst the groups is what initiated cancel culture. It amounts to the proletariat fighting amongst themselves for the table scraps, while the owners of capital are generally off-limits.

All of it amounts to a slight of hand in the fight for economic equality.

Isn't assuming that the axis is by economic equality in itself a divide and conquer based upon assumed affinities while ignoring every other source of divergence like fundamentals of world view?

It isn't like a Crips member can just ignore that the Aryan nation has genocidal views towards them and focus on the police as a common enemy because they are of the same economic class. Claiming an affinity there is like saying Goebels and Churchill should have gotten along splendidly because they were both conservative white men in power who spoke germanic languages. It really doesn't work that way.

This has a term, BTW: "Intersectionality"[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

Righteousness drives cancel culture. Power structures and capitalism have nothing to do with it.

Historically communists literally cancel people by imprisoning them and sending them to re-education camps or worse.

Today's virtue signaling by corporations is no different than it was twenty years ago when Janet Jackson slipped a nip at the Super Bowl. Advertisers threatened to leave NFL. FCC opened an investigation. All of this to please what these corporations perceived as the majority mob.

In order to fire someone, you need power. In order to fire someone based on vague accusations or how they worded a tweet, you need a complete lack of labor rights.

edit: in the US, it's completely legal to fire people because you don't like their taste in shoes, or because you're so attracted to them that you think you'll be tempted to try to cheat on your wife. I don't think we should have a carved out protected class for employees who sounded transphobic on twitter once. We should have a minimum process for firing people that is dictated by the state, and further process that is negotiated by the employee's union. "Free speech" libertarians hate that a lot more.

> In order to fire someone based on vague accusations or how they worded a tweet, you need a complete lack of labor rights.

Not really: "I'm sorry, it's now clear that your values are out of alignment with the company values. While your work here has been effective, we can't justify the harm your value misalignment is bringing the company."

" you need a complete lack of labor rights."

What on earth does a lack of labor rights have to do with capitalism?

Labor can be -- and often is -- unprotected in all economic structures. A laborer in a communist state has historically had very few labor protections.

Right. Capitalism doesn't "drive" cancel culture any more than it drives other cultural developments of all sorts. People have always sought to take advantage of cultural and political shifts, and this is no different.

Righteousness lies in the eyes of the beholder. And often nowadays, the disconnect is in how much righteousness-attention is placed on specific topics in relation to others, dependent on what's in-vogue politically.

This post is very coincidentally timed with today's Dilbert.

https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-07-15

This is a great piece. It provides a clear framing to interpret how institutions (and individuals) act when faced with social injustice. The article cites several interesting cases to make the point: the injustice itself can be very real, or it can be just something "assumed" but magnified by social media.

The author argues that there's an important distinction between socially vs. economically radical (re)actions to injustice. The socially radical approach is relatively easy to follow through but also quite ineffective, or even counter-productive (e.g. appointing the first female board member in a corporation, or instantly fire an employee who's been blamed on social media). On the other hand, an economically radical reaction is costly but can lead to real change (e.g. stop selling to a business partner who violates our own values).

And, as the article points out, leaders of institutions typically have personal incentives to follow the "soft" version: making some PR moves without caring too much about the real problems.

If we look at the IT sector we had several examples of this lately [0-4].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23740818

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7801646

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23726882

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23445987

To me, current cancel culture smells a lot like McCarthyism. Perhaps social media is attempting to kill itself.

Here's a historical tip. The bad guys never believe they are the bad guys. Maybe everyone should use that nugget to keep yourselves in check before you get some Taco Bell worker fired for saying something that offended your delicate sensibilities.

Current cancel culture is nothing but infant stage fascism. People with power hate to lose it, so they will sacrifice whomever they need to in order to keep it.

If you don't think cancel culture rhymes with McCarthyism, maybe you're the bad guy.

I don't believe capitalism is a problem here, same shit happened in socialism (without twitter of course). It's a human nature, I guess.

This article borders on incoherent in terms of how meta it tries to get about responses to social justice activities.

I think the author should read, “Inequality Talk is About Grabbing” and “Sex Prizes” by Robin Hanson and reflect soberly on what they mean about society’s motives.

- http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about-gr...

- http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/sex-prizes.html

Cancel culture is about selfishly taking resources, that’s all. There are many things we could try to cancel that would make the world better, but why is it that it tends to only focus on removing someone from a position of (usually pretty menial) authority or influence, like a job or a high status social media outlet.

Cancel culture isn’t impacting overt horrific actions of billionaires. We don’t tend to try to cancel across international lines, or cancel people from the past, because we can’t take resources from them.

It’s purely about taking whatever stuff you can smash and grab, like social looting, from people positioned with menial wealth, power or influence, in your own country for the most part.

Anyone who can resist you is somehow conveniently not a worthy target.

We also don’t try to take things that aren’t easy to grab. It’s super easy to remove statues or cancel someone on social media, or get people in the middle ranks fired.

This is why you also see calls for direct cash payment forms of reparations even though that utterly makes no sense on any level whatsoever. Direct cash payments by grabbing tax money is one of the easiest things to grab. Real reform that addresses systemic addiction, gang influence, employment gaps, police discrimination, etc., are extremely hard to solve and require complex coordination. So of course conveniently major op eds are written defending direct cash reparations as the only solution.

I really wish people would wake up to this more.

The world around you is constantly trying to drum up covert hypocrisy reasons why it’s OK to simply take what you have and why this isn’t wrong.

The target on your back is a function of what stuff you have that they want, and how easy it is to take it from you.

Lower middle class doesn’t have much, so nobody focuses on taking from them. People in other countries are separated by complex laws so taking their stuff is hard. Very wealthy people have resources to resist so taking their stuff is hard. People from past eras are dead and locked their stuff away in institutions, so taking anything aside from symbolic gestures is too hard.

This leave you - upper middle class or low end of the wealth class. You have just enough stuff for it to be worth grabbing, and you don’t quite have enough power to resist social movements that take it from you under the guise of social progress.

Despite you being downvoted, I appreciated your post. I especially find the idea of "social looting" interesting, and I agree with you about the path of least resistance being the middle class--we're easy targets, it seems.

Movements are built off the back of small victories. It's not a surprise or a revelation that what you paint as 'cancel culture', a concept without personification, is exercising its (limited) power in the ways you describe. It seems likely to me that, as victories accumulate, so will the socio-political power of the group, until they are capable of making serious change at the level of nation-states.

I think you misunderstood. These aren’t “victories” in the sense of having any impact on reform or progress - they have none, not even a little, and the people doing the cancelling never expected or needed them to.

It’s only about taking what you can grab. The goal is to get more stuff while not being accused of violating social norms during the act of taking. So cancel culture is invented as an excuse of convenience that allows taking stuff on one hand while claiming moral righteousness (even though your only motive was to take peoples stuff you wanted) on the other.

If you wanted social reform, there are many actions you could choose that aren’t directly rooted in terms of who are the easiest people, with sufficiently valuable stuff, to take from.

The fact that people choose to focus on social looting instead of all the rational alternatives is what really conclusively demonstrates that cancelling is not at all about pure motives to fix things but instead is just about what can you get away with taking while protected under the righteousness banner of the social movement convenience excuse.

“It’s only cancel culture if it comes from the Cancelle region of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling consequences.”

- https://mobile.twitter.com/BerrakBiz/status/1276320815240208...

Consequences for what exactly? That's the real question.

Cancel culture is one of those things that is so nasty, so obviously unproductive, that it makes me sick to see how broken our culture has become. I mean, I was sure that society had definitely concluded that mob justice was a bad thing. Discovering that I was wrong was difficult.

Regardless of the virtue of off-color jokes, thousand-year-old religious viewpoints, and fear-based worldviews, we must admit that we've lost sight of the goal. To quote an Aaron Sorkin 'Republican': "If liberals are so fuckin' smart, how come they lose so godddamn always?"

You can just imagine being a young employee fresh from college, or a blue-collar dude just working on a show, when bam! suddenly you're out of a job because of a tweet you had nothing to do with. The alt-right is waiting there with open arms. Why does nobody see how that works? It's like a college fair where one group of tables is telling you how much you suck and the others are high-fiving you for what you've already done. Guess who gets the candidates?

Twitter is poison.

The problem is, "cancel culture" has come to mean two very different things: Punishing, even firing, people because of relatively innocent statements or actions misinterpreted, taken out of context, or blown out of proportion; and ostracizing or shunning people, primarily public figures, for revealing their bigotry and hateful beliefs.

The former seems to be what you're describing, and is, IMO, caused by people with little power in a world they feel is spinning out of control trying to exercise control over the spaces they do have power over. It's definitely a problem, and is definitely counterproductive to efforts to improve the inclusivity and compassion of our society.

The latter is, as some people have described, simply speech having consequences, and those consequences being upsetting to people who are used to being treated as authorities.

I think nobody should be fired or ostracized for holding any beliefs. Penalties for action can be ok, but not penalties for thought.

Education system should innstill those principles. In many ways it has tried, but you still meet people of all ages ignorant of their own intolerance and general lack of sound principles. Not everyone is a philosopher, and the world wouldn't be better for it, though we need more robust platforms to build our structures on.

They get the direction of agency completely wrong. Capitalism /responds to/ so called cancel culture of all sorts which by accident or design excludes ostracism well before it was coined.

Be openly gay, socialist, and/or in an interracial relationship in the the US in the 1950s - compile a very short list of places you aren't canceled from.

The framework doesn't exist in a vacuum and blaming it for its host context's dysfunction would be incorrect even if it excaberrates them in some way. Because it isn't the origin.

Capitalism driving cancel culture would be if it was possible to invest money in ostracizing someone and reaping financial benefits if it suceeds or ostracism being preferred because it is cheaper than a police force.

Yup.

Social groups imposing conformity is normal.

Weaponizing conformity is normal.

Spanish Inquisition, Salem Witch Trials, McCarthyism, etc.

The only novelty this iteration is formerly in-group cohorts are now getting their turn at the woodshed.

Coincidently occurring during demographic shift, whites on track to becoming a minority, so is adjacent to the white resentment nonsense.

(Buy me a beer and I'll tell you what I really think.)

Corporations today provide the platforms for mob rule.

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