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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Ending at-will employment is a legal solution to a cultural problem. Unlikely to work, but more importantly, I’d argue it’s unwise to rely on legal codes to solve non-legal problems. You end up ignoring other forms of education and culture (for example, from the family or local community) in favor of those which are explicitly written down.

Instead I think we need to collectively, as a society, be less sensitive to perceived insults and disagreeable opinions. Words are not violence. Disagreement is a natural, healthy consequence of a diverse society.

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I think a lot of the unspoken debate on "cancel culture" is how much of a culture it actually is. If you spend all of your time on Twitter it can seem like the whole world is entangled in cancel culture, but in reality I think the majority of people have better things to do than call on strangers to be fired.

Employment law seems to me like a surface-level-reasonable way to prevent small mobs on twitter from spilling over into the real world.

>but in reality I think the majority of people have better things to do than call on strangers to be fired.

But if the majority of people are forced to behave super conservatively in order to hedge against cancel culture does it really matter how small that vocal minority really is?

I see the phenomenon to be similiar to people being worried about frivolous lawsuits or being worried about Karen calling the police because their kids are playing outside unsupervised. These events are rare but fear of them shapes all of society's behavior in a bad way.

Even more worryingly the behaviour deemed acceptable seems to be sliding window. So in a few years you can't even be sure any more what is acceptable to people calling for firings and what isn't.

Also all past transgressions will count at any later time. So something said today what might be fine is not fine in a few years. And someone might just dig up this thing and rally up lynch mob to act upon it. There has been already cases of this happening.

I do really see that some protections are needed. Either by preventing companies taking actions or making the people calling for losing job liable for damages.

Right, the problem is that a small mob of people can have outsized control by putting pressure on individual employees. To that employee, it doesn't matter how big the mob is.

But in terms of ending cancel culture, if a small mob is all it takes, how effective can anything but employment law be? People calling on someone to be fired, after all, have free speech rights themselves; the best the law can do is limit the consequences of that speech.

> People calling on someone to be fired, after all, have free speech rights themselves

Somehow the "everything is free speech and nobody should ever be censored" arguers forget this.

Intimidation, harassment, and attempts to harm individuals are not protected speech. If they were, cross burning would be protected speech as well. See, for example Virgina v. Black; quoting from the Wikipedia article: "Justice Sandra Day O'Connor delivered the opinion stating, 'a state, consistent with the First Amendment, may ban cross burning carried out with the intent to intimidate." In so doing, the Court considered the speech to be constitutionally unprotected 'true threats. Under that carve-out, "a State may choose to prohibit only those forms of intimidation that are most likely to inspire fear of bodily harm.'"

I always shake my head when seeing people smugly trotting out the "trying to get people fired is protected free speech too" argument. Don't they realize they're trying the same arguments that cross-burners tried in courts and failed at? Moreover, don't they realize what using having to use cross-burners' legal arguments to defend their desire to freely intimidate individuals looks like to an outsider from a moral perspective? If free speech proponents are forgetting things, well, they're not the only ones.

Free speech is not a positive in isolation, but need to be channeled constructively according to democratic principles. Most people are not educated to wield that power.

Did you just say most people are not educated enough to have free speech?

What a wild ride we're on.

Yes indeed. Of the kind social media optimize on, most people are NOT educated enough for, or rather, society have not enough controls for; fringe outrage growing into trends and mob.

Beware empty belief in general principles.

> most people are NOT educated enough for

That was a rather fringe outrageous thing to say.

Indeed. So will you protect it, or will you lie?

Let me clarify: While people may be educated enough to cast votes how many beans is in the jar, or what cause to support in the moment, they are mostly not equipped to be jury and judge of mob rule, or am I wrong?

See this thread: https://twitter.com/js_rubin/status/1283493690741268482

13/ Ironically, then, dismissing cancelling as a “culture” allows critics to not engage with the actual substance of calls for accountability. If it’s a culture, there cannot possibly be reasons behind their desire to hold people accountable.

14/ Side note: Look how often critics of #CancelCulture label their opponents as being a “mob” rather than a movement. A “mob” works off passions and emotion, whereas a movement is an organized effort to change society.

15/ And, by labeling calls for accountability as “culture,” critics draw the same kind of civilizational contrast as early anthropologists. They (often BIPOC) are governed by reflexive culture whereas we (often white) uphold the principles of free speech and rational debate.

Using labels to short circuit debate works both ways equally well.

13. The blanket term "accountability" implies some sort of clear, reasoned collection of guidelines. The reality is that there is little consensus on public standards. If there were a real level of consensus this wouldn't be a topic.

14. Calling your mob a movement doesn't change it's nature. Movement is every bit as loaded of a term as culture.

15. That looks a lot like "If you disagree it's because you're a Victorian racist". From what I've seen, the vocals sides of this are both affluent whites claiming to have the moral high road.

It doesn't really matter to the person getting fired how many people it took to make it happen.

> Instead I think we need to collectively, as a society, be less sensitive to perceived insults and disagreeable opinions

So we're going to ask the boss to pretty please not fire people because of what they wrote on Twitter? Without any teeth behind it? I've seen it happen in my country: here's a few millions€, please don't sell the factory, please maintain all those jobs. One week later the factory closes and everyone is fired.

No.

If we agree on a social norm, "please" must be followed by "or else". Without "or else", my employer's freedom to fire me will naturally override my freedom to write what I like on HN. If we agree it shouldn't, we need to build an incentive structure where it doesn't.

Laws and regulations are pretty damn effective, as incentive structures go.

> Ending at-will employment is a legal solution to a cultural problem. Unlikely to work, but more importantly, I’d argue it’s unwise to rely on legal codes to solve non-legal problems.

Let me prefix my remarks by noting that I'm not American and that I live in a country where at-will employment for the most part doesn't exist.

I disagree that getting someone fired from their job is merely a cultural problem. It's also a financial problem and hence a legal problem.

As I see it, if someone burglarizes your home, they're depriving you of the goods they steal. If you're arbitrarily dismissed from a job that you're performing perfectly well (including treating coworkers, clients, etc. correctly), you're deprived of the lost income. In either case, there's a financial loss involved and I fail to see why the law shouldn't try to protect the victim of such a loss.

I do agree that laws will never offer a complete solution to cancel culture, but a solution doesn't have to be complete to be justified, various partial solutions are OK.

That is already covered under libel laws but it calls for it to be untrue and malicious. A negative opinion is protected along with statements of facts.

Otherwise you have such absurdities as being able to sue for a bad review for "loss of profits". That is why the law doesn't try to protect them. Expecting to be able to sue just for damages sounds like the sort of thing which gets your country's judgements libel ruled unenforcible under libel shopping laws after a history of abuse.

> Unlikely to work, but more importantly, I’d argue it’s unwise to rely on legal codes to solve non-legal problems.

Laws aren't the end in itself. Laws exist to help avoid social problems, and help keep society working.

This Cancel Culture is a major social problem. Society's tool to avoid social problems is to punish antisocial behavior through law.

Laws mean justice. Cancel Culture is politically-motivated mob rule.

> Instead I think we need to collectively, as a society, be less sensitive to perceived insults and disagreeable opinions. Words are not violence. Disagreement is a natural, healthy consequence of a diverse society.

Where do you draw the line between a disagreeable opinion v. something so abhorrent as to warrant cancelling someone's job, e.g. the use of racial slurs in spoken language?

Not rhetorical. Genuinely wondering.

Are you really suggesting that "racial slurs in spoken language" are "so abhorrent" that they "warrant cancelling someone's job"? That completely bypasses the ever important context of the situation, bypasses due process, etc etc etc. This mob justice is abhorrent.

There are courts to deal with issues like racism. There are laws. Firing people because they say something you don't agree with is a very slippery slope indeed. Especially when it's not on company time. In my part of the world, it will likely result in the employer being taken to court.

The issue I see is how "racial slurs in spoken language" are defined. There are plenty of people who assert that criticism of Israel's behaviour towards Palestine, or Xi Jinping, count as abhorrent racial slurs for instance.

> Are you really suggesting that "racial slurs in spoken language" are "so abhorrent" that they "warrant cancelling someone's job"?

Yes.

> That completely bypasses the ever important context of the situation, bypasses due process, etc etc etc

It really doesn't. If you're "using" a racial slur, you're leveraging the definition of the word, which requires mal-intent by definition.

"Do not call me a ______" or "This word [written on the board] is a horrific hallmark of bigoted Americana that must be excluded from your vocabulary" is not the employment/use of a racial slur.

> which requires mal-intent by definition

Not always, and within these types of assumption lies the key problems. There are a lot of words which had their meaning changed or become less used with time to accommodate racial biases. Even in the software industry, where terms such as “black list” or “slaves” shouldn’t be used anymore.

> Not always, and within these types of assumption lies the key problems.

With racial slurs, always. 100% of the time.

It takes at least a generation of time for a word to evolve to that level of offense. You're describing terms which haven't evolved to that level of offense yet, words with which there's still a window of time to safely set the expectation that they shouldn't be used in a given manner.

> Even in the software industry, where terms such as “black list” or “slaves” shouldn’t be used anymore.

True, though it's worth noting that we should be seeking the opinion of the impacted population about this rather than assuming it to be true (Ex: https://twitter.com/marcusjcarey/status/1271624977805185024 - a fairly qualified opinion around which language in tech, or infosec specifically, should be revisited).

> It takes at least a generation of time for a word to evolve to that level of offense.

Not true, maybe you are biased towards English words. Take Spanish or Portuguese, where the word “negro” (not to confuse w/ any English slur) really means “the color black” (etymologycally) and is thereby synonymous to black. It has always been used to show respect, in a less biased sense towards black people, because it really doesn’t carry any ideology in its semantics. But now, its use and meaning are changing towards similar slur words avoided in the US. It didn’t take a generation in such countries to change its meaning (politically), it is happening now, even though the word itself is the same, means the same, and had no problem at all a couple of years ago.

> Not true, maybe you are biased towards English words.

We're also discussing a chiefly American phenomenon, and while I recognize that English isn't the only language spoken in the United States, English is the primary language of business in the United States, and boycotts/terminations are squarely in the realm of business.

So, not biased; appropriately scoped.

It is mostly a global phenomenon, and the argument remains.

> It is mostly a global phenomenon, and the argument remains.

The article is clearly scoped to US issues. Language dynamics change when you move to other locales with other biases and prejudices. The article is even focused on US laws specifically.

Please read the article before you engage with others so that everyone's on the same page. I've disengaged from this conversation, sorry.

What a great assumption: one goes outside the scope of the article, therefore the same hasn't read the article, and then other perspectives cannot be brought in. It is only naïve to think this discussion isn't scoped in a broader perspective since the very phenomena is happening elsewhere as well, and the obvious impacts linguistics have in it.

Using a slur does does not "require malintent by definition". Slurs can be used as terms of endearment, within jokes, etc.

The concept of civility and politeness once existed, but unfortunately has been almost entirely thrown away. This is easy to see if you look up old debates on YouTube; it was normal and expected for people of diametrically-opposite worldviews to engage and debate with each other in a polite, mostly-calm manner. Compare that to the shouting-match of today’s media landscape and you’ll see what we’ve lost.

> The concept of civility and politeness once existed

When? Where? How? What old debates on youtube? I've seen people throw out this line since the W Bush administration and as far as I can tell it just means most of them have never actually delved into the media they think they're exposed to.

US political officials used to fight each other, physically all the time -- senators bludgeoning each other into comas with canes, the VP of the US shooting and killing the head of the opposing political party in a dual. Andrew Jackson got shot something like 4 times. Dig up some of the terrible things Lincoln used to say about his political rivals -- The Great Emancapator used to spit fire at people. Before we had Rupert Murdoch we had Hearst, who literally caused a war, and is one of the inspirations for the term Yellow Journalism.

There may have been 5 minutes where youtube wasn't complete garbage but I recall Newgrounds being big then and seeing more than a few blatantly pro-nazi vids then.

Of course you can find specific obscure examples for or against the argument I'm making. I really don't find this sort of comment helpful or useful and it's rather tiresome when it inevitably appears. I'm speaking of general cultural trends, not isolated incidents. American culture is far less formal, polite, and respectful than it used to be even 30 years ago. This is reflected in language (vulgarity is far more acceptable today), clothing (far more casual), vocabulary level (far lower), and in countless other ways. Even the insults today are more base and direct than they used to be. If this is not obviously true to you, I'm not sure we can agree on anything.

For a specific example on YouTube, watch some old episodes of Firing Line. Here's one where William F. Buckley (conservative) talks to Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers (quite left-wing). For one, this sort of interaction would almost never happen in the modern media world, and if it did, it would be nowhere near as calm as the Firing Line episode is. Certainly Buckley is not a paragon of civility (see his arguments with Gore Vidal) but again, the overall culture was far more collected. Compare it to today, where every conversation is combative and the only non-hostile forum is something like Joe Rogan, who functions as more of a sounding board than an actual intellectual host.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NPwk_Dbin8

> The concept of civility and politeness once existed, but unfortunately has been almost entirely thrown away. This is easy to see if you look up old debates on YouTube; it was normal and expected for people of diametrically-opposite worldviews to engage and debate with each other in a polite, mostly-calm manner. Compare that to the shouting-match of today’s media landscape and you’ll see what we’ve lost.

Nobody's cancelling people over political disagreements; they're cancelling people for dehumanizing groups of people, regardless of the tone of voice.

People may have had orderly disagreements more often back in the 50s, sure (although the violence against Black as well as Native Americans in the 50s is casually and commonly forgotten - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_Un...). The difference is that in the 50s, people weren't fired for casually employing the n- word against Black people. This is the difference between today v. the past. What you describe still feels like a regression.

> Nobody's cancelling people over political disagreements;

That seems to be exactly what is happening.

> That seems to be exactly what is happening.

Please cite? Need more than one, notably cases where people have lost their jobs for "offensive" language other than dehumanizing groups of people.

It doesn't even have to be a political disagreement - could be something as simple as appearing to have fallen asleep in a zoom call: https://www.newsweek.com/petition-fire-nyc-professor-accused...

Some others:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/white-fragility-raci...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/14/rosetta-come...

https://www.thefire.org/research/disinvitation-database/#hom...

https://reason.com/2019/05/05/teen-fiction-twitter-is-eating...

Plenty more instances that have happened in the past 5 years.

I said cancel culture, not people who have lost their jobs. There are plenty of examples of people who otherwise would have lost their jobs had they not already been wealthy, so many that it is so obvious that a topic like this can be posted to HN without any prior explanation. Goya Foods is a recent example and the list goes on. They don’t seem to have done anything other than show support for Trump.

I despise Trump, didn’t vote for him, and think he has done significant damage to the office of the presidency and the country as a whole, but clearly expressing any sort of support for him will get you boycotted (I.e. canceled.) which falls under ‘unacceptable political opinions’ in my book.

Otherwise, I’m really not sure what your definition of ‘dehumanizing’ is. Outright racism and hatred is condemned by nearly everyone.

Realistically, boycotts seems to be the only political tool you have in the US, with all major candidates could be considered varying degrees of authoritarian and sometime libertarian right[0], with no big unions like Germany. If you're not on the "right" side, this moight be your only way of speaking for yourself. Boycott is a non-violent way of saying "stop this", so if you can afford to, you should absolutely do it. Even for petty things.

[0] https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 (there is better tools but this one is Ok-ish)

> but clearly expressing any sort of support for him will get you boycotted (I.e. canceled.) which falls under ‘unacceptable political opinions’ in my book.

They used to call this “voting with your wallet” when I was a kid. I don’t really see what the problem is here. If I don’t like the ethics of a company, I’m free to buy beans from a company whose ethics I do like. This seems to be a critical component of capitalism. What are we supposed to do, force people to buy beans for Goya?

> Goya Foods is a recent example and the list goes on. They don’t seem to have done anything other than show support for Trump.

Context around what you're describing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/10/goya-boycot...

The boycott seems to be stemming from Trump's blatant use of bigotry against the Latinx community, so Goya is being blackballed by the Latinx community for endorsing racism.

Just because Trump is a politician doesn't mean boycotting people for endorsing him is only political. Considering Trump's generally-known and blatant bigotry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump), it's no different than boycotting someone for endorsing David Duke (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Duke)

Just wanted to add we would be a better society if we had infact been firing people for using the n word in the 50's.

> Just wanted to add we would be a better society if we had infact been firing people for using the n word in the 50's.

1000‰, without a shadow of a doubt.

The difference is that in the 50s, black people weren't only cancelled by being fired, or cancelled via perjury, they were also cancelled via extrajudicial execution. (compare Emmett Till)

This is the ideal we should strive for.

But looking at history with at least a layman’s perspective it seems this was only ever done in small subcultures/circles and never the norm.

Typically scholars of some kind and only within their group. So from a position of privilege: people who are well educated and have time to think. And given time to talk.

The mainstream media and social media typically don’t respect/support the latter.

Social media in particular is more inclusive. Everyone gets to speak as loudly as people ‚like‘, in a more protected manner.

Also there are vast differences in basic values, which were almost always hotly debated, even by the most well spoken, such as religion, equality etc.

> “ something so abhorrent as to warrant cancelling someone's job”

This is what laws around hate speech and discrimination are for. If some mob seeking social looting doesn’t like the laws and wants to cancel someone based on their mere preferences of what’s abhorrent, that’s just too bad. That’s not how protections of free speech work.

I disagree. We have decided a long time ago to handle such things with laws, not oppinions, not "common sense", not morals and not cultural beliefs.

Laws against discrimation exist exactly to protect against such things. And apparently discimination against political affiliation and political beliefes is growing.

If a legal solution were unacceptable, the free market solution would be https://findsomethingnew.org ?

>collectively, as a society

"We" are not "one society" thus "we" cannot do anything collectively.

Even in the scope of "the United States," it's never been one society and it is even less so now that it is excessively "diverse" racially, ethnically, and culturally. As the United States becomes more diverse, the less chance there is to do anything "collectively" "as a society."

To my eyes, it's an extreme example of hubris that Silicon Valley employees who control various aspects of the Internet have arrogated to themselves the privilege to speak for "society" or create moral standards for others, all based on the fact they have control of various social media platforms.

I have nothing to do with Silicon Valley and have never been there in my life.

The fact remains that there are certain basic values which underly the American experience. What those are specifically is up to debate, but clearly there are some foundational ones which nearly-all citizens would agree upon. This doesn’t seem like a controversial statement to me.

Certain basic values like freedom of speech?

Personally, yes, I’d include that along with the Constitution and its amendments, as well as a number of other values.

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