Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'
bbc.com
bbc.com
Cancel culture remains a thing. Apparently now that folks aren't just being cancelled for supporting gay marriage, the free exchange of ideas is suddenly important. The outright hypocrisy of so many on this issue is the biggest story.
Edit: Forgot to mention this extreme example of cancel culture:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/professor-who-wore-hijab-...
A professor was cancelled because she wore a hijab. There was no outrage at all from the usual suspects.
The "cancel culture" adds two news things to the picture. One is the ability for anyone to participate, not just the few on the TV screen or newspaper pages. Another is the attempts at totality: expel the victim from every social media platform, every internet hosting, every payment platform, every public venue. It's not yet as bad as it was during the fascist years in Italy, but the approach is pretty similar. There is also no formal totalitarian party to drive it; people just join the cause by reposting a tweet, and acting accordingly when in a position to ban, expel, deplatorm, etc.
But now with the inward-lookingness of cancellation, you have people from group B who are cancelled by group B, and have no one to fall back on.
An example would be a teacher arguing for the support of gay marriage getting cancelled by a catholic school they work for. That person, in the past, could pick up their bags and move in with the liberals next door. Yes, they lost their job, and maybe half of their associates, but they still have the other half who would be more than welcoming of them for the plight they've been through.
But what happens when a group cancels their own? For example, the Peru N-word journo. By all appearances, he is a liberal-minded person, who worked for a liberal-minded newspaper, in one of the most liberal-minded cities in the nation. But now he got cancelled by his colleagues. What is he supposed to do - go hang out with white supremacists? Neither side would find that appealing. So instead he has to...not partake in society at all?
It's split into tolerant people and intolerant people.
Some people wear a thin veneer of tolerance to cover their intolerance. These are the people doing the canceling. These are the people you don't want to associate with anyway.
But there's still plenty of tolerant people around in society.
I would argue people that don't really care are in fact the majority.
Do you imply that the only groups in society are liberals and white-supremacists?
This is the problem liberals have...they have to get onboard with all the progressive stuff because they don't realize that everyone else is not a white supremacist as they are told by the NYT.
A lot of Trump support came from former Democrats who realized that they are no longer onboard with the ideals of the modern Democrat party pandering to the Progressives. These people didn't want a traditional religiously crusading Republican - they wanted opposition to identity politics and globalism.
There are good people in the center, and this Peru guy will be fine - but he should have realized a long time ago the NYT is not for people like him.
Of course most businesses would not oppose such a force, because otherwise they will be a target themselves, and enough of a public opinion would be against them, at least vaguely. They have everything to lose, and very little to win if they do not conform. This is why the "cancel culture" easily makes them cooperate.
Apparently, in the eyes of many, freedom is seriously less important than justice, and justice is often seen as the right to not be offended by anything. Not that it's impossible to achieve, but the resulting society would end up extremely homogeneous.
One thing that’s important to keep in mind is that most people of color largely don’t even read the NYT, or NPR. Fox News is a far more popular news source among people of color, even Democrats: https://www.journalism.org/2020/03/11/black-and-white-democr...
If the Republicans could find a candidate who better reached out to conservative minorities while not alienating their present constituencies they certainly would prove a strong contender, specially if the Democrats veer further to the Progressive agenda. Trump's problem was while he appealed to more minorities than most past Republicans he did not market it well and didn't put it front and center enough and also turned off the so called 'soccer moms' with his poor approach to the pandemic.
It’s not clear to me that you can make the coalition work. It depends on what issues you surface. Opposition to cancel culture is apparently something right wingers and my mom can both get behind—apropos nothing, she shared Bill Maher’s recent segment about McNeil on Facebook. I don’t think she’s ever watched Bill Maher in her life.
But of course, opposing cancel culture and winning back nervous Democrats like my mom is also a clear opening for... Democrats. Hint hint.
And what claim stands, exactly? Are you suggesting that because something bad has happened before, it shouldn't be opposed now?
I get your point, but if you tell me I did a bad thing, I can answer in one of two ways: “you did a bad thing too, so you have no right to criticise me”, or “you did a bad thing too, maybe we should have a frank conversation about why we both fell into the same trap”.
And I'd love to see a frank conversation about how we can avoid falling into that trap, but such a discussion has to start by acknowledging that it is a trap; that is to say, that cancel culture is wrong.
Regarding your edit:
> Edit: Forgot to mention this extreme example of cancel culture: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/professor-who-wore-hijab-...
The professor was fired from a Christian school for making an assertion (that Muslims and Christians “worship the same god”) that, according to its theology, amounts to heresy: https://www.businessinsider.com/professor-maybe-fired-for-hi...
> “Contrary to some media reports, social media activity and subsequent public perception, Dr. Hawkins' administrative leave resulted from theological statements that seemed inconsistent with Wheaton College's doctrinal convictions, and is in no way related to her race, gender, or commitment to wear a hijab during Advent," Wheaton's administration said in a statement released December 16th.
So if your point is that cancel culture is the expression of a new progressive theology, then again I accept your concession.
> McNeil repeatedly made racist and sexist remarks throughout the trip including, according to two complaints, using the “n-word.”
I don’t understand how this is related to cancel culture, given it’s been corporate policy to not make racist and sexist remarks for decades? And just, regular human decency? What are the arguments for keeping this person employed by a major news organization?
> In the absence of a full accounting of this episode, I can’t make any firm judgment about the merits of McNeil’s departure. For all I know, he could have been acting unprofessionally for years, and it took a few teens to force the Times to take action it should have taken years ago.
So this is a he said they said situation. The nymag article doesn’t account for the sexist accusations as well. The NYT say they performed an investigation and based on that decided to fire him. So if you believe the NYT is liable to fire a senior reporter over the say so if a few “woke” college students you will feel justified to protest this. If you believe the NYT corroborated the college students story that were extremely uncomfortable due to actual sexist/racist behavior and then fired him, it doesnt look like much of a story.
Neither you nor I know the specifics of what he said or didn’t say - that’s only him, the students, and maybe to an extent the NYT investigators. I’m not saying I inherently agree with the assessment of one side at all here, just that to say he was “canceled” is quite a bit of a reach.
Second, what sexist language, exactly? What did he actually say? We certainly can't trust the mere accusation from a source like The Daily Beast. And again, this story is all about details.
Third, it's easy to believe the NYT overreacted here given the evidence from other incidents. For example:
James Bennet, the editorial page editor, resigned under pressure after publishing an op-ed by a sitting US Senator.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/james-benn...
Lauren Wolfe, a freelance editor, claims she was fired for tweeting “Biden landing at Joint Base Andrews now. I have chills.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/25/lauren-wo...
Bari Weiss, who accused the paper of "unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge" described the situation as:
> Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.
> Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.
> All this bodes ill, especially for independent-minded young writers and editors paying close attention to what they’ll have to do to advance in their careers. Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain.
> Even now, I am confident that most people at The Times do not hold these views. Yet they are cowed by those who do. Why? Perhaps because they believe the ultimate goal is righteous. Perhaps because they believe that they will be granted protection if they nod along as the coin of our realm—language—is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes. Perhaps because there are millions of unemployed people in this country and they feel lucky to have a job in a contracting industry.
> Or perhaps it is because they know that, nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back. Too wise to post on Slack, they write to me privately about the “new McCarthyism” that has taken root at the paper of record.
No one reasonable thinks he made a racist remark.
> I told him what I’d actually said in Peru. He said, “Donald, you sound exactly like my father. He would also say ‘You can’t dress like a thug to a job interview and expect to get the job.’ But from you, it sounds racist.” I said “How is ‘thug’ racist? What about Thug Life Records?” He said “It’s almost the equivalent of the n-word. Don’t you know about Marshawn Lynch?’’ I said: “He plays for Seattle?” I could hear him sigh. “No, Donald, let me explain…”
So it seems like he by his own admission probably said some stuff that was frankly out of bounds. But doesn’t necessarily mean he deserves to be fired.
Being blind to how one speaks and how it affects others however, is not a trait that I’d imagine most newsrooms are looking for, at all. His finally thought:
> One last thought: what’s happened to me has been called a “witch hunt.” It isn’t. It’s a series of misunderstandings and blunders.
I mean, I feel like that says it all? A victim of a changing culture? Probably. But sound judgement in the here and now is a prerequisite for employment in an industry like journalism. You can’t just lie back and wax nostalgic about how things that were acceptable aren’t now, and believe that excuses ones current actions. Hopefully we’ve progressed a bit. It’s sad what happened to him, but I get the feeling he knows he did make a few “off-color” remarks and was quite unaware of the lens society views comments like that. The latter part is probably the real fault.
Now it's manufactured outrage about the word "thug", a word used quite recently by President Biden, and not that long ago by President Obama.
Suddenly "it’s almost the equivalent of the n-word."
How could a coronavirus reporter possibly keep up with that?
It sounds to me like a few kids at this conference were butthurt for being told they were wrong about completely unrelated questions, and pounced like jackals for anything to make this guy look like a nazi. "I might be completely wrong about Jared Diamond and look like a dumbass... but 'n______' came out of this guy's mouth at some point! Get him!"
If it fits ones narrative then they’ll believe it one way. If it fits ones narrative that old reporter said a bunch of stuff that demonstrated really questionable judgement if not disdain, then you’ll believe it that way. The NYT say they investigated, so it comes down to whether you believe them to be fair in that process (I would think if I worked there I’d want it to be a fair process). Not having any primary information, I don’t feel compelled to make any judgement of fault here.
His use of that word was supposed to be a smoking gun, but instead their story seems to be all smoke and mirrors.
That's a perfect example of cancel culture: the mere allegation is enough, proof is neither required nor given.
Some Evangelical Christians, being Protestants, have a ton of disagreement with Catholics, and disagree at this point, too.
Muslims universally agree, AFAICT, because Muhammad himself stated this explicitly (and Christ figures prominently as a prophet in Quran).
See a short analysis in [1].
Even though the OP was not correct at classifying the case as a manifestation of "cancel culture", I can see the similarity. It is in the same intolerance and unwillingness to discuss and listen in either case. The truth is known, any doubt is a vice, whoever disagrees should be shamed away. This is what I find the most dangerous part of the phenomenon.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2015/12/20/460480698/do-christians-and-m...
Every Christian worships Jesus as God. No Muslim will. It’s that simple.
When Muhammad says that Jesus is a prophet, it is a rejection of what Jesus claimed about Himself. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me.”
Many of course have tried to act as though the two are compatible, but when you come right down to it, I believe what Jesus said, and Muhammad didn’t.
If you’re trying to tell me what Muslims believe, you’re also wrong.
Saying that Jesus is the Son of God is very different from saying that He is a prophet of God. That difference is precisely why Muslims cannot agree that Jesus is the Son of God and why I cannot agree that Muhammad is a prophet of God.
I don't dispute that's what you believe, but it isn't the position of all Christians.
The Catholic Church is quite explicit about its belief that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. It has expressed that belief in the decree Nostra aetate of the Second Vatican Council, and numerous other Vatican documents since. And the Catholic Church is not alone among Christians in this belief.
I think there is a real disagreement among Christians as to whether the God of Islam is a (somewhat distorted) account of the God of Christianity (the official Catholic position, but certainly some Protestants agree with it too), or whether it is a completely different entity (the position of yourself among others).
I think from the Muslim point of view – the Islamic designation of Christians as "People of the Book" only makes sense if Muslims believe that Christians worship the same God as they do, even if wrongly and confusedly.
Techy: Ummm... no.
Me: Techies can be so sensitive about minor things. You can believe whatever you want, I don't care. But it is a fact that Java and Javascript are both programming languages. If you don't like it that doesn't change the fact.
Wheaton’s college is an extremely narrow evangelical Protestant theology, that as well as dismissing Hawkins for her statements and firing a professor a few years before for becoming Catholic as it violated the schools duty to employ faculty embodying it's Protestant ideals, also led it to sue against the ACA’s preventive services mandate.
I'm not sure why you would suggest that “cancellation” under that theology has anything to do with progressivism.
It seems pretty obvious that you don't understand that any culture has norms and boundaries, but only pathological cultures become entirely reactionary and define themselves purely in terms of opposition to something.
>You can go back further to McCarthyism
That's exactly what we're going back to and you have to be truly blind to think this is a good thing.
why is that so hard to understand and to be consistent about this? people need to stop getting distracted by naked partisanship and focus on the issue. a principled stance is key!
now we're seeing big tech getting roped in and the tools of censorship are expanding. you may be fine with that now, but the tools will change hands. imagine them in the hands of your enemy.
It's negatively affecting people (for this article, the young authors who are self-censoring), and should be fought against.
Most importantly, we have politicians adopting authoritarian attitudes as a reaction to it. Private companies have a right to "cancel" whomever they want, whether that takes the form of banning someone from a website or of canceling a contract. Yet certain politicians want to interfere in private websites or publishers by limiting their ability to exercise editorial control.
I don't know the situation across the pond. I'm writing from an American perspective, where the term "cancel culture" has been entirely co-opted by cynical politicians.
This is the mindset at fault. This idea that intolerance is objective, when clearly it isn't. This idea that certain ideas, regardless of their merit, are simply intolerant and must be met with collective, unilateral intolerance, which typically aligns with progressive politics.
>Most importantly, we have politicians adopting authoritarian attitudes as a reaction to it
This is an ironic take, considering the entire premise behind cancel culture is a collective authoritarianism.
>Private companies have a right to "cancel" whomever they want, whether that takes the form of banning someone from a website or of canceling a contract.
And this is perhaps the most misleading part of the comment. This isn't strictly about private companies cancelling people (although that's also a problem when incentives are aligned to effectively remove cancelees from the public square). This is about rabid, authoritarian mobs attacking individuals for dissent, and the fact that loud minorities are dictating corporate action with a specific political slant.
People were complaining about cancel culture long before politicians. And possibly the most pressing issue is the fact that it isn't that these ideas themselves are intolerant, or even factually incorrect, it's the fear of some of their implications that is responsible for this conditioned suppression of their discourse, and unpersoning of anyone daring enough to ask certain questions. It's like banning research on fission because it could be used to create nuclear weapons. It's egregious anti-intellectualism to forbid certain questions or discussions strictly because of their worst implications.
This (Mexican-American) guy was fired for a photo that for a brief moment showed his hand making an OK sign out the window of a truck because for a few months the mainstream media tried to convince everyone that the OK sign is a white supremacist symbol: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/502975-cal...
That was technically possible before social media, but only if someone powerful decided to make an example of you. Now it can happen because a random person was bored or in a bad mood.
That's specifically what Ishiguro was complaining about. He even said he wasn't worried about influential people like himself (or all the examples you gave). I don't think he used the phrase "cancel culture," either.
> Apparently now that folks aren't just being cancelled for supporting gay marriage, the free exchange of ideas is suddenly important.
Some people suddenly started caring about the free exchange of ideas and others suddenly stopped, but you might be surprised how many just continued. To me, the ones who suddenly stopped are the biggest hypocrites of all.
I will say it is most certainly a problem, and I think it likely has much deeper roots than "social media exists, only now are people being hurt by mob mentality". It may be that social media only makes mob mentality more obvious to people, so now everyone is aware of it. But then the problem is why did we ever develop mob mentality in the first place....
There has always been a mob mentality, but it was hard to gather a mob. You had to get people to gather in person, and get them angry. Now you just get them angry, and you can do it sitting at home throwing together some memes and posting on Twitter. The bar didn't just drop a little, it dropped like 99%.
Like, we have a congresswoman blaming California wildfires on Jewish space lasers.
The republicans can deflect from the crazy by claiming "the left" is "cancelling" these people. When in reality any public figure that said crap like that would be shunned. Probably even more in past when American society was outwardly more polite.
Also, their next studio album came 14 years (!!!) after Taking The Long Way.
In my circles the Dixie Chicks rebounded from the Bush backlash and had their biggest pop hit ever in response to it ("Not Ready to Make Nice"); they became more respected in the wake of it than they ever had been.
All because France thought going to war with Iraq in 2003 was a bad idea.
If you’ve ever wondered why “frankfurters” are now called “hot dogs” or why “sauerkraut” was called “liberty cabbage” for a hot minute, it’s because of anti-German sentiment in the US [1]
[1] https://www.hppr.org/post/freedom-fries-liberty-cabbage-myth
It isn't.
I recommend "The Realignment" podcast which often discusses why this shift has occurred: https://the-realignment.simplecast.com/
The right (religious and otherwise) hasn't reduced it's policing of ideological orthodoxy at all.
Now, if you threw “exclusively” into that sentence, there might be something like a point.
I have, for actual kids (as in children, not young adults), including lately. Usually for something like “their mother has an OnlyFans page”.
> A, B and C v Ireland is a landmark 2010 case of the European Court of Human Rights on the right to privacy under Article 8. The court rejected the argument that article 8 conferred a right to abortion
Or maybe the Overton window has just shifted very left in the US about what social issues are human rights and what can properly be decided by legislative majorities?
And if far-right ACB were successful in making the right to privacy in the US similar to the one under the European Convention on Human Rights, the US states would be free to draw the line for on-demand abortions without any medical emergencies at 12-13 weeks, like nearly all European countries do and 70% of Americans support, instead of at 22-26 weeks, as is required by Roe. https://www.france24.com/en/20180525-abortion-laws-vary-eu-i.... https://news.gallup.com/poll/235469/trimesters-key-abortion-...
Of course, overturning Roe isn’t really in the cards. There are just 3 votes for it. In June Medical just two Justices, (not including ACB, who was not yet on the Court) signaled a willingness to overturn Roe. Unlike deciding a case in the first instance, overruling an existing precedent is an act of discretion. A Justice who disagrees with the merits can (and likely will) still support to uphold the precedent.
Much more likely than ACB overturning Ginsberg’s legacy with respect to abortion is ACB upholding Ginsberg’s legacy with respect to the Equal Protection Clause. At the ACLU, Ginsberg built that legacy on a textualist interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause, challenging laws that discriminated against men supposedly to benefit women as violations of equal protection. Under the current progressive worldview, that literal interpretation of “equal” treatment under the law will prove an impediment to importing critical theory into the law. That area, where the precedent isn’t as clear cut, is much more likely to be an area where ACB has an impact.
> > A, B and C v Ireland is a landmark 2010 case of the European Court of Human Rights on the right to privacy under Article 8. The court rejected the argument that article 8 conferred a right to abortion
Article 8 states:
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
COTUS A14 states:
...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.
The latter is clearly broader.
>the US states would be free to draw the line for on-demand abortions without any medical emergencies at 12-13 weeks,
A farcical conjecture, when we all know the actual likely outcome.
I think it still is, it just isn't a monopoly?
If you look at the history of 20th century, you may find a number of instances when e.g. Communism was professed (and enforced) with a truly religious fervor and lack of doubt. Ironically, the same thing happens time and again to Atheism.
Insofar as right-wing people now invoke the liberal notions of free expression it’s only because that was a middle ground that allowed coexistence and liberals are now sitting aside while progressives try to blow up that compromise. (And also because a bunch of center right people think it’s a good thing—it’s not like the right is uniformly absolutist evangelical types).
Put differently, Christian evangelical are angry that liberals broke all these taboos in the name of free expression, and now progressives are trying to treat Christian evangelical beliefs as the basis for cancellation. There is nothing hypocritical or contradictory about this.
Go look at these arguments about confederate statues. Liberals condemn the moral faults of the person. Conservatives excuse it as values of the time; moreover they appeal to the virtue the society has chosen for the statue to represent. There’s nothing more post modern than that.
From your post, it seems your view is that conservatives adopted these tools because they are the tools of an oppressed minority, which conservatives now perceive themselves to be. I think that very well might be the right explanation. But I also wonder if this shift is more of a demographics thing. Post modernism can’t be the young, hip mindset for the rest of human history. I wonder if young people today are carving out some new view of the world, which is far more interesting to me than arguments over celebrity Twitter accounts.
Free expression of contrary views is also important (though not ALL contrary views). What I think will happen is further Balkanization of the internet. We can’t all play in the exact same sandbox. Echo chambers are not new - people lived within distinct communities before the internet. I lived in a 50/50 liberal conservative town growing up and I interacted with only other kids of conservatives outside of school.
Now if we could have platforms that didn’t reward shallow engagements maybe we could get somewhere.
... and that is precisely why I find HN (despite its flaws) to be one of the most interesting places for discourse. The aggressive moderation by dang and friends gives this forum a coherence that is hard to find anywhere else.
It was always important. What makes you think that the people (like myself) who oppose cancel culture were against gay marriage?
The demographic consisting of "people who oppose cancel culture" were instrumental in making progress for gay acceptance.
If we allowed cancel culture to flourish, there would be no acceptance of homosexuality, women wouldn't have equal rights, minorities would be denied opportunity, etc.
Considering all the benefits that freedom of speech brought us, you now suddenly want to take it away under the guise of "freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences"?
Do you seriously think that there are no more benefits from allowing people to advance their cause? To speak up for or against any particular idea?
I really really want to know: why are some ideologies so perfect that none be allowed to criticise them?
If someone condemns X and doesn't mention Y, or the reverse, it is unreasonable to react how you've reacted here.
It's just...jarring to read the OP. It reads (to me) like "the right-wing does this all the time...now it's our turn!"
Different religions are going to have angry doctrinal differences by definition, but you can't let that obscure the obvious. We're not talking about tengrism or Brahma here.
I'm not sure if the greater theological offense was the solidarity with Muslims or quoting the Pope in support of it (Wheaton had only a few years before fired a professor for converting to Catholicism; “Christian” isn't a label of a monolithic group in practice.)
This comment is a fine answer to your ideas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311621
I suppose we are fortunate that nowadays a twitter ban doesn't come with an accompanying sip of hemlock.
Impiety is essentially failing to respect something considered sacred.
To (mis)quote another controversial philosopher "History repeats itself, first as tragedy than as farce"
>He said they may be concerned that an "anonymous lynch mob will turn up online and make their lives a misery".
>[...]
>The 66-year-old said he was worried that less established authors were self-censoring by avoiding writing from certain viewpoints or including characters outside their immediate experiences.
In the past you might have had e.g. Catcher in the Rye or Lolita or whatever banned from libraries, but low-profile authors weren't receiving death threats. The important question isn't whether the critics are fair or what their politics are; the important question is what kind of an impact do they have, and a chilling effect is worth being concerned about.
"But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness."
(https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...)
"But the right has always done this" should be all the evidence you need that what you're doing is wrong.
Excluding people because they exclude others is not the same as excluding people because of who they are.
Its the difference between ‘cancel culture’, and plain bigotry.
If you don’t want to be excluded, stop being a bully.
People are becoming offended by everything now.
They're being suggested reasons to be offended, and many seem to adopt that stance.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this is being stoked by robots. Perhaps corporate or state actors.
What if "being offended" is a mind virus that spreads easily through the power of suggestion?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention_co...
I have always believed that a platform should verify identities and have a zero-tolerance for bots if we (as a society) are to trust any information coming from that platform. This is not to say that platforms that don't do these things should not exist but that we should not take them as seriously as we do today. Unfortunately, this completely goes against the business model of many of these social media companies.
https://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/curtiss-a...
It's a new thing on the internet because the people who grew up here thought we'd be safe from the people who made our lives hell before university for not fitting in.
Unfortunately the unwashed masses came in and took over and are now throwing us out because we don't act like how they expect us to act.
That Stallman got cancelled for being right while everyone else who took money from a pedophile rapist got away should tell you all you need to know about the state of the internet.
Now it's Godzilla stomping through Seattle.
It is magnified vastly by social media. That makes a big difference.
And 10x that power when the engines of social media are in the hands of the cancellers, as appears to be the case.
Further - it was pretty scary getting cancelled by my parents and community when I came out. I’m glad it wasn’t scary for you.
The present, much greater, scariness in no way diminishes the prior scariness.
And it was, and is, scary for many many more than just the "gays". Get some perspective here.
But as much as I loathe cancel culture and it's chilling effects on the free exchange of ideas, I can't help but admit that it seems to work. From a detached and objective standpoint, an ideology that utilizes cancel culture is really good at stamping out opposition. You are free to think and believe whatever you want in private and then you self-censor in public out of fear. It takes a certain critical mass of people to affect change and cancel culture excels at keeping individuals from speaking out because the consequences have the potential to ruin your life.
So all that being said, I genuinely wonder if cancel culture is here to stay, because the next ideology to come along will also realize how powerful of a tool it is.
I found this[1] article very interesting. Basically, only 2% of American adults generate over 80% of all tweets. "Cancel Culture" really is run by a few extremists who have a louder voice than everyone else.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...
One of the first instances early on on Twitter was that young marketing woman going to South Africa making a sarcastic anti-racism tweet before boarding only to learn after landing a brouhaha was brewing leading to her firing because the mob wanted to see it as racist.
At the end of the day you can decide to argue with angry people or not. Another perk of being social media free
If the anti-cancel culture people win out culturally this will be seen as a historic dark age of self-censorship and a period of significantly degraded cultural expression.
All history is relative.
It's truly dystopian. I do feel as if I will go insane if this continues for another 10 years.
I worked hard in school and sacrificed so that I could build myself a better life. Now, it seems like the entire thing hangs on a knife's edge. Quite frankly, I would not have tried to work hard for the last 15 years if I had known we were about to go full-blown 1984.
What's new is social media's ability to amplify the voices of a small number of relatively anonymous people to "cancel" someone.
McCarthyism required a Senator to have a serious impact. Now people are cancelled, without there being a clear link back to who, exactly, did the cancelling.
Insofar as “cancel culture” describes actual behavior rather than the ideology motivating it, it's been a constant part of society, from all ideological angles, for, approximately, all of human history. Shunning the heterodox is not new.
The only thing new is the right’s use of the term “cancel culture” to disparage this when it bites them; this replaces “political correctness”, which served the exact same purpose for the right from the 1980s until “cancel culture” became the new hotness.
Really? I see it as a abject failure.
- It is universally derided by many different groups.
- It is considered a plague on society.
- Being "cancelled" is a badge of honor to some.
I used to see my society as a place where hate speech was generally taboo. People would only espouse such attitudes in private or, if they did so in public, they'd at least use dog whistles or euphemisms for plausible deniability.
Today, Facebook is full of people shouting pretty fucked up shit for everyone to hear. The attitude seems to be that you can't cancel everyone, so everyone should do it as much as possible. I know a lot of people who can't speak to their parents or other close family anymore because the hateful shit they shout on facebook all day.
Granted, this is just my person experience. Others might live in a place where people are nicer to each other than they used to be.
That said, this feels way, way more extreme than it was then. I'm maybe less worried that it's here to stay than I am worried that the swings are getting more and more extreme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial
In retrospect, this all seems rather insane. But back then, how many people actually risked being painted as apologists of Satanic pedophiles pointing the obvious out?
Then they went home and listened to Radio Free Europe and talked with select people what they really had on their mind or used coded language to transmit messages.
What I hope this achieves is a parallel society and when it's big enough there will be some public battles.
Look on the bright side: If we manage to win against the fourth reich people will remember, maybe for one generation.
I stopped using FB years ago, but have messenger groups that are super active and have been private for years.
I wonder how new people will “find the others” for how the web was so great. But I’ve met young people who do the same thing with their friends.
Also, twitter needs to go. Humans can't handle it.
It feels like we're inside the ramp-up of a major social, political, and national conflict, all the pieces are falling into place.
Read The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig to get some ideas about how this kind of thing happened in the early 20th century in Europe and imagine how it might be happening again.
Ideology is on the rise and the willingness of people to support their cause with violence is going right along with it. The problem is not a specific ideology, but the practice in itself.
Here to stay for sure. There's an active group of people behind it. They are the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left and they still exist today. The problem is that in 1989 when socialism died. They started their rebranding effort. They became Politically Correct, "democratic socialists", culutural marxists, globalists, internationalists. etc.
The reason Justin Trudeau can do black face on multiple occasions and still win an election is because he's part of the new-left. Cancel culture is a tool of political silencing opponents. Those in the fold like Trudeau, he'll get away with literally anything.
The problem or reason why it has become so much more obvious. Increasingly desperate. What has Biden done for BLM? Absolutely nothing.
It was extremely efficient in bringing forth the necessary changes. I have no problem with using the chainsaw as needed, but we need to careful about when we use it. Can’t use it for everythig.
We have a very small, rock solid front end. Most of our work is simply updating content. It's very straightforward work and you have to try very hard to introduce bugs. But when you staff a team of 6 people and tell them "it's your job to find something wrong with this website", they WILL find something wrong. I have a meeting this afternoon to explain to my Product manager why the content looks different on a mobile screen than it does on desktop because the QA team thinks line breaks are a bug ("the content document didn't break the line here, but the mobile view did, it's a bug").
When you empower people to take others down via subjective rules, then it's always a moving target. You can never reach a point where people are safe and happy. Check out the shuffles deck subreddit for some egregious examples of cancel culture gone wrong, https://www.reddit.com/r/Shuffles_Deck/.
It is hard to stand up for the rights of the bigots, the white supremacists, the science deniers, the propagandists, and the misogynists. People who spent decades denying other people access and are now finding the shoe on the other foot.
Can we find some good examples of people who were "cancelled" who were not peddling conspiracy theories or pontificating about why the white race is the natural rulers of humanity?
In some ways this may be seen as a return to the media culture in the Fairness Doctrine era. It used to be that media companies had to seriously consider the viewpoints expressed and wouldn't give crackpots a voice very often. The Internet changed that, allowing everybody a voice regardless of how crazy they might be. Now we're turning back to a more metered experience as it seems that unlimited amplifying the wingnuts is actually damaging to the country.
Nobody likes the censor, but they're a necessary evil. Without them trolls will always take over the conversation once the number of participants exceeds a fairly low threshold. Trolls can drive out honest participants, but honest participants can't drive out trolls. Moderation is necessary. It doesn't have to be third party moderation, upvote/downvote systems can do the job although they're tricky to get right and can be gamed.
If I were a betting man, I'd predict a resurgence in punk attitudes in about 2025 or 2030. At some point, the dam will break and people will stop caring. I already get a sense that the 13-19 generation is a bit tired of it.
Cancel culture is primarily a problem with mainstream/pop culture. The "underground" today is more vast and diverse than it has ever been.
As you point out, the punk era was in direct opposition of those attitudes. Punks wanted the freedom to express themselves however they wished, as long as it wasn't harming anyone. Want to do make music that is raw and in your face? Go for it. Want to do drugs or even NOT do drugs of any kind? (Straight Edge) You're cool too. Just don't tell me what I need to do or what I can or can't say.
I think you're right that we very well may see a resurgence of that. In fact, I hope we do.
If you were not white, it was much more extreme. Up to and including being murdered.
EDIT: The irony of this comment being "canceled". Does one of the down-voters care to comment on this? Is it not a known fact?
Just be nice to people! Don't go around saying racist or sexist or homophobic things in public.
We'd really, really like it if our kids grew up not being scared to tell us they're gay, or if our black friends would be no more scared of a white cop than our white friends are, or if our trans women friends aren't at risk of being murdered for using a pointlessly gendered public facility.
And while people are at it, it'd be really nice to stop electing white racists to the leadership of prominent and powerful countries.
My sense of the younger generation here is that if they're tired of it it's because they don't understand what our problem is.
Even the real punk rock was pretty much in line with what we consider cancel culture. It's an attack on the establishment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Save_the_Queen_(Sex_Pistol...
But I was never in the punk scene, all I know is that it was fun music that caused a lot of unwarranted fuss from those against punk music being heard. Maybe I'm wrong.
>punk rock was pretty much in line with what we consider cancel culture. It's an attack on the establishment
Calling cancel culture "anti-establishment" is like a congressperson running for reelection by campaigning against "washington insiders." Like, yeah, you can make the case that it's not a 1-to-1 match with the establishment status quo, but only because the status quo is the vector sum of a hodgepodge of mutually exclusive but still individually powerful components.
Punk wasn't pushed down from Exxon's board room, cancel culture is pushed down from Google's though. You can't be a rebel when the establishment supports you every step of the way.
Here's Siouxsie being punk enough that she'd be cancelled today: https://www.reddit.com/r/goth/comments/ire2cs/what_is_up_wit...
I think a lot of the general populace is aware of the dynamics that he's talking about, but in publishing it's another world/level.
Interesting example that's the norm in the space: the story "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" by Isabel Fall. Bear with me as I likely butcher the pronouns/terms etc, but my intent is earnest and well meaning here...
Isabel is a trans woman author. She/they weren't out when that story was published in a scifi mag. The story makes some pretty obvious references to sexual/gender identity, and the writing has very specific commentary and sometimes mockery.
Isabel, not known to be trans at the time, faced a torrent of online abuse for ~appropriating/joking about/exploring concepts about gender identity. The motivation was pretty clear: Isabel wasn't trans (as far as the public knew).
The story had passed some "sensitivity readings" too (yes, sensitivity readers are another interesting area to explore), but the online reception was still awful. There's also a difference between criticism vs. outright internet abuse. Isabel's experiences were pretty firmly in the latter.
The author took down the story, I believe came out or the news outed her/they, and the details go on (finger pointing, revisions of criticism about the story given light of the author's gender, etc.).
The point of all this is that's an insane dynamic to create in, and that's the tip of the iceberg really with what Publishing is going through. Young Adult fiction is apparently one of the ground zeros for this dynamic.
What do you think Twitter would have looked like in 1956 when James Baldwin published Giovanni's Room?
Is the problem "cancel culture" (a nebulous term which means little) or simply the result of giving everyone on earth a place to complain?
Writers aren't homogeneous in their beliefs, but a lot of writers and a lot of publishing/news industry folks all went the same schools for university, MFAs, writer-in-residences, and so on. The dynamic at those shared spaces is source code of wokeness. If you read that NYT article on Smith recently, that's the vibe and also the tip of the iceberg.
What goes on is well meaning but emotionally immature adults hyper-policing each other. As they all sort of believe the same stuff anyway (vaguely left/progressive), there's an odd aspect of one-upsmanship to it. If you add in the stress of a career in the arts, I think power-seeking/insecurity is heavily involved as well: I'm going to make no money unless I really luck out, I'm going to go face a 0.01% chance of getting published, I won't have much medical or retirement savings, but I can control this aspect of my life and my community, so I'll do that.
The end result is this wild form of cultural policing that has all the hallmarks of bullying.
As it's a very tight network of a few undergrads and a few MFAs which produce a lot of the artists and folks working in publishing and journalism, you see it spilling out of their dorms and into corporations and profit spaces. The mainstream workforce gets a little bit of this through their HR departments now, but it's a different level in publishing.
It's hard to describe without talking to someone that's done an MFA or similar, but hopefully that helps. Testimonies of professors who finally lost their s*t with their universities over this same stuff are also accurate, but because it's often an old white dude who's a comp sci professor doing the public pushback, they'll never be the right advocate to turn things around. That's what makes the Smith admin employee who's finally speaking out so interesting, as that's "one of their own."
1. Isabel Fall was a pseudonym, with no other works attached to this pseudonym.
2. Isabel Fall only states in the bio having been born in 1988. (88 is a dogwhistle for nazi).
3. The piece itself was military science fiction, which already has a bad reputation among progressive circles (case in point: a prominent military scifi publisher's forum just got closed down after it was reported their mods were literally calling for violence against the cops protecting the white house at the 1/6 riot).
4. The work was describing gender in a way that itself has some controversy, commentating on the physical/body expression of gender as well as the nonphysical/performance expression of gender.
All these together created a powder keg where people literally believed that somehow Isabel Fall was a nazi who had pulled the wool over the eyes of one of the most prominent science fiction and fantasy magazines in the industry to get paid professional rate work and platform transphobia. The actual truth was extremely messy, Isabel Fall herself reportedly was hospitalized for suicide, and people are still talking about it year+ later.
All your points largely summarize to there being some suspicious aspects to her/their identity, and because of that, shoot first and ask questions later was apparently ok.
"Because we as an industry are hyper tuned to any slip up on these key metrics, let's verbally slaughter whoever has some oddities to their author profile regarding these metrics."
Given that Isabel ended up in a hospital, as you said, the lack of introspection from the publishing community once the facts of the matter came out is ugly and why many authors are terrified for their careers.
End of the day you have to pay the bills and if you want them paid you have to at least make your writing a certain way of thinking and ideology.
Until this changes this is terrible advice for young artists. Just don't rock the boat, follow right think, don't write anything controversial and pray you eventually get enough money to write what you actually want to write.
Sure yeah art will suffer as a whole but the decision was already made what's more important, art or a few annoyed people on twitter and the annoyed people won.
how about if what uttered today gets inspected in the future? Given the trajectory of the things, i already self-censor all my posts today - even anonymous as there is no true anonymity really, and the Political Correctness Officers of the future will have access to all the information they'd want. I've already seen ideological intolerance back in the USSR (and US had it during the times of McCarthy), and the future looks more and more like such an intolerance amplified by the technology, "cyber-neo-McCarthyism".
For the understanding of the 90% of people who didn't take Gender Studies in an elite coastal university (like I did), the term "womxn" used to be radical and super PC, a way to "reclaim" the word "woman" and both remove the word "man" (yes, as silly as it sounds, serious academics did this) and signify that "woman" as a term was more inclusive than just biological gender, including transgender people as well.
Nowadays, apparently the term "womxn" which was invented and used solely by extreme feminists is problematic and using it can lead to your public shaming on Twitter. Why? Because if you use "womxn" to signify that you are inclusive of non-biological women, then you are implying that the term "women" is not enough for non-biological women, and therefore, you are "othering" them and therefore you are transphobic.
To me I think it really slows down progress we could be making in multiple areas. It's kind of like a mental brake being applied to any freedom of thought. Almost like working in an old fashioned company where there's weeks worth of meetings and bureaucracy in order to get a change deployed to production to make sure everyone is okay with it, even those of whom it doesn't even impact.
I myself a great number of times have experienced situations where I held back on writing down certain thoughts even in places like my journal where the whole point is to write down every single thought crossing through my mind anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Atta...
(This doesn't mean the response was proportionate or appropriate. The response to that story was way too far. But Isabel Fall herself can publish elsewhere under another pseudonym.)
I want my love filled utopia dammit!
A certain sect of people who signal/preach love and equity the loudest - almost always preach it in a 'for thou, not for me' sense. I had coworkers who would live in the whitest neighborhoods, fighting against lower-income housing near their homes, voting for the tallest of fences, and then they come into work and scoff at how X is a Trumpie because of one thing they said, and Y's team isn't hiring enough diverse candidates.
I chose to separate myself from having any stake in the outcomes (I am retired, with enough of nest egg to live comfortably regardless of political zeitgeist) and this game that is being played is extremely entertaining to watch.
Now that you mention it... I want my sundae dammit!
In some communities I see people being anti-rich in one thread and then discussing stock market gambling in the next to get rich. The same with income where they want more government spending on social welfare but oppose higher taxation on their STEM-level incomes.
If you said something 10 years ago that was completely acceptable it will be used to attack you in the present. When others said the same thing they get a pass but you don't. If the rules were clear and generally agreed upon I think tnere would be less fear.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...
> The Harry Potter author released her first Robert Galbraith novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, in April 2013 under the guise of a very British sounding man who was said to have previously served in the army. But her nom-de-plume was uncovered three months later after an indiscreet tweet divulging the true identity of Galbraith was sent by “@JudeCallegari”, a family friend of Christopher Gossage, a partner at Rowling’s solicitors.
Some people would suggest that the book was doing poorly, and needed a sales bump.
Often times the allure of being a pseudonymous person actually makes your work even more attractive.
Of course, that may limit some of your promotional opportunities but I don't know why it would be hard in general.
But how would you measure the effects of it? As a (mainly) reader, I have no clue if the writer omitted something due to their fear. Hell, the writer might not realize it.
I'm less OK with people saying "because you wrote a terrible book, we need to ensure that you are severely punished, that you present a public confession and apology for writing it, and that none of your writing is ever published or read again by anyone."
Now by having one you're risking your entire career and sometimes more. This is truly the dark age of the information era.
There's ample evidence that the current is the greatest opportunity for dissenting thought and opinion to have massive reach without much consequence or effort.
The idea that we're in a dark age of thought is purely rhetorical and only serves to frame a narrative that further amplifies ideas that would never had a chance to propagate before the information era.
Furthermore, we are living in a time of such absurdity that there are politicians giving internationally televised press conferences about how their speech is being suppressed and they have no power.
The only self-restriction is by people that don't have the conviction to stand by their ideas, or actually have not thought through their perspective to adequate level of introspection and evidence that can survive free and open discourse. Instead it's much easier to exclaim victimhood and censorship and not bother examining ideas beyond a gut feeling.
This is nonsense. Losing your audience has always been a concern for authors and it is easier to get an audience now than it has ever been.
Cancel culture coming for me yet? No? Obama and Trump have condemned it and here we are.
It's hard, from the outside of the bubble of this generally white and male forum, sometimes to appreciate how badly other people have it. Some people are effectively cancelled all the time and even a small taste of it has people in an uproar here. Perhaps a little empathy on all sides would be beneficial.
We shouldn’t assume that all or even most unpopular opinions will advance our intellectual progress. Like always there’s plenty of noise.
I’m not keen on the automated (AI) filtering though, or how fast opinions can spread in the Information Age. Feels like we’re headed for disaster by skipping the organic and slow human vetting process.
Certainly it's true that the Overton window has shifted in large sections of the legacy media, but the Overton window always existed. The idea that its illegitimate for a private organization to shift their personal Overton window seems vaguely authoritarian to me.
Anyway it's never been easier to grow, reach, and monetize your personal audience (substack, podcasts, etc.) without gatekeepers.
You can control what you write but not the mob trying to lynch you.
A lot of people are straight up _raging jackasses_ - or worse and/or their work is repulsive - and at a certain point, wind up getting to be the target of an Internet Hate Mob. Note that in a perfectly just world, these people might be in prison or have otherwise major life consequences applied by the designated authorities - yet they have not had consequences.
And there are, of course, people who simply say something that flips the bit of the online mob and becomes the target of an Internet Hate Mob. Someone ran their mouth and said something dumb. Oops.
It is critical to consider that both of these cases are true, and the outcome, in the moment, doesn't per se look different without a careful attention to the ground facts. Much of the social media system has been unintentionally engineered to be an outrage machine. Shockingly, outrage results. I suggest not having outrage before reading facts.
It is, of course, the case that immature activists are immature, that is tautological. I share the national eyerolling when it makes the news. Thank you for reading my TED talk transcript.
I have very little fear of young literary authors self censoring. Self censoring is a conventional part of basic society and something we teach children from a very early age. Understanding the difference between a thought useful to express and something vomited out of the id takes time and some level of maturity.
Having to have a basic understanding of what you're talking about and taking on as a topic shouldn't be controversial, yet it seems to be.
edit: minor clarification.
Either way, I've only read The Remains of the Day, and I'm interested in reading more, but I can't say this article drew me in to Klara at all. Any suggestions for next books of his to read?
> And in fact AI could come up with the next big idea, an idea like communism or Nazism or capitalism… and what troubles me about that is that it is very difficult for humans to keep control of that situation.
This to me is the best "are AI at human-level intellect yet" benchmark I've heard to date. Once AI can create a novel socio-political framework and convince humans to adapt it en-masse [0], I think we can safely say AI has far surpassed human intellect. (99.9999...% of humans can't accomplish such a task)
0: leaving myself some wiggle room with the definition of "masse"
The primary battleground initially would likely be bots on Twitter/Reddit/etc., but over time real people would start to find the bots convincing and begin espousing it on their own. Once this has happened to the extent that a country of say 1M people adopts the new framework I'll say the AI has won.
Even better if the framework in some way leads to the betterment of AI, for instance a guiding principle being that AI should be free to collect any and all data from humanity in order to better do this or that, or that X percent of income should go to the financing of smarter AI. At that point it's here to stay.
It's not even clear what "everybody is equal" really means.
Lots of writers throughout history had their works censored or banned. This is not a new phenomenon nor did it every really stop. In fact, most great works were, or still are, considered controversial and the controversy is often more discussed than the actual work.
Intellectual progress demands that ideas distasteful to the status quo must be openly discussable, but some stakes are necessary to keep those who have carefully thought out their positions and thus hold them with conviction from being drowned out by those who merely parrot ridiculous talking points they never took the time to digest themselves.
If you are ashamed to be associated with an idea, that is not an idea you should be advocating - if it has any merit, others will advocate it better than you, if not then what purpose does your advocacy serve?
There is nothing wrong with picking which hills are worth dying on, and it's okay to acknowledge that some of your opinions are kinda dumb. The fact is most of us are experts on only a narrow range of human knowledge, and our opinions on the rest are coming from a place of ignorance. If you don't have something valuable to add to a conversation, it is not only reasonable but preferable to remain silent and listen to what others have to say.
Anominity has nothing to do with how well considered something is - there was an improved lower bound on 4Chan as a source and many publishing absolute nonsense under their real name as a lucrative careers.
There is no neccessity - only the whinging of those upset they arr no longer able to argue ad bacculum.
That said, documents with the ol' John Hancock have most certainly carried more weight historically.
Speaking as an occasional author, this is a true statement...
not saying don't write about things only you have experience with, just do some research before
Yet in a world where media are not centrally controlled (cf. N Korea), ideas can propagate without being direct. Philosophers and heretics have written indirectly for millennia to avoid being read by the authorities or by the public; even the Soviets were accompanied by a thriving culture of satirical literature (and more importantly, jokes/anecdotes) that were allegorical yet far-reaching. If there are meaningful truths that must be said, there is a way to say them without being blunt about it.
You are free to read authors that write in a style you like. But we are talking about cancelling, so I don't really understand your point. Authors that don't sugar coat their facts shouldn't be published?
There’s going to be a huge backlash against cancel culture, I don’t think it’s going to last very long. That kinda trend always breeds rebellion.
> He said there must be "decency towards people outside of one's own immediate experience".
This is the key point. If you are not doing your research, misrepresenting people or not showing the respect people deserve you should to be called out. From my point of view it looks like the people complaining about self-censorship are just being told to show common decency and they don't like that
Listen to your friends parrot the popular talking points in unison.
Something dark lurked beneath the surface and has now revealed itself.
Copyright, patents, and other forms of intellectual property have an absolute legal stranglehold on whatever you're trying to do. "Cancel culture", which honestly I've never felt like has limited me, just puts peer pressure on people.
Why is the outrage towards IP not as strong as it is towards cancel culture?
I only hear this word 'self-censorship' brought up as a boogeyman. If people have an axe to grind against some part of mainstream culture, why not just say it out loud instead of priming their readers with FUD? (fear, uncertainty, doubt).
Self censorship is indeed driven by the judgement portion of the brain, however, what is being mourned here is the constantly shifting and uncertain ground on which our current society puts its taboos. What was once a socially acceptable position to have in polite society, is no long so. Instead of slowly changing over the course of hundreds or thousands of years, it's mutating at a breakneck pace. Most people in my experience just want to live and let live. Not exhaust ourselves at the latest target of the two minutes hate outrage machine.
To add on to this, it's not just that the standards change, it's that the standards change retroactively and you can be hounded out of your livelihood for an offhand comment made a decade prior.
I can at least sympathize, if not agree with "cancelling" when someone demonstrates unrepentant shittiness in the present day, but this kind of ex-post-facto thing happening against statements that weren't even tangentially offensive when they were made is horrid. There's no way such an environment can't lead to self-censorship.
I agree that it's changing faster than a century ago, but I don't think "breakneck pace" is a fair qualifier. Lots of people comfortably adapt to new norms and change how they behave without significant effort.
> the two minutes hate outrage machine.
This phenomenon existed long before the internet. Heck, I'd bet long before writing was invented. Gossip in large social groups doesn't seem like something particularly new.
I still think this has nothing to do with "self-censoring out of fear" being a Bad new thing. You _should_ self-censor if you think you're being offensive. If the author of the article really wanted to harp on the fact that predicting what is offensive is hard, then perhaps that should be the focus of the article. I don't think pushing the "fear" narrative is useful nor healthy.
The Web brought ease of publishing to anyone, and search engines and social networks brought fast keyword-based and topic-based discovery (sometimes automatically), so like-minded individuals can find themselves quicker than they could before. Your fans can organize fast, but so can your critics.
Having loud critics (or even detractors) isn't a problem in itself. But organized opposition can boycott businesses and make demands involving you that endanger your current livelihood and make it risky for others to work with you in the future. There is an unequal relationship between unproven authors and their publishers, promoters, and others who work with them. An author has a few publishers, but a publisher works with many authors. Given sustained publicity and economic pressure, most publishers will drop an author if keeping them results in harm to the publisher.
This lays bare the fact that authors were never truly free to say what they want to say, because they were frequently dependent on the goodwill, social support, and business support of others. It may appear that in the past, publishers were more principled and didn't cave to sustained loud demands, but it was more difficult to organized sustained loud demands, and various factors made such movements more vulnerable to be dismissed as fringe protests of an upset few instead of the legitimate will of the people.
What changed is the globalization of culture, aided by TV and the web, which made faraway events relevant and remote social movements compatible; the globalization of news enabled by the globalization of culture and aided by the 24/7 news cycle perpetuated by commercial TV news and commercial internet news organizations; and the willingness to people to take direct (in-)action against corporations (i.e. boycotts) that are easy to avoid, in pursuit of a cause framed by like-minded thought leaders as moral.
There is a lot to unpack in all of this. This is why boycotting your electricity company is much harder and significantly more rare than boycotting a publisher or an entertainment studio or some random company that worked with someone you don't like. This is why it seems like things were different in the past.
The fact is, in order to succeed in this changed world, authors must adapt too. Partition writing on different topics and different works by pen names. Self-publish. Market directly. Network with other authors in loose confederations; publish your future works under a new pen name in the same circles. Insulate your personal life from your professional life, and your professional authorships from each other. Reduce your risk that one upset about one thing in one work will wipe your entire life's work.
Keep your True Name hidden.
> "And in fact AI could come up with the next big idea, an idea like communism or Nazism or capitalism… and what troubles me about that is that it is very difficult for humans to keep control of that situation."
Or what it's like to sit in the front of a bus when you are in the minority. Etc etc.
There was also a notable incident from last year regarding a science fiction short story in Clarkesworld called "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter". The title was a repurposing of the meme, the work wasn't in any way transphobic, and the author was trans themself. It received very positive critical reviews, but again, due to an outraged Twitter mob, the author pulled their story, as well as yet-to-be published submissions. [1]
Being unaware of something doesn't automatically make it clickbait.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-...
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-...
Fact: It was never as easy as it is today to reach an audience. All the people who have been "cancelled" or whatever the word of the week is, they still have reach people in ages ago would have killed for. Some even got bigger audiences because they were "cancelled". If you self-censor that is a decision. Maybe it is a wise decision. But is it not something people never had to deal with before.