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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

I am quite interested that people worry cancel culture is preventing intellectual progress more than copyright.

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?

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Cancel culture isn’t simply peer pressure. It’s a mob harassing employers and schools to fire or expel wrongthinkers. Cancel culture literally ruins lives.

That's called peer pressure through capital control. It's a feature of Capitalism to ruin people's lives through their jobs because of the opinions they hold. This is happened time and time again in US/World history:

- Civil rights activists being fired from their jobs

- Red scare and people getting fired from their jobs

- etc

If we want this problem to go away we need to stop connecting your ability to live to your ability to hold a job. Everything else is just treating various symptoms of the problem.

One is a legal framework with rules that govern how it is applied, even if you don't like that framework you can understand it. Cancel culture on the other hand does not have a specific set of rules. It is constantly changing and unevenly enforced by random people. When things are wildly unpredictable there is fear.

Being a legal framework makes it a lot scarier and a lot more dangerous.

Cancel culture doesn't have the ability to throw you into a cage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lundgren

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