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Comment by okareaman | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that everyone has a different idea of what it means to be cancelled and what the culture is around that. I can be rebuked (an expression of sharp disapproval or criticism), I can be censured (the expression of formal disapproval) I can be given a fine, put in jail, fired from my job, kicked off social media, or any number of things that could be called "cancelled." The people who have recently exhibited a zeal for cancelling people form a group of some sort. I'm not sure who these people are. It's different for different types of cancelling. I'm confused by the whole issue.

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Cancelling is an exercise of power.

What we're seeing these days it how social media can be used to easily create a large angry mob and focus it upon someone by attacking their family, their friends, their employer and anyone associated with them with the intent of silencing or hurting that individual, regardless of any collateral damage. And I really believe the instigators do it because they get off on that exercise of power.

There's nothing good about it, as it can only lead to a chilling effect as no one will feel free to say anything counter to what is a very small minority (a 1%) who are vocal.

As attributed to Ira Glasser, former head of the ACLU: "You don’t stop hateful acts by censoring speech. You do so with more speech."

I get it now. Thanks. In the 70's we used to say people were on a 'power trip' and you would call people out for power tripping. It seems a natural result of outrage culture. Some outraged people are bound to want to do something so they organize other outraged people to do something. People learned to 'gang up' on others in grade school. It really is very immature and the opposite of exercising wisdom, control and maturity.

The problem with social media is that it is very easy to find many "like-minded" people throughout the world, regardless of how insane their collective opinion is.

The fact that we have flat-earth groups and so many anti-vaxxers is a good example.

The issue right now is how wide the surface area is. People stand up on global soapboxes, and in turn, something you say on Twitter (or said 5 or 10 years ago) comes back to bite you in places where you never even came close to saying something like that. People take snapshots of what you say and assemble them to try to make unequivocal statements about who you are as a person. And the goal is not usually to "rehabilitate" the person, offering lenience and good-faith, and questioning what they meant to say; instead, people seem to want to see bridges burnt.

There's permanence to what we say on the internet, but there's not permanence to what the culture says you are allowed to say. People are getting retroactively canceled for things that were fine at the time, which I think can be an issue. Remember how people behaved in video games as little as 5 or 10 years ago?

It's stifling, and frustrating. It makes you afraid to have a personality, but at the same time it makes having the courage to have a personality more meaningful.

This is a very valid point, but isn't it kind of the same for most topics? More often than not, well-intentioned people have to move towards more specific, contextual definitions in order to avoid broad, empty statements.

Might be that I'm a pedantic a-hole, but I'm asking "what do you mean by X, exactly?" all the time.

Concerning "canceling" specifically, I agree there's a lot of fluff, but there are also valid points and concerns behind it all.

I'm confused by the whole issue.

You aren’t the only one, partly because the people complaining about it the most are pretty obnoxious in their own right (PG excepted).

Agreed. I always assumed the term “cancel culture” was a partisan broad brush created and wielded by right-leaning media to tar young people with honestly-held but perhaps loudly and annoyingly-expressed convictions about the appalling state of the world and our toxic public discourse in the age of Trump and Twitter.

Seeing Rupert Murdoch come out against it all pretty much settled the question for me: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-25/fox-mogul....

I think if someone starts talking to you about “cancel culture” like you’re supposed to know what that means, it’s a fair bet that they’re leading into a partisan political position.

EDIT: Haha, I’m being cancelled

At this point the term has been abused by the right-wing in its persecution complex narrative so thoroughly that literally any disagreement, criticism or social activism which can be interpreted as "progressive" is interpreted as "cancel culture." It's just a catch-all pejorative for any opinion publicly expressed by any "leftist," anywhere.

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