Be anonymous. Be obscure. Stop talking to people on the internet.
Which isn't to say that your advice is poor advice!
They had to come to special terms with their publisher to modify contract because the nature of cancellation is such that at the time, there was basically nothing they could say that would improve their "brand," so the purpose of the contract stipulation had become counterproductive. But as parent notes, this is a real problem some people have, depending on their profession.
One should not pretend that social media is a place to broadcast your unedited inner-most feelings. It's media. Even if you are honest, it doesn't mean you're good enough at expressing yourself that what you intend to come across actually does. If you don't feel you'd be confident expressing yourself millions of people on prime-time television, you shouldn't feel confident expressing yourself to millions of people on twitter.
That's a fair nitpick, actually. What I meant to emphasize is that the truth should have no bearing on your performance, except to the extent that it affects which performance you elect to give. As the saying goes, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, nor should they.
These days it seems somewhat more difficult to be anonymous online. I'd be better off having a username of numbers, such as yourself. I have published a few writings online but if I really wanted to throw that into a blog I'd definitely construct a new online persona to do it.
I've tussled accidentally with mentally ill individuals online and experienced harassment that was bordering on dangerous. I would not be quick to put myself in that position again.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...
Don't blame knives for killing people, blame people who kill people.
I think the issue here is that Twitter came too quickly into our lives, and people did not have time adapt to the new reality.
Three hundreds years ago people would happily join a mob on a square trying to burn a woman because she is a witch or a traitor or unfaithful. Today people would just tell them they are coo coo and continue with their business.
After a couple of years people will learn to react to Twitter cancelling mob the same.
The term womanizer generally refers to people that have lots of sexual encounters with different women, and has a strong connotation of “I’m very attractive to the opposite sex and am sometimes careless about which sexual advances I accept”
“Sexual predator” on the other hand indicates the use of force or coercion in order to initiate sexual contact, the use of professional or financial pressure to obtain sex, unwanted sexual behavior directed at folks that don’t want it, etc.
The wording in this article kind of seems like he got canceled for being too cool and getting laid too much, which is what he meant to say but accidentally wrote “shitty, creepy sexual predator”(0) in his apology instead. What a typo!
0 https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/noah-bradley-admi...
You might think this sounds insane, but it's a real thing: https://www.nsvrc.org/i-ask-how-power-impacts-consent
The handouts on here handwave the issue at the end "consider how holding a position of power might influence the situation" but some people advocate that any power imbalance inherently makes consent impossible and they will attack people on Twitter over it.
“I preyed on them. I ceaselessly hit on them. I pressured them into sex. I got too drunk and did all manner of dumb things. Yes, I was one of those shitty, creepy sexual predators you hear about.”
I do not get the impression that he apologized for having sex with people while also being guilty of being prominent in his industry. I’m not entirely clear how “any sex with a celebrity is rape” is a salient point here.
I genuinely am just now learning about this “new” shift in definition as my understanding was that the term was applied to people due to their behavior towards others and how they’re experienced by the other involved parties. Expanding it to mean “anybody with money or status” doesn’t seem useful aside from maybe diluting the phrase’s meaning in such a way that it provides cover for actually abusive people.
This isn't talking about "forgiving" at all, in fact. i think the only person who can "forgive" someone who has done harm is the person they have done harm to, that's not even in the capacity of anyone else to do, is it?
This is, by the way, very related to "abolish prisons/policing" stuff.
When someone has done grave harm, and the recommended response is to try to keep anyone else from employing, doing business with, or even socializing with them -- what is the goal, what do you expect to accomplish? Preventing them from doing further harm? Repairing the harm done to those who had harm done to them? Making it less likely others will do harm? Just pure vengeance? Which of these are accomplished, how well, by this technique? What kind of community or society is creating, knowing that we will all do harm and all have harm done to us?
> I wouldn't be poor in the first place!
> I wouldn't be sick in the first place!
> I wouldn't be in their shoes in the first place!
What an argument.
To quote Cardinal Richelieu, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
This behavior really has nothing to do with the nature of the crime at hand; it's been used to discriminate against people by race, by gender, by interest, by religion - by just about anything. Giving human beings the ability to arbitrarily punish other humans, without recourse, is obscenely dangerous.
For example, I'm of the (extremely unpopular) opinion that we're too hard on sex criminals. The framework the US has put together doesn't just not help reformation, but in many ways encourages recidivism by limiting employment and housing options. But what's the right choice? Am I right because I'm backed by dozens of studies by social scientists? Or is the local parent mob right to "protect their children" by keeping laws on the books that keep sex offenders in the fringes of community? If a child molester gets off on a technicality, is the victim's father who murders him a hero or a villain?
What about other crimes? In China you can go to jail for 10 days without prosecution for possessing pot. Here in NJ I can smoke a blunt on my front lawn as a police parade goes by and I'm fine. Who is right?
IDK, I'm just rambling at this point. This whole debate is so stupid and circular and hypocritical and fluid on all sides.
Nowadays we know this is dumb and causes tons of unwanted harassment. People changed and made the world a better place, which was great. Then we went back and started prosecuting people for doing what they were told they were supposed to be doing at the time. This is why we have grandfather clauses in the law.
The difference between Sexual Harassment and Flirting is if the other person is into it.
My contention is that this whole spiraled up from discovery of some bad behavior from the past, that seems to have been inflated into an exaggerated character assassination.
My contention with the grandparent comment is that "just don't be x" is not really an option if we are seeking redemption for past sins.
Sometimes actions have long-lasting consequences. Apologies can't magically wash those away.
Try thinking about it with Noah replaced by one of HN’s favorite ‘bad guys’. Facebook periodically puts out statements saying “Oops, sorry, but don’t worry – we totally respect privacy now”. How long would it take for you to believe that Facebook had really changed? How would you feel about a privacy conference accepting sponsorship from Facebook, and justifying this decision by pointing to one of the apologetic statements?
Do you just make things up as you go?
The frightening thing about "cancel culture" isnt that its new or eye-opening. Its has always existed, sandboxed, in places called school playgrounds. The world have adults has this annoying thing called due process. Filing cases, going to court, giving evidence etc etc.
Now that the playground rules are stating to proliferate into adult spaces, companies - surprisingly - have started to use playground platforms to make -what used to be - adult decisions about who to fire, who to buy from, whose services to use...from a 240 character platform. No due process, no due diligence, nothing. Just tweets.
God bless us all.
The fight against cancel culture is a fight against people doing things. It's literally that. "Cancelling" is just a framing device for a myriad of behaviors and reasoning behind those behaviors. If this post gets downvotes, "cancel culture". If OP's post gets a bunch of negative comments, "cancel culture".
TL;dr- There's never been an egalitarian, logic-only meritocracy, in human history, and people getting upset that there isn't one is as reasonable a choice as other people deciding to "cancel" someone.
I don't think anyone had tools like this at their disposal in the 1990s. You could call up someone's employer and lie about an employee saying something bad about immigrants at a birthday party and they'd probably just hang up on you or threaten to call the police for harassment.
The Salem Witch Trials were cancel culture. Jim Crow lynch mobs were cancel culture. The Red Scare was cancel culture. Same idea, new execution.
(Edited for spelling error)
I don't think it's necessary to answer this because "sexual predator" was literally Noah's description of himself and his behavior (in those words) in the apology post that led to Wizards no longer wanting to work with him.
In that sense, the entire somesphere is a tumor to the Internet.
I think most of us here are anonymous.
It was not inherently about people, it was about what those people managed to bring into virtual existence that was interesting, and it was that you wanted to connect with.