Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

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1) Cancel culture has always existed, it's just been branded in the last decade as a political wedge.

2) People (especially political pundits and libertarian minded tech people) have been crying for more free market principles to exist. Don't like Facebook is sharing your pictures? Good, stop using the service then. Is that the free market at work or is it cancel culture?

3) Whether an organization deems employees actions political or not doesn't matter - the only thing that matters is what the audience deems political. If an employee gets "canceled" and you refuse to fire the person resulting in an impact to your financials, you better have a good reason to tell your board why you suffered economic loss.

I have first hand experience with cancel culture in the workplace. At a former company, we had an employee (one of ~60) who tweeted something critical about Trump during his presidency that was drug out into the spotlight (it got Fox News coverage) by Trump Jr. Our management team received scathing emails from clients and potential clients that said "fire this person or never work in this industry again" (mind you some of these came from billionaires and CxO's of Private Equity funds).

When your revenue is on the line you don't have a choice in this matter. So, to the parent's point, pretending to take this stance isn't not be apolitical.

> Cancel culture has always existed, it's just been branded in the last decade as a political wedge.

To be clear "canceling" in the sense of "cancel culture" was coined by the cancelers. It's not a conspiracy "to drive a political wedge", but a description using the movement's own jargon.

As far as "it has always existed", I don't think that's true. Certainly campaigns of targeted harassment have always existed (which is to say "canceling" has always existed), but the culture where this kind of behavior is normalized and valued is relatively novel. Like any kind of social ill, if you rewind far enough you can find a time when it was common, but at least in my lifetime it was never normal or valued.

The canonical exception which proves the rule was the Dixie Chicks' cancellation as a result of their criticism of the war, and even then to get that kind of a response, the Dixie Chicks had to say something which offended a supermajority of Americans, while "cancel culture" today is typically about offending a small minority (roughly 10%).

> When your revenue is on the line you don't have a choice in this matter. So, to the parent's point, pretending to take this stance isn't not be apolitical.

Like everything, opposition to cancel culture is political for a sufficiently broad definition of "political". Maybe the more interesting question is whether it's partisan, and I think your anecdote proves that it's not. There are elements of the left and the right for whom "cancel culture" is an apt description. Similarly, there are folks on all sides who oppose cancel culture.

> As far as "it has always existed", I don't think that's true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott

> Like any kind of social ill, if you rewind far enough you can find a time when it was common, but at least in my lifetime it was never normal or valued.

Keep in mind social media has drastically amplified the attention we point on cancel culture. Both the "cancelling" itself but as well as people talking about it. Perhaps that has also increased the amount of events happening, but it doesn't mean it hasn't existed (see Boycotting above).

> Like everything, opposition to cancel culture is political for a sufficiently broad definition of "political".

You have to be able to define what cancel culture is first. As my little story pointed out, there is nothing I can do as a business to recourse clients not buying my product as a result of an employee getting "canceled".

> Maybe the more interesting question is whether it's partisan

Maybe, but trying to assign a political party to the use of its weaponry you're only further creating a divide and therefore creating partisan. In other words, if you conclude that the left/right they're using cancel culture they'll only dig their heals in more and project that the opposite side is weaponizing it.

> Similarly, there are folks on all sides who oppose cancel culture.

Ultimately the fact that there isn't a commonly accepted definition regardless of political affiliation is what holds us back from either eliminating it or accepting it as simply free market principles.

One example that immediately comes to mind is McCarthyism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism , that 'cancelled' many people's careers and normal lives at the mere accusation of being a communist.

Maybe one of the more prominent victims was Oppenheimer, who created the atomic bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer .

I keep seeing this brought up on HN. Isn't it telling that you have to go back 70 years to find a good example? At that time, the Democratic Party was still in bed with the KKK. It's not relevant to today's politics.

One could easily pull up stories of people in the 70s, 80s, or even 90s who were fired or ostracized for supporting homosexuality and gay rights. Left-wing causes like supporting unions or even more radical leftist politics was a firing offense deep into the 80s. The only thing that has changed over a couple of generations is that now those who were once on the receiving end of cancel culture have the power to turn the tables and people who grew up with the implicit assumption that their beliefs and behaviors were beyond reproach are learning what it means to face consequences for their speech or actions.

"Being fired for something" isn't the same as being cancelled. "Cancellation" implies a concerted campaign to pressure employers into firing employees. Being fired on the grounds that you've offended your employer or said something that is broadly unpopular are both awful, but they're different than "you've said something that offended a tiny minority of the population but they're threatening to call up our clients and slander us (and otherwise make business difficult) unless we fire you".

They did not fire you just because they disagreed, they did so because others would harass and complain until you were fired. Sorry if the attempt at making some sort of 'both sides' point went off the rails, but cancel culture was created by the right and was their exclusive domain for almost 60 years in post-war America. There was a large list of things that you were not allowed to say, to do, or even to be just because right-wing pressure groups and 'concerned citizens' would ensure that you had no job and no voice if they found out.

The only thing that is different now is that the shoe is on the other foot. I guess when some people find they no longer have license to be an asshole the transition can feel a bit uncomfortable and needing to learn about these things called 'consequences' that everyone else has been forced to endure must seem a bit strange.

Mothers Against Dungeons & Dragons certainly tried to cancel role-playing games in the 1980s and they were just the largest group to try and do so. The Dixie Chicks were cancelled in the 2000s for a single instance of political speech.

I think you would benefit from the context to be gained by reading the comment I replied to.

I replied to "the culture where this kind of behavior is normalized and valued is relatively novel", with the Dixie Chicks as the "canonical example".

Surely, providing an older example that predates the Dixie Chicks, can be used to argue that the phenomenon is, indeed, older, no?

>It's not a conspiracy "to drive a political wedge", but a description using the movement's own jargon.

There isn't a conspiracy being suggested. The use of this term was heavily promoted last year by certain people and news outlets towards a certain demographic. In other words, the meme took off and became viral: https://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-cancel-culture-tuck...

Further polling data illustrates the effect of this, where views on the term are split among party lines: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/17/how-america...

Our management team received scathing emails from clients and potential clients that said "fire this person or never work in this industry again" (mind you some of these came from billionaires and CxO's of Private Equity funds).

Has anything like this reached the media, or is the media at similar risk? I'm sure some employment lawyers or journalists out there would love to know more about this kind of backroom pressure, whether right or left.

> I'm sure some employment lawyers or journalists out there would love to know more about this kind of backroom pressure, whether right or left.

Why on earth would I go to the media about <Insert PE Fund with $10B AUM that I don't want to name> when doing so would definitely guarantee me not working in that industry again? Think about that for a second.

Not you personally, of course. But I would have thought that the risk of the rumors this kind of pressure being used as a weapon by competitors, if nothing else, would have come into play to minimize this type of undue influence.

One of the reasons people buy products/goods is because of social proof - if that social proof erodes (i.e. one of my biggest clients cancels their revenue to me and tells everyone about it) then I have no control over what those clients' competitors say about me.

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