The Low Cost of Cancelling Someone
randomminds.substack.com
randomminds.substack.com
Back in school (in Germany[0]) we had a case of a teacher, who among other things taught PE, and who was falsely accused of "inappropriately touching some girls". The girls in question told everybody (except the teachers of course) that they will be fabricating such a story as "revenge" for the PE teacher actually trying to make them take part in PE instead of just sitting around. As soon as the police got involved, they backed down and recanted, apologizing and basically claiming they considered it not "a big deal" and just a "prank", but by that time the damage was done.
The teacher in question had been suspended during the investigation and of course that was the talk of the school and everybody including their parents knew about it. After being cleared, parents would constantly ask to take their kids out of his PE class "just to be sure", so he ended up not teaching PE at all anymore shortly after. Afterwards we usually saw him eat alone, as the other teachers seemed to avoid him, and roam around alone in the halls during breaks instead of going to the teachers lounge like everybody else. He retired as early as he could.
Not directly related to "cancel culture", but to the mindset that goes with it, my mom told me later in life that back in elementary school, one couple took out their kid of my sisters' class before school even started, because their kid had been assigned a teacher who... was male. That was enough. There was no allegation, no rumors of inappropriate behavior, no nothing. The parents in question had never met him before either. He just was male.
[0] Germany has (had) very strong labor protections for teachers. All teachers, including the one I am writing about, used to be "officers of the state" (Beamte), and therefore in order to be fired they'd either have to commit treason, an act against the democratic order, or a crime resulting in a felony conviction of no less than 1 year in prison. These days, a lot of teachers do not automatically become "officers of the state" but are merely employed.
That gives them power, for example over non-union employees of the company.
In my experience, no one's opinion changes because he gets punished by some faceless bureaucratic authority. He simply doubles down, because he believes that not only is his opinion correct, but that it has provoked a crackdown from the authorities.
Not every "wrong" needs to be punished or "held accountable." And "cancel culture" itself is sort of a faux accountability, anyway: an angry mob lobbies some bureaucratic authority to deprive an "offender" from his supporters, often on trumped up accusations and with meticulous organization. They could have instead brought up whatever the offense was forever, they could have debated the person, they could have boycotted, all of which at least give the supporters and the offender the chance to think about what happened.
A large part of cancel culture involved excluding the multitude of middle ground positions down to either legal sanction or a few degrees of unpersoning. There are so many more solutions, including maybe just tolerance of statements we find offensive.
And I'd like to see proof of GP's claim, but it's pretty plausible that there are people who would try to offer and seek such a service. Imagine the damage you could cause if you managed to cancel a competitor's CxO...
That doesn't mean that such deals actually happen, of course.
I could make a twitter account if that would up my chances?
Another phrase lefties love is, "I don't know how to convince you you're supposed to care about other people." Whenever I see some regular Joe fired from his forklift job because he isn't totally up-to-date with elite social norms around discussing race or gender -- or how about people literally calling CPS on "bean dad?" -- I just think, yeah, I don't know how to tell you that you shouldn't take pleasure in that outcome. Apparently people genuinely do get off on getting guys like that fired and, again, I don't know what to say that would make them just a little less bloodthirsty, because it's in fact very easy for me to empathize with that guy.
Lefties gives me the impression I know your opinion and political views well before the end of your thought. It weakens an argument that I actually agree with… even though I’m a lefty.
How often have you seen this?
People grumbling about the views of a dead person is pretty damned harmless, isn't it? JK Rowling is "canceled" but she's still getting book and movie deals. Like Dave Chapelle, "cancelled" is a highly profitable status.
The problem is people thinking they actually have a right or privilege to a platform, you don't and never did. Nobody had a 'platform' in the 80s, but now everybody thinks they're an internet celebrity if they have 1000+ followers. You're not, if you say something bad you should be rightfully held accountable for it.
Any rich celebrity or business person like Elon Musk, could get shunned by all of society but they'd still do pretty good because of the money, pretty sure they won't cry too hard on their private jets.
Once you've made it, yes.
One of the problems with cancel culture is once someone has been cancelled the socially accepted and then unchallenged view of who are what they becomes over time an increasingly extreme caricature. JKR is just an unapologetic second-wave feminist, and that in itself is a socially and philosophically reasonable position to take (even if you don’t happen to agree with it).
Anyway, this isn't an example of cancelation. You can't cancel a dead person. He wasn't killed by Twitter, he apparently died of illness.
What negative consequences, other than some people having a negative opinion of him?
There's nothing inherently wrong with people having a negative opinion of another person, that happens all the time. It's not a phenomenon to be worried about.
And I wasn't saying he was canceled, I meant that he was bullied for 'defending' someone who was being bullied.
Yes, but Robbie Coltrane wasn't socially outcast.
> I meant that he was bullied for 'defending' someone who was being bullied.
Replaced "bullied" with "criticized".
The President of the United States is routinely and vehemently criticized. Hated by millions of people. And yet, he is not socially outcast. Nor is he bullied. And his mental and physical health seem ok for someone his age, or in any event, he doesn't appear to be suffering from feeling socially outcast.
Being criticized is not the same thing as being canceled. It's not even close.
Degrees on the same scale
> Replaced "bullied" with "criticized".
Criticized publicly and unfairly, I'll stick with bullied.
> The President of the United States is routinely and vehemently criticized. Hated by millions of people. And yet, he is not socially outcast. Nor is he bullied.
I am sure he suffers from any amount of bullying and criticism he's receiving that he knows about.
> I am sure he suffers from any amount of bullying and criticism he's receiving that he knows about.
Doubtful, given he's probably insulated from that because as a politician 100% of his career he's always had roughly 50% of the people against him give or take.
Trump on the other hand couldn't take criticism because he wasn't a career politician, which would be a breath of fresh air honestly if it wasn't a rich narcissist at the wheel. Maybe a school teacher, or musician, hell even Tom Hanks. He got sucked into twitter wars, the current admin has a hotshot Twitter team that delivers blows but again keeps him insulated from it. That's the mark of a leader.
I say this as someone who did NOT vote for Joe because I refuse to vote for an establishment candidate for the Presidential ticket, though I was relieved he won, for the sake of democracy and so we don't devolve into fascism. I was also glad Trump won though, not because I wanted anything he was selling but felt maybe having the crappiest timeline might push the left to the progressives if we fully just give up supporting them. It kinda worked. Overton window has shifted maybe 0.2 % but any give is good.
I don't expect great things from Joe, not by a long shot. I long for the day that the presidential races are decided by ranked choice voting or similar systems. Then maybe we can get some good leaders from regular society who maybe could lead better than the rich bastards who run everything else.
I mean it worked well for Ukraine, sure President Zelenskyy wasn't always the best, and had issues earlier in his Presidency, and such but he was a freaking actor and comedian, now he's a war hero and rightly so. The west gave him a ticket out, to escape and he stayed with his people to fight. That's pretty bold. You know none of our leaders on either side would be brave enough for that.
Strange comment. Just because you haven't seen it in your feed doesn't mean it isn't happening.
https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/scottish-news/tr...
You can certainly cancel his memory, which, for the people closed to said dead person, might matter a lot.
The really point isn't to find who is guilty, which is why these witch hunts almost more often than not targets people on the left that dare stick out their neck or ask the wrong questions, usually left-of-center moderate liberals.
I was trying to find a nice summary in written form of her theses, but here's a nice podcast discussion on Arendt's totalitarinism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_fV_2LOL6Y
Something else?
It's a fairly nuanced and insightful discussion. She holds Stalinism as the most complete example of totalitarianism, in front of the Nazis, and especially the Italian fascists who she merely considers has totalitarian tendencies.
I didn't say it was. But whether the comparison is Hitler or Stalin, it's absurd, because both cases involved mass murder, and nothing even remotely comparable is happening with social media.
It's possible to say a ball is round like a melon, even if the ball does not share the color or pattern or size.
The similarity I'm noting is the erasure of the private life, the arbitrarily shifting rules of what is acceptable, the relentless witch hunts, the irrelevance of guilt and truth, the fear that you might be next.
Which is, to Arendt, some of the defining hallmarks of totalitarianism.
Except that tweets are nonviolent, whereas totalitarianism is extremely violent. If you wanted to make a subtler point, you started off on the wrong foot. Your original comment felt over the top to me.
I would argue with that. :-)
In general, the rhetoric over "cancel culture" feels very over the top to me. There's a level of fearmongering and victimhood that's not warranted by the empirical facts, much like whenever it's claimed that there's a "crime wave". I'm not saying there's no crime, or no cancellation, just that I don't see totalitarianism as a natural next step from Twitter.
The myth of Fascism (that she called totalitarism, but in this case it's the same, the roots are bonapartism) is "Our group is the best, and everybody should aim to be like us (Poles, French, Dalmatians, but also anarchists if we're talking about USSR... Depends on the flavor). But we aren't at the place we deserve because those other groups infiltrated us and we have traitors working agaisnt us (historically Jews, but also anybody "weakening" your group, like trans and handicaped people in Nazi germany, or pacifists in 1914). We need to get rid of the traitors and we will be as strong as we deserve."
Yes, the society is becoming more fascist (or totalitarist if you want to use Arendt terms), but there is one reason to not be down: they are stupider than they were in 1920s. "Neofascists" are basic protofascists at best, with no real ideals, barely adopted the "great replacement" theory which is at best a rehashing of a 1900 theory. They did not read Nietszche but the Bible, and now seems to base their ideals in religion, which in my opinion, made them weaker.
If they ostracized you right from the get-go without even listening to your side of the story, then they obviously weren't friend material to start with.
>The few people who did not behave that way—I’ll be grateful to forever. They had integrity and honor. And at the very least, curiosity.
This could be considered a good result of such cancellation attempt: You got rid of heavy luggage you didn't know you were carrying, and ended up with a lighter and healthier weight.
It's in the interest of the large internet companies to encourage this culture shift. It makes it easier to target advertising.
Even stranger, few people seem willing to re-evaluate their place in mass-scale social sites, even after 20 years of spam, scams and shams.
Maybe it's a tragedy of the commons. People might enjoy the effortless positive reinforcement provided by their worldwide in-groups, which makes it easy to ignore the huge negative externalities?
Or could people be addicted to the feeling of righteously fighting a great evil, such as their [adjective-of-the-month] neighbors?
If they analyzed hundreds more anecdotes of corporations caving to Twitter mobs they’d have gotten the truth
Also honestly it’s a huge story if you can find systematic firings of people based on Twitter bullying. You should absolutely put that together and sell it as a freelance article to the NYT or similar. I hear they pay well for this kind of research.
That is, for me, basic concept of conformity behaviour. Accepting virtual reality without critical thinking, just because most people agree.
"The few people who did not behave that way—I’ll be grateful to forever. They had integrity and honor. And at the very least, curiosity."
Those people are usually named as conspiracy theorist lovers, outsiders... Well in virtual reality represent by internet.
Trends are easy, skepticism brings problems.
Almost every "cancellation" I've seen has been accountability, this blog makes it sound like every cancellation is based on lies. Yes, there are definitely people being mobbed that either don't deserve it at all or are getting more than their 15 minutes share, but to say that people being "cancelled" only occasionally deserve it is hogwash.
How do you know, exactly? Did you personally verify the facts underlying each and every case?
Other people i know who suffer that are politicians, but we weirldy don't call that "cancellation", but "calling out". To me, if you are a public figure, you ought to be called out if you do something a part of the population don't agree with.
Oh, i also know a small restaurant owner "cancelled". The cooking institute tell its female students to avoid apprenticeship there. The last time I spat on him was two month ago (basically the last time i met him). Considering he raped my sister, this isn't much of a punishment.
Obligatory example of bullshit cancellation:
Fantasy writer attends panel on role of race in fantasy authorship. She accidentally uses the word colored. Now she is professionally shunned. Her husband later issued a statement pointing out she didn’t mean to offend anyone by using a term that the NAACP uses on a regular basis.
As someone who got repeatedly lectured about how we must all use the word “African American” now instead of “black” back in to 90’s (But most of my African friends are white!?!), I can sympathize with the gaffe. Anyway, she’s been kicked out of a bunch of professional associations.
Based on her invitation to speak at the panel, I’m assuming she’s not exactly a card carrying member of the KKK, Trump voter, etc..
For every bullshit cancellation like Mercedes Lackey, there is a "bullshit cancellation" of terrible people like Kanye West, Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Mel Gibson, etc. etc.
I know a little about Brodsky. She's everywhere! Google her name, you'll find her twitter, her essays, her bylines, her substack. Yet here we have a whole essay dedicated to her experience with... cancellation? What got canceled?
I actually dug around trying to find out what she's talking about. And... I couldn't. I can't find anyone complaining about her, any links to her tweets that went viral in angry circles. No "Brodsky is a Pedo" nonsense. There's just nothing I can find that says that anyone dislikes her at all.
But boy, howdy does she write a lot about Cancel Culture.
Basically: I call shenanigans here. She wasn't cancelled, at all. Someone was mean to her on the internet, and that surely sucks. But it's not the kind of endemic social problem she claims it is.
Mob justice isn't great. While I don't think the problem of "cancel culture" is nearly as pervasive as some claim, mob justice is clearly not the best mechanism for fairness and I have seen concrete examples of people being canceled unfairly, I have also seen examples of people who seem to derive a sense of fulfillment from incessantly pestering employers or would-be employers of their targets. "Bean Dad" was a good example of someone who was unfairly harassed out of employment. Al Franken also comes to mind.
HOWEVER, I think it's 100% wrong that the problem of mob or tribal justice is a phenomenon of the left. The aesthetic and mechanisms may be different, but consider the McCarthy era. Consider racial discrimination, sex discrimination, and religious discrimination, all of which are ongoing and rely on various forms of ostracization, in addition to having the power of the law and institutions behind them. The reason the left uses public call-outs as their go-to mechanism is that they historically, institutional power has been so egregiously biased against them that there wasn't much other recourse.
Well... Al Franken is fine. He was rich and famous before he became a Senator, and he's still rich and famous now. Moreover, his successor was reelected, so the Senate seat hasn't changed parties.
Franken was a liability. Imagine him campaigning for women's rights. It just wouldn't work.
To be clear, though, it was Franken's own Democratic colleagues in the Senate who pressured him to resign. He didn't resign because Twitter told him to.
In any case, I don't think I articulated my thought very well there, which was not to say these people had been irrevocably damaged, but to point out a tendency on the left (where I am) to take swings at people, even, or especially, their own, sometimes performatively and without cause.
This happens on the right to the same degree, it's just that the litmus tests are different (currently the only one being loyalty to the previous president).
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/the-case-of-al...
He has made over 200 million though from his platform, and conspiracy talk show, and decided it was a good idea to pester and make fun of people who's kids died in a gruesome shooting. Seriously, there's an evil bar and he's just slightly above serial killers and hitler. Running a grieving parent who's 6 year old was murdered and claiming they're a hoax and not real.
I can't imagine going any lower than that, and in a case like that he definitely should be cancelled.
Bill Cosby is another good example, he should be a pariah. I feel sometimes maybe the back and forth online open 'battles' can become evidence in court for injustices, so maybe the answer would be an immutable Twitter where what you say can't be erased and to get an account you must be 'verified' so you better be damn sure you want to say what you want to say to the whole world.
i'd be much more hesitant if words had permanency with screenshots they still kinda do, but at least then you can claim it was photoshopped, hell AI could probably easily make screenshots of tweets that never happened.
Cancelling happens on the left too, Chris Matthews called Bernie a nazi, was afraid he'd hang him when he became president, and called his supporters brown shirts which is very derogatory because those were basically Nazi's and Bernie had relatives killed in the Holocaust. Of course turnabout is fair play, as Chris Matthews was cancelled shortly thereafter.
Dr. Jason (can't remember last name) black guy on MSNBC called Bernie's female supports the "island of misfit black girls". He received a lot less airtime after that, again rightfully so.
I still have a hard time seeing where canceling isn't anything more than just accountability.
ADHD has me all of the place on this issue, but I guess my tLDR:
Often mob justice is the only justice anybody will get so it is warranted, and it happens at all points on the political spectrum, I feel it's childish perhaps to think you as the center of your universe are getting unfairly dished on and can't take the heat, having autism/adhd I've said things before online and had some depression from backlash, often I just mispoke and sure it made me more cautious about what I say, sometimes but it made me more cautious.
People SHOULD be cautious about what they say online because it lives on forever. Sometimes you need to get 'burned' before you can realize oops I see that was wrong. At this point 'cancel culture' though seems to be a childish cry of people who want everyone to think they're the 'victim', and I just don't see most of these people as real victims. Sorry, not sorry.
The question we haven't asked (and I haven't either) is what socities or cultures of good people have done to mitigate pools of hysteria forming like these in the past.
We know that people actuated by attention are untrustworthy, and treating them as anything other than edgy entertainment is probably harmful socially. You can't fix the mobs, but you can create cultures that isolate them and don't tolerate or believe them in principle, no matter what their cause is. If you can't do that, you can at least respect people who do. I feel like this isn't a new problem.
Cancelling is just another word for "Accountability" so many childish-grownups, are so sad that they can't be racist and bigots online and have their feels hurt.
Look cupcake, freedom of speech is a given in America, but there's no such thing (and never has been) speech without consequences. You call someone a racial slur on tv, you deserve to have your career ended. You sexually harass someone, same thing.
The only thing that does worry me, is when we could go to far and make every little thing an issue, thought police, and china's social credit score come to mind, but then I'm pretty sure those in power already have a pretty good profile of just about everyone in America either through browser cookie tracking or more nefarious NSA programs we don't know about.
So, sure there's a line that crosses into the badlands, but so far I haven't seen a case of 'canceling' that wasn't really warranted and most of it is organic influencers doing the canceling not government 'shadow' agencies. Some people will just think everything is a conspiracy though no matter what you tell them.
I'm personally willing to pay $0. That's just anecdotal, but I suspect it's not a wise investment for most people. And if only the likely-to-be-canceled are willing to pay for the policies, then that's not a good risk for the insurance companies.
This blog post itself is poor quality writing that adds nothing to what has already been said exhaustively for more than 5 years.
Pretty funny because before white people latched onto the word "cancel", this was known as "calling out".
You can go back to the McCarthy era, where people were blacklisted for allegedly being Communist sympathizers.
A "Twitter mob" has no power to fire someone, cancel contracts, or do anything other than tweet. If the people who are in power cave to pressure from a bunch random people on Twitter, that's on the powerful, not on the otherwise powerless tweeters.
Cowardly people in power would rather throw their colleagues under the bus than experience any bad PR whatsoever. Is that the fault of Twitter? No. Would that problem be solved by shutting down Twitter? No.
> It’s very difficult people to fight alone, or take risks alone, but having the backing of an organization or legal fund can make a big difference.
But they could easily fight it if they had the backing of their own employer, for example, who would be the very organization that's officially doing the "canceling".
I feel like you can't call a group that can get "the people in power to cave" as powerless. That is power.
But it only works if the authorities are fearful, conflict-averse ass coverers. If the authorities ignore Twitter, then Twitter has no power. It's not like the "Twitter mobs" have guns, or even literal pitchforks. If they don't get want they want, all they can do is whine some more on Twitter.
Obviously, cancel our authorities. :-)
Yeah, that's power. It doesn't matter that you call them "authorities". If they cower in fear, it's because someone else has the power.
> all they can do is whine some more on Twitter.
And all Putin does is sign decrees and drop a few hints. Perhaps press a button.
Putin is the President of Russia. You can't seriously compare him to anonymous people on Twitter.
If Twitter was so powerful, then Putin would have resigned by now.
No matter how stupid it is: as long as enough people care about the opinion on twitter, in particular people with power themselves, the twitter crowd has power. Russia understands that too, given their troll army.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Twitter is a just a bunch of people. (According to Twitter, there are over 200 million mDAU) Anyone with a device that can connect to the internet can sign up for Twitter, if they want. It's not an organized special interest group. So you're imaging that the opinion of a bunch of people had been different. Which, yes, would have made things different, but I'm not sure this thought experiment is very useful.
> many see Twitter as indicative of voting trends
> No matter how stupid it is
But it does matter how stupid it is. I was trying to point out that stupid and cowardly leaders are actually the problem and always have been the problem. You could abolish Twitter, but the problem of stupid and cowardly leaders won't magically go away.
We're letting the leaders off the hook by blaming the "Twitter mobs" for their behavior. I believe this is the opposite of what we should be doing.
> Russia understands that too, given their troll army.
Well, their troll army doesn't seem particularly successful. Even less so than their real army.
I think you mean: it should matter. But it doesn't, unfortunately.
> Well, their troll army doesn't seem particularly successful. Even less so than their real army.
They had a decisive influence in Trump's election and the Brexit vote. I think that's enough of a demonstration of the power of influencing via "social" media. We've since become a bit more weary, but Twitter still has a lot of influence.
I strongly disagree with this conclusion. I think it's a convenient myth.
The margins were small. But my personal belief — which of course I can't prove either — is that no votes in the election were changed by Russian Twitter bots. Not even a single vote.
Both candidates were already very well known public figures before they ran, and both were also more disliked than liked. In the end, Republicans mostly voted for the Republican, Democrats mostly voted for the Democrat, and the late deciding independents rolled the dice with Trump, because he had much less of a political record than Clinton. Voters like a "fresh face", and Trump was more of a fresh face in politics, despite being famous for other reasons since the 1980s. Washington outsiders tend to do well in open seat elections.
If random people want to cancel waffles, they are powerless to do so. It’s only when someone who actually has the power to cancel waffles decides to cancel them does it happen. The mob can only influence these powers that be.
An army isn't powerful because there's one powerful person at the top. An army is powerful because there are many people at the bottom, and they are organized to act as a single force.
Is this a real case though? It seems like only a counterfactual hypothetical. In most cases, millions of people are not going to feel as strongly about something as the minority of people tweeting. If the people tweeting about it even feel strongly; it's easy to tweet about something, but writing a tweet doesn't necessarily represent a powerful and lasting dedication to a cause. These incidents tend to be fleeting.
Shouldn't we blame the people in power for having incompetently bad misperceptions about their own organizations?
That's true for literally every human with power.
If everyone* just stopped listening to the government, all government officials would immediately lose all of their power.
Don't get me wrong, it's not simple to organize that. This would be a coordination problem that would be extremely difficult to pull off. But that doesn't change the fact that the power over other humans is still given by other humans.
*everyone includes the military
Fully agree - except for the word "only". That's the argument. "Powers that be" are never absolute. Your own quote fully applies to them as well:
>They have no power outside that which is given to them is the point.
I mean, the Peelian Principles for example are based on this central notion.
Convincing people in power that they they should act isn't power itself.
The point your comment is willfully ignoring is that information, rumors, truths, and lies, are what Twitter and other online media spread, and that this information influences others. We can spread true and false information faster than McCarthy’s day or any time in history. We have mountains of evidence that sometimes information goes viral and causes damage to people, sometimes to people in power, sometimes to businesses, and sometimes to democracies. Claiming that Twitter (and by extension other social media) has no power is to be willfully blind to what’s happening.
I don't address it because "cancellation" is normally understood as losing professional and financial opportunities due to personal opinions and actions, whereas losing friends due to personal opinions and actions is not really worth noting as a phenomenon. Friendship is inherently personal.
> Claiming that Twitter (and by extension other social media) has no power is to be willfully blind to what’s happening.
Of course Twitter has the power to spread information, and misinformation. But what people do with that information or misinformation is an entirely different matter. It ought to go without saying that one shouldn't uncritically believe everything one reads on Twitter.
I don’t understand why you think saying that people shouldn’t believe everything they read is helpful. Yeah, obviously, and who ever disagreed? That’s a straw man and we still have a reality where social media is a powerful force for both good and harm. We still have rampant lies, bullying, climate misinformation, and Qanon. The evidence we have contradicts the claims made in your comments that social media isn’t powerful or that only people in power are doing the cancelling.
Well, if you're going to cite Wikipedia as documentation, I'm going to cite it too: "Criticism of the concept" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture#Criticism_of_th...
I get the impression that the term "cancel culture" can mean anything that anyone wants it to mean, and it ends up becoming amorphous complaining about random grievances real and imagined. (Kind of like the imaginary "War against Christmas", where Christmas is cancelled because some people choose to say "Happy Holidays".) Regardless, I would personally make a distinction between "I was fired because of X" and "My friends don't like me anymore because of X". I don't think it's useful to have one term that covers these two very distinct things, and also I don't think the latter is worth having much of a public debate about.
It's difficult to take "cancel culture" too seriously when many self-described victims of cancellation were simply criticized. They seem to think any form is criticism is bullying and ostracism, and that everyone has to duty to be accepting of their obnoxious opinions.
> I would personally make a distinction between “I was fired because of X” and “My friends don’t like me anymore because of X”.
Good for you. Contrary to your claim, that’s not a distinction that was made either with “cancellation” nor with your own example of MyCarthyism. And again, you’re failing to capture the fact that most people’s social circle involves co-workers, and what the cross-over effects are between work and personal life. You’re also failing to capture family and church and neighborhoods and loads of other organizations of people where being ostracized can and does have a meaningful impact, for good or bad.
Here's the problem: If you define "cancel culture" so extremely broadly that it covers any form of social ostracism whatsoever, then it's not in any respect a new or novel phenomemon. It's been with us for as long as society has existed. In this sense, it's almost a tautology that cancel culture exists. But so what? Why is everyone going on and on about cancel culture in recent years when it's thousands of years old?
What is relatively new is global social media, which has existed for less than 20 years. Personal information or misinformation can now go "viral" in a way that it never could before, as a result of computers and the internet. But it's not clear that there's been a "culture" change. It's just the same old human culture, now technologically enhanced.
Do people sometimes lose their jobs or other professional opportunities because of information spread on social media? Yes. Although I think this happens less than the fearmongers would have us believe. So "cancel culture" in the stricter sense may exist too, but I think it's been exaggerated quite a bit.
Of course I wouldn't deny that social media has the ability to rapidly spread information. What I deny is that social media has the power to cancel people. It does have the power to initiate the discussion about whether to cancel people, but that's only a discussion, mere words (tweets). The actual decision to cancel someone is always made by the people in power, and not by the "mob". Twitter can be denied or ignored. However, the people in power often have no loyalty or regard for those who are under them, so they're perfectly willing to throw underlings under the bus to cover their own asses, without a second thought, just to make an unpleasant PR situation go away. So leadership cowardice and selfishness is empowering and incentivizing "cancel culture" in this sense.
I should note that I'm expressing no particular opinion about whether a particular person should or shouldn't lose a particular job or financial benefit. That really depends on the specifics of the situation. In general, I don't think that anyone should be denied the ability to make a living, but I'm less sympathetic about someone losing special privileges and high status, which are nobody's right.
> We know it’s sometimes serious, just ask Harvey Weinstein.
I can't, because he's in prison.
> that’s only a discussion, mere words
That’s got to be one of the funniest things I’ve ever read here. Or strangest, I can’t tell which. You’re going in circles. Reductionism like this isn’t just boring, it’s meaningless and false. What among human interactions doesn’t reduce to words? Laws are mere words. Jobs are mere words. Everything you know in the world came from words. All of civilization is built on words. Violence and sex aren’t words, but they are almost always the outcomes of words. Your argument is the same as claiming people can’t lose jobs because people are only made of atoms and atoms can’t fire people.
> he’s in prison.
Somehow you saying my point out loud to me makes me speculate that you missed the irony entirely.
You heard wrong, but I've lost all interest in continuing this "conversation", which seems to be going nowhere, amounts to nothing but talking past each other, and is quite unpleasant, not enjoyable or informative at all.
At this point I do regret my replying to you in the first place (and also your replying to me in the first place).
I did actually flag your first reply as violating the HN guidelines, but I chose to reply anyway. That was a mistake (the replying, not the flagging).
What I was trying to get to is why you’re reacting to the term “cancel culture” with consistent disbelief. It feels like there’s probably some core feeling or belief or assumption here that is driving your reaction to the article and to the idea of cancellation, and I’m curious what it is. You don’t seem to like the words, even though along the way you’ve described exactly what it is: online words going viral causing groups of people to enact painful consequences on someone.
To be fair, your top comment that started this thread violates multiple HN guidelines wrt to the article, and I (along with others) was trying to see if you’d reflect on that and explain it, and hear your point of view and understand your reasoning, by arguing with it. I didn’t flag it though. It wasn’t egregious, and I realize you’re making a meta comment and may not be thinking specifically about how it comes off next to the article, so I replied instead. In effect, you responded to a personal account of someone’s problem with what comes off as a tone deaf claim that the problem doesn’t exist, in multiple ways, and have since maintained and insisted you’re right without addressing any counter argument. Your stance so far as a whole is failing to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation.
Words do have power, which goes without saying, it’s not even debatable. I’m just curious why you’re choosing to use the argument repeatedly that tweets are mere words to suggest that cancel culture somehow isn’t a real or serious phenomenon.
Thank you! I appreciate the apology.
> In effect, you responded to a personal account of someone’s problem with what comes off as a tone deaf claim that the problem doesn’t exist
I don't agree with that characterization. I've never been in denial that some people have lost their jobs and other professional opportunities in this way. For example, I said, "Cowardly people in power would rather throw their colleagues under the bus than experience any bad PR whatsoever." That's an affirmation rather than a denial of cancellation. (One of the fastest ways to get cancelled in the United States, ironically, is to criticize the government of Israel.)
The point of my original comment was to correctly attribute blame for the occurrence. I understand that Twitter loudly calls for some people's heads, but there's no legal mandate to act on the basis of that. Tweets are no substitute for thoughtfulness and due process. Which is why I said:
> they could easily fight it if they had the backing of their own employer, for example, who would be the very organization that's officially doing the "canceling".
My goal was to put the focus on the people in power, the ones making the final decisions. The ones who can say "You're fired." Ultimately, it doesn't matter if thousands of people call for you to be fired, as long as none of those thousands is your boss. To the extent that leaders cave to Twitter pressure, those leaders empower and incentivize "cancel culture". The culture could not thrive unless the leaders abide by it.
To be fair, Twitter can raise legitimate complaints. Historically, the powerless have been routinely subject to cancellation. Black people, women, et al. Twitter has given formerly powerless people a public voice they never had before, which can be a force for good. And some of the targets of Twitter scorn truly deserve it.
But again, Twitter is not decisive on the matter. You mentioned Harvey Weinstein: he was convicted of crimes by a jury in a court of law, where evidence and testimony was presented. That's why he's in jail. The court of public opinion doesn't have that power. Moreover, Twitter is the ultimate in slacktivism. It takes almost no effort at all to tweet, and you don't even have to leave the couch. So in general, Twitter "mobs" ought to have less weight than, say, in-person protests. Of course, protests can also be ignored by those in power, but at least a protest shows a significant amount of effort and determination in support of a cause, vastly more than a tweet.
In the abstract, I'm personally ambivalent about "cancellation". I think that some people have been treated wrongly, but I also think that other people deserve to be removed from positions of power. Which is why I said:
> I should note that I'm expressing no particular opinion about whether a particular person should or shouldn't lose a particular job or financial benefit.
Correctly according to who? I understand and agree that this was your goal. I disagree that you did it correctly. Why does it even make sense to pretend like there’s only one reason or only one part to blame in said “occurrence”?
You’re also still talking about jobs and making black and white assumptions that it comes down to only a few people who have “power”. The assumptions you’re stating clearly demonstrate that you’re talking about only one narrow form of cancellation, and trying to downplay painful social stigma as an outcome.
> Twitter is not decisive on the matter.
Again, nobody said it was. This is still a straw man. Social media doesn’t have to be decisive on the matter in order to have massive and unstoppable influence. It doesn’t have to have the final say in order to initiate things or sway public opinion. It is not useful to draw a line between who’s making a final decision and who’s starting a campaign to spread information with an agenda.
You’re trying to skip right past the fact that Harvey Weistein’s trouble did not start in a court of law. It started with his actions, which lead to public allegations, many shared on social media. He’s in jail because he was convicted after and as a result of words being spread around about what he did. Cause and effect. Private and public allegations are the cause that lead to newspapers and then police to investigate, the court of law that jailed him was the effect of that cause. Suggesting that public opinion had little to do with this and doesn’t have that power is so weird and incorrect, the order of events here was extremely public and extremely well documented.
The outcome of his story lead many other people to share their experiences on social media, which in turn has caused other “cancellations”, some of which then became police investigations into other people. In these a bunch of these cases (which just so happen to be pretty much the exemplar class for social canceling) your framing of people in power caving to Twitter is entirely and completely incorrect. The negative outcomes are caused sometimes by audiences refusing to watch some celebrities, sometimes by advertisers and sponsors doing the pressuring by dropping financial support, sometimes because of legal investigations revealing wrongdoing, and almost always because public outcry came first. There are very few cases in the national media that match your imaginary scenario of someone getting fired after their boss just read and believed some unverified junk online. The very small number of storied I’ve ever read like that usually involved the boss apologizing or the employee being offered something much better by people who heard the story.
> Twitter is the ultimate in slacktivism.
Sometimes, yes. This was the point of the article. This is also one reason why social media cancel culture is not the same as McCarthyism or other kinds of ostracism historically.
The former is true, but I'm not sure the latter is true, or that the former implies the latter.
> unstoppable influence
I disagree that it's unstoppable.
> It is not useful to draw a line between who’s making a final decision and who’s starting a campaign to spread information with an agenda
I also disagree with that.
> Harvey Weistein’s trouble did not start in a court of law. It started with allegations, many shared on social media.
Well, no, his trouble started with sexually assaulting a number of women. And that's also why he's in jail.
You actually seem to have your timeline reversed. The New York Times published an exposé https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-haras... on October 5, 2017 and the New Yorker (Ronan Farrow) https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-ove... on October 10. Rose McGowan didn't start tweeting about it until after the NYT story broke, and "Me too" started https://twitter.com/Alyssa_Milano/status/919659438700670976 on October 15. Weinstein's victims were talking privately to the news media long before social media got involved.
> the order of events here was extremely public and extremely well documented.
Indeed, as I noted above.
Weinstein was actually investigated by police a couple years earlier https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/nyregion/harvey-weinstein... but they didn't bring charges against him at the time, which in retrospect turned out to be a scandal itself. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/sexual-misconduct/nypd-pro...
ADDENDUM: I see that you rewrote some of your comment after I published mine, apparently in order to make yourself look less wrong about the facts I cited. That's pretty silly and pointless, because I know you did it, and there's likely nobody else reading the thread at this point except you and me.
I'm done with this now, I won't be reading or replying anymore.
That is false. I edited my own comment before you replied (I even checked right before and after submitting my edits), and apparently unfortunately you didn’t see my edits until afterward, and have made yet another incorrect assumption. My edits were not a reaction to you, I clarified and improved my own comment. Is it possible you’re complaining about my argument getting stronger, and jumping to incorrect conclusions about my motivation, because you were already failing to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation?
The point that you just clarified is that Weinstein would never have gone to court, nor to jail, without his actions, nor without the allegations. Just 1 comment ago you “attributed” his being in jail to the court, arguing that here and in all cases of cancel the final decisive people in power were the primary cause of the outcome. I fully agree that he’s in jail because of his actions. You’ve just illustrated the point that the judge that delivered his sentence is not the correct way to attribute his being in jail. The judge’s decision is only one reason, and it’s almost completely irrelevant. Once Weinstein was finally accused in public, after mounting public outcry, and once he was investigated and formally charged, jail was practically inevitable. The cause of him being in prison is correctly attributed to the whole series of events, especially the events that started everything (his actions and the allegations), and not, contrary to your claim, to someone in power.
It's a power with useful idiots doing the heavy lifting and those in power with a ready excuse to do the will of the people. Yes, on occasion, some of those in who think they are in power have to be thrown under the bus.
When faced with an unstoppable force, no one will be your immovable object. Everyone you think cares about you will eventually cave in and throw you under the bus.
Interesting theory, but how does it match reality? Donald Trump, Joe Rogan, JK Rowling, Dave Chapelle, Louis CK... these are powerful but "cancelled" people. Why aren't they out of the public sphere despite years of "the mob" being against them?
Considering how slow and unrespobsive big corporates usually are, there must be some real power broker behind it. Deplatformings usually all happen within the same day in a few hours. Last example is probably the deplatfoeming of Andrew Tate.
Some platform does a high profile ban, and then the PR inboxes of the other platforms are set ablaze with journalists asking for comment on how your particular platform wants to handle that person - high profile bans make nice clickbait articles after all - and the twitters and reddits and youtubers and so on of this world talk about what those other platforms are doing/are not doing/should be doing. At this point the other platforms have to do something, either issue a ban as well, or issue some kind of statement why at this time they won't be issuing a ban. Usually the option to just issue a ban as well is a lot easier and PR-wise "safe" than trying to come up with a "defensive" statement of why such a ban is not (yet) appropriate.
Google Groups aren’t as popular nowadays. My guess is a private Discord.
Then the rage will boil over. You may not like the fact people have different opinions, but you must accept it. Suppression of their voices leads to revolution.
The top down censorship is a "let them eat cake moment".
If everyone could get a loan for a business idea, there'd be a lot more cool inventions and restaurants, and choices in society - but they're very selective and if you're rich - they don't even look at your credit just give you money and business cards to tell your friends.
PayPal and traditional banks have been closing accounts for having wrong opinions for years.
Only going on an aggressive offense will work.
A bully will never back down if the victim apologizes: this will cause the victim only to be bullied more.
The bully must feel the hard fist of his victim breaking his nose, there is no other way.
I noticed the same thing in the 90s in France, a country were many still have a cult of the revolution. Anytime you had 1000 guys vociferating in the street, they are somehow referred to as "the people" (except if their opinion is contrary to major newspapers, then it is a "small violent mob"). The reality is that it is only 1000 guys in a population of 60 millions. They are representative of nothing else than themselves. But it's a way for journalists to push their own opinions like if somehow they were mainstream.
It's the same today. You can find 10k retweets for any random cause, even hitler. But if they align to major newsrooms opinions, they will be presented as expression of the public opinion. And I think the people doing the cancelling (employers firing, companies cancelling contracts) are more worried of the media than of the twitter mob. But given how little credibility the media have those days, they could safely ignore them and nothing would happen. Unless they evolve in those few liberal circles where all your friends will turn their back on you if you think differently on a single thing.
Not scalable, often infeasible. Is it effective? Who knows?
I'm asking you to be clear about what this is. It's not obvious to me what "force" is in this context.
I draw an exception for comedians, who are famous for how worth listening to they are.
I can't tell if your post is sarcasm or not.
Later edit: From here [1], I was too optimistic of the 4-5 year estimation, this shit started 10 years ago. I guess we, programmers/IT people, were just the canaries in the coal-mine:
> Hi, I'm the guy who made a comment about big dongles. (...)
> My second comment is this, Adria has an audience and is a successful person of the media. Just check out her web page linked in her twitter account, her hard work and social activism speaks for itself. With that great power and reach comes responsibility. As a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have 3 kids and I really liked that job.
Later later edit: Also, that Adria Richards lady got canceled and fired by her employer in return [2]. That reddit thread I linked to is a good example of how fast (relatively speaking) things change, nowadays there's no way in hell for a person to include a pr0n-related remark in a conference talk that is not related to the pr0n industry, but back in 2013 saying that that was not ok (and it wasn't and it isn't) was reason enough for ridicule.
All this to say that cancelling someone for his/her opinions, as long as they're not inciting to violence, is not ok.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391667
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1aqyc7/adria_ri...
How well would you survive that? Not purely financially but emotionally.
Added to this is that cancellation usually includes criticism from friends.
I can not imagine publically criticizing a friend. I've cut people off before, I've criticized friends within social circles even.
Criticizing someone for the purposes of strangers I find quite disgusting, akin to tribal excile likely one of the worst traditional punishments of humans probably historically a death sentence.
It hits people hard.
My hot take, the power of social isolation is why older male suicide is horrifically high following divorce.
People on HN collapse if Google shuts their accounts down unexpectedly lol let alone every service and business you've worked with and your friends and family dropping you.
From a minority position (e.g. far-left, person of color, or LGBT), you ask people who are sympathetic to take action against somebody and exclude them. Your ally does not neccessarily support your ethics 100%, but they will agree. Then when backlash comes, they will suffer a portion of it, too. And there is often an element of forcing people to position themselves - either you are an ally, or you are an enemy / whatever-phobic.
This is a concious political strategy of identity politics, and it does work. It helped leftist, feminist and other groups affect society even from a position of relative weakness. I think that's not bad - MeToo, the growing acceptance non-traditional gender identities, people using gender-inclusive speech, and so on. I've supported such campagins, too - using moral outrage to get (actual!) antisemites, neo-nazis, christian pro-life sects deplatformed from using our university rooms. But activists should be aware that this can lead to attrition among allys. Next time it might be less trouble to just disinvite every political group, including you. And once you called all your favors for topic X, don't expect to get any help with topic Y (since you are still in a position of weekness after all).
How so? With each witch hunt their power will increase and they'll be feared more. Each one after that becomes easier, because people have been seeing the previous one and know what will happen if they don't comply, so they'll be even more inclined to go along with whatever you say.
You can use polarisation and moral outrage to win people over on one issue today. Say your thing is to convince people that JK Rowling is a bad person. But afterwards you'll be the annoying trans rights or SJW person, and people not on your side will be less inclined to listen to you when it comes to other issues.
You can imagine political allegiance as a sigmoid function. It's zero on one side of the spectrum and one at the other. What's happening is not that the center is shifting. Rather, the function is getting steeper, it is turning into a step function. The strategy of cancelling people is effective, but it is alienating people at the same time.
> How so? With each witch hunt their power will increase and they'll be feared more. Each one after that becomes easier, because people have been seeing the previous one and know what will happen if they don't comply, so they'll be even more inclined to go along with whatever you say.
As, well, a leftist, that is not my experience at all. I think we are rapidly loosing ground in the middle of society. "Each one" may be the one that breaks the camel's back and makes somebody say "screw it" to us. And the far right capitalizes a lot on this. Fearmongering about cancelling is much more widespread than actual cancelling. (This is my experience in Germany, it might be different in the States).
That's not what I see happening. Granted, I try not follow these things too closely, but I didn't get the impression that any social capital was spent -- quite the opposite. If you successfully cancel someone, you earn the points for bringing down a bad person, they were cancelled after all, which proves their guilt. And, like a war lord after a successful raid, you also gathered power, and you instill fear. Will one of your allies jump in front of you to protect someone they don't deem evil when they've just seen you destroy someone? I believe the likelihood decreases with each campaign.
It looks to me more like a authoritarian state forming: in the beginning, you still have an opposition that will resist and fight. But the more of them you throw in prison, drive into exile or simply murder, the weaker the resistance gets and the easier it becomes to attack those that remain.
Several of these are not minority positions on big media.
>I think that's not bad - MeToo
MeToo caused huge fallout to the point male mentors were unwilling to tutor women, men seen with minors were deemed creeps, and more.
You're right as to the backlash and polarizing effects, but you are still only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
Do you have any non-anecdotal data to back those up?
There certainly is evidence active participants tend to skew a certain way on e.g. Twitter and Reddit. These participants are predominantly left-wing. "Do you have any data" you can Google it, it is well known.
The majority itself is passive. The majority of active participants are left wing and skew young, which by extension are generally pro-inclusion. Anti-diversity standpoints are a minority except for specific cases.
And really, it would be strange if it wasn't, considering the encouragement of anything unfavorable towards a minority is grounds for getting yourself on the fast track to the banlist.
Why would you want to encourage something that hurts other people?
I'll take that to mean that these are your personal opinions and you have no data to back them up.