Comment by ElevenLathe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ElevenLathe | Hacker News Reader

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That's what I get for making predictions!

What pronouncements do you mean? Who in the left is making them? What does it mean to cancel someone? I guess you mean things like a celebrity saying something unsavory and then a fan campaign on Twitter getting them written off of a show? I can't say how I understand that to have anything to do with political economy (except in that literally everything happening on the planet does) and definitely not the left.

Also, my understanding is that being written off of a show is on the harsher end of things that have been called "being cancelled". Most are really just instances where somebody has had something (or lots of things) mean written about them. By this measure, I was cancelled several times on LiveJournal in middle school, Nixon was cancelled repeatedly in hundreds of newspapers, and Ea-nasir was cancelled in a clay tablet in like 1700 BCE.

Anyway, this kind of stuff hardly seems to matter at all, and I can't find any way to connect it to leftism. Or do I misunderstand?

The Yale Halloween controversy involved a couple who were cancelled in a way that it would be disingenuous to describe as hardly mattering at all:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new...

For me the most illuminating cancellation was that of Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla, in 2014. He was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla because someone unearthed that he had made a $1000 donation in support of California's Proposition 8 of 2008, the California Marriage Protection Act, which was approved by the voters. It was upheld in State court but was overturned by a federal court.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mozilla-ceo-prop-8-controver...

With the note that I still don't understand how these incidents relate to leftism at all, or even with elected Democratic officials, I did look into these two things. (https://archive.ph/jN2Up is a non-paywalled version of the first URL, btw)

For the Yale incident, it seems this was basically just some people being mean to a couple professors because of an email blast they sent out. One of the professors still works for Yale and the other quit a year later, so it doesn't seem that anybody was fired over it, just more spilled ink. The one who quit has since had a book on the NYT bestseller list so even voluntarily quitting doesn't seem to have really hurt her career.

In the Mozilla case, this was basically just some people saying they disagree with the CEO of their company about gay marriage, and he eventually resigned. Even if he was really forced out by the board or something and the "resignation" is a nicety for the public statement, this just seems like a "risk" of making millions of dollars being a tech CEO. If your employees are gonna quit over some political donation unless you resign, your choices are basically: 1) let them quit, 2) don't write the check, or 3) write the check and resign. He probably didn't know he was choosing 3 when he wrote the check but lots of things in business are like that, and he probably could have chosen 1 if he'd actually owned the company but apparently he didn't. Also, he is now some other flavor of tech CEO (Brave Software, which seems to be trying to market a browser while also running what is presumably a crypto scam?). Again, no real consequences.

If "cancel culture" is just what we call it now when rich, powerful people have mean things said to them then yeah, it hardly seems to matter at all.

I guess I have a lower threshold for what constitutes nasty, destructive, unjustified behavior than you do.

Guess so! Anyway thanks for letting me interrogate you. I've never before had the chance to understand what people who are scared of "cancel culture" are actually upset about.

Get "canceled" in your own work or social sphere, or in social media in a way that filters down to your work or social sphere for saying, writing, being recorded doing (or saying) something that doesn't fit the dominant ideological narrative of modern culture, and maybe you'll rapidly find out just why and how some people get scared of cancel culture. Sure, Stalinist show trials or Maoist purges these things in our modern western world certainly are not, but examples abound and in a non-lethal modern context, they can be very damaging indeed.

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