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Comment by huhkerrf | Hacker News Reader

Things seem to have cooled down on the cancellation front since the peak fever of 2020 and 2021, so I don't see it as much anymore. But for a while, the rejoinder of the cancellers was always, "well, he can just find a different job" or "he got a different job, cancelled yeah right."

As if the job was all that mattered.

We are social creatures. Shunning and ostracism have a significant impact, even when happening by people we don't know, especially when it's a pile-on.

I'm not saying there's never a reason to shun someone. If people do something terrible, cut ties with them. I don't think that's what a lot of this is, though. If it was, it wouldn't happen on such flimsy evidence and it wouldn't happen to people others don't even know.

Most cancellations are a blood letting, where people are trying to feel powerful and the cancelled (or even the wronged) don't really matter.

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That's also why, generally, apologies don't matter. Go look at an apology of a "cancelled" person.

How many replies are about how the apology sounds hollow, or how a PR person must have written it?

It's surely not your contention that said apologies sound hollow because there is nothing really to apologise for and therefore it is inherently untrue?

There are some challenges with media-based apologies because they can only be done at all through media PR systems, of course, and there's an impact therefore on the shape and style of an apology that Marshall McLuhan might have written about if he were still here.

So there's an element of apology fatigue that will prompt some of those replies.

But even then, apologies that sound hollow or sound written by PR generally are somewhat hollow or written with help from, or experience of, PR. Usually the PR of a law firm, right?

It is wholly possible to apologise in ways that do not have those qualities, and wholly possible for people to recognise them.

>It's surely not your contention that said apologies sound hollow because there is nothing really to apologise for and therefore it is inherently untrue?

I can not understand at all how you got that from my message.

As for the rest of what you're saying. Yes, there's a way to apologize in a way that don't have those qualities, and it's apologizing directly to the people you've wronged, if you have. Apologizing to a faceless group is pointless.

That's why it was a question.

> Apologizing to a faceless group is pointless.

Well... it might be at least pragmatic. Apologising to the wider community for wronging a member of the community is normal; it's also expected.

And I guess apologising to one's audience for not being who they think you are is essentially, the same thing, just with a parasocial twist.

Parasocial "communities" exist (fandoms) and they do rather complicate things.

Apologizing to the mob is more likely to backfire: It's seen as an admission of guilt and that they're right to "cancel" the person.

Yeah, you should apologize before the mob forms. This is much more important for large corporations, if they do a big screwup and apologizes after massive backlash, that is bad, but if they apologize before the massive backlash its much better.

> It is wholly possible to apologise in ways that do not have those qualities, and wholly possible for people to recognise them.

I have watched many of these apologies to a crowd, the problem is they never satiate the crowd, only further cementing the idea that something worse happened.

I ask that anyone in this situation to never apologise it will never help your situation.

I absolutely do not agree with public pile-ons, social media hysteria, or understandable mistakes leading to cancellation. Everyone should be able to make mistakes and learn from them -- that is incredibly important.

But shame is also incredibly important in that it causes self-policing of social norms. There is no way that society would work if everyone just did things that benefited them with no regard to others, in ways that weren't actively harmful but just annoying. That's why we have norms and enforce them with shame. If this gets broken down because people use shaming inappropriately then it will be used as a reason to do away with shaming completely. We see this trend happening and its continuation can only lead to bad outcomes.

Agreed. Additionally, negative sanctions have been part of human life since the beginning. Anyone who has raised a child or pet understands this.

This discussion of far more nuanced than many of the comments in this post address. It's true people are often swiftly found guilty in the public eye without due process - see most true crime - but it's also true such sanctions have their place.

On the flip side of cancellation, I wonder how much people cancelling are hurting themselves by sticking to retaliation.

Go read about the psychology of forgiveness. There are some pros to "letting it go", when appropriate.

Well, maybe women who’ve been sexually harassed for most of their lives, and who couldn’t even feel safe at their own community events, were fed up with “letting it go.”

(Caveat: I have no idea what happened with this particular person.)

People making judgements without having all the facts is the main issue here.

I think the main issue is people being fed up with society treating them like crap and taking advantage of an opportunity to do something about it.

And where ‘something about it’ is treating someone else like crap who probably didn’t deserve it?

I mean, that’s not great. But saying “they shouldn’t do that” accomplishes nothing. People will wield their power to cancel whether you like it or not. Want it to end? Work towards making people feel like they can actually seek justice whenever they are wronged.

Ultimately, I admit that I'm much more troubled by women routinely getting threatened and harassed for daring to speak up against their assailants than the occasional undeserving victim of cancel culture. One problem is just orders of magnitude more common than the other.

What will really happen is people will just tune out all women due to this, because it’s more convenient. It’s not like they get paid to pay attention eh?

And the pendulum swings.

In office environments anyway, the false accusations I’ve seen were easily an order of magnitude more common than actual issues. Transparently so.

When investigating, I’ve had multiple women flat out admit they were making the accusations to get retribution or leverage to get the accused party to go back to them.

> In office environments anyway, the false accusations I’ve seen were easily an order of magnitude more common than actual issues. Transparently so.

It probably wasn't always like that, but when accusations got more powerful and less risky then of course bad actors start doing it more. Women aren't better than men, they just attack people in different ways.

"well, he can just find a different job" they said while trying to make it impossible for that person to find another job.

Many, many people deserve to be shunned or ostracized.

The inverse here is that we should all be forced to like people we don't like. Well, that's stupid.

If you're an asshole then I don't want to hang out with you. Doesn't matter what, specifically, you did to be an asshole, as long as it's legitimate (not a lie).

Yes, I'm going to "shun" people I don't like. Not because I'm evil or I even want to harm them. I don't. I'm only thinking about myself - not them. Okay, I want to have a good time, so that necessarily means I can't be around people I don't like. So, there.

If that's cancellation well then, cancel me back in retaliation.

> Things seem to have cooled down on the cancellation front since the peak fever of 2020 and 2021, so I don't see it as much anymore. But for a while, the rejoinder of the cancellers was always, "well, he can just find a different job" or "he got a different job, cancelled yeah right."

Thank god society got more mature since then and didn't participate in imagine some kind of doxing app for this purpose :)

Sure, if you ignore the federal government of the united states.

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