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Comment by wredcoll | Hacker News Reader

> eloquent description of a generalization of cancel culture, yet the author still went out of her way to virtue signal to readers who would reflexively dismiss any allusion to cancel culture as made up or partisan

Probably because we all know "cancel culture" was an invented, highly partisan and ultimately fake concept.

The proof is as trivial as noticing the people who complained about being cancelled were doing so to audiences of literally millions of people and there's no viable way to reconcile the idea of someone's ideas being somehow hidden when they had some of the highest cultural recognition of anything at the time.

Also, for the last time, stating a fact is not what "virtue signalling" means and I wish people would bother to learn what words meant before they repeated them.

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> Probably because we all know "cancel culture" was an invented, highly partisan and ultimately fake concept.

No, we don't all know that. There's a whole Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture. Denying its existence is just a lazy rhetorical tactic to deflect criticism of antisocial behavior and censorship.

> stating a fact is not what "virtue signalling" means and I wish people would bother to learn what words meant before they repeated them

Non sequitur. The factuality of cancel culture's non-existence is immaterial here. If a piece of writing includes a tangent that serves no other purpose than to signal to a subset of the audience that the author is "one of them", that's virtue signaling.

> No, we don't all know that. There's a whole Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture. Denying its existence is just a lazy rhetorical tactic to deflect criticism of antisocial behavior and censorship.

There's a wikipedia article about the earth being flat and moon landing hoaxes and so on and so forth. People wanting something to be true does not make it so.

You literally prove my point by saying censorship as if that was possibly related.

The people who talked about "being cancelled" were wealthy celebrities who could spread their message as far as they wanted. Equating being disinvited from a conference with censorship is incredibly disengenous.

So is referring to it as "antisocial behavior". There are, quite frankly, very things that are more deeply a part of human socializing than telling someone else that they're wrong and should shut up.

Cancel culture being a thing is one of those memes that people spread, and much like the meme of republicans being good for the federal government, it causes real problems when people start to believe it via repetition.

This is an odd response. Wikipedia does not in any way claim that the moon landing was faked or that flat Earth theory is legitimate.

The insinuation that I "want it to be true" is silly. Why would I want cancel culture to exist? I'd prefer that it not. I'd be thrilled if everyone were nice to each other, social media were a thriving hub of only productive good faith discourse, and reddit mods had no interest in censoring everyone and everything they personally disagree with.

It sounds like you find cancel culture inconvenient to acknowledge, for whatever reason, and want to project that cognitive dissonance onto others.

> The insinuation that I "want it to be true" is silly. Why would I want cancel culture to exist

People want cancel culture to be real in the same way they want jews to be spreading the black plague. It lets you take reactionary measures based on false premises.

Everytime people bring up "cancel culture" they're using it as a justification for silencing an opposing viewpoint. Thats why they want it to exist, so they can justify a reaction to it.

What happens is that someone says something, then someone else criticizes them, and they try to shutdown that criticism by invoking the concept of cancel culture.

That's the part I object to. Criticism is just as valid as the initial speech and we need to protect it, doubly so when so frequently the ideas people are trying to protect are so objectively abhorrent.

I don't find the "cancel culture inconvenient to acknowledge"; I find talking about it as if it's real gives cover and justification for other antisocial and otherwise negative actions.

I cannot stress enough that telling some asshole to get out of your house and stop saying racist slurs is a perfectly norma and good social interaction that's healthy for society.

Social media is full of politically motivated bullying, harassment, and censorship. That should be readily apparent to anyone who's ever used the internet. That's what cancel culture is, not a dispute with rude houseguests.

I'm not sure why you're so insistent on denying this that you'd compare Wikipedia — and everyone quoted on the subject therein, including presidents from both parties and the former pope — with antisemitic conspiracy theorists.

Who are you implying I intend to silence? I'm commenting on it because I oppose cancel culture, which is the opposite of wanting to silence opposing viewpoints.

People who use the term "cancel culture" are trying to silence their critics. If this isn't what you intend, you may wish to reexamine the words you use and how you use them. Because you keep bringing up wikipedia, lets actually quote from it:

> n October 2017, sexual assault allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein led to the cancellation of his projects, his expulsion from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and legal consequences, including a conviction on charges of rape and sexual assault.

Is this the cancel culture you're so vehemently against? People disassociating from Harvey Weinstein because of his history of sexual abuse?

How about the next one:

> In November 2017, comedian Louis C.K. admitted to sexual misconduct allegations and, as a result, his shows were canceled, distribution deals were terminated, and he was dropped by his agency and management.

Is this more of that cancel culture you're trying to get rid of?

I'll pick an example I like from that page:

> According to Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan professor of media studies, canceling someone is a form of "cultural boycott" and cancel culture is the "ultimate expression of agency", which is "born of a desire for control [as] people have limited power over what is presented to them on social media" and a need for "accountability which is not centralized".[3][42][43]

There's some abstract talk about "mob justice" and "disproportionate response" but that is so far from reality that attempting to use it as a guideline for what's actually happening is laughable.

In the actual, real world, cases, rich and powerful people with nearly infinite access to spreading their own speech are complaining about being disinvited from college speeches or even fired from their tv show.

Here's a follow up: in your definition of the word and your understanding of reality, do you claim the jk rowling was cancelled or experienced cancelled culture and if so was this a bad thing?

You're attacking a straw man. I didn't say I supported Harvey Weinstein, and I don't have any strong opinions on J.K. Rowling.

Why are you so focused on wealthy celebrities? They're a tiny minority of the population and inherently the ones least harmed by cancel culture. You can't really doxx a celebrity, and trying to have them censored or financially ruined is a much larger hurdle than for ordinary people.

I don't intend to silence anyone, critics or otherwise. I welcome all constructive criticism. You're just inventing a motive and arbitrarily assigning it to a phrase you don't like.

On a meta level, this whole subthread proves my original point. Whether or not you actually support cancel culture, what you're attacking right now is vocabulary. It sounds a lot like how certain people online react to the term "cisgender". Having a commonly understood term for a thing that exists isn't offensive; it's just how language works.

> Having a commonly understood term for a thing that exists isn't offensive; it's just how language works.

I repeat my claim that you're trying to wish this thing into existence by using words.

Words and language matter because they help shape how we think and what actions we take.

It's easy to notice that you refuse to actually engage with any attempt to meaningfully define the term "cancel culture" instead you just use it as a phase with no inherent meaning except the negative ones you need it to have at any given moment.

I'll repeat myself here: the idea that cancel culture actually exists is deliberately fomented by a small group of people and those people are doing this in order to attempt to protect certain ideas from criticism.

> I don't intend to silence anyone, critics or otherwise.

You say this but this is literally what the proponents of the idea of cancel culture are attempting to do. This is why they invented the term cancel culture, in order to silence people.

Yes, I get it, they're coopting terms that appear to mean the opposite of how they're using them. Shockingly, people lie a lot.

> Why are you so focused on wealthy celebrities? They're a tiny minority of the population and inherently the ones least harmed by cancel culture

Because they're literally the only example anyone can ever come up with of "cancel culture". If we're not talking about wealthy celebrities, what exactly are we talking about?

You're imagining an exchange that didn't happen. At no point have I declined to provide a definition upon request. In fact, I went out of my way to provide both a Wikipedia link and my own off-the-cuff paraphrasing.

That being said, here is my answer to your question: I would broadly define cancel culture as a culture of engaging in grassroots campaigns to materially punish, ostracize, and/or silence sources of speech which one finds disagreeable.

I'm not sure what you think celebrities being the most prominent (debatable) examples proves. That's practically a tautology. It's not difficult to find specific known impacted individuals who weren't celebrities, whom I'm hesitant to name out of respect. Having said that, here are two general examples off the top of my head:

1. Ostensibly non-political major subreddits setting automod to indiscriminately ban anyone with a past comment in /r/conservative. This quietly hits large numbers of nameless people on a daily basis, and manual moderation activity isn't much better (particularly on subreddits that are actually related to politics).

2. A recent campaign of targeted doxxing and harassment against authors of distasteful remarks regarding Charlie Kirk's assassination, including reports to employers with intent to cause financial harm. This is one current prominent example, but there are many others in relation to pretty much any controversial political issue.

I've given no indication of bad faith, so I'm not sure why you insist on accusing me of lying about my preference that cancel culture not exist. It's an anathema to free speech and privacy, and ultimately bad for everyone.

I just want to point put there that your argument's exact same rhetorical structure could be (and has been) used to deny "rape culture":

E.g. - "Rape is illegal and prosecuted, so how can we have a 'rape culture'?" - "That's not rape culture, that's just individual bad actors" - "People criticizing women's clothing choices is normal social interaction" - "Rape culture is a partisan feminist concept like [insert dismissive comparison]"

The parallel is that both involve:

1. Demanding an impossibly narrow definition (complete silence vs. systematic legal tolerance) 2. Dismissing patterns as "just normal social behavior" 3. Focusing on whether the most extreme version exists rather than whether there's a meaningful phenomenon worth discussing 4. Using the term's political associations to avoid engaging with the substance

The irony is particularly sharp when you argue that "telling someone to shut up" is quintessentially social while simultaneously arguing that coordinated efforts to damage someone's reputation/livelihood for speech don't constitute a distinct social phenomenon worth naming.

> The proof is as trivial as ...

That proof doesn't hold as an argument. You're arguing that if people got a message out then it isn't cancel culture, but if people didn't get a message out because they were cancelled then people just wouldn't talk about it. It is setting up a rhetorical position where taboos can't exist and we know that they do.

Cancel culture might not exist depending on what people think it mean. The term is a bit vague. But arguing that some people managed to push past the cancellation attempts doesn't mean that there isn't anything there. We'd expect cancel culture to have some cancellation attempts that ended in failure, the authoritarians are fallible humans too. And although they tend to be good at wielding government power the extreme authoritarians do tend to be ideologically isolated and so struggle to act when people pay attention to them.

Look, "cancel culture" is almost as vague a term as "communism" and tends to be used in the same way: as a thought terminating pejorative description for anything someone doesn't like.

If we want to have an actual conversation about it we'd have to come up with some kind of working definition of the term that was actually useful enough to discuss existing examples with.

The wikipedia article on cancel culture uses an example of people disassociating from harvey weinstein and ultimately charging him with crimes related to sexual abuse. Is this cancel culture?

If a university employee invites a celebrity to come give a lecture one evening and then a bunch of students ask the university to cancel the invitation, is this cancel culture? Is it morally wrong?

Is the person who makes the original statement deserving of some kind of extra protection for this speech over the responding person who is trying to criticize this speech?

A cursory look at the real world, actual examples, of how people attempted to use the term "cancel culture" it was invariably part of an attempt to prevent criticism of (mostly) right wing ideas.

What actually happened was some number of right wingers tried to give speeches and got yelled at and then started complaining about cancel culture and trying to prevent future criticisms.

Like, at the level we're discussing we're talking about things like ethics/morality/social standards, right? What is good and virtuous for society to permit and encourage. Trying to "cancel" people who are "bad" by using speech to criticize or contradict or even ask people to stop associating with them is a good thing.

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