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These are the exact arguments that were trotted out in defense of people like the okay sign guy that got fired, and they fell on deaf ears. For 10 years.
Why should these arguments be seriously considered now that the shoe is on the other foot?
I agree that cancelling random people is really, really bad for society. But it seems insane to me to expect the side that's been on the receiving end for a decade to listen to these arguments.
The problem with decentralized cancellation is that no one person controls it. I've found cancellation distasteful for years, even as a relatively left-of-center person, and there's no Pope of Cancel Culture I can appeal to to make things stop. I'm not even on most social media platforms, and even when I'm on them I've cultivated a very separate little bubble, so I have literally no say in what anyone on "my side" does.
I think short of laws with teeth protecting the jobs of randos, or the big platforms adopting policies that would reduce cancellation, I can't see this changing. And unfortunately, the incentives of the attention economy mean that most big platforms like the angry froth of cancellation, and many states have at-will employment, and probably don't have much will to approach cancellation from this angle.
You say the arguments "fell on deaf ears", but who were the ears that could hear and could possibly do anything about this?
CEO of Cloudflare had ears, and a sense of self-awareness to know he was opening pandora's box when he made his move against Stormfront. Apple and Amazon had ears when they were pulling Confederate and other RW imagery from their stores. ACLU could have maintained its usual tone instead of landsliding into progressive ideals. And am I to presume that heads of Google and Facebook were never availed of these concerns?
The rabble is hard to control, yes. And yet various captains of industry, historied organizations, and formerly libertanian-ish techbros either bent the knee, got fully on board, or played along out of fear of looking x-ist. A platform like Twitter can stuff its Trust & Safety Board with all stripes of feminist, POC, and LGBTQ advocates with nary a conservative in sight, and nobody on the inside recognizes how fucked up this is. It is impossible for me to believe that there was nobody in a position to listen to these concerns. They were indeed heard, and considered either naive, old-fashioned, or even dangerous.
These 'leaders' had every opportunity to stand athwart their mobs, wait them out, and go back to selling sneakers to Republicans. They passed it up. And I think it's worth remembering that a lot of this turn was occurring before Trump stepped off the golden escalator.
Okay, but if your position is that people in power "have ears", then I would ask what power we have to avoid them?
If it's not the Cthulhu of the masses we're trying to wrangle, then it is the power of the Cathedral or whatever right wing power brokers have going on, and we have basically no levers to pull on. There's a certain line of argument around warfare that bombing civilians doesn't make sense, because it doesn't directly hurt the military or the people in power who are isolated from the consequences. I think that cancellation works largely the same way. The vast, vast majority of people who are successfully cancelled are random people no one has ever heard of. A rich and powerful enough celebrity is relatively shielded from dire consequences, as evidenced by people like J.K. Rowling.
So if we live in a multipolar society propped up by capitalism making a small number of people almost untouchably powerful, and the powerful people are the only part of cancel culture that can be reasoned with, we're fucked. What levers do we have to affect the CEO of Cloudflare, against the heads of organizations, against private social media corporations?
I again come back to the idea that laws of some kind would be necessary to end cancel culture, and that's a massive coordination problem in its own right. Not to mention that it is unlikely to actually happen if neither side ends up taking a principled stance and supporting an end to cancel culture. A lot of the reactions here on the Motte seem to show that people would be happier with cancel culture as long as their side can get in on it too. What politician do you vote for if you want an end to cancel culture in that environment? What tangible steps can the sane people on both sides who oppose cancel culture no matter who's doing it take?
Fwiw, I would be interested in seeing codified protections for whatever is considered 'abhorrent speech' in any given year. Maybe I'd eventually be a little disgusted by the extent of the leeway in practice, but I can swallow that bitter pill if I think everybody is getting a reasonable share of the security blanket.
I just don't see how we get from here to there without reminding people across the board that they actually have skin in this game too. Something needs to actually force people to the table to avoid an exchange of WMDs, and the only path I see is to make people sweat a bit. And while you may not be able to claim a CEOs scalp this week, you can give them a light preview of where the winds will be blowing soon enough. Fortunately, there's Trump and his incoming admin to handle some of that.
I don't consider people like HD lady to be innocent civilians, although I do feel bad for her. I think these are people who volunteered for the fight, and are now having regrets that a mortar landed in their foxhole. In many a sense, this is ugly, unfair, and not quite hitting the target. But in what I see as a war between roughly two mass psychologies, the ultimate goal is to reprogram the opponent's consensus. That angle of attack can be opened from anywhere. Remember that the death of a fentanyl junkie sent a wide and powerful message that upended US society for years and brought forth new standards everybody had to live with.
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I think we're actually in agreement about all of this; the deaf ears belonged to the unprincipled blue-tinted cancellation mobs which, as you point out, had no central authority to push in any particular direction.
I'm mostly just riffing on the futility of appealing to reason, compassion, or MAD here, when the unprincipled red-tinted would-be cancellation mobs have been watching this play out for a decade and know that the strategy is very effective. I don't think this is a solvable problem in the short term either.
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The big platforms have had no shortage of notable policy changes and enforcements.
Add to that the media and its narratives around harassment. They are absolutely willing to make online harassment a national issue, and have done so repeatedly over the last decade, more or less exclusively when the harassment could be framed as Red on Blue. Blue on Red harassment, on the other hand, has been deliberately facilitated by these same outlets and individuals.
So that's two obvious plausible options.
Okay, but again there's no one to appeal to? If news media turns a blind eye whenever one tribe is doing something, what power do I have to stop it, even if I dislike it? I don't have a megaphone, I don't have any power.
Again, it seems like people here on the Motte are saying, "It's about time we had the power to cancel people - it's been 10 years of one-sided cancellations, and our repeated requests for stopping have been denied!", and I'm just in the position where I feel like people are trying to control Cthulhu or something, and justifying it because of the impossible-to-control eldritch horror on the other side. Don't summon up what you can't put down and all that.
Ending cancellation is a coordination problem, and coordination problems are notoriously hard to solve. The Right now having a better ability to cancel is good for the purposes of "revenge", but I don't actually think it gets us any closer to an equilibrium where the incentive structures are set up to properly mitigate the worst aspects of human tribalism. Parts of the internet sometimes make me wonder if we don't need a Hobbesian Leviathan of some kind to force people to get along online. The more powerful the state, the stronger free speech protections can be, because the less it matters what the people actually think.
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