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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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I think short of laws with teeth protecting the jobs of randos, or the big platforms adopting policies that would reduce cancellation

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.