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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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