This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Scott posted Lukianoff And Defining Cancel Culture. He takes one of the given definitions of cancel culture and tries to see how it applies to edge cases, and whether it makes sense as a definition. I thought the comments on the slatestarcodex reddit thread were pretty good. I tried to post a synthesis of the ideas I got while reading the comments:
Cancel culture is speaking about and coordinating your disassociation with a person.
You have the right to not associate with people. You should feel free to exercise that right when you personally notice them doing something you don't like.
To avoid being a part of cancel culture:
Supplemental section.
Applying these to Scott's examples:
A1-A6 are not cancel culture. The actor is taking personal steps to change their association with someone they don't like.
A7-A12 are cancel culture. The actor is trying to coordinate and spread their disassociation with someone.
The other ones are a bit more complex.
B1-B2 The university admin isn't really the prime source of "cancel culture" in this example. It is the newspaper that is trying to publish a juicy story. I think the university admin is fine to resist as much as they feel comfortable resisting, but is not obligated to resist at all. The newspaper is bad, and you should cancel your subscription from that newspaper (and only tell the newspaper why you are cancelling).
B3-B5 It is cancel culture to write the article and focus it on the grad student or any particular person as the problem. If you are able to anonymize the grad student and others involved then it is not very cancel culture. If others then dig deeper and de-anonymize the grad student, they are cancel culture. If you wish to be part of the anti-cancel-culture alliance, probably don't write it at all. If you just wish to follow politeness norms anonymize the people involved to the best of your ability. If you want to be a part of cancel culture make the article entirely about the grad student.
C1 The New York Times was doing cancel culture against Scott. His friends did cancel culture against the New York Times. Scott in his articles about the situation did not encourage cancel culture. Tit-for-tat strategy can be good for getting people to not do things. But it needs to be handled carefully. Retaliate for specific instances against exact people. Do not retaliate for general attacks by generally attacking the other direction.
C2 Scott can personally cancel his subscription and never associate with the Atlantic again. That is not cancel culture. Telling us about it is cancel culture.
I'm late to this thread, but I did read Scott's post a few days ago. I don't love any of his examples or his framing. To me there are three categories to consider:
The first two categories are not cancel culture. They are just economics and personal/group preference. Companies may change their behavior in response to the economic reality, including terminating employees, but these are in response to employees directing the company in an unprofitable direction. The desired outcome, if accomplished at all, is achieved passively. All choices are made by the company in response to changing circumstances. Budweiser, Gillette, and Dixie Chicks all fall into this category.
The third category is cancel culture. It is a direct and active demand on the company to change it's behavior in some way. The company often has no direct economic rationale for taking the action. The action, if taken, is done to placate the mob. Gina Carano was well liked as Cara Dune, but Disney caved under pressure. My own company, who publicly espouses values disconnected from their core mission that are somewhat misaligned from my own, would happily sacrifice me to avoid an online mob, despite my opinions having zero to do with my company's profitability. Indeed, official policy states that an employee is liable to termination if they make controversial posts and are subsequently revealed to be an employee. This has an absolutely chilling effect on speech.
More options
Context Copy link
Tbh, I think the attempt to find a subject matter-neutral definition is pointless, and it's fine for 'cancel culture' to just mean when a group 'cancels' someone for poor reasons in ways that have negative consequences. If someone you know IRL regularly promotes pedophilia and isn't super clear about whether or not they'd actually engage in it themselves, it's fine to suggest that others stay away from that person. Whereas if someone IRL regularly promotes traditional conservatism, then it's absurd to suggest others stay away from that person. There's no difference in 'coordination of disassociation' between the two, but just by my gut the second is 'cancel culture' and the first isn't, and that's fine. I think this is closer to the way people actually use 'cancel culture'.
If someone in your gaming clan groomed a minor, so you dm your friends to have your friends ban them from any other groups they're admin in, that is "cancel culture" by your definition (grooming a minor over the internet is speech!), but I don't think the definition should include it. Or in another example, say you're running a regular rationalist meetup, and you hear from other rationalist community members that an infrequent attendee has been stalking/harassing other community members and has generally become unstable. You look at some of the evidence they sent, and in part because of your experience the last time you let such a person come anyway, you ban the person from your meetups indefinitely. This is, by your definition, cancel culture. But I think it's good, because such pruning is necessary to have fun events. This does not feel, to me, like cancel culture. But attempts to kick people out for being conservative or racist look exactly like that! Someone will claim racism necessarily harasses and harms minorities, sexism makes women not want to attend, and so banning the person is just pragmatic. (although because blah blah witches, the overlap between the two groups is much higher than you'd expect by chance) And when they do it, it's cancel culture, and a very central example! The reason we care about cancel culture is because it is/was common and is bad. There's no reason to adopt a formal definition that includes reasonable behavior as well.
More options
Context Copy link
Not being able to persuade others to stop associating with a bad actor seems to be an overreach of a definition of cancel culture. Either you prohibit sharing anything negative or you end up trying to define what is a legitimate or illegitimate reason to call people out.
My opinion is that cancel culture operates at a level removed from the actual behavior you dislike and is more about interactions with third parties. To put forward my own definition: cancel culture is when you attempt to compel others who are not directly performing an objectionable behavior to disassociate from that objectionable behavior. Just trying to spread the reason you personally disengaged or persuade another party of the badness of a particular action is not cancel culture.
The type of behavior defined above is toxic because it puts people or organizations in the position of having to take sides in areas which may be completely unrelated to what they do. This is why many things are splitting towards either woke or anti-woke stances and neutral is becoming harder to find.
A real-world example of this is the idea that "if you have 10 people sitting at a table and one is a Nazi, you have a table of 10 Nazis." Cancel culture is the idea that some things are too awful to interact with in any way; not denouncing and disassociating from them is sufficient proof you hold objectionable ideas.
This definition doesn't require debates over sharing comments like "that reporter who you think is honest has published a bunch of lies" or "the leader of that animal welfare charity secretly kicks puppies" which I do not think any reasonable definition of cancel culture should prohibit.
As long as you can interact with someone who continues to read that reporter or support that charity despite what you consider bad behavior then you have a society where people with differing opinions can live and work productively together. While this does not prevent people from deciding as a group that they dislike a behavior, a world where people followed this rule would mitigate the worst effects where third parties are pressured into deplatforming while leaving the freedom for people to stop directly supporting things they find horrible.
From Scott's sets of examples, I think this definition would define as cancel culture A5 onwards (unsubscribing from content simply because it platformed actors you dislike), B1 (newspapers holding the university responsible for non-official behavior of an employee), and possibly C2 (holding Atlantic workers responsible could go either way for me depending on whether or not they're in an official capacity at the time). It also leaves me agreeing with P3.
More options
Context Copy link
I think the entire view isn't focusing enough on minority, plurality, and majority viewpoints. To wit, my own theory: Cancel Culture is when too many people all exercise their Freedom of Association in the same way at the same time. You can't know if any example of what you are doing is good or bad without considering the way the rest of the world will act. This applies regardless of the topic.
An extended analogy to dating to demonstrate what I mean. Romance, we can agree for the sake of the discussion, is an area where FoA is, and of right ought to be, absolutely sacrosanct. No one can force you to date or be attracted to someone you aren't attracted to or don't want to date. And no problems arise from this, provided that everyone's preferences are kaleidoscopically unique and match up with the diversity of options available. This is the utopian vision of FoA: a lid for every pot.
Imagine a Midwestern high school, with a student body that is more or less entirely varieties of mixed up European white mutt, with no particular dominant strain. Within this student body, some boys prefer sunny blondes, others sultry brunettes, and a few happen to really have a thing for redheads. On the flip side those same groups of boys find the other girls outside their preference less attractive, the blondes too dumb, the brunettes too boring, the redheads too pasty, respectively. This is fine, terrific even, certainly not a problem, provided that the rate of boys with those preferences lines up close enough to the rate of girls with those hair colors that everyone has a reasonable chance to get a date. If 40% of guys prefer blondes, 40% love brunettes, and 20% worship redheads; and 40% of girls are blonde, 40% are brunette, and 20% are readheads, then we win. FoA is great, we all get to date a girl we find really pretty, or be courted by a boy who finds us really pretty, respectively. On the flip side, if 90% of the boys are crazy about blondes, the remaining 10% prefer brunettes, and no one will touch a redhead, but we keep the percentages from above; then we get a distorted market. FoA is good, is sacrosanct in dating, but it has lead to negative outcomes: the blondes are besieged with fetishizing fawning attention, the brunettes are left competing desperately for the attention of just a few men, and the redheads are out in the cold.
Without violating strict FoA and forcing anyone to do anything, in the first scenario where everyone's preferences match up with availability, there's nothing wrong with allowing or even encouraging hair-color fetishism. Men, refuse to date any girl that doesn't have your preferred hair! But in the latter case, it would make sense to push the opposite message, hair color doesn't really matter that much, as such a message will make everyone happier.
We can play with this pet example in a million ways, with ranked rather than strict preferences, with touchy subjects like skin color or height instead of low stakes examples like hair color. But in all cases, I root for the less common preferences, and decry the more common. I love to see a girl cheat on her tall husband with a short king! Because I know girls who are 5'2" who won't date a guy under 6', that market is deeply distorted, so I love to see the opposite preference in action!
The problems don't occur from any one individual having preferences and exercising their freedom of association to enact them, they come from too many people having the same preferences and enacting their freedom of association together.
Back to Cancel Culture. FoA, and Freedom of Speech, require that no one is forced to hang out with anyone else, listen to anyone else, publish speech they don't agree with. And that is fine inasmuch as everyone else doesn't happen to have the same opinions, such that people get unpersoned. This is the basic American values of freedom we were taught growing up. If we all choose to freely associate in the same way at the same time, it becomes freedom-limiting rather than freedom exercising. This is the Christian virtue of reaching out to the oppressed and the outcast, visiting the sick and the imprisoned. There is virtue in eating lunch at school with the kid sitting by himself, even when you don't really want to.
McCarthyism was bad, according to this teaching, not because there weren't any Communists, and not because the Communists were right or weren't bad. It was bad because it lead to people being driven out of society, forced out of their professions. It ultimately failed because there were enough people who didn't really care all that much, and were willing to hire blacklisted workers, but for the brief moments when everyone did care, the results were tragic, with people totally shunned and unable to earn a living. Communists were wrong, but a man has a right to earn a living. I don't particularly object to any individual employer saying something like, my favorite uncle died in Budapest in '56, I'll never hire anyone who breathes a positive word about Lenin. But if everyone decides that no one who has ever breathed a positive word about Lenin can work for them, then we've got a problem.
Boycotts are the same. The Bud Light boycott is a good thing, regardless of your level of agreement with the motivation and rhetoric, because it represented a group that wasn't being heard in the discourse, and it inflicted pain for ignoring their demands. Companies hewed closer to mainstream views, and avoided strong stances. Bud Light was good because you can still be a libtard beer company, but you know what you will lose if you do. But you can also be a conservative beer company. Let a thousand flowers bloom! Cancel culture is bad when you can't be something, not when being something causes you to lose 30% of your sales. A moderate range of consequences isn't Cancel Culture, a total loss of ability to associate is.
If you want to avoid engaging in cancel culture, avoid being in the majority. Always be skeptical of the crowd, the mob, the herd. Refuse to be bullied into what is popular. Since anything worth doing is worth doing with fake numbers, the moment more than 20% of people agree with you, reassess your views and see if they will be harmful if everyone holds them. If you see something, don't just complain, reach out. Support places, like our very own Motte, where any voice can be heard. I started using Twitter after the Musk takeover for that reason, I wanted to support a free speech positive platform, even if it has had its problems since.
That's a terrible definition. Cancel Culture has nothing to do with Freedom of Association, and if you want to argue otherwise you should at least go through some high-profile cancellation attempts and show how they are in any way connected to it. When Scott got doxxed and a horde of people tried to get him fired from his clinic and bullied him to the point where he locked himself in a room and had nervous breakdown, was that Freedom of Association? When Meghan Murphy tried to make an event and booked a venue she already worked with before, planned on keeping it secret until the last day as per her own anti-cancellation protocol, but ended up publishing at the insistence of the venue itself, which double pinky-promised they will not cancel her and will not cave to pressure, but did in fact cave to pressure and canceled her, when activists started vandalizing it and harassing the staff - is that like a brunette being passed over for a blonde?
Let's not descend to this level of pathos based arguments, people have nervous breakdowns or kill themselves for all kinds of reasons. It doesn't grant one moral power that one has gotten upset, one's interior emotional state as a result of actions doesn't make those actions right or wrong. They stand or fall on their own merits.
That said, the clinic choosing to fire Scott is clearly the clinic exercising their FoA. They decide they don't want to be associated with Scott, based on the things that people are calling the clinic to tell them about him. Or merely because they would choose not to be associated with someone so controversial. The alternative, to say that the clinic is obligated to retain Scott regardless of what anyone says about him or the amount of controversy he engenders, is obviously to abrogate the clinic's FoA. That's the debate we're having here. The Clinic is free to choose who it wants associated with it; and people at large are free to decide that they will or will not associate with the Clinic based on their choices of who they associate themselves with. It is absurd to say that the Clinic is required to associate with people, and absurd to say that people are forced to associate themselves with the Clinic. But at some point in that process of everyone exercising that FoA, we get a Problem. Maybe we draw the line at people telling the Clinic they won't associate with it, but secrecy and confusion seems like a poor strategy for achieving rational ends, more like to end in superstition than in good outcomes. So I'm trying to draw a different line: we need to limit the freedom for majorities to associate.
I know nothing about Meghan Murphy, so I'm not going to get into a nebulous debate about it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree pretty much across the board with you except with C1-C2. Intent matters, and since we can't read minds all we have to judge on is the actions taken.
B1-B2 is not cancel culture because the university has plausible denial that their motivation is protecting their reputation from a smear campaign rather than shutting the speech of the grad student. That said, it's a cowardly decision, and it being taken over and over again rather than defending their employees's right to their opinions is what gives cancel culture its power, so it should still be opposed by anti-cancel culture.
B3-B5 again intent matters but we can only tell by the actions taken. Journalists are pretty transparent thankfully. It's really obvious when a journalist's writing is oriented towards encouraging people to take action to get someone fired or really genuinely informing them.
For C1, I don't think Scott's friends engaged in cancel culture because of the target of the letter. Going only by the detail in this article (I didn't read the whole drama when it happened): "Some of my friends made an open letter/petition asking them not to do this". I haven't read the whole letter, but unless it ended with an appeal to other readers to unsubscribe from the NYT if they didn't comply with their demands (it might have, though I would assume that's a relevant detail Scott would have included in this post), then they deserve the benefit of the doubt that their actions were to persuade the NYT and not threaten them.
For C2, I don't think Scott telling us about it is cancel culture. Though reading it has lowered my already low opinion of The Atlantic, I think that wasn't Scott's goal. I think he mostly wanted to show that when someone's widely stated opinion feels like a personal attack against you it's difficult to have detachment and to not go on crusade against them.
*EDIT:
Another aspect I think is important to highlight is intent to what. I would define it as intent to cause damage to someone's associations (personal or professional) for speech unrelated to those associations. For instance, a hardware store employee's political opinions are unrelated to their job, so trying to get them fired for their opinion is cancel culture. A politician's political opinions are related to their job so campaigning against them is not cancel culture. There are more complex and murky cases.
a) Trying to get fired a programmer at a games studio having expressed an opinion on a forum a year ago that they believe there should never be gay people (or straight white men) in games is cancel culture because it's not something that's related to their job.
b) Trying to get fired a WRITER/DESIGNER at a games studio having expressed an opinion on a forum a year ago that they believe there should never be gay people (or straight white men) in games is... a tough call, dependant on how much they let their personal opinion drive their professional conduct. In general I believe people should be given the benefit of the doubt, but I wouldn't begrudge people keeping an eye on someone like that.
c) Trying to get people to boycott games from a studio because they wrote a blog post on their website saying that they believe there should never be gay people (or straight white men) in games is not cancel culture.
By that aspect, Scott's friends writing to the NYT and Scott writing about The Atlantic is not cancel culture because the articles that sparked a reaction IS their job. If they had written those articles on their personal blogs, it would have been a tough call, dependant on how much they let their personal opinion drive their professional conduct. For a straight up journalist writing factual stories (if that still exists), then I would give them the benefit of the doubt, but for an opinion columnist, then the lack of distinction between their opinion and their job is pretty much the point of their job, so...
More options
Context Copy link
This is a good definition. Other commenters have mentioned that punishment being disproportionate is a key aspect of cancel culture, but I don't think it's necessarily bad. Punishment being disproportionate is how people build moral systems that are effective in keeping people from breaking them all the time. 'Cancel culture' is a pejorative term for this process, used when the speaker doesn't like the moral system being developed. But the same process is responsible for creating the morals we all take for granted.
If a punishment is legible and it is easy to predict what punishment follows from which transgressions, then:
Some comments pointed out that part of how cancel culture work is being illegible. That would be like the Anti-Speed party removing Speed Limit signs to have a chilling effect and people don't even try to push it.
Scott (I believe) coined the term "coordinated meanness" to refer to legible punishments.
More options
Context Copy link
Whatever happened to "an eye for an eye"? Or to use Scott's preferred historical example:
It fell to the Chicago Way. "He pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue."
I didn't like that movie at all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think one of the comments was also on to something when he said that cancel culture is also about action out-of-proportion to the perceived transgression. Which is now not only about the loss of reputation and resulting disassociation, but also deplatforming or in extreme cases firing from the job. Potentially also debanking or who knows, maybe in the future your heating or electricity could be shut down.
I think the problem with adding "action out-of-proportion to the perceived transgression" is that it sort of absolves everyone of responsibility and doesn't really solve the cancel culture problem.
@YE_GUILTY also discusses this point below.
If someone says something that annoys me, its not really out of proportion for me to say "hey that thing you said annoyed me, and I don't really want to talk with you anymore".
Now, imagine a million other people also say what I said. And the person that said the naughty thing has a public facing job where they need to talk to random people. The company would probably be justified in firing them, since they will be worse at their job if they ever run into one of these million people that refuse to talk with them.
No one individually took an action that is out of proportion to the transgression. The million people only expressed their right to not associate with people they don't like. And the employer responded appropriately to mildly pissing off 1 million people. But the person who said something naughty still gets punished in a way that is out of proportion. So how do you stop the out of proportion punishment? My answer is that you need to avoid the point where a million people are saying "I'm never gonna talk with you".
This depends on what they said, on where they said it, and on what you'd otherwise be talking with them about, doesn't it? Even for a public-facing job?
If they say they think birth control is a sin they could never support, maybe you should find someone else to go to for a prescription but you should be fine with going to them for a soda. CVS might want to fire someone like them from the pharmacy but not from the checkout counter.
If they say to their friends that homosexuals/billionaires/Wiccans/Christians/Muslims/Republicans/whoever should repent their evil ways, maybe that's a deal breaker for you to talk to them as a friend, but unless they're preaching to their customers too you ought to be okay talking to them as a customer.
We made it out of devastating religious wars not because everybody stopped believing that infidels and heretics on the other teams would burn in Hell, but just because we got a little more tolerant and stopped deciding that we needed to rush the job on Earth.
Pillarisation is such an embarrassing failure mode for a society. It's so easy to find a bubble of like-minded people online that we do it almost by default, but at least eventually you have to go offline and touch grass and figure out how your worldview integrates with random people who might react with shock at some of the assumptions your in-group take for granted. That's a partial solution to a problem, not an extra problem in need of a solution.
Maybe I'm just pissing into the wind here, though. Part of the trouble with everybody bubbling up is that eventually the assumptions in a bubble online do legitimately become too shocking for someone to want to interact with you offline in any capacity. The Home Depot lady didn't just say her political opponents were awful people, nor even that one should be tried and executed, she said one should be shot dead by a random gunman. I'm not a Trump voter, but I'm not familiar with what her other triggers might be and I'm not bulletproof, so "I don't really want to talk with you" feels like it should be an allowable response. But isn't even that tragic? She doesn't seem like a killer, nor even a particularly serious person, just someone who does all her fun social chatting in a bubble where "yay murder" against the right targets is an applause line. The trouble is that we're also in a society where people don't want to risk becoming the white chalk outline in the background of a "she was such a quiet person, I don't know what happened" interview. She probably felt like she was commenting about a TV melodrama, not an actual incident where someone proved they were willing to take "yay murder" to its logical conclusion.
To a first approximation, there are no social bubbles where "yay murder" against the right targets isn't an applause line. Social homogeneity minimizes the friction created by this element of human nature by ensuring that those far away in values-space are also far away in physical space. Rapid values change means that social homogeneity goes away, and we lose the necessary protection of distance.
What is the difference between the division between, say, France and England or the Christian and Muslim worlds and Pillarization? Division is the large-scale social norm for humans, isn't it?
I think part of why I understand how tempting "bubbling up" can be is that I'm such a big fan of the "borderline-autistic nerds" social bubble in particular.
"... we can't expect to meet on everything right away, you and I. So I won't ask you to say that the Dark Lord was wrong to kill my mother, just say that it was... sad. We won't talk about whether or not it was necessary, whether it was justified. I'll just ask you to say that it was sad that it happened, that my mother's life was valuable too, you'll just say that for now. And I'll say it was sad that Narcissa died, because her life was also worth something. We can't expect to agree on everything right away, but if we start out by saying that every life is precious, that it's sad when anyone dies, then I know we'll meet someday. That's what I want you to say. Not who was right. Not who was wrong. Just that it was sad ..."
I think this was surprisingly poignant for me because the moralist in me wants to say that this sentiment is so trivially, obviously true that it's not worth any melodrama, whereas the cynic in me wants to say that it's so empirically, historically doomed that it's not worth any optimism, and there's a lot of tension from that dilemma.
Are you thinking historically or currently? E.g. currently, trade between the UK and France is something like $100B/year right now, so they're hardly shunning each other, but historically, I'd say the Hundred Years' War meets my "embarrassing failure mode for a society" criterion hands down.
Rapid values change and rapid communication. It's awesome to be able to learn about others' beliefs directly without a clueless game of telephone in between; it's admittedly less awesome when your neighbor can also get all the data they want but is still clueless about how to turn it into information.
I'd hope we might build up some immunity to memetic assault, over generations, ideally as people who take on poor values learn from their mistakes and teach their kids better, possibly as they just end up with fewer kids. I guess the biggest problem here is that, more than the France/England or Christendom/Dar-al-Islam separations, pillarization within a single country makes it much less safe to let your countrymen make their own mistakes, so long as they can vote to make their mistakes yours too. Or maybe we'll find that nasty memes can evolve faster than our immunity to them can? Nobody worries about "The Gin Craze" anymore, but the descendants of people who could resist "the devil's brew" etc. are now finding it harder to cope with fentanyl...
Or maybe it'll all be moot for one reason or another; everything's changing fast now, not just our values.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What usually happens is that a hundred people expressed their right not to associate and the employer fires the person anyway.
I'm not understanding your point
What I think @Jiro is getting at is that companies often have itchy trigger fingers and mistake Xitter for real life, and erroneously believe that, because they've received 100 DMs in the last hour urging them to fire Alice, this is representative of a broader trend outside of Xitter and Alice has seriously embarrassed the company. When in fact most (if not all) of those DMs came from people who have never done business with the company (and never will, regardless of how they handle the Alice situation), and Alice's ability to perform her job would not have been impacted in the slightest.
More options
Context Copy link
The mob isn't that big. The employer fires them anyway, either out of pure cravenness or sometimes because of bad Civil Rights law. (Note that not only is the mob of a hundred people not very big, probably ~99 of them never would have associated with the target in any case, just because they would have had no reason to)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The key is that it's cancel culture. It's not a specific definable process, it's just the general cultural trend, suddenly much more prevalent, where if someone says something naughty it's appropriate not only to take it personally, not only to tell everyone how upset you are, but to try to visit consequences on them for it. There's no precise definition, it's just a vibe shift.
I don't see why cultural things are undefinable. The edges might be fuzzy, and the definition may shift in the future, but it doesn't mean we can't generally point out where those edges are in a specific time period.
"Indefinable" might be too strong a word, but he has a point. Cancel Culture isn't about a specific set if behaviors, the behaviors are a means to an end. With changing conditions the behaviors might change, bit Cancel Culture will remain the same.
There are some things in culture that are a little pointless to define because they shift so much with sentiment.
"anti-left" would be a very nebulous concept, because the views of "leftists" and those who oppose them can change drastically based on time and place.
But there are social tactics that are mostly not going to change over time. Killing political opponents is a constant through much of history, and the stated reasons for why have changed many times. But killing is killing and there is no reason to mark it as undefinable.
If there is a spectrum from "pointless to define" things like "anti-left" to easily definable things like "killing" then I believe "cancel-culture" is closer to "killing". The reasons for doing it might change, the targets might change, and the methods might change. But it is still the same underlying strategy/tactic.
The ancient equivalent of "cancel culture" is probably exile which has also been pretty popular throughout history.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
One principle or rule that I try to stick by is that though I am free to dislike or avoid other people, I never try to persuade anyone else to do so.
There might still be some scope issues for me, personally. I'm thinking about my family. I don't think there's anything all that wrong with trying to impress upon a spouse/child, "You don't want to associate with that person; here's why." I mostly don't go beyond anything like that.
Another area that might be hazy is whether you're avoiding a specific person or a group. I had a friend once invite me to what was clearly an MLM scheme that they had just started to get into (they jettisoned it not long later, thankfully). I sort of tried to convince them that (implicitly) it wasn't a good group to associate with, but focused on the reasons why I didn't think it made business sense to do (framed as reasons why it didn't make sense for me, trying to soften it with, "...if someone else has these characteristics, maybe..."). This makes me sort of feel in my bones the value of people just blasting to everyone, "MLMs are bad, here's why, and you shouldn't get involved with these specific MLMs," but I can also see how this opens the door to some pretty big conceptual tensions.
I don't have a spouse or children, but I think it's fine to persuade or even directly forbid them from certain associations.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Exactly, and if everyone followed this rule cancel culture would not be a major problem.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In the interests of discussion I’ll say I think A7 is not cancel culture. I’m not even sure A8 is.
Is it cancel culture to post that I simply think an inoffensive podcast, say, has declined in quality and I don’t think it’s worth people’s time?
I think the line is crossed at A9 where I start imposing sanctions on people who disagree. Forcing people to pick a side is how you get people who don’t actually care that much to join a mob.
There is some ambiguity and gray area in A7 and A8 that partly depends on your normal behavior. If it is normal behavior for you to review stuff then it is probably not cancel culture. Or if you are a journalist of some type that typically reviews video games, then your absence of opinion would be more notable than the presence of a bad opinion. Or finally if someone directly asks you for your opinion. Going out of your way to say 'fuck you in particular' seems more cancel culturish.
To post the review as a comment on the podcast I don't think it is cancel culture. To go back and edit an old post that recommends the podcast with some more recent review of "this now sucks" is not cancel culture.
But to draw attention to something that people might not have naturally noticed, and to draw attention to you disassociating with it is cancel culture. Its just the tiniest bit of cancel culture. But when millions of people do it then it is clearly recognized as cancel culture.
And we probably wouldn't have an issue with "cancel culture" if that is all people did. But sometimes correcting a problem requires swinging back hard in the opposite direction.
I’m not sure how to resolve the disagreement. Publicly disavowing something seems categorically different from drawing a line in the sand and saying “join me or I block you” or whatever. Drawing the line is what creates sides out of people with different opinions.
I don’t like when the left “swings too hard in the opposite direction” and over corrects and I don’t like that approach here. I think it’s short sighted and self-defeating.
More options
Context Copy link
Intent is the difference IMO, did you write your review because you wanted to share your opinion, or because you wanted to spark action against the thing. You can usually tell from the outside which it is because the person sharing their opinion will usually genuinely state it as such, whereas the person trying to drum up a cancel mob will not. Also, the person trying to cancel will either directly call to action, or do it indirectly: they will hint at the pressure point the mob should target ("We've contacted the chair of the psych department at the university to ask them if they endorse this grad student's side papers and they declined to comment").
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This doesn't concern "where do you draw the line," but one aspect of what I consider "cancel culture" is diffusion of responsibility.
The people who actually dish out the consequences can claim they're doing so not out of personal judgment, but instead in response to others who hold some power over them (or at least, that's what they can claim if they get challenged about the case,) so it's really Not Their Fault. The people who are agitating for the cancellation, by contrast, can claim to be powerless nobodies if they are challenged, and so it's really Not Their Fault, either. Ultimately, fingers end up pointing into a completely indefinite mob, and so there's nobody who can be dealt with who claims to have power and opinions at the same time.
For example, suppose Suey Park's campaign were more successful. (As far as I remember it, that's where the "cancellation" term gained this use.) "Sorry," some Comedy Central executive could say to Stephen Colbert as he delivers the news that The Colbert Report is canceled for anti-Asian racism, "it's nothing personal. I'm just acting in the best interests of the network, because if I don't cancel your show, the advertisers will boycott us."
Ask an advertiser about it and they also might say "we also aren't acting out of any non-fiduciary motives: if we don't boycott the network unless the show is canceled, the public will boycott us."
"Who, me?" Says an agitator on Twitter, "I'm just a random private citizen! I can't possibly do anything to the great and powerful by myself. How dare you pick on me!" (In conversations more positive about the whole thing, though, they may freely crow about having claimed such a prize.)
Ultimately, all responsibility is ascribed to "public opinion," and the fact that there's a long chain from "agitation on Twitter" to "somebody gets fired" means that the whole process very rarely gets to the level of popular boycotts. (And there's another link at the end of the chain, after "somebody gets fired," which is the most important of all: people self-censor to avoid getting fired. The chilling effect is the prime weapon here.) The mere specter of popular action is enough to get managers or executives or advertisers or employees to proactively take these steps themselves.
Or, at least, that's how the story goes. I think it's often a lie, and the specter of popular action is not the main motive for all these proactive steps; it's just a cover story for contentious actions that agents wanted to take already but want to dodge responsibility for (including chilling-effecting out views that differ from their own.) Otherwise we'd see much less of a political tilt to the offenses that it's feared could produce popular action: the Bud Light incident at latest should have convinced management nationwide to avoid doing anything to offend the right, as well as the left, to the extent that story is true. (And that extent is? Well, more than zero, but I don't see a whole lot.)
But this "diffusion of responsibility" criterion also means I need to defend Nathan Robinson.
As I recall, Nathan Robinson was (basically) fired from Guardian US by his editor for his anti-Israel opinions. He had been known before for taking the position that "cancel culture isn't real," and, in response to his opponents' chortling, said that what he went through still wasn't cancel culture.
If what I recall is accurate, I agree that his case was not. At least, it wasn't Cancel Culture. It was something much simpler: he offended a specific, single individual with power over him who used that power. If someone challenged John Mulholland about the case of Nathan Robinson's firing, my understanding is that he would (and maybe did) defend his actions rather than claim that his hands were tied.
Though here's the point where somebody with a better memory chimes in to say "no, actually, he used those exact words."Regardless of this example, I think it's worth noting the difference between culture-war disputes fought openly, by people who will admit to what they're doing, and ones where the victory is sought by stealth.More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link