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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.
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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.
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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)
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