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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

I still haven't seen anyone suggest a solution to so-called "cancel culture" that doesn't involve equally Orwellian restrictions against various important freedoms (e.g. speech, what to buy, whom to employ, etc.)

If you can "cancel" someone by writing about them, refusing to employ them, refusing to buy their products, or refusing to subscribe to them, then isn't cancellation inevitable? It's certainly not new. There has always been fame and infamy.

It seems like the major difference now is that large social networks enable the amassing and coordination of groups at a speed and scale that was never possible before.

If that's the case, then Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey are essentially the only people capable of changing the dynamic without infringing on anyone's rights.

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The entity who performs the act of cancelling isn't the employer who fires the "offender", but the angry mob who lobbies the employer to fire said person.

The only solutions I can think of involve limiting the dissemination of false or exaggerated information and fact checking.

> The only solutions I can think of involve limiting the dissemination of false or exaggerated information and fact checking.

Everyone seems to agree on the need for this except the people who are spread the most misinformation and the people who want to make them happy.

Again, it seems like we're all hostages of the whim of a few social media CEOs.

A USPS letter carrier once asked me to say "bulk mail" instead of "junk mail." Similarly, I believe social media CEOs don't say "the angry mob" but instead refer to "highly engaged active users" (who, for a modest sum, may receive your targeted message).

It would be ironic if it turned out some huge percentage of observed echo chambers were bots and alts. Unfortunately, I may be too optimistic on that point.

pre-internet sock puppetry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Scherhorn

non-internet spontaneous angry mobs include rock fans on 12 July 1979, serbs on 24 April 1987, etc.

> The entity who performs the act of cancelling isn't the employer who fires the "offender", but the angry mob who lobbies the employer to fire said person.

Boycotting, publicly denouncing or even attempting to convince an employer to fire someone falls within the bounds of legitimate free speech. The effects of cancel culture lie within the power of employers, platform owners, etc. The angry mob isn't putting a gun to anyone's head, they're just complaining loudly.

>The only solutions I can think of involve limiting the dissemination of false or exaggerated information and fact checking.

Which would, itself, be cibsuderedd Orwellian and denounced as an attempt to create a Ministry of Truth to punish wrongthink, all while questioning who gets to define what "falsehood" or "exaggeration" is, and who watches the watchers?

That's a solution, but it's one that the opponents of cancel culture would probably vehemently oppose as being no different than cancel culture itself.

If work in the US weren't "at will", wouldn't an employer be legally unable to fire someone just because of an angry mob?

(:philosoraptor:)

Probably, but it is, so they do.

And not to get too "political" with it, but the camp opposed to cancel culture tends to be right-wing, and tends to frame their opposition as being left-wing (using US standards.) Right-wing people also tend to support at-will employment as an expression of right-libertarian/anti-regulation principles.

This may be why the discourse around cancel culture tends to be framed in such a way that the threat is the speech of leftists/liberals/progressives, etc. rather than the power of corporate entities to enforce arbitrary consequences.

> The only solutions I can think of involve limiting the dissemination of false or exaggerated information

We do that already, specifically if it has the effect of harming someone. See, defamation law.

But most of what is objected to about “cancel culture” is dissemination of true facts about people as well as statements of personal preferences about how others should react to those facts, not dissemination of false or exaggerated information.

Or someone who is building the next social network. It is becoming apparent to a lot of people that the things that cause Facebook and Twitter to make a lot of money are corrosive to people's psychological integrity and society. The time is ripe for them to be replaced.

> The time is ripe for them to be replaced.

You can't replace companies that have up to 2 billion combined users and buy any competitors that get any traction at all. All you can do is legislate.

I recently read Martin Luther King's last speech. He suggested boycotting businesses until such time as they were willing to treat all God's children fairly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23414101 "All we say to America is to be true to what you said on paper."

No wonder he deserved assassination[1], unlike the uppity types who merely got a more modern cancellation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23641010

(for that matter, Orwell wasn't even very "Orwellian," in the modern sense. I haven't read much of the potboiler surrounding Goldstein, as I view it as having been fast-forward for what Orwell had to communicate, but as far as I can tell proles, Inner Party members, and animals are all relatively free: it's the Outer Party members who must newspeak and blackwhite and self-censor, and they are not a large percentage of the population, nor even would they be a large percentage of current internet users.

I don't think Orwell had intended to be predictive[2] so much as descriptive, and the "Outer Party" would have corresponded (as EA Blair himself was) to the middle Ronnie in: https://twitter.com/johncleese/status/1254130854462455813?la...

(note well that Cleese himself has felt the need to point out to the BBC that one of the ways one makes fun of an idea is to put it in the mouth of a clearly unsympathetic[3] character)

cf Animal Farm or why waiters are the worst snobs in Down and Out... or Notes on Nationalism http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part30 When Orwell says "... it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which [nationalism] deals should actually exist" he is probably pointing at the same ideal which in the Vonnegut multiverse is known as a Granfaloon.)

[1] Kennedy and Khrushchev horrified their hard-liners with détente, and they both got "cancelled". Causation or mere correlation?

[2] although he did call Airstrip One's relationship to Oceania well before the Suez Crisis made it official.

[3] unfortunately Poe's law has won, and it's no longer clear what is clearly unsympathetic?

Is this a Poe's law pony? https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/986/297/383...

et in Arcadia ego?

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