I wonder if the only way to meaningfully oppose cancel culture is actively cancel the proponents. It's hard to fight a movement that's willing to go to such extremes while holding on to ideals which restrict your own response.
As such, canceling the cancelers would likely be useful under the following constraints:
1) Publicly state your intention to cancel anyone who cancels you; and 2) Only cancel people defensively, never on offense; 3) If the canceler professes a change of heart, cease the cancellation, accept the apology (forgiveness/mercy and relatively simple reintegration for offenders is one asymmetric advantage the free speech side has going for it); 4) Form a mutual-aid alliance with likeminded people, such that the cancelation of one implies the cancelation of all; 5) Never under any circumstance apologize or "bend the knee" to a cancel mob, even if you are not completely in the right - you are not dealing with people who want to treat you as an equal, but totalitarians who want to control you.
I think if people who are in favor of free speech (myself included) followed those rules, cancel culture would at least plateau. A couple of prominent cancelers like Anima Anandkumar getting stung would probably allow cooler heads to prevail.
This is a vitally important principle in a great many scenarios. Sun Tzu mentions it, saying that when you surround an enemy, you should leave them an [apparent] avenue for escape. Backing people into corners they cannot escape from is generally a bad strategy since it will make them fight back twice as hard. I think this applies to nearly anything from casual conversation to actual war.
This doesn’t seem to be something that everyone can do. "Cancellation" irradiates someone as a racist or sexist. It’s a power reserved to those who can appear to credibly make that claim.
The bigotry thing is not actually essential, just like support for Irish republicanism or Islamic fundamentalist extremism is not an essential aspect of terrorism, or even being a Russian or Chinese government agent is not essential to spreading disinformation. (And in most cases, charges of sexism happen to be untrue.) Bullying and serial harassment may not be as "irradiating" as charges of sexism and racism, but they are still considered bad in our culture. And besides, most of the wokes themselves are actually themselves quite racist, and in some cases (e.g. Robin DiAngelo) they admit it.
The end goal of retaliatory cancelation should be to get the organizations being pressured to take a stand to instead wash their hands of the whole thing. It increases the cost of taking the cancel swarm bait, since a counterswarm may also appear at any moment.
The one aspect I don't know about is the sophisticated attacks involving journalist-activists.
And that gives me pause as to whether your proposal is actually a good idea...
Well, yes, that's one hell of a difference. Their definition of "aggression" is basically expressing any disagreement with their ideas, because they're totalitarians and totalitarians can tolerate no dissent. The symmetry is thus false. This would be a bit like saying that China and Japan had a defensive stance at the outset of WWII, but that Japan merely had a much looser set of criteria for what constituted Chinese aggression than vice versa. I'm sure from the Imperial Japanese perspective, they saw themselves as defending their way of life, even though they were obviously aggressors to all other parties.
How is it dangerous? I suspect that the logic of it drives you more and more into open conflict and warring camps. I'm not sure that's the best response to cancel culture.
Good that we basically agree about the nature of the enemy.
> Still, to me, starting from a more reasonable starting point and then following the exact same playbook seems like a bad idea. I think it likely that the playbook is dangerous, not just the starting point.
But it's not the exact same playbook. For example, when do woke mobs forgive and leave their targets alone? It's pure domination from them.
> How is it dangerous? I suspect that the logic of it drives you more and more into open conflict and warring camps. I'm not sure that's the best response to cancel culture.
Yes, of course it's dangerous. There will be people who simply hate the wokes just as much as the wokes hate them, and they'll bask in power games just as much as the wokes do. I reject and disavow that now and will continue to. That being said, I think following the conditions I laid out would prevent my "side" from going overboard. The biggest danger IMO is in operational problems like falsely accusing someone of being a cancel culture warrior, which could cause serious harm. It could also be weaponized by the wokes themselves.
Ultimately, I think cancel culture either dies out on its own (the cancelers begin to cancel each other, which we have seen some evidence of), or it drags literally everyone into its maw. I think the latter, esp. in the tech world, is a serious risk. Once cancel culture and social justice take root in some organization, they are polarizing. Since wokeness is totalitarian, trying to remain neutral is an unstable position (in practice, neutrality is an anti-woke position), a bit like trying to stay away from the Nazi or Communist parties in 1930s Germany or Russia.
I'm not sure the best response either, but this seems like a fairly good one, albeit one I won't act on until some of the vulnerabilities can be mitigated (such as false accusations).
While I strongly support the open letter to the ACM, and other open letters like the Harper's one, or even Bari Weiss' open letter to the NYT, I'm not sure those are much more than a wet noodle to the wokes. If anything, it just helps them organize the target list. My way at least has some teeth and gives the various parties an incentive to behave civilly again.