Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear' | Hacker News Reader

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

bbc.com

396 pointsundefined1641 comments

Surprising how much press "cancel culture" gets these days as if it's a new thing or as if it's a new thing being pushed on society by the left. We've always had cancel culture. Some might remember the Dixie Chicks. How about the Rachael Ray ad that Dunkin Donuts pulled merely because it looked like an Arab scarf? Jerry Falwell came to prominence entirely based on his pushing of cancel culture. When I lived in North Carolina, one of the things that was repeated all the time was that a newspaper editor would lose his job for publishing a story with a positive spin on free trade. You can go back further to McCarthyism, Turing being prosecuted for being gay, and on and on.

Cancel culture remains a thing. Apparently now that folks aren't just being cancelled for supporting gay marriage, the free exchange of ideas is suddenly important. The outright hypocrisy of so many on this issue is the biggest story.

Edit: Forgot to mention this extreme example of cancel culture:

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/professor-who-wore-hijab-...

A professor was cancelled because she wore a hijab. There was no outrage at all from the usual suspects.

The Dixie Chicks are a great example. They vanished from the mainstream basically overnight. People still hate them to this day and probably don't even really remember what they said.

Well, the "Dixie Chicks" have been cancelled again, and now are just "The Chicks".

Is this sarcasm or a window into a different side of American culture?

In my circles the Dixie Chicks rebounded from the Bush backlash and had their biggest pop hit ever in response to it ("Not Ready to Make Nice"); they became more respected in the wake of it than they ever had been.

And the attempt to cancel France. Going so far to rename french fries "freedom fries".

All because France thought going to war with Iraq in 2003 was a bad idea.

The “freedom fry” troupe can actually be traced back even farther to WWI

If you’ve ever wondered why “frankfurters” are now called “hot dogs” or why “sauerkraut” was called “liberty cabbage” for a hot minute, it’s because of anti-German sentiment in the US [1]

[1] https://www.hppr.org/post/freedom-fries-liberty-cabbage-myth

Not just the US - Berlin, Ontario was renamed to Kitchener (after British WWI general Lord Kitchener) in 1916.

I thought this was a joke.

It isn't.

By “vanished from the mainstream” you mean their 2003 album still went 6x platinum, and then their 2007 album went 2x platinum and won 5 Grammys?

Yeah, you unexpectedly demonstrated how effective the ban was. After being blacklisted from thousands of radio stations (including ClearChannel, one of the biggest), their album sales plummeted. Except in Canada.

Also, their next studio album came 14 years (!!!) after Taking The Long Way.

Frankly, who cares whether this is new or not? Why does that even matter?

It's negatively affecting people (for this article, the young authors who are self-censoring), and should be fought against.

Because we have people pretending it's new so they can drum up outrage and gain power. Because we have people playing the victim after being fired for being intolerable to work with.

Most importantly, we have politicians adopting authoritarian attitudes as a reaction to it. Private companies have a right to "cancel" whomever they want, whether that takes the form of banning someone from a website or of canceling a contract. Yet certain politicians want to interfere in private websites or publishers by limiting their ability to exercise editorial control.

I don't know the situation across the pond. I'm writing from an American perspective, where the term "cancel culture" has been entirely co-opted by cynical politicians.

>Because we have people pretending it's new so they can drum up outrage and gain power. Because we have people playing the victim after being fired for being intolerable to work with

This is the mindset at fault. This idea that intolerance is objective, when clearly it isn't. This idea that certain ideas, regardless of their merit, are simply intolerant and must be met with collective, unilateral intolerance, which typically aligns with progressive politics.

>Most importantly, we have politicians adopting authoritarian attitudes as a reaction to it

This is an ironic take, considering the entire premise behind cancel culture is a collective authoritarianism.

>Private companies have a right to "cancel" whomever they want, whether that takes the form of banning someone from a website or of canceling a contract.

And this is perhaps the most misleading part of the comment. This isn't strictly about private companies cancelling people (although that's also a problem when incentives are aligned to effectively remove cancelees from the public square). This is about rabid, authoritarian mobs attacking individuals for dissent, and the fact that loud minorities are dictating corporate action with a specific political slant.

People were complaining about cancel culture long before politicians. And possibly the most pressing issue is the fact that it isn't that these ideas themselves are intolerant, or even factually incorrect, it's the fear of some of their implications that is responsible for this conditioned suppression of their discourse, and unpersoning of anyone daring enough to ask certain questions. It's like banning research on fission because it could be used to create nuclear weapons. It's egregious anti-intellectualism to forbid certain questions or discussions strictly because of their worst implications.

You aren't paying attention if you think people are complaining about being fired because they're hard to work with.

This (Mexican-American) guy was fired for a photo that for a brief moment showed his hand making an OK sign out the window of a truck because for a few months the mainstream media tried to convince everyone that the OK sign is a white supremacist symbol: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/502975-cal...

Before Twitter, I never saw headlines like "X actor under fire for previously dating Y actor". Clicking on such trends, you find the Twitterverse raging and debating totally invented controversies.

People are becoming offended by everything now.

They're being suggested reasons to be offended, and many seem to adopt that stance.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this is being stoked by robots. Perhaps corporate or state actors.

What if "being offended" is a mind virus that spreads easily through the power of suggestion?

The media landscape is more diverse now. In the past, television stations would regularly censor material in order to avoid getting “cancelled” by the Christian right.[1] Cancel culture is just a new word for an age-old illiberal phenomenon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention_co...

> I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this is being stoked by robots. Perhaps corporate or state actors.

I have always believed that a platform should verify identities and have a zero-tolerance for bots if we (as a society) are to trust any information coming from that platform. This is not to say that platforms that don't do these things should not exist but that we should not take them as seriously as we do today. Unfortunately, this completely goes against the business model of many of these social media companies.

The difference now is social media makes it easier for media outlets to publish libel as fact from unverified accusations solely interpreted as fact

I think what's interesting is the moral policing is no longer coming from the religious right.

I recommend "The Realignment" podcast which often discusses why this shift has occurred: https://the-realignment.simplecast.com/

I also find this topic far more interesting than the fairly cliche discussion over “cancel culture”. It seems like conservatives have caught up to post modernism, whereas liberals are now passionate about objective truth and morality being black and white. I really wonder how tenable these positions are going forward.

No conservatives are still conservatives. They don’t need to embrace post-modernism to oppose what they perceive as a heretical religion.

Insofar as right-wing people now invoke the liberal notions of free expression it’s only because that was a middle ground that allowed coexistence and liberals are now sitting aside while progressives try to blow up that compromise. (And also because a bunch of center right people think it’s a good thing—it’s not like the right is uniformly absolutist evangelical types).

Put differently, Christian evangelical are angry that liberals broke all these taboos in the name of free expression, and now progressives are trying to treat Christian evangelical beliefs as the basis for cancellation. There is nothing hypocritical or contradictory about this.

The fact that you go to the word “hypocritical” makes me think we’re already in agreement on the basic point. I’m not trying to make a value judgement here.

Go look at these arguments about confederate statues. Liberals condemn the moral faults of the person. Conservatives excuse it as values of the time; moreover they appeal to the virtue the society has chosen for the statue to represent. There’s nothing more post modern than that.

From your post, it seems your view is that conservatives adopted these tools because they are the tools of an oppressed minority, which conservatives now perceive themselves to be. I think that very well might be the right explanation. But I also wonder if this shift is more of a demographics thing. Post modernism can’t be the young, hip mindset for the rest of human history. I wonder if young people today are carving out some new view of the world, which is far more interesting to me than arguments over celebrity Twitter accounts.

I’d rather have them vigorously defending for their right to be a bigot than be a bigot actually with cultural power, having grown up during the latter.

Free expression of contrary views is also important (though not ALL contrary views). What I think will happen is further Balkanization of the internet. We can’t all play in the exact same sandbox. Echo chambers are not new - people lived within distinct communities before the internet. I lived in a 50/50 liberal conservative town growing up and I interacted with only other kids of conservatives outside of school.

Now if we could have platforms that didn’t reward shallow engagements maybe we could get somewhere.

> Now if we could have platforms that didn’t reward shallow engagements maybe we could get somewhere.

... and that is precisely why I find HN (despite its flaws) to be one of the most interesting places for discourse. The aggressive moderation by dang and friends gives this forum a coherence that is hard to find anywhere else.

>>I think what's interesting is the moral policing is no longer coming from the religious right.

The right (religious and otherwise) hasn't reduced it's policing of ideological orthodoxy at all.

Now, if you threw “exclusively” into that sentence, there might be something like a point.

maybe internally, but i haven't heard of conservatives getting random kids on twitter expelled from school lately

> haven't heard of conservatives getting random kids on twitter expelled from school lately

I have, for actual kids (as in children, not young adults), including lately. Usually for something like “their mother has an OnlyFans page”.

Source please.

this example is obviously reprehensible but does not seem like the same phenomenon

I agree that parts of the left are engaged in moral policing, but I think you may be mis-speaking when you say it is "no longer coming from the religious right."

I think it still is, it just isn't a monopoly?

It's coming from both sides you can't deny that. Look at the dangerous appointments made to the judicial branch. While the far left dominate twitter and social media and try to cancel everyone the evangelicals are doing pretty well at cancelling liberal voting rights and women's rights if you aren't paying attention. It's as if people things others don't have a right to think in any way other than the way they think and live.

ACB is so “dangerous” she might vote to overturn Roe and thereby make abortion a legislative rather than constitutional issue, as in almost every developed country such as France. https://repository.law.uic.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2.... Far-right wing ACB might possibly vote the same way as the ... European Court of Human Rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A,_B_and_C_v_Ireland

> A, B and C v Ireland is a landmark 2010 case of the European Court of Human Rights on the right to privacy under Article 8. The court rejected the argument that article 8 conferred a right to abortion

Or maybe the Overton window has just shifted very left in the US about what social issues are human rights and what can properly be decided by legislative majorities?

And if far-right ACB were successful in making the right to privacy in the US similar to the one under the European Convention on Human Rights, the US states would be free to draw the line for on-demand abortions without any medical emergencies at 12-13 weeks, like nearly all European countries do and 70% of Americans support, instead of at 22-26 weeks, as is required by Roe. https://www.france24.com/en/20180525-abortion-laws-vary-eu-i.... https://news.gallup.com/poll/235469/trimesters-key-abortion-...

Of course, overturning Roe isn’t really in the cards. There are just 3 votes for it. In June Medical just two Justices, (not including ACB, who was not yet on the Court) signaled a willingness to overturn Roe. Unlike deciding a case in the first instance, overruling an existing precedent is an act of discretion. A Justice who disagrees with the merits can (and likely will) still support to uphold the precedent.

Much more likely than ACB overturning Ginsberg’s legacy with respect to abortion is ACB upholding Ginsberg’s legacy with respect to the Equal Protection Clause. At the ACLU, Ginsberg built that legacy on a textualist interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause, challenging laws that discriminated against men supposedly to benefit women as violations of equal protection. Under the current progressive worldview, that literal interpretation of “equal” treatment under the law will prove an impediment to importing critical theory into the law. That area, where the precedent isn’t as clear cut, is much more likely to be an area where ACB has an impact.

>Far-right wing ACB might possibly vote the same way as the ... European Court of Human Rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A,_B_and_C_v_Ireland

> > A, B and C v Ireland is a landmark 2010 case of the European Court of Human Rights on the right to privacy under Article 8. The court rejected the argument that article 8 conferred a right to abortion

Article 8 states:

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

COTUS A14 states:

...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

The latter is clearly broader.

>the US states would be free to draw the line for on-demand abortions without any medical emergencies at 12-13 weeks,

A farcical conjecture, when we all know the actual likely outcome.

Well, yes, some Left are no less religious, even if their religion is not the old Christianity usually confessed by the traditional Right.

If you look at the history of 20th century, you may find a number of instances when e.g. Communism was professed (and enforced) with a truly religious fervor and lack of doubt. Ironically, the same thing happens time and again to Atheism.

Honestly, it's viewpoints like yours that I despise the most. We have innocent people losing their careers with no due process, just mob justice, and what do you people do? "Oh, republicans did it 30 years ago, so any criticism is invalid." Honestly, F that. I was never even alive for what you are talking about. How about we try to build a better society where people don't lose their jobs for their views, rather than pursue some sadistic version of "payback" towards the right for what they did 30 years ago?

I think this person isn't saying it's fine. They're pointing out that the outrage about this is dissociated from the fact that this has been a longstanding problem and therefore likely has significantly deeper issues than the surface-level symptoms (eg. self-censorship).

Pointing out one incident almost 20 years ago isn't evidence of a long standing problem. The world is a different place with social media today, making the problem both more widespread, and more damaging to people. There have always been boycotts and attempts at cancellation, but the power of the mob is amplified in the current moment.

Multiple incidents were pointed out, and I legitimately don't know if it's more damaging today than it was before. This is a country that burned black wall street to the ground over an accusation. I actually, seriously don't know if the problem is more widespread or more damaging given the history in the USA.

I will say it is most certainly a problem, and I think it likely has much deeper roots than "social media exists, only now are people being hurt by mob mentality". It may be that social media only makes mob mentality more obvious to people, so now everyone is aware of it. But then the problem is why did we ever develop mob mentality in the first place....

They edited in a second example after my comment. But it is a telling edit, they clearly looked for a second example, and the one they found is in no way a good one. There was no mob rallying against that professor. The school fired her (stupidly), and protests were in her favor.

There has always been a mob mentality, but it was hard to gather a mob. You had to get people to gather in person, and get them angry. Now you just get them angry, and you can do it sitting at home throwing together some memes and posting on Twitter. The bar didn't just drop a little, it dropped like 99%.

Moral policing is a far older struggle than a recent US-centric partisan squabble. I’m with you in that I wish more people held liberal values, but reducing a complex, entrenched cultural phenomenon present throughout human history to such a myopic view of the present isn’t likely to improve the situation you’re concerned about.

Cancel culture used to be just a bear in woods. Scary but not super scary.

Now it's Godzilla stomping through Seattle.

It is magnified vastly by social media. That makes a big difference.

And 10x that power when the engines of social media are in the hands of the cancellers, as appears to be the case.

It was just never scary to social conservatives. Gay people got "cancelled" so hard they were thrown in jail and disowned from their families.

And laughed as 1/15 or more of a generation died from AIDS. The harm caused by the extreme right is astounding if you’re in one of the targeted groups. Someone being fired for bigoted comments when they work with minorities isn’t even in the same ballpark. And then they put up a gofundme and buy a house or get a conservative media deal.

Is it? Or are we all working off of anecdotes here. Do you have data to back that up?

Further - it was pretty scary getting cancelled by my parents and community when I came out. I’m glad it wasn’t scary for you.

Yes. It was scary. And now it is much more scary.

The present, much greater, scariness in no way diminishes the prior scariness.

And it was, and is, scary for many many more than just the "gays". Get some perspective here.

Can you quantify how or why it’s worse? It seems like it could also just seem like it’s “worse” to you since it is something that could actually effect you.

The underpinnings of the "cancel culture", the intolerance and mob mentality, were always around.

The "cancel culture" adds two news things to the picture. One is the ability for anyone to participate, not just the few on the TV screen or newspaper pages. Another is the attempts at totality: expel the victim from every social media platform, every internet hosting, every payment platform, every public venue. It's not yet as bad as it was during the fascist years in Italy, but the approach is pretty similar. There is also no formal totalitarian party to drive it; people just join the cause by reposting a tweet, and acting accordingly when in a position to ban, expel, deplatorm, etc.

Modulo specific technology, that's how life was if you were gay, Jewsish, Black, Asian or communist at certain times. None of that is new and the point stands.

It was wrong then too.

And what claim stands, exactly? Are you suggesting that because something bad has happened before, it shouldn't be opposed now?

Because something bad has happened before, we should look at it happening now as part of an ongoing problem, instead of characterising it as new phenomenon.

I get your point, but if you tell me I did a bad thing, I can answer in one of two ways: “you did a bad thing too, so you have no right to criticise me”, or “you did a bad thing too, maybe we should have a frank conversation about why we both fell into the same trap”.

I don't think anyone's denying that the desire to cancel those who believe differently is an ongoing problem; in fact, that is implicitly acknowledged when recent actions are described as witch-hunts or McCarthyism. Those allusions to history are powerful precisely because this behavior isn't new.

And I'd love to see a frank conversation about how we can avoid falling into that trap, but such a discussion has to start by acknowledging that it is a trap; that is to say, that cancel culture is wrong.

Spot on. The interesting thing to note about the "mob mentality" of cancel culture in 2021 is that it is truly "power to the people". Essentially you have major corporations, politicians, and a media environment that are ceding to the cancelling demands of a certain majority because they will reap the rewards of this massive group of people whether that is more sales/profits, more votes, or more views. It is a story of a society that does whatever it needs to win, regardless of the collateral damage it creates.

I'm not even sure it's a majority, just a very vocal and intolerant group, seen by many non-participants as doing a virtuous thing, fighting for social justice.

Of course most businesses would not oppose such a force, because otherwise they will be a target themselves, and enough of a public opinion would be against them, at least vaguely. They have everything to lose, and very little to win if they do not conform. This is why the "cancel culture" easily makes them cooperate.

Apparently, in the eyes of many, freedom is seriously less important than justice, and justice is often seen as the right to not be offended by anything. Not that it's impossible to achieve, but the resulting society would end up extremely homogeneous.

Yeah, I’m very skeptical of who is the “majority” here. If you read Twitter and the NYT, you’d think that my minority group (American Muslim immigrants) is full of people like Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour. And it’s not. I literally know more Bangladeshi Trump supporters than super-progressive Bangladeshis. Plenty more Democrats, sure, but not particularly liberal ones.

One thing that’s important to keep in mind is that most people of color largely don’t even read the NYT, or NPR. Fox News is a far more popular news source among people of color, even Democrats: https://www.journalism.org/2020/03/11/black-and-white-democr...

It's not unusual for 0-gen or 1st gen immigrants to be conservative (at least culturally and fiscally). The Republican party to their detriment has not taken advantage of this reality --being too busy fighting for somewhat edge cases or constituencies (conservative religion and corp interests) to the detriment of growing their base. Not that dems have not been guilty of the same mistakes (catering to edge constituencies like the progs and corp interests, just differently).

If the Republicans could find a candidate who better reached out to conservative minorities while not alienating their present constituencies they certainly would prove a strong contender, specially if the Democrats veer further to the Progressive agenda. Trump's problem was while he appealed to more minorities than most past Republicans he did not market it well and didn't put it front and center enough and also turned off the so called 'soccer moms' with his poor approach to the pandemic.

My mom reliably votes Democrat but is basically conservative. She was Trump-curious (she loves his “energy” lol) until he stopped governing in the last six months during the pandemic.

It’s not clear to me that you can make the coalition work. It depends on what issues you surface. Opposition to cancel culture is apparently something right wingers and my mom can both get behind—apropos nothing, she shared Bill Maher’s recent segment about McNeil on Facebook. I don’t think she’s ever watched Bill Maher in her life.

But of course, opposing cancel culture and winning back nervous Democrats like my mom is also a clear opening for... Democrats. Hint hint.

What was the social justice being fought for when Colin Kaepernick was cancelled?

Quality of football. Kaepernick wasn't that good. Take a mediocre player brings in a controversy and its not worth the gamble. Have him out of the league and his skill falls further. What's more telling is that he is still talked about, most similar talent football players simply fall to the wayside. If he had been good he would have been playing football.

Funny how it took 6 whole seasons to figure that out. Must have been a coincidence to do so when a lot of NFL fans are tweeting out messages saying they'll boycott the league if it doesn't cancel him due to his "disrespect for the flag" (a flag I saw recently being used at the capitol to beat up on one of those blue lives that I heard matter so much).

I think the inward-lookingness of cancellation is key here. Regarding attempts at totality, in the past, if you were cancelled, it was because you were group A masquerading in a group B world, and group B found out and kicked you out of B-world. But, importantly, Group B couldn't cancel you in the eyes of Group A, only in their own eyes. So if you were found out, your direct life got cancelled but there was frequently another segment of society welcoming you with open arms.

But now with the inward-lookingness of cancellation, you have people from group B who are cancelled by group B, and have no one to fall back on.

An example would be a teacher arguing for the support of gay marriage getting cancelled by a catholic school they work for. That person, in the past, could pick up their bags and move in with the liberals next door. Yes, they lost their job, and maybe half of their associates, but they still have the other half who would be more than welcoming of them for the plight they've been through.

But what happens when a group cancels their own? For example, the Peru N-word journo. By all appearances, he is a liberal-minded person, who worked for a liberal-minded newspaper, in one of the most liberal-minded cities in the nation. But now he got cancelled by his colleagues. What is he supposed to do - go hang out with white supremacists? Neither side would find that appealing. So instead he has to...not partake in society at all?

The world isn't split into liberals and the far-right.

It's split into tolerant people and intolerant people.

Some people wear a thin veneer of tolerance to cover their intolerance. These are the people doing the canceling. These are the people you don't want to associate with anyway.

But there's still plenty of tolerant people around in society.

> But there's still plenty of tolerant people around in society.

I would argue people that don't really care are in fact the majority.

> What is he supposed to do - go hang out with white supremacists?

Do you imply that the only groups in society are liberals and white-supremacists?

This is the problem liberals have...they have to get onboard with all the progressive stuff because they don't realize that everyone else is not a white supremacist as they are told by the NYT.

A lot of Trump support came from former Democrats who realized that they are no longer onboard with the ideals of the modern Democrat party pandering to the Progressives. These people didn't want a traditional religiously crusading Republican - they wanted opposition to identity politics and globalism.

There are good people in the center, and this Peru guy will be fine - but he should have realized a long time ago the NYT is not for people like him.

If what you’re saying is that the New York Times is now the progressive version of Liberty University then I accept that concession.

Regarding your edit:

> Edit: Forgot to mention this extreme example of cancel culture: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/professor-who-wore-hijab-...

The professor was fired from a Christian school for making an assertion (that Muslims and Christians “worship the same god”) that, according to its theology, amounts to heresy: https://www.businessinsider.com/professor-maybe-fired-for-hi...

> “Contrary to some media reports, social media activity and subsequent public perception, Dr. Hawkins' administrative leave resulted from theological statements that seemed inconsistent with Wheaton College's doctrinal convictions, and is in no way related to her race, gender, or commitment to wear a hijab during Advent," Wheaton's administration said in a statement released December 16th.

So if your point is that cancel culture is the expression of a new progressive theology, then again I accept your concession.

> So if your point is that cancel culture is the expression of a new progressive theology,

Wheaton’s college is an extremely narrow evangelical Protestant theology, that as well as dismissing Hawkins for her statements and firing a professor a few years before for becoming Catholic as it violated the schools duty to employ faculty embodying it's Protestant ideals, also led it to sue against the ACA’s preventive services mandate.

I'm not sure why you would suggest that “cancellation” under that theology has anything to do with progressivism.

I’m not saying Wheaton’s cancellation is progressive. I’m pointing out that OP is essentially admitting that left-wing cancel culture is a progressive analogue to Wheaton’s “extremely narrow evangelical Protestant theology.”

I had to cancel my NYT (after 15 years) because it has gone from center left to far left cancel culture bastion. They follow the guilty until proven innocent mindset of the current generation of "twitterati" and sucumb to their whims.

Do you have examples of the NYT cancelling someone for nonbigoted views?

As it happens, there's an example being discussed here on HN right now: the NYT pushed out Donald McNeil Jr. for saying "You should never call someone a [N-word]".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26306020

From the daily beast -

> McNeil repeatedly made racist and sexist remarks throughout the trip including, according to two complaints, using the “n-word.”

I don’t understand how this is related to cancel culture, given it’s been corporate policy to not make racist and sexist remarks for decades? And just, regular human decency? What are the arguments for keeping this person employed by a major news organization?

That’s not what he did, any more than the dictionary is “racist” for printing a slur in order to refer to it. See: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/new-york-times-don-m...

From the article:

> In the absence of a full accounting of this episode, I can’t make any firm judgment about the merits of McNeil’s departure. For all I know, he could have been acting unprofessionally for years, and it took a few teens to force the Times to take action it should have taken years ago.

So this is a he said they said situation. The nymag article doesn’t account for the sexist accusations as well. The NYT say they performed an investigation and based on that decided to fire him. So if you believe the NYT is liable to fire a senior reporter over the say so if a few “woke” college students you will feel justified to protest this. If you believe the NYT corroborated the college students story that were extremely uncomfortable due to actual sexist/racist behavior and then fired him, it doesnt look like much of a story.

Neither you nor I know the specifics of what he said or didn’t say - that’s only him, the students, and maybe to an extent the NYT investigators. I’m not saying I inherently agree with the assessment of one side at all here, just that to say he was “canceled” is quite a bit of a reach.

First, the students were in high school, not college. This story is all about details.

Second, what sexist language, exactly? What did he actually say? We certainly can't trust the mere accusation from a source like The Daily Beast. And again, this story is all about details.

Third, it's easy to believe the NYT overreacted here given the evidence from other incidents. For example:

James Bennet, the editorial page editor, resigned under pressure after publishing an op-ed by a sitting US Senator.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/james-benn...

Lauren Wolfe, a freelance editor, claims she was fired for tweeting “Biden landing at Joint Base Andrews now. I have chills.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/25/lauren-wo...

Bari Weiss, who accused the paper of "unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge" described the situation as:

> Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.

> Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.

> All this bodes ill, especially for independent-minded young writers and editors paying close attention to what they’ll have to do to advance in their careers. Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain.

> Even now, I am confident that most people at The Times do not hold these views. Yet they are cowed by those who do. Why? Perhaps because they believe the ultimate goal is righteous. Perhaps because they believe that they will be granted protection if they nod along as the coin of our realm—language—is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes. Perhaps because there are millions of unemployed people in this country and they feel lucky to have a job in a contracting industry.

> Or perhaps it is because they know that, nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back. Too wise to post on Slack, they write to me privately about the “new McCarthyism” that has taken root at the paper of record.

https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

Are we supposed to believe a vague allegation from a publication that so badly misrepresents a statement like "You should never call someone a [n-word]"?

His use of that word was supposed to be a smoking gun, but instead their story seems to be all smoke and mirrors.

That's a perfect example of cancel culture: the mere allegation is enough, proof is neither required nor given.

You can read McNeil's perspective: https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/nytimes-peru-n-word-p...

No one reasonable thinks he made a racist remark.

I think he posted a reasonable and thoughtful response - in it however be pretty much admits he could’ve said some very disparaging things.

> I told him what I’d actually said in Peru. He said, “Donald, you sound exactly like my father. He would also say ‘You can’t dress like a thug to a job interview and expect to get the job.’ But from you, it sounds racist.” I said “How is ‘thug’ racist? What about Thug Life Records?” He said “It’s almost the equivalent of the n-word. Don’t you know about Marshawn Lynch?’’ I said: “He plays for Seattle?” I could hear him sigh. “No, Donald, let me explain…”

So it seems like he by his own admission probably said some stuff that was frankly out of bounds. But doesn’t necessarily mean he deserves to be fired.

Being blind to how one speaks and how it affects others however, is not a trait that I’d imagine most newsrooms are looking for, at all. His finally thought:

> One last thought: what’s happened to me has been called a “witch hunt.” It isn’t. It’s a series of misunderstandings and blunders.

I mean, I feel like that says it all? A victim of a changing culture? Probably. But sound judgement in the here and now is a prerequisite for employment in an industry like journalism. You can’t just lie back and wax nostalgic about how things that were acceptable aren’t now, and believe that excuses ones current actions. Hopefully we’ve progressed a bit. It’s sad what happened to him, but I get the feeling he knows he did make a few “off-color” remarks and was quite unaware of the lens society views comments like that. The latter part is probably the real fault.

This is such a perfect example, thank you. The outrage machine, ever in search of new fuel, can never stop finding new things to be outraged about.

Now it's manufactured outrage about the word "thug", a word used quite recently by President Biden, and not that long ago by President Obama.

Suddenly "it’s almost the equivalent of the n-word."

How could a coronavirus reporter possibly keep up with that?

When my grandpa used the word thug its absolutely racist. He would call literally any black person without chinos on a thug. That was and is common.

Alright, but what does that have to do with McNeil?

If you don't understand, you're not paying attention. There's a big difference between saying a word and using a word. He was answering a question about someone else's use of the word and trying to clarify. What he essentially said was "Did she actually say 'n_____'?"

It sounds to me like a few kids at this conference were butthurt for being told they were wrong about completely unrelated questions, and pounced like jackals for anything to make this guy look like a nazi. "I might be completely wrong about Jared Diamond and look like a dumbass... but 'n______' came out of this guy's mouth at some point! Get him!"

I’m paying attention, but my filter is different than yours. I am pretty liable to think that sheltered college students can be very overly sensitive to usages of words, but on the other hand the accusations (according to the daily beast article) don’t seem to center around the usage of a word, and the NYT investigated.

If it fits ones narrative then they’ll believe it one way. If it fits ones narrative that old reporter said a bunch of stuff that demonstrated really questionable judgement if not disdain, then you’ll believe it that way. The NYT say they investigated, so it comes down to whether you believe them to be fair in that process (I would think if I worked there I’d want it to be a fair process). Not having any primary information, I don’t feel compelled to make any judgement of fault here.

Older reporters are expensive. It was an easy way to force early retirement and save on payroll; an economic decision.

Who did the NYT cancel who had anything other than mainstream center-left views? (Serious question. Maybe they did and I just wasn’t aware of it.)

The problem is that Christians are varied. For Catholics, for instance, God of Muslims and Christians is the same, and the Pope has explicitly stated so.

Some Evangelical Christians, being Protestants, have a ton of disagreement with Catholics, and disagree at this point, too.

Muslims universally agree, AFAICT, because Muhammad himself stated this explicitly (and Christ figures prominently as a prophet in Quran).

See a short analysis in [1].

Even though the OP was not correct at classifying the case as a manifestation of "cancel culture", I can see the similarity. It is in the same intolerance and unwillingness to discuss and listen in either case. The truth is known, any doubt is a vice, whoever disagrees should be shamed away. This is what I find the most dangerous part of the phenomenon.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2015/12/20/460480698/do-christians-and-m...

The Christian faith is based on the fundamental fact that Jesus is God in human flesh. I worship Jesus. Muslims do not. No Muslim will claim to worship the same God as I do.

Jesus is "the son" and Muhammad is "the prophet" of the same God.

If you’re trying to tell me what I believe, you’re wrong. By the way, I’m a pastor.

If you’re trying to tell me what Muslims believe, you’re also wrong.

Saying that Jesus is the Son of God is very different from saying that He is a prophet of God. That difference is precisely why Muslims cannot agree that Jesus is the Son of God and why I cannot agree that Muhammad is a prophet of God.

> If you’re trying to tell me what I believe, you’re wrong. By the way, I’m a pastor.

I don't dispute that's what you believe, but it isn't the position of all Christians.

The Catholic Church is quite explicit about its belief that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. It has expressed that belief in the decree Nostra aetate of the Second Vatican Council, and numerous other Vatican documents since. And the Catholic Church is not alone among Christians in this belief.

I think there is a real disagreement among Christians as to whether the God of Islam is a (somewhat distorted) account of the God of Christianity (the official Catholic position, but certainly some Protestants agree with it too), or whether it is a completely different entity (the position of yourself among others).

I think from the Muslim point of view – the Islamic designation of Christians as "People of the Book" only makes sense if Muslims believe that Christians worship the same God as they do, even if wrongly and confusedly.

Geez Christians can be so sensitive about minor things. You can believe whatever you want, I don't care. But it is a fact that the traditions derive from the same jewish abrahmic God. If you don't like it that doesn't change the fact.

Me: Javascript is a version of Java for the web.

Techy: Ummm... no.

Me: Techies can be so sensitive about minor things. You can believe whatever you want, I don't care. But it is a fact that Java and Javascript are both programming languages. If you don't like it that doesn't change the fact.

I will not even try to discuss the intricacies of Trinity; the Nicene Council tried hard to come to an agreement regarding it, and in 1054, details of it were the cause of the Great Schism.

We’re not talking about the intricacies, though. We’re talking about the basics of it.

Every Christian worships Jesus as God. No Muslim will. It’s that simple.

When Muhammad says that Jesus is a prophet, it is a rejection of what Jesus claimed about Himself. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me.”

Many of course have tried to act as though the two are compatible, but when you come right down to it, I believe what Jesus said, and Muhammad didn’t.

If you believe this, then you must also believe that Christians and Jews do not worship the same God since obviously Jews do not believe in the deity of Jesus either.

Correct. But this is nothing new. Just as when the Jews were bowing down to the golden calf that Aaron made, they were not worshipping Jehovah, though they claimed to be.

>We've always had cancel culture.

It seems pretty obvious that you don't understand that any culture has norms and boundaries, but only pathological cultures become entirely reactionary and define themselves purely in terms of opposition to something.

>You can go back further to McCarthyism

That's exactly what we're going back to and you have to be truly blind to think this is a good thing.

I don't know if I've met or heard of anyone that defines themselves solely in a reactionary way. Maybe you could expand on some ways you're seeing that?

many of us were against it when the puritanical right was censoring people/art/media, and we're still against it now that it's a puritanical left censoring people/art/media.

why is that so hard to understand and to be consistent about this? people need to stop getting distracted by naked partisanship and focus on the issue. a principled stance is key!

now we're seeing big tech getting roped in and the tools of censorship are expanding. you may be fine with that now, but the tools will change hands. imagine them in the hands of your enemy.

Exactly some of my younger friends don't understand that voices from the right have a place too. Cancelling everything that you don't like or that makes you feel uncomfortable is a dangerous echo chamber philsophy that leads to dictators in waiting (see Trump) . I am a progressive who highly values the Bill of Rights as critical to keeping us free from despotism but I know that a huge portion of the country isn't progressive and to turn them into villains and "evil" people that are easy to hate is very dangerous.

If X and Y are wrong, and someone condemns only X, only Y, or X and Y, you should just agree with them.

If someone condemns X and doesn't mention Y, or the reverse, it is unreasonable to react how you've reacted here.

Not really. The intention of OP is to demonstrate that the people often mentioning cancel culture are not doing it out of advocacy for free speech norms but rather because it suits their particular style of bigotry at this very moment.

There are people in that category. But do you think Kazuo Ishiguro is one of them?

It's just...jarring to read the OP. It reads (to me) like "the right-wing does this all the time...now it's our turn!"

I’ve always been relatively libertarian, and the libertarians I know have consistently opposed cancel culture before it was a meme. There are plenty of folks who are consistent on this one, and I hope that we’re finally at a turning point (though I doubt it).

It's all well and good to point out the hypocrisy on this coming from the right; but that doesn't invalidate the issue. And you're right - it's pretty old, both on the right and the left. Here's a bona fide socialist ranting about leftist groupthink ... in 1943:

"But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness."

(https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...)

Of course we've always had it but the current generation of political far left have turned it into an art form on twitter and other platforms.

I'm very puzzled by the assertion that disproportionate punishment for violating some tribal taboo is old news and uninteresting, while hypocrisy is the real big story. I mean, hypocrisy has been around as long as tribal taboos, so, if anything, you should be just as uninterested in the hypocrisy... and thus uninterested in the whole topic, so why bother making a comment?

I'd say that the left doing its best imitation of the worst things the right does is a bad thing.

"But the right has always done this" should be all the evidence you need that what you're doing is wrong.

See also the phrase “Banned in Boston.” Some of the replies seem to assume that cancel culture is worse because it is more indiscriminate or less well-informed. Social conservatives in Boston banned a $5 bill for showing an unclothed breast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_in_Boston

> Surprising how much press "cancel culture" gets these days as if it's a new thing or as if it's a new thing being pushed on society by the left. We've always had cancel culture.

It's a new thing on the internet because the people who grew up here thought we'd be safe from the people who made our lives hell before university for not fitting in.

Unfortunately the unwashed masses came in and took over and are now throwing us out because we don't act like how they expect us to act.

That Stallman got cancelled for being right while everyone else who took money from a pedophile rapist got away should tell you all you need to know about the state of the internet.

This is whataboutism. Just because something may have always been, doesn't make it any less valid to talk about ending it.

> Turing being prosecuted for being gay

Excluding people because they exclude others is not the same as excluding people because of who they are.

Its the difference between ‘cancel culture’, and plain bigotry.

If you don’t want to be excluded, stop being a bully.

A professor at a Christian college claimed to be in religious solidarity with Muslims. That’s pretty much like saying that you’re attempting to further Facebook’s goals as a Google employee. Of course you get fired.

> A professor at a Christian college claimed to be in religious solidarity with Muslims.

I'm not sure if the greater theological offense was the solidarity with Muslims or quoting the Pope in support of it (Wheaton had only a few years before fired a professor for converting to Catholicism; “Christian” isn't a label of a monolithic group in practice.)

It doesn’t matter. Either way you are not dealing with cancel culture. You are dealing with somebody who has gone on the record s as opposing the fundamental goals of the organization she works for. As I said before, of course you get fired.

Virtually every instance of firing or other institutional disaffiliation attributed to “cancel culture” follows the same pattern: someone—inside or outside an institution—complains to an institution (of those within it empowered to make decisions on this kind of issue) with an allegation that the institutions relationship with someone violates what they perceive to be the fundamental values of the institution, the institution reviews and reaches a similar conclusion, and the relationship is terminated.

That’s like equating a cruise missile with a cap gun because “they both just make explosions.”

This comment is a fine answer to your ideas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311621

She was fired for saying that Muslims and Christians worship the same god, which is literally heresy according to many Christians: https://www.npr.org/2015/12/20/460480698/do-christians-and-m.... Jews and Muslims reject the trinity, which is an essential part of the confession of faith in most branches of Christianity. So it’s quite loaded to say that the Jewish and Muslim god is “the same” as the Christian god.

Right. That’s my point. It’s simply not an example of cancel culture.

Yes I’m agreeing, just elaborating. It’s like Planned Parenthood firing an executive for being a pro-life activist. That’s not cancel culture. The NYT doing the same would be.

I guess. The Jesuits taught me they were all pretty much the same dude.

It's exactly the same God. Islam is basically Judaism fanfic, and Muslims accept Jesus as a prophet of God (though denying his divinity). Christians are upset about the Mohammed thing, and about the two other faiths downgrading Jesus, but there's no question that the dude doing the smiting in the Old Testament is the same God in all three Abrahamic traditions.

Different religions are going to have angry doctrinal differences by definition, but you can't let that obscure the obvious. We're not talking about tengrism or Brahma here.

It's new and bad that unknown authors can face massive backlash while they're still unknown. You can sell twenty copies of your first book and get twenty million calls for a boycott in response, if someone photographs a page and tweets a hot take.

That was technically possible before social media, but only if someone powerful decided to make an example of you. Now it can happen because a random person was bored or in a bad mood.

That's specifically what Ishiguro was complaining about. He even said he wasn't worried about influential people like himself (or all the examples you gave). I don't think he used the phrase "cancel culture," either.

> Apparently now that folks aren't just being cancelled for supporting gay marriage, the free exchange of ideas is suddenly important.

Some people suddenly started caring about the free exchange of ideas and others suddenly stopped, but you might be surprised how many just continued. To me, the ones who suddenly stopped are the biggest hypocrites of all.

Socrates is a prominent early example of "cancel culture" he was cancelled circa 400 BC for Impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens.

I suppose we are fortunate that nowadays a twitter ban doesn't come with an accompanying sip of hemlock.

Impiety is essentially failing to respect something considered sacred.

To (mis)quote another controversial philosopher "History repeats itself, first as tragedy than as farce"

On this specific subject it's hard to think of parallels and if there were parallels then that was bad anyway.

>He said they may be concerned that an "anonymous lynch mob will turn up online and make their lives a misery".

>[...]

>The 66-year-old said he was worried that less established authors were self-censoring by avoiding writing from certain viewpoints or including characters outside their immediate experiences.

In the past you might have had e.g. Catcher in the Rye or Lolita or whatever banned from libraries, but low-profile authors weren't receiving death threats. The important question isn't whether the critics are fair or what their politics are; the important question is what kind of an impact do they have, and a chilling effect is worth being concerned about.

Surprising how much press "Flying Cars" gets these days as if it's a new thing or as if it's a new thing being pushed on society by the VCs. We've always had "Flying Cars".

https://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/curtiss-a...

I don't think this is a fair characterization. A lot of the biggest critics of cancel culture today (Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein, Bill Maher, etc) are moderate liberals who also criticized the right-wing Christian fundamentalist cancel culture of the Bush era. It's not hypocrisy, they really have been in favor of free speech the whole time.

> Apparently now that folks aren't just being cancelled for supporting gay marriage, the free exchange of ideas is suddenly important.

It was always important. What makes you think that the people (like myself) who oppose cancel culture were against gay marriage?

The demographic consisting of "people who oppose cancel culture" were instrumental in making progress for gay acceptance.

If we allowed cancel culture to flourish, there would be no acceptance of homosexuality, women wouldn't have equal rights, minorities would be denied opportunity, etc.

Considering all the benefits that freedom of speech brought us, you now suddenly want to take it away under the guise of "freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences"?

Do you seriously think that there are no more benefits from allowing people to advance their cause? To speak up for or against any particular idea?

I really really want to know: why are some ideologies so perfect that none be allowed to criticise them?

Unprofessional opinion, I think the powers on the right are pushing "cancel culture" to make the crazy stuff they're saying seem okay.

Like, we have a congresswoman blaming California wildfires on Jewish space lasers.

The republicans can deflect from the crazy by claiming "the left" is "cancelling" these people. When in reality any public figure that said crap like that would be shunned. Probably even more in past when American society was outwardly more polite.

Cancel culture is just the modern witch hunt and it didn't start with the witch hunt either. It's just the most ridiculous form that everyone is aware of. This is engraved in into our genes as humans and no amount of thinking will make it go away. People love declaring individuals as enemies and receiving confirmation from a group of other people who are declaring that same individual an enemy.

I genuinely wonder what cancel culture is going to look like in the next 5-10 years and beyond. Just about everyone I speak to about the subject agrees that cancel culture is bad but very few people seem willing to confront it. I sense that people hope the rest of society will come to its senses and we all stop being so judgemental.

But as much as I loathe cancel culture and it's chilling effects on the free exchange of ideas, I can't help but admit that it seems to work. From a detached and objective standpoint, an ideology that utilizes cancel culture is really good at stamping out opposition. You are free to think and believe whatever you want in private and then you self-censor in public out of fear. It takes a certain critical mass of people to affect change and cancel culture excels at keeping individuals from speaking out because the consequences have the potential to ruin your life.

So all that being said, I genuinely wonder if cancel culture is here to stay, because the next ideology to come along will also realize how powerful of a tool it is.

Cancel culture scared the ever living shit out of everyone, even everyday people. Whether you like it or not, it got every male in the workplace to not even breathe in the direction of women you work with. The movement permeated through normal life fast.

It was extremely efficient in bringing forth the necessary changes. I have no problem with using the chainsaw as needed, but we need to careful about when we use it. Can’t use it for everythig.

I don't think the "fear of women" thing is real. At least it isn't real in SF where I've worked for the last eight years.

It's a real thing among the group of guys who exhibit creepy/abusive behavior towards women. They used to be able to get away with it, now they realize they may not be able to anymore.

They aren't so much afraid of women, as they are afraid of consequences for their actions.

This, this, this a million times.

Anyone you hear complaining about it is the very kind of person who needed to be on notice in the first place.

Quick anecdote under a throwaway, white male for what its worth.

New hire, been working a few months at a job out of college. I was on a business trip to another state with some people not on my immediate team. There were like four or five people going in total and I didn't have a hotel room yet, so my supervisor asked me to reach out to some of the others going and see what they were doing. I picked a number from the list at random and called. A woman a good bit older than me answered the phone and I explained the situation. She told me she had gotten a four bedroom house on AirBnB close to the location we were going. Assuming that she had booked the house so we could all stay together, I asked if there was a room left for me. She immediately became very stern and told me that she would never "room alone with a younger man" and that my request was "extremely inappropriate". Sputtering apologies I told her I thought she had gotten the house for everyone from the company going on the trip and she said no, it was just for her. She nastily asked who my supervisor was and I told her the name. Confused as hell I hung up the phone and got a room at a hotel nearby. My immediate first thought was oh fuck, I'm going to be getting a call from HR about sexual harassment, it's all over, fired before I even really started.

When we actually got to the client location this woman acted very creepy. She made several comments about how if she was 'ten years younger' this would be a 'memorable trip' while eyeing me up. She asked for my personal cell number. She even invited me to dinner, just the two of us. After that I stopped responding to her texts, cold shouldered her hard in person, and would only send very cordial, short emails to her in response. Some months after she left the project and I haven't talked to her since.

After she left I told some other male coworkers about what happened and everyone agreed I was a hair's width away from some sort of sexual harassment case, and also agreed that had it come to that, corporate would have sided with her and I could have been fired for a simple mistake. I now walk on pins and needles around women that I work with, unless I know them well.

TL;DR: Accidents happen, women can be creeps, and at least where I work young men are definitely worried about being accused of sexual harassment. I don't think this is a typical case but it does happen.

Honestly, I have it, realized over the years I’ve had it since a teenager and I don’t like it.

Subconsciously I keep females at a bit more distance than men. I’m less likely to have personal conversations with them. I watch myself at social situations mostly interacting with other males and less with females. At a bar I’m more likely to end up chatting to guys than girls. I think there’s some subconscious fear of rejection mixed with an assumption that they’re not interested in talking to me, etc.

And please don’t assume “oh he falls in the asshole crowd” as I see sibling comments already are.

This is Northern Europe though.

I’m pretty convinced it exists around you as well, it’s not necessarily visible even to those subject to it.

> Cancel culture scared the ever living shit out of everyone, even everyday people.

No, I don't think it did, to “everyone”. I think the degree of effect varies a lot, with the two main driving factors being (1) preexisting behavior, and (2) sources of information.

> Whether you like it or not, it got every male in the workplace to not even breathe in the direction of women you work with.

As an employee male, it's had about zero impact on how I relate to women, at work or in other contexts. I don't think I'm alone.

> The movement permeated through normal life fast.

I don't think this is any more true than when this complaint started to be made (with “political correctness” in place of “cancel culture”) in the 1980s, or when it saw another resurgence with “sexual harassment” (often with sneer quotes in writing, or just a plain sneer when spoken) in the 1990s.

> It was extremely efficient in bringing forth the necessary changes.

I think that very much remains to be seen, just as with the previous rounds.

> Whether you like it or not, it got every male in the workplace to not even breathe in the direction of women you work with.

Jesus Christ. No it didn't.

The easiest way to confront cancel culture is to embrace it and try to get everything cancelled for the most minor of reasons. Hopefully, people will just get fed up and ignore it. The hardest part will be to stop companies bowing to the twitter mob for fear of bad publicity.

Also, twitter needs to go. Humans can't handle it.

I wonder if cancelling of really big companies start to happen. Make one misstep in advertising or messaging even in past and then have people attack your partners telling them to stop associating with your brand...

I wonder if we ever properly reach that level. And if after a few big attempts social media companies would put stop to that...

It's starting [0]. Andrew Neil is a guy who DESTROYED Ben Shapiro btw [1]

[0] https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/1395314/Andrew-Ne...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E

It happened to Goya.

Did it though. How many people actually changed their shopping habits?

Closest thing I've done to "canceling" anyone is switching from Autozone to the O'Reily 500yd down the street because the former donated to something I really don't like and the latter had better people working at that particular location anyway.

Goya's CEO, this weekend, continued to push the lie that Trump was cheated out of the election which directly lead to the 1/6 attacks.

Is boycotting Goya in response to that a bad thing? Should #boycottgoya hashtags on social media be deleted, for example?

That has been the status quo for /centuries/ with boycotting along with sponsors getting pissed off over minute things. It has usually failed against big companies because their supporters vastly outweigh their complaints and even egregious sins are forgiven for being the cheapest or ubiquitous.

These things go in and out of the news cycle so fast that I'm surprised companies care anymore. If they just ignored the mob, the list of "cancelled" companies would quickly grow so long that nobody could even keep track.

History is written by the winners, if Cancel Culture "wins" this will just be seen as a positive embyrotic formation of the dominant culture eradicating and stomping out evil in the world via a superior tactical formation (cancellation). If they win this will be seen as a very primitive form of mob-cancellation whereas in the future it will be cancellation via sophisticated "fair" social-credit scores.

If the anti-cancel culture people win out culturally this will be seen as a historic dark age of self-censorship and a period of significantly degraded cultural expression.

All history is relative.

Both sides could lose and this may only be dimly remembered by a distant culture.

Eh, I don't think it's here to stay. The political correctness pendulum swings back and forth every 10-20 years it seems to me, the last time it was on the watch-what-you-say spectrum felt like the mid-90s.

That said, this feels way, way more extreme than it was then. I'm maybe less worried that it's here to stay than I am worried that the swings are getting more and more extreme

If you haven't seen it, check out the movie PCU. It's from 1994 or so but could be written today.. it couldn't be made though.

> Just about everyone I speak to about the subject agrees that cancel culture is bad but very few people seem willing to confront it. I sense that people hope the rest of society will come to its senses and we all stop being so judgemental.

I found this[1] article very interesting. Basically, only 2% of American adults generate over 80% of all tweets. "Cancel Culture" really is run by a few extremists who have a louder voice than everyone else.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...

100% this, there is an extremely small, extremely vocal minority which gets amplified by social media and the media tends to report on this small group as its views are outrageous and generate outrage which in turn generate clicks and ad revenue for those outlets. Boring dependable/sensible government is not something that generates huge ad revenue.

New slogan: "We are the 98%"

This 2% are the are same folks who will berate you on Reddit for saying you prefer partners with jobs.

At the end of the day you can decide to argue with angry people or not. Another perk of being social media free

It's not even clear that those extremists have a louder voice in and of themselves. Nobody really listens to them except their opponents, who amplify them because they think it makes the entire progressive culture look bad.

That may be so, but you don’t want to end up being an unwitting victim.

One of the first instances early on on Twitter was that young marketing woman going to South Africa making a sarcastic anti-racism tweet before boarding only to learn after landing a brouhaha was brewing leading to her firing because the mob wanted to see it as racist.

I guess you’re talking about the IAC PR director publishing the following:

  Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!

if you’re directing PR for internet companies and post something like this from a public profile associated with your workplace - yeah, I wouldn’t call them an “unwitting victim”, and I think they would have lost that job if they made the same joke on a talk show in the 90s.

That being said, I find it crazy how easily people get fired with no recourse in general in the USA. Seems like even personal dislike from management is legal grounds for termination?

It’s in poor taste. Should not have been tweeted. It was an anti-racist commentary, but you know the mob, throw them some fresh meat.

In firing her the company is complicit in casting her as racist when her sarcasm was pointed at low brow racism. But that escaped the shamers and cancellors. They were too busy frothing at the mouth.

> In firing her the company is complicit in casting her as racist

No, in firing her the company is complicit in furthering the idea that the duty of a PR representative to their employer is to have and exercise good judgement when it regards public relations for the firm.

That’s an ex-post excuse. They got blowback from her attempt at exposing people’s preconceptions. They didn’t like it. They caved in to the mob. PR isn’t perfect. They make mistakes judging public reaction to comms for their clients. Unless it’s super bad, they don’t lose their jobs in public. There was no opportunity fir her to explain her side. Nope. Hot potato.

Companies burry all kinds of misdeeds for their staff. So it’s not at all congruent.

> They got blowback from her attempt at exposing people’s preconceptions. They didn’t like it.

Yes, “actions that produced blowback that the company doesn't like” are the definition of a PR failure. When PR is your whole job, that's a big deal.

> Companies burry all kinds of misdeeds for their staff

You can't bury it when it is public and tied to both the employee and the company from the outset.

“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

I'm having a hard time seeing this as 'anti-racism', even if the 'punchline' hinges on the uncomfortable truth that black africans are disproportionately the victims of HIV, it is very much punching down.

Is it in very bad taste? absolutely yes. Is it something that needed to be #1 trending on twitter? no. Is it something that should noticeably alter the path of someone's life? Not in any world I would choose to live in.

I do agree with your premise, a single joke in very bad taste by a non-public entity is a non-event. I think that we all have something somewhere in our closet that could be twisted against us by cancel culture.

The scariest part is that there is no redemption. A picture or recording of you doing something reprehensible when you were 17 will be used against you years later. Cancel culture needs to recognize that people grow and change. We need to recognize that young people say and do stupid shit without understanding the full context of what they are doing, or the potential consequences.

We are in agreement. As I mention elsewhere. It’s in poor taste. It relied on if not racist at least negative stereotypes to expose the bad stereotype and the assumed privilege that a type of person gets AIDS. Her company panicked.

If she been accused of murder they would have offered more sympathy. They’d have probably helped with a lawyer, etc. but here? Oh no, the mob singled you out. You’re on your own, bye now!

> The scariest part is that there is no redemption. A picture or recording of you doing something reprehensible when you were 17 will be used against you years later

“Redemption” is not the same thing as “freedom from accountability due to having escaped accountability for a sufficiently long time”.

There is certainly an argument that for at least some forms of accounts one ought to have the latter as well as the former (hence statutes of limitations), but they are distinct and radically different concepts.

When your job is PR, when you have a PR disaster you might have trouble finding another job until you figure out how to demonstrate to future employers that you have learned something from the experience.

The French revolution was effected by a relatively small mob of Parisians, not at all representative of the rural France that was the majority. Still, minority or not, the heads rolled.

To be a bit more precise, that small mob invented head rolling, since the French Revolution and subsequent Reign of Terror is when the guillotine first became widely adopted.

The problem with cancel culture is much the same as the problem I'm having with my QA department:

We have a very small, rock solid front end. Most of our work is simply updating content. It's very straightforward work and you have to try very hard to introduce bugs. But when you staff a team of 6 people and tell them "it's your job to find something wrong with this website", they WILL find something wrong. I have a meeting this afternoon to explain to my Product manager why the content looks different on a mobile screen than it does on desktop because the QA team thinks line breaks are a bug ("the content document didn't break the line here, but the mobile view did, it's a bug").

When you empower people to take others down via subjective rules, then it's always a moving target. You can never reach a point where people are safe and happy. Check out the shuffles deck subreddit for some egregious examples of cancel culture gone wrong, https://www.reddit.com/r/Shuffles_Deck/.

r/Shuffles_Deck more like r/thathappened and everyone clapped

I don't think it's limited to just what you say in public. Videos and audio recordings have a way of triggering human emotions that writing simply does not. To tell you the truth, I live in perpetual fear that some acquaintance could secretly record me saying some non-PC thing in private, and post it to Twitter to get me cancelled. I have deleted all social media to try to achieve "out of sight, out of mind" but I still feel unsafe.

It's truly dystopian. I do feel as if I will go insane if this continues for another 10 years.

I worked hard in school and sacrificed so that I could build myself a better life. Now, it seems like the entire thing hangs on a knife's edge. Quite frankly, I would not have tried to work hard for the last 15 years if I had known we were about to go full-blown 1984.

Deep fakes are coming and with it a tsunami of outrageous videos that have no connection to reality.

People will learn to distrust video evidence.

I think this could extend to major public figures, but offers no recourse to the average joe who doesn't have 100 hours of talking footage online. Deepfakes require a lot of data to produce. Anyone who doesn't have this much data, you could reliably assume the content is real.

"Deepfakes require a lot of data to produce."

I wonder if this is going to hold, especially as 4K video is becoming the norm.

It won't, as with everything in DL the models are becoming much better at training on a large amount of data and fine-tuning on very little. I am pretty sure in 1-2 years we will have semi-convincing one-shot learning deepfakes models with 5-10 pictures you could get on the person's Facebook profile.

"Deepfakes require a lot of data to produce."

Are you sure? https://www.myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia

The result is not perfect but it could be with a few more photos.

And realistic synthetic voice generation is not so far away in the future.

> 100 hours of talking video

You mean like zoom recordings? Yeah nobody has those.

Haha, good point. I didn't even really think of that.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

Just don't be an ass to people who you have locker room talk with and they won't have shit to say later.

Sure, there's always those lizard-brained people who will smile then stab you in the back, but they could also just as easily poison your dog or cut your brake lines vs. ruin your life on social media.

These are the choices we make. Or we can live as a hermits Ted Kaczynski-style.

Well, poisoning my dog or vandalizing my car is illegal. Whipping up a twitter mob is legal and highly encouraged by an enormous number of people.

I try not to be an ass to anyone, but jealousy and envy exists. It's now impossible for me to relax around some acquaintances who are unemployed while I pull in a big tech salary.

All in all, I really made my mind up on this issue back during the BLM protests. This cancel culture is orwellian, evil, and directly contrary to what made the US a technological powerhouse. And more and more people are being radicalized by it, and the alarming number of apologists, every day.

I've unfortunately have discovered that the people who I thought to be friends (smart, funny, kind) have completely changed their attitude once they found out my employer. Now I have to watch out everything I say around them because it's all assumed to come from a place of evil intent and interpreted in the worst case possible.

Lesson learned: do not share your work place with anyone you want to keep being friends with, at least not people that aren't similarly employed/earn similarly.

Do you work at Palantir or the GOPs social media department or something? Because that sounds extreme and can’t be just about income levels

BTW it’s freeing coming from a country where discussing income and money is taboo. I don’t even know what my parents earn. It has its downsides as well, but it’s nice not even being able to judge.

It happens on HN as well, if you work for Google or FB.

Never seen that. Lots of skepticism and animosity to the companies themselves, which is at it should given their position. Never seen it directed at individuals just for being employed at either of those, though.

Don’t be surprised if no one appreciates or even cares about your work besides your employer. It’s part of the package.

The real scary truth is that people probably don't care as much about you as you might think they do. The way you frame the problem, assigning envy of your success to acquaintances by default, worrying about negative attention, reiterating how hard you've worked, leads me to believe that self-importance might be the underlying issue that saps your enjoyment of life. I say this not as a personal attack, but as a cautionary observation.

I know it's hard to deal with a fear just with rational discourse. But if you have a good salary and work in tech, you are probably getting more out of the dystopia than the dystopia is getting out of you. So just learn to enjoy life without worrying about hypothetical events that remain statistically unlikely even by the most conservative estimation in a world of billions. Anything else is self-indulgent.

I appreciate the comment, and you're right. It doesn't make any sense for me to worry about this type of stuff, and it does likely spring from my own self-centeredness. It's certainly easy to get caught up in the negative headlines these days, which is why I try to stick to HN - every once in a while, an article like this slips through and triggers me, I guess. Maybe step one towards changing my outlook would be changing my HN username...

If this continues for another 10 years I’m buying a farm far away from anyone with a Twitter account.

Communism was also like this. People has the public persona, the party tasks, things they had to do and say.

Then they went home and listened to Radio Free Europe and talked with select people what they really had on their mind or used coded language to transmit messages.

What I hope this achieves is a parallel society and when it's big enough there will be some public battles.

This. And you only spoke political jokes to really close friends.

I was 11 when Communism fell in my country.

By that time, kids knew perfectly well what to say in school, what to say among close friends and who of their colleagues was a snitch.

It was chilling when before the first day of school may parents made it very clear I shouldn't tell anyone (especially not teachers) that they were listening to Radio Free Europe.

I think that in 50 years, maybe even 20 years cancel culture will be looked at a low point in the culture of the US and its adherents will try to disassociate themselves with it by saying thats how people thought/acted back then(popular sentiment). Similar to McCarthyism and its blacklists which ruined actors/directors, that moment is taught in history books as a backwards time, cancel culture will be similar.

The fact that a cancellation I undergo now will be seen as unjust after I'm elderly does nothing for me.

Yeah, it seems that way to me too. I think it will be viewed as a backwards and sad episode that cost...well, everyone...a great deal.

It's 70% power, 20% revenge, and 10% justice. A cri-de-coeur of the bored. If it happened in an elementary school we'd call it bullying.

moral panics and the resulting witch-hunting/burning is feature of humanity that comes and goes. the mob always thinks it's a good idea in the moment, but history never looks fondly upon it.

Wasn't McCarthy-ism basically proto-cancel culture?

Moreso super cancel culture. Same for Mao's struggle sessions. And so on forever. Cancel Culture is just a new name for an eternal phenomenon in every society.

We're heading towards fascism. This time on two fronts, one horn from each end of the political spectrum. (perhaps a new name for it that isn't fascism because of the history of that word referring to a kind of right wing movement)

It feels like we're inside the ramp-up of a major social, political, and national conflict, all the pieces are falling into place.

Read The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig to get some ideas about how this kind of thing happened in the early 20th century in Europe and imagine how it might be happening again.

Ideology is on the rise and the willingness of people to support their cause with violence is going right along with it. The problem is not a specific ideology, but the practice in itself.

>So all that being said, I genuinely wonder if cancel culture is here to stay, because the next ideology to come along will also realize how powerful of a tool it is.

Here to stay for sure. There's an active group of people behind it. They are the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left and they still exist today. The problem is that in 1989 when socialism died. They started their rebranding effort. They became Politically Correct, "democratic socialists", culutural marxists, globalists, internationalists. etc.

The reason Justin Trudeau can do black face on multiple occasions and still win an election is because he's part of the new-left. Cancel culture is a tool of political silencing opponents. Those in the fold like Trudeau, he'll get away with literally anything.

The problem or reason why it has become so much more obvious. Increasingly desperate. What has Biden done for BLM? Absolutely nothing.

> The problem is that in 1989 when socialism died.

Socialism didn't die in 1989. What is that even supposed to mean?

> They started their rebranding effort. They became Politically Correct

“Politically Correct” was never part of a rebranding effort on the left, it was originally a pejorative used between different groups in the left, and adopted heavily as a pejorative by the right against the left in about the early 1980s, serving the same purpose as “cancel culture” does today (like, literally, anything the right says about “cancel culture” today can pretty much have that term swapped out for “political correctness” and be a quote from the right in the 1980s-1990s.)

> "democratic socialists",

“Democratic Socialist” isn't part of a post-1989 rebranding. The DSA itself was founded in 1982, and the “democratic socialist” label is older (one of the DSAs predecessor organizations was the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee.)

> culutural marxists,

“Cultural Marxism” isn't a post-1989 left-wing rebranding, it's a right-wing conspiracy theory. No one on the left identifies or brands themselves or any movement they are part of as “cultural marxism”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_...

> globalists

Again, not a left-wing rebranding; pretty much no one identifies/brands with globalism, and globalism is a term used both on the left- and far-right to refer to and critique an aspect of neoliberal capitalism (a center-right ideology).

> internationalists

Again, not a post-1989 left rebranding. Leftist “internationalism” historically has referred to association with one of the Communist Internationals (though it pretty much fell out of useful use with the overlapping, competing, Stalinist Third and Trotskyite Fourth Internationals before WWII, and the subsequent schism within the Fourth International. More recently, the left has been more prone to use “internationalism” as part of a term of critique with regard to liberal (centrist to center-right) internationalism, though even that negative use has largely been replaced with criticism of neoliberal “globalism”.

I wonder what the OP means by "globalists" and "internationalists". Are there any other words that he or she could use in place of those? Hmm.

>I wonder what the OP means by "globalists" and "internationalists". Are there any other words that he or she could use in place of those? Hmm.

Globalism is still there but is also dying. The problem with rebranding efforts is that it makes the subject difficult. In essence globalism was a failed attempt to destroy borders and have no immigration as a subject. Have just 1 global government and only 1 set of laws.

The reason why globalism has essentially failed is because you can never in a million years do this without force. The country that doesn't go along with it becomes wealthy by not being it.

Globalization is the the antithesis of globalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalism_(politics)

In terms of internationalism it's just another brand of socialism that failed. There's no need to use another word because it's correct. Nobody today goes by the term because it's dead as socialism is.

Imagine spending all this time and effort to defend your dogwhistle. Yikes.

>Imagine spending all this time and effort to defend your dogwhistle. Yikes.

You had a question and I answered in good faith. I accept your concession.

>Socialism didn't die in 1989. What is that even supposed to mean?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989

China continues to be socialist because they killed everyone who protested. Even despite slaughtering their own people at Tiananmen Square. China is more capitalist today than ever. In fact the majority of 'stuff' coming from China is being produced in capitalist zones like Shenzhen.

>“Politically Correct” was never part of a rebranding effort on the left,

The rest of your post is basically just trying to deny the rebranding. The problem with rebranding is that when the old brand dies, the adherents say 'oh we were never that' that's in essence the point of rebranding.

Here's the reality. Socialism is dying worldwide. Here in Canada for example, tons of government monopolies have gone private. Telus, Petro-Canada, CNR, Various electricity entities, road repairs and in some cases even the roads themselves.

The wind is blowing that direction and the world governments will divest themselves out of their socialism eventually.

I don't understand how someone can write this much without knowing the difference between neoliberalism and leftism.

I don't think Justin Trudeau is left. He wouldn't be the leader of a centrist party otherwise. The Canadian Liberals go right (eg: Martin/Chrétien in the 90s [1]) and then left (Cannabis legalization in 2012 [3], social positions in 2015 [2]) when it suits them. If he was left-wing his fiscal policies would be a lot closer to the NDP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Martin#Finance_Minister

[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-party-...

[3] https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/liberal-delegates-vote-...

>I don't think Justin Trudeau is left. He wouldn't be the leader of a centrist party otherwise.

Well lets look at the new-left wiki page.

>broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, feminism, gay rights, abortion-rights, gender roles and drug policy reforms.

That's literally Trudeau in a nutshell. He has done every one of those.

>The Canadian Liberals go right (eg: Martin/Chrétien in the 90s [1]) and then left (Cannabis legalization in 2012 [3], social positions in 2015 [2]) when it suits them.

The confusion many people have is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

they generally support free markets, free trade, limited government, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), capitalism, democracy, secularism, gender equality, racial equality, internationalism, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion.

I find it quite difficult to see anything in that list that Trudeau stands for. He's not a Liberal. That's the clear confusion. Yes Chretien and others were liberals.

>If he was left-wing his fiscal policies would be a lot closer to the NDP.

I am very confused by this. https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/canada-deficit-2020_ca_5...

They ran a not-so-universal basic income and had a >$343 billion deficit. This is literally 20 years of debt in a single year.

If anything, this is worse than the NDP.

> That's literally Trudeau in a nutshell. He has done every one of those.

Good. That's sensible social policy for any developed nation. If the Liberals weren't in the wilderness in the early 2010s they should have done those things then as well. They felt overdue in 2015.

While I can't debate the high-level ideals of the first paragraph of the New Left article, its examples of student movements and grassroots activism don't seem like the sort of thing types like Trudeau, Friedland, or Morneau would associate with. The Federal Liberals are far too pro-business and pro-establishment.

> I find it quite difficult to see anything in that list that Trudeau stands for.

Really? I think the Federal Liberals' attitudes tend to be closer to those ideals than their opposition. The SoCon base of the Tories seem a lot less keen on secularism, individual rights, and freedom of speech.

> He's not a Liberal. That's the clear confusion. Yes Chretien and others were liberals.

I agree with you, I don't think Trudeau's a liberal. I don't think him, Chrétien, or the Federal Liberals are ideologically that much liberals either. I think they're incredibly centrist and are interested in popular policies that strike them as good government. The good things about that include Medicare in the 60s and fiscal reform in the 90s. The bad things include security theatre like the recent firearm legislation. If you're less inclined to realpolitik and more principled about something you'll likely end up with the Conservatives, NDP, or Greens.

> If anything, this is worse than the NDP.

What makes you feel that way? I feel like the Federal NDP would have a different paradigm towards spending than the Liberals. Their 2019 didn't even entertain the idea of a balanced budget.

Jailing anyone who owns a C++ compiler will stop all hackers, that would also seem to work.

> So all that being said, I genuinely wonder if cancel culture is here to stay

Insofar as “cancel culture” describes actual behavior rather than the ideology motivating it, it's been a constant part of society, from all ideological angles, for, approximately, all of human history. Shunning the heterodox is not new.

The only thing new is the right’s use of the term “cancel culture” to disparage this when it bites them; this replaces “political correctness”, which served the exact same purpose for the right from the 1980s until “cancel culture” became the new hotness.

The only way we'll ever be able to combat cancel culture is through online anonymity. I fear that we're drifting in the other direction, though - specifically to make cancellation easier.

I think the real answer is resilience. Enough people, especially those in positions of power (who decide whether to fire someone), must stop giving a shit.

There will be some evolutionary pressure there. I don't think Elon Musk would fire his engineer over a doubtful tweet, given that his own Twitter feed is pretty wild. Once some places establish themselves as safe, they will attract "mouthy talent".

You will be declared alt right. You will be declared a nazi even if you are jewish.

Your employer will get phone calls, tweets, emails, constant harassment until they agree to fire you. They will use other people harassing you as a reason to fire you. Being fired is controversial, and they will use the firing as another weapon against you. "the former x company engineer let go because..." etc

They will talk about you in a million places a thousand times a day. People who never knew you existed will only know you as that guy who they said was evil.

If you work for Elon Musk, great. If you don't, you might be well and truly screwed.

When enough people stopped giving a shit they got lumped in with other enemies. That's the way orthodoxy works.

Problem with that is that anonymous content is generally text and that's the easiest to have bots spurt out with little effort. Sometimes reading a basic forum, I wonder whether the future forums will be some percentage bot-generated. Much of it is hardly high-level discourse.

Meanwhile, more engaging content is personal - faces, travel, personal action, being physically in a place. That's harder to do anonymously.

Obviously there are exceptions in both cases.

>I can't help but admit that it seems to work.

Really? I see it as a abject failure.

- It is universally derided by many different groups.

- It is considered a plague on society.

- Being "cancelled" is a badge of honor to some.

I used to see my society as a place where hate speech was generally taboo. People would only espouse such attitudes in private or, if they did so in public, they'd at least use dog whistles or euphemisms for plausible deniability.

Today, Facebook is full of people shouting pretty fucked up shit for everyone to hear. The attitude seems to be that you can't cancel everyone, so everyone should do it as much as possible. I know a lot of people who can't speak to their parents or other close family anymore because the hateful shit they shout on facebook all day.

Granted, this is just my person experience. Others might live in a place where people are nicer to each other than they used to be.

I think it will look like it is now. Long running private thread that aren’t open to new people.

I stopped using FB years ago, but have messenger groups that are super active and have been private for years.

I wonder how new people will “find the others” for how the web was so great. But I’ve met young people who do the same thing with their friends.

The concept is not new, see McCarthyism.

What's new is social media's ability to amplify the voices of a small number of relatively anonymous people to "cancel" someone.

McCarthyism required a Senator to have a serious impact. Now people are cancelled, without there being a clear link back to who, exactly, did the cancelling.

> the voices of a small number of relatively anonymous people

Has someone been cancelled as a purely grassroots effort before? It seems like the seeds of a cancelling may begin this way, but quasi-journalists, pundits and other online personalities are the engine that does the crucial amplification to reach broader public discourse.

I think their is an interesting sort of 'laundering' of attribution where social media power brokers can point to the seeds and say "Look at this grassroots movement that is changing the way society views X", and then the issue is broadcast to a much wider audience. However, that small grassroots movement may not have been seriously affected X except for the effects of the power brokers' pointing fingers.

It seems like these social media power brokers may not even intend to have this effect in some cases, but they are a crucial step in the cancelling lifecycle.

The Dixie Chicks.

Country stations stopped playing their songs because listeners would call in to complain, threaten boycotts, etc.

While I'm struggling to remember exact successes, I know the Parents Television Council would use petitions to cancel programming that they deemed inappropriate.

I think the Parents Television Council was largely unsuccessful.

They hated the Simpsons, which is now the longest running show in US history, I believe.

What are some examples of people being cancelled by a small amount of anonymous people? I can't think of any.

Lets looks at Gina Carano for example. She was "cancelled" (fired from her job) as the direct result of her social media posting things a large number of people found offensive and inappropriate, not a small amount. 10 anonymous people didn't cause it, hundreds of thousands of people thought it was wrong.

The Inquisition, witch trials, outing people as gay, most of the history of the Jews..

The OP specifically says "social media".

Which is just the common media of our time, I mean come on, media is right there in the title.

Where did you get hundreds of thousands?

Even if that’s accurate, doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinion of the broader public.

So no examples then?

Not a single one? That seems strange. Its almost like "cancel culture" is really just "repercussions for my terrible views" but that can't be it, right?

Thought I'd post what was said that made her lose her job for everyone to make up their own minds:

> Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children.

> "Because history is edited, most people today don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.

> "How is that any different from hating someone for their political views."

On one hand I worry about this power being abused, but it's hard for me to side with the people being cancelled because they're so repugnant.

It is hard to stand up for the rights of the bigots, the white supremacists, the science deniers, the propagandists, and the misogynists. People who spent decades denying other people access and are now finding the shoe on the other foot.

Can we find some good examples of people who were "cancelled" who were not peddling conspiracy theories or pontificating about why the white race is the natural rulers of humanity?

In some ways this may be seen as a return to the media culture in the Fairness Doctrine era. It used to be that media companies had to seriously consider the viewpoints expressed and wouldn't give crackpots a voice very often. The Internet changed that, allowing everybody a voice regardless of how crazy they might be. Now we're turning back to a more metered experience as it seems that unlimited amplifying the wingnuts is actually damaging to the country.

Nobody likes the censor, but they're a necessary evil. Without them trolls will always take over the conversation once the number of participants exceeds a fairly low threshold. Trolls can drive out honest participants, but honest participants can't drive out trolls. Moderation is necessary. It doesn't have to be third party moderation, upvote/downvote systems can do the job although they're tricky to get right and can be gamed.

Someone being cancelled who shouldn't have been: Monica Lewinsky.

She's been cancelled? She has a million Twitter followers https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky and 150k on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MonicaLewinsky/

I've found articles about her speaking on college campuses with her anti-bullying campaign. I've not found anything about her being cut off from platforms yet. Can you post a link?

In her videos, etc, she talks about how she couldn't get a job because she's Monica Lewinsky, the lady that the president had an affair with in the 90s. It's been nearly 30 years.

Connection with the Clinton Impeachment doesn't seem like a cancel culture thing. That's just normal infamy, and while it sucks it's not relevant.

> Someone being cancelled who shouldn't have been: Monica Lewinsky

When was Monica Lewinsky “cancelled”? The closest to that would be the negative treatment she got from Clinton’s reflexive defenders in the late 90s during the scandal, but that's substantially before the supposed sudden, recent emergence of “cancel culture”, and her current profile rather undercuts the catastrophic descriptions of “cancellation”.

People currently describe cancel culture as an all-powerful, all-encompassing, all-devouring tyranny that can topple governments and ruin lives at will. An evil on par with that of Nazi Germany (at least according to white Conservatives who will unironically declare themselves victims of a modern Holocaust by cancel culture) which threatens the very foundation of human civilization and liberty itself.

Almost every realistic description of cancel culture and its actual effects will undermine the narrative, because the need to spread fear and hatred of the left by overstating it and its scope has caused the dialogue around it to spiral out beyond hyperbole into batshit insanity.

But yes, Monica Lewinsky would definitely be considered "cancelled" by today's standards. Any form of public backlash is considered cancel culture, now.

We can. My go-to example is Emmanuel Cafferty (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...) - a Twitter power-user took a video of him using the OK sign, then declared him to be a white supremacist and summoned up a Twitter mob to get him fired for it.

That's a good example of atrociously poor HR by PG&E. Especially since they're apparently not willing to reconsider. It should be noted that he's has not been banned from speaking anywhere.

I was curious about this so I tried to follow up on the story to see what happened after the fact, but the reporting is pretty much entirely about the firing. I'm curious if he's been blacklisted from his industry or not? If so, that would be a perfect case of cancel culture going too far.

He reports that he's been unable to find work (https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2020/nov/25/cover-sdge-l...), although I don't know how anyone could go about confirming that.

Moral panics can and do get a lot worse. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial

In retrospect, this all seems rather insane. But back then, how many people actually risked being painted as apologists of Satanic pedophiles pointing the obvious out?

I agree with you, nobody will do anything until it's too late.

Look on the bright side: If we manage to win against the fourth reich people will remember, maybe for one generation.

I find it almost funny how the media/culture/etc. seems determined to build a group of people that will react negatively to so-called "cancel culture." They seem to think that people will gladly follow the ever-growing list of arbitrary rules indefinitely.

If I were a betting man, I'd predict a resurgence in punk attitudes in about 2025 or 2030. At some point, the dam will break and people will stop caring. I already get a sense that the 13-19 generation is a bit tired of it.

But then, what are the norms and injunctions that this new generation will break...

At some point, I think every generation looks at the collective "rules" of their parents and thinks, "Huh?" and starts to disregard it entirely, if only out of ignorance.

There is no lack of dissenting opinions to be found outside of the mainstream (the same place where punk once existed exclusively).

Cancel culture is primarily a problem with mainstream/pop culture. The "underground" today is more vast and diverse than it has ever been.

What's underground today? Genuinely curious.

People with a Parler account.

In the realm of music, I think the mainstream has stayed roughly the same size but the rest of music has exploded in size and variety via Spotify/Bandcamp/Soundcloud/YouTube.

Instead of zines there's a million or so blogs and forums and newsletters.

Podcasts are an entirely new realm and only a tiny sliver of it cracks the mainstream.

The number of outlets for "TV shows" has exploded, so there's plenty that comes and goes without any significant mainstream exposure.

Much of the above is created on an enthusiasts budget for a tiny audience.

And I'd argue a lot of the above are exempt from "cancel culture" if only because most people don't know they exist.

Good point, but I am not sure how much weight it carries. Safety in numbers? You are fine as long as you don't offend anybody?

Have we accepted censorship just like that? What is next, coded language to escape the thugs?

But hasn't it always been like that? Radical social/political views and any fringe stuff around sex and drugs has never had mainstream support or backing from big companies, basically by definition. And a lot of times it is straight up illegal. It has only ever survived by staying under the radar. And when it pops above the radar we get purity movements like the War on Drugs and the Parents Music Resource Center.

I think a lot of conservatives are mad about "cancel culture" because now they're being targeted by purity movements instead of the punks and freaks and hippies and queers. I say tough shit. Overall, the realm of acceptable discourse has expanded considerably and is arguably larger today than ever before. If they think their particular viewpoints are being unfairly suppressed, then do what everyone else did and go underground and do the work of bringing your views to the mainstream.

If they rely on YT, IG, etc for monetization or promotion, they risk having monetization revoked or being entirely deplatformed.

That has always been the case, and it used to be far worse when the entire media landscape was controlled by a couple dozen conglomerates. Being underground/subversive means you don't make a lot of money. If you want to make money do what everyone else does... sell out.

While that's true, I tend to imagine it like a horde of mosquitoes, a bit like Paul Graham's idea[1], but applicable to social trends. I wrote a whole essay on trend movement that leads me to believe the pendulum is close to swinging.[2]

[1] https://observer.com/2011/06/paul-graham-outlines-the-mosqui... (and he also has an essay that I was too lazy to find about startups) [2]https://gainedin.site/trends

Distributed networks and the like.

The first draft of an actual underground which can't just be shutdown by attacking a server is https://getaether.net/ having build up on the lessons of freenet and bittorrent.

It isn't the be all and end all, but it's a huge step forward.

Wow, you bring up a point I had never considered which is; we've seen this before. In the 1950's and 1960's, you kind-of had to tow the line in what you said, how you dressed, etc... The cancelling wasn't quite as broad as it can be now simply because it wasn't technically feasible back then. You could, however, be in real danger of losing your job if you said you supported a registered Communist's right to speak their mind, for example. Or if you were openly a Communist yourself for that matter.

As you point out, the punk era was in direct opposition of those attitudes. Punks wanted the freedom to express themselves however they wished, as long as it wasn't harming anyone. Want to do make music that is raw and in your face? Go for it. Want to do drugs or even NOT do drugs of any kind? (Straight Edge) You're cool too. Just don't tell me what I need to do or what I can or can't say.

I think you're right that we very well may see a resurgence of that. In fact, I hope we do.

> In the 1950's and 1960's, you kind-of had to tow the line in what you said, how you dressed, etc... The cancelling wasn't quite as broad as it can be now simply because it wasn't technically feasible back then.

If you were not white, it was much more extreme. Up to and including being murdered.

EDIT: The irony of this comment being "canceled". Does one of the down-voters care to comment on this? Is it not a known fact?

Like usual you focus on the few dozen Americans that it happened to while ignoring the millions of South Americans and South Asians who were murdered for being communist. Which is the point of identity politics, and the reason why more black panthers were murdered by FBI sponsored police raids than blacks were lynched.

Like usual? We're talking about the US. Yes, the FBI killed Black people. They're a fascist organization that should be disbanded. Far more Black people were killed by "regular" Americans though. It's not even close.

The communists also killed many, many people. No one is excusing that, but that's not the topic here.

Have you considered that cancel culture is the new punk rock? Look at the reaction in this thread. The responses range from clutching pearls to legitimate fear. Just like the reactions to punk rock.

Even the real punk rock was pretty much in line with what we consider cancel culture. It's an attack on the establishment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Save_the_Queen_(Sex_Pistol...

No, I haven't considered that shutting down expression was punk.

But I was never in the punk scene, all I know is that it was fun music that caused a lot of unwarranted fuss from those against punk music being heard. Maybe I'm wrong.

>punk rock was pretty much in line with what we consider cancel culture. It's an attack on the establishment

Calling cancel culture "anti-establishment" is like a congressperson running for reelection by campaigning against "washington insiders." Like, yeah, you can make the case that it's not a 1-to-1 match with the establishment status quo, but only because the status quo is the vector sum of a hodgepodge of mutually exclusive but still individually powerful components.

>Have you considered that cancel culture is the new punk rock?

Punk wasn't pushed down from Exxon's board room, cancel culture is pushed down from Google's though. You can't be a rebel when the establishment supports you every step of the way.

Here's Siouxsie being punk enough that she'd be cancelled today: https://www.reddit.com/r/goth/comments/ire2cs/what_is_up_wit...

I think you're right about the pendulum swinging, but on the other hand the Victorian era lasted a lifetime. Moral fashions are hard to predict.

What's arbitrary about it?

Just be nice to people! Don't go around saying racist or sexist or homophobic things in public.

We'd really, really like it if our kids grew up not being scared to tell us they're gay, or if our black friends would be no more scared of a white cop than our white friends are, or if our trans women friends aren't at risk of being murdered for using a pointlessly gendered public facility.

And while people are at it, it'd be really nice to stop electing white racists to the leadership of prominent and powerful countries.

My sense of the younger generation here is that if they're tired of it it's because they don't understand what our problem is.

If you talk to someone who works/worked in publishing or the creative arts scenes (MFA programs, etc.), you'll see that KI is likely specifically addressing that crowd - his industry.

I think a lot of the general populace is aware of the dynamics that he's talking about, but in publishing it's another world/level.

Interesting example that's the norm in the space: the story "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" by Isabel Fall. Bear with me as I likely butcher the pronouns/terms etc, but my intent is earnest and well meaning here...

Isabel is a trans woman author. She/they weren't out when that story was published in a scifi mag. The story makes some pretty obvious references to sexual/gender identity, and the writing has very specific commentary and sometimes mockery.

Isabel, not known to be trans at the time, faced a torrent of online abuse for ~appropriating/joking about/exploring concepts about gender identity. The motivation was pretty clear: Isabel wasn't trans (as far as the public knew).

The story had passed some "sensitivity readings" too (yes, sensitivity readers are another interesting area to explore), but the online reception was still awful. There's also a difference between criticism vs. outright internet abuse. Isabel's experiences were pretty firmly in the latter.

The author took down the story, I believe came out or the news outed her/they, and the details go on (finger pointing, revisions of criticism about the story given light of the author's gender, etc.).

The point of all this is that's an insane dynamic to create in, and that's the tip of the iceberg really with what Publishing is going through. Young Adult fiction is apparently one of the ground zeros for this dynamic.

| that's an insane dynamic to create in

What do you think Twitter would have looked like in 1956 when James Baldwin published Giovanni's Room?

Is the problem "cancel culture" (a nebulous term which means little) or simply the result of giving everyone on earth a place to complain?

Cancel culture is a direct result of giving everyone on earth a place to complain.

That seems to be an entirely different issue than how the term "cancel culture" is used politically.

I don't think it's cancel culture in the way normal folks are tuned into it, but it's pretty similar.

Writers aren't homogeneous in their beliefs, but a lot of writers and a lot of publishing/news industry folks all went the same schools for university, MFAs, writer-in-residences, and so on. The dynamic at those shared spaces is source code of wokeness. If you read that NYT article on Smith recently, that's the vibe and also the tip of the iceberg.

What goes on is well meaning but emotionally immature adults hyper-policing each other. As they all sort of believe the same stuff anyway (vaguely left/progressive), there's an odd aspect of one-upsmanship to it. If you add in the stress of a career in the arts, I think power-seeking/insecurity is heavily involved as well: I'm going to make no money unless I really luck out, I'm going to go face a 0.01% chance of getting published, I won't have much medical or retirement savings, but I can control this aspect of my life and my community, so I'll do that.

The end result is this wild form of cultural policing that has all the hallmarks of bullying.

As it's a very tight network of a few undergrads and a few MFAs which produce a lot of the artists and folks working in publishing and journalism, you see it spilling out of their dorms and into corporations and profit spaces. The mainstream workforce gets a little bit of this through their HR departments now, but it's a different level in publishing.

It's hard to describe without talking to someone that's done an MFA or similar, but hopefully that helps. Testimonies of professors who finally lost their s*t with their universities over this same stuff are also accurate, but because it's often an old white dude who's a comp sci professor doing the public pushback, they'll never be the right advocate to turn things around. That's what makes the Smith admin employee who's finally speaking out so interesting, as that's "one of their own."

Some of the things to point out about Isabel Fall:

1. Isabel Fall was a pseudonym, with no other works attached to this pseudonym.

2. Isabel Fall only states in the bio having been born in 1988. (88 is a dogwhistle for nazi).

3. The piece itself was military science fiction, which already has a bad reputation among progressive circles (case in point: a prominent military scifi publisher's forum just got closed down after it was reported their mods were literally calling for violence against the cops protecting the white house at the 1/6 riot).

4. The work was describing gender in a way that itself has some controversy, commentating on the physical/body expression of gender as well as the nonphysical/performance expression of gender.

All these together created a powder keg where people literally believed that somehow Isabel Fall was a nazi who had pulled the wool over the eyes of one of the most prominent science fiction and fantasy magazines in the industry to get paid professional rate work and platform transphobia. The actual truth was extremely messy, Isabel Fall herself reportedly was hospitalized for suicide, and people are still talking about it year+ later.

It seems Isabel was "verified trans," and had sensitivity reading done. As lived experience is the metric that matters here, and then she/they got the additional verification done, that's the full stop here. She/they lived it, she/they got sensitivity readings done, and QED she/they can write about it... at least as the current rules go.

All your points largely summarize to there being some suspicious aspects to her/their identity, and because of that, shoot first and ask questions later was apparently ok.

"Because we as an industry are hyper tuned to any slip up on these key metrics, let's verbally slaughter whoever has some oddities to their author profile regarding these metrics."

Given that Isabel ended up in a hospital, as you said, the lack of introspection from the publishing community once the facts of the matter came out is ugly and why many authors are terrified for their careers.

Not sure a 66 year old can truly understand what consequences young people can face. You can be completely blacklisted not only from your works being stocked, but even all means of promoting yourself too and in the most extreme cases get blacklisted from payment processors which I'm sure will trickle down and become more common over the next few years.

End of the day you have to pay the bills and if you want them paid you have to at least make your writing a certain way of thinking and ideology.

Until this changes this is terrible advice for young artists. Just don't rock the boat, follow right think, don't write anything controversial and pray you eventually get enough money to write what you actually want to write.

Sure yeah art will suffer as a whole but the decision was already made what's more important, art or a few annoyed people on twitter and the annoyed people won.

I wonder what "PC" terminology we use today will be a fireable offense if uttered in the future.

>if uttered in the future

how about if what uttered today gets inspected in the future? Given the trajectory of the things, i already self-censor all my posts today - even anonymous as there is no true anonymity really, and the Political Correctness Officers of the future will have access to all the information they'd want. I've already seen ideological intolerance back in the USSR (and US had it during the times of McCarthy), and the future looks more and more like such an intolerance amplified by the technology, "cyber-neo-McCarthyism".

I think just today (or yesterday), Twitch had to backtrack on a statement celebrating "Womxn's History Month"

For the understanding of the 90% of people who didn't take Gender Studies in an elite coastal university (like I did), the term "womxn" used to be radical and super PC, a way to "reclaim" the word "woman" and both remove the word "man" (yes, as silly as it sounds, serious academics did this) and signify that "woman" as a term was more inclusive than just biological gender, including transgender people as well.

Nowadays, apparently the term "womxn" which was invented and used solely by extreme feminists is problematic and using it can lead to your public shaming on Twitter. Why? Because if you use "womxn" to signify that you are inclusive of non-biological women, then you are implying that the term "women" is not enough for non-biological women, and therefore, you are "othering" them and therefore you are transphobic.

https://twitter.com/Twitch/status/1366543370257002496

This is happening in all professions I'd imagine. Everyone is so scared that they are violating some social framework - which is constantly shifting in what is acceptable or not acceptable.

To me I think it really slows down progress we could be making in multiple areas. It's kind of like a mental brake being applied to any freedom of thought. Almost like working in an old fashioned company where there's weeks worth of meetings and bureaucracy in order to get a change deployed to production to make sure everyone is okay with it, even those of whom it doesn't even impact.

It's an interesting phenomenom the one described in the story.

I myself a great number of times have experienced situations where I held back on writing down certain thoughts even in places like my journal where the whole point is to write down every single thought crossing through my mind anyway.

I know this experience. For me the fear was that if I put the thought onto paper that somehow it would be more real, but the result was that the thoughts ended up burning away at me and taking up more headspace than if I just put them on the page. The realization that I am an emotional being full of contradictions and not a logic machine helped me stop suppressing.

Can you really blame authors? Anything that is even mildly controversial can easily result in effectively being banned from participating on various platforms. More recent example of this weird feedback loop is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Atta...

Isabel Fall is a pseudonym; she can likely publish elsewhere under a different name.

(This doesn't mean the response was proportionate or appropriate. The response to that story was way too far. But Isabel Fall herself can publish elsewhere under another pseudonym.)

How does that make it better? What if she had published under her real name? Do you think she could have published again after? Do we all have to publish under pseudonym's now for our own safety?

No, I'm not saying it makes it better. I'm in fact explicitly stating that the reaction to Isabel Fall was ridiculously overblown. However that's still not true that she's banned from the industry. Just because she's a victim doesn't mean we should misrepresent the manner in which she was victimized.

We live in an era in the western world which feels like pilgrim censorship with a new set of taboos, as opposed to an extremely tolerant love filled utopia we were promised.

I want my love filled utopia dammit!

And you know what's the cherry on the sundae?

A certain sect of people who signal/preach love and equity the loudest - almost always preach it in a 'for thou, not for me' sense. I had coworkers who would live in the whitest neighborhoods, fighting against lower-income housing near their homes, voting for the tallest of fences, and then they come into work and scoff at how X is a Trumpie because of one thing they said, and Y's team isn't hiring enough diverse candidates.

I chose to separate myself from having any stake in the outcomes (I am retired, with enough of nest egg to live comfortably regardless of political zeitgeist) and this game that is being played is extremely entertaining to watch.

I vacillate between hopeful at change on the horizon, and sad that I see eye to eye with my fellow people less now than ever before. It sure is an entertaining ride!

Now that you mention it... I want my sundae dammit!

I noticed this, too. I suspect that it doesn't come down to believe but to social acceptance. It's currently en vogue to be pro diversity and contra racism which is good in and of itself but I don't think that all people are actually meaning and voting for it.

In some communities I see people being anti-rich in one thread and then discussing stock market gambling in the next to get rich. The same with income where they want more government spending on social welfare but oppose higher taxation on their STEM-level incomes.

Or we're dealing with the paradox of tolerance, where we cannot be tolerant of intolerance because the intolerant will destroy the tolerant culture which my generation have been trying to build. Some of us have, anyway. The one we feel is under threat because people like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson can still be elected to the leadership of powerful nations which are supposed to be fair and just but that looks like a mockery when you put a white racist dude in charge.

This is just bullshit. People like you are why we can’t have nice things.

One of the biggest issues is the lack of consistent canceling for the same offense along with the changing rules.

If you said something 10 years ago that was completely acceptable it will be used to attack you in the present. When others said the same thing they get a pass but you don't. If the rules were clear and generally agreed upon I think tnere would be less fear.

#MeToo died the second it was used on Biden. Something I got banned from twitter for pointing out would happen 6 months ahead of time for 'hatred'. All I did was use the Salem witch trials as a blue print.

Putting aside the fact the worst examples of "Cancel Culture" are an amplified, tiny number of edge cases, given fuel by those who wish to attack fairly reasonable requests to marginalise hate speech. Ishiguro makes a good point a skilled writer can write from the perspective of someone very different from them. Not that many people are actually arguing against that. What was of concern is the perspectives of marginalised people being written in a cliched and harmful way by people who have no understanding of their lives. Or because they have an agenda of portraying those people in a negative way. Understanding built on accurate and intelligent writing is great but I'm not going to read stuff that has an agenda to caricature and attack.

Hate speech is free speech you don't like.

I don't like the Dune prequels, Monetarism or Atlas Shrugged. None of them is hate speech.

I thought this was the reason authors often use pen names. Creating an entirely anonymous identity isn't easy but it is nice to screw up safely.

It's pretty easy, actually. You make a website with whoisguard enabled, you sign your writing with a fake name, and you decline interview requests. Bonus points if you pretend to be a different gender, like JK Rowling did.

Often times the allure of being a pseudonymous person actually makes your work even more attractive.

How do you protect your intellectual property? As soon as there is any kind of legal battle your pseudonymity will be gone.

Banksy has managed to preserve his pseudonymity through a corporate structure.

Kinda. Like SSC, if you want to know his identity, you can find it out with a bit of effort.

Not really. There are two contradictory claims as to his identity, neither is confirmed, and what little evidence has been adduced can be explained in another way.

If you're bestselling enough for it to matter, probably a publisher would protect their property. Being pseudonymous doesn't necessarily mean that no one knows but that just a few people know who generally won't go blabbing to the newspapers. But if authorship of something becomes a widespread puzzle to solves, e.g. Primary Colors, it does tend to get out sooner or later.

Presumably there's some point at which fame makes it hard to conceal an identity that many are intensely curious about. But for the vast bulk of authors, pretty much no one is going to do even casual sleuthing to try to find you out.

Of course, that may limit some of your promotional opportunities but I don't know why it would be hard in general.

until the NYT outs you, see for example what happened with the slate star codex:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...

He was known before

It took effort to find him, and it was possible. But he wasn't public about his identity prior to this, and in fact was making a deliberate effort to mask it.

just because someone with a lot of time on their hands could technically have found his real name does not conflict with the parent's point.

> But he wasn't public about his identity prior to this,

I don't understand how people make this claim when had given out most of his real name, his profession, his state, and the kind of work he did.

Finding SSC from his real name was easy, and finding his real name from SSC was easy.

Well. I said he was known. Not publicly known.

From his hand: “To stay anonymous, I wrote it under my first and middle names – Scott Alexander – while leaving out my last name.”

This is hardly a major attempt at anonymity.

Not that it matters but I’m very much in favour of remaining anonymous. I also am a fan of his writing.

> This is hardly a major attempt at anonymity.

Well, it's an attempt at pseudonymity, not anonymity.

And it's a pretty weak attempt at that, too.

Just need a bit of NLP to figure out identity from writing style, similar to how JK Rowling's pseudonymous identity was uncovered.

Perhaps we should use NLP to change the writing style but maintain the core idea. :)

Rowling's identity was uncovered when a family friend of her solicitors tweeted it out.

> The Harry Potter author released her first Robert Galbraith novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, in April 2013 under the guise of a very British sounding man who was said to have previously served in the army. But her nom-de-plume was uncovered three months later after an indiscreet tweet divulging the true identity of Galbraith was sent by “@JudeCallegari”, a family friend of Christopher Gossage, a partner at Rowling’s solicitors.

Some people would suggest that the book was doing poorly, and needed a sales bump.

That's true if you're an established author and create a new itentity. If you've never published fiction though, there'd be no corpus to train on. What the article is saying is is that it's difficult for new artists to establish themselves, but in this case, I think psuedoanonymity is a good idea if you have any topics or ideas that you worry would cause a backlash.

What's interesting here is that the use of pen names is heavily policed in the publishing culture/industry. Some can use one, some can't, you will/will not get published if you follow the policy, and so on.

I've been wondering how much cancel culture is affecting journalism right now. The way it affects won't be clear since it seems stating that you're self censoring due to cancel culture makes you a target of said culture. Also, I imagine for journalists it's not easy to admit to self censoring. Confronting cancel culture is a big risk to take.

But how would you measure the effects of it? As a (mainly) reader, I have no clue if the writer omitted something due to their fear. Hell, the writer might not realize it.

I'm OK with people saying "you wrote a terrible book that nobody should buy or read."

I'm less OK with people saying "because you wrote a terrible book, we need to ensure that you are severely punished, that you present a public confession and apology for writing it, and that none of your writing is ever published or read again by anyone."

Are you thinking of something specific here?

It's really sad that in the age of unrestricted access to information public discourse is self-restricting to avoid wrong-think and dissenting opinions. If you look at the history of intellectual progress, much of it was exactly due to unpopular opinions.

Now by having one you're risking your entire career and sometimes more. This is truly the dark age of the information era.

I don't really think no one is allowed to say anything controversial anymore. Plenty of national newspapers are willing to give people front-page editorials to say things that are not mainstream. That's hardly a dark age.

I love "anymore" in these statements, like in the US thirty years ago where anywhere you could speak to a wide audience was tightly controlled by wealthy white men

>Plenty of national newspapers are willing to give people front-page editorials to say things that are not mainstream.

Do you have some examples?

I have a counter example, just look at the debacle when the New York Times published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton and the editorial page editor had to resign because of the outrage about its content:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/07/nyt-opinion-bennet-...

He called for using military force against civil rights activists. Is this the kind of great intellectual leap forward the grandparent post was talking about? Because if you want to talk about cancelling things, using the military to crush and jail activism is cancelling things pretty hard.

He called on the use of force against people doing violence, not the peaceful protestors.

"One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers."

Incited by "violence" (mostly property damage, some clashes with cops trying to box in and disperse non-violent protestors) - but calling for dispersal of everyone. Using the military to crush a civil rights movement

Someone peacefully protesting is not a "lawbreaker". The quote you provided only refers to criminals. In fact "the right of the people peaceably to assemble" is explicitly allowed in the Constitution.

Please show me where he said peaceful protestors should have force used upon them.

When he said send in the military to do "an overwhelming show of force".

The military isn't going to walk through the crowd picking out the few people smashing windows or throwing bottles. That would not be an OVERWHELMING SHOW OF FORCE. They would march on the crowds, and almost inevitably use lethal force on them. Even if the target is only the ones throwing bottles or smashing windows, the military cannot and would not make that distinction in the moment.

We don't have to imagine what it would be like, it's happened before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

So whn you said "He called for using military force against civil rights activists" that was not actually accurate? Cotton only said against lawbreakers right?

If I spread my coin jar out on the table, to sort all the quarters out, and you walk in and say “let’s clean all these pennies up! I’ll tip the table over and they’ll all fall into this garbage bag!” You technically said that you wanted to remove the pennies from the table, but your suggested course of action would have also removed all the quarters and dimes.

Do you understand the difference between how you say something, and the ideas you are conveying? The thing he suggested was using military force on the people protesting.

Even setting aside that. Even if he did mean to magically only use military force on protestors who broke the law. There were a lot of protests happening peacefully, but after an 8pm curfew - those would have been lawbreakers... and also peaceful protestors. Should they have military force used on them because they broke a curfew? Tom Cotton appears to think so

People who don't recognize your username assumed you were making your request in good faith.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/opinion/bon-appetit-cance...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/academic-freedom-is-withering-1...

depending on if you consider george will "mainstream"- he is an establishment conservative which certainly is a dissenting viewpoint at the washington post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/unprecedented-untarg...

not a newspaper, but a national magazine a front page article with a definitively non-mainstream message: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/04/good-guys-with-guns-soci...

>https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/opinion/bon-appetit-cance...

Seems like a mainstream article. Not sure what the point of this was? I didn't look at the articles mentioned in this article so if that was your point then let me know so I can review them.

> https://www.wsj.com/articles/academic-freedom-is-withering-1...

I got a paywall so I could only read part of the article. The first part of the article seems to agree with my point that viewpoint discrimination is in fact happening. I didn't get to anything about newspapers before I got the paywall so I don't know what exact this had to do with what I posted. The article seemed quite mainstream to me though.

> depending on if you consider george will "mainstream"- he is an establishment conservative which certainly is a dissenting viewpoint at the washington post

I am getting a paywall so I couldn't read the article, but it seemed mainstream. Based on what I could gather it sounds like he supports a more fiscally responsible stimulus and to have it targeted to people who actually need it rather than to everybody. Assuming that is the gist of the article then I think that is decently mainstream. I would agree that it is a dissenting viewpoint for the Washington Post though.

>not a newspaper, but a national magazine a front page article with a definitively non-mainstream message

This article was pretty long so I skimmed it (so if I missed an important detail let me know). It sounds like a mainstream message. Gun ownership and protection of oneself with guns is a mainstream message in the US. Maybe it is a bit non-mainstream since the author is a socialist, but nothing stood out as out of the norm.

the first two articles are people who are being given a platform to complain about cancel culture. If the premise of the complaints about cancel culture is that anything outside of the "mainstream" woke consensus is silenced, these are proof that that is not happening.

The last article is not mainstream at all. Gun ownership as a means of pushing a leftist agenda is extremely different from the somewhat mainstream, right-leaning ideas about gun ownership

Who knew, the age of unrestricted access meant that others would have unrestricted access to our secrets too

There is no era of Western history where unpopular opinions were more acceptable than today. In the past, dissenting opinions voiced loudly were often punished by blacklisting or excommunication or prison or death. Now, you get yelled at on Twitter and some companies won't work with you.

Or fired from your job, branded with the scarlet letter, have your private information shown to the public by some news outlet...

And fired from your job. And yelled at on the street. And prevented from working in your field ever again. And death threats.

So, blacklisting: check. Excommunication: check. I'd rather not wait till it goes down further.

Who (apart from Colin Kaepernick) has been prevented from working in their field ever again?

Very little of that is new ("You'll never work in this town again" is an old statement).

What has changed is that the Internet and the associated record of a person's conduct online can make the town very, very big indeed.

I think the point is this had been around for a while, and what people are calling "cancel culture" is the same old-same old, but with (hopefully) less prison/death.

There's nothing new about receiving negative feedback for having and expressing unpopular opinions. That's really common in pretty much every single social group I've been in, including on HN.

People are upset now that the current is shifting and you get shunned for being racist, rather than being shunned for not speaking properly or whatever the heck.

The underlying mechanism has not really changed.

It's specifically about speaking properly.

Nobody gives a shit when Uber classifies their drivers as independent contractors to stiff them on benefits, but everybody cares about the propriety of master/slave replication terminology. We're dealing with police violence by capitalizing Black in our style guides. Etc etc etc.

> Nobody gives a shit when Uber classifies their drivers as independent contractors to stiff them on benefits,

I think quite a few people gave a shit? I think you're attacking a straw man, it is perfectly possible to have opinions on small stylistic issues (like master vs main) while also thinking that there are fundamental economic things that need to change.

Uber's referendum won in California.

I'm sure that people 'care', and I suppose I'm straw-manning those people.. I'm not straw-manning the system. Time and again, challenges to monetary order aren't permitted but puritanical word-propriety is encouraged. It's an energy outlet.

> Time and again, challenges to monetary order aren't permitted but puritanical word-propriety is encouraged. It's an energy outlet.

I agree very much with this statement, but somehow have reached the opposite conclusion about whether "cancel culture" is a big problem that we need to spend a lot of time addressing. To me, that seems to be playing into the same issue you identified.

Glad we agree on the shape of things :)

I was more being descriptive than prescriptive, I'm just posting here.. but it's a problem that all of the energy and outrage go into stylistic and cultural bullshit. In a perfect world we could channel that energy into community organizing, electoralism, or other forms of people getting out there and interacting with the groups they claim to speak for.

> Uber's referendum won in California.

Their appeal lost in the UK just last week.

No one is complaining about going after actual racists. The problem is that things which aren't racist are now defined as racist and vice versa. e.g. saying that universities shouldn't admit students by race and only use grades and test scores is now "racist"

I don't think that's racist, although, personally, I do think that people holding those takes often have a myopic view of the world.

You're saying that you think that your job would be in danger if you said publicly that you thought that universities should be race-blind?

Me personally no, but I'm not so sure that I would risk saying it. On the other hand, I know I would be in no danger whatsoever stating that I favored racial admissions policies. I am sure that I would be in danger if I criticized my employer's hiring policies on that point. You set a high bar, though. The idea of getting called racist for advocating directly against racism should be no more than a bad joke.

People are upset that the definition of racist has been repurposed to apply to racially neutral positions and even anti-racism positions. If one advocates in favor of enforcing existing immigration laws, that's a quick way to get labeled a racist Nazi even though it's actually a very moderate stance. If one supports treating everyone equally regardless of race, then that explicitly anti-racism position is characterized as racist and attacked with baseless accusations of "bad faith".

There's also a difference between saying something stupid and having some people telling you to knock it off. And posting it or having it posted to Twitter with a possible consequence like a bunch of people emailing your employer demanding you be fired. Which they probably will because it's easier that way if you really did say something you shouldn't have.

If you had a gay character in a sitcom in the 70s-80s you would similarly get a bunch of people calling your employer.

There's totally a difference, but you honestly think that this is a new thing that never used to happen?

>you honestly think that this is a new thing that never used to happen?

No, but I do think it's a lot easier for someone to tweet out an inappropriate joke or get caught on video doing something obnoxious today--that have at least the potential to blow up to a greater degree than a few decades ago.

> If you had a gay character in a sitcom in the 70s-80s you would similarly get a bunch of people calling your employer.

Apparently not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_comedy_television_seri...

I think it's pretty obvious how that isn't contrary to what I said. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediawatch-UK

this is common whataboutism. What about the dark ages ? What about burning witches ? If we claim to be a compassionate society we should be anti-censorship and let ideas succeed or fail through the strength of their argument.

Normal feedback is down votes and replies. Cancel culture is messaging dang and asking him to ban you.

> Cancel culture is messaging dang and asking him to ban you.

And your claim is that this sort of thing just started happening in the last decade or two?

I didn't really hear much about outrage mobs and repeated celebrity firings over unpopular political opinions 10 years ago. Hear about them all the time now.

> I didn't really hear much about outrage mobs and repeated celebrity firings over unpopular political opinions 10 years ago.

That's probably because you weren't listening, possibly because it was 30 years into the right whining about that under the label “political correctness” and everyone had learned to tune it out.

Now they've got a new label and marketing effort behind selling it as the boogeyman, and everything old is new again.

Yeah, because dang wasn't a HN moderator before that.

I had it at about 50/50 odds I would get this reply

Half a century ago, in Japan, someone wrote a fictional story critical of the Emperor, and someone broke into the publishers house and murdered their housekeeper and severely injured their wife. [0]

In response to the murder, the writer was pretty much universally condemned and the a bill was introduced in the legislature to ban writings of that sort.

The fact that so many have convinced themselves that somehow we're in some new illiberal age is comical.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimanaka_incident

Well, peoples' expectations have changed in America since we declared independence from Japan.

I am curious what era of US history do you think was free of this stuff?

For right-leaning, racist, sexist White male elites? Most of it.

Which is why that's where most of the whining that this is a new and dangerous phenomenon is coming from.

Heck, the government hyperfocus on rooting out Communism began almost immediately after the suggestion of turning the same apparatus against the KKK was rebuffed because of that organizations loyalty and patriotism.

I erroneously thought the critic in the article was Japanese, although the "sir" should have been an obvious giveaway.

In the states, just off the top of my head: the McCarthy era, the reaction to the 1968 Olympic raised fist incident

I guessed as much :)

> the McCarthy era, the reaction to the 1968 Olympic raised fist incident

Aren't those examples of the kinds of things we want to stop doing?

So you are agreeing Cancel Culture is bad and we should find better ways to peacefully disagree with each other?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EuCsAqKWYAkfEIF.jpg

I agree with your sentiment, but it wasn't that long ago that people were being brought to court in the US just for accusations of being socialist or communist. Any there wasn't even anything against the law with have different economic ideals.

Try 20 years ago.

Try reading about the ridiculous fallout conservatives triggered in 2004, following a one second exposure of a female nipple on TV.

> some companies won't work with you

It's a pretty big deal when that company is your employer. We need better protections around speech in this country. Firing someone for something they said cannot be a one-sided decision. At the minimum, the worker deserves the chance to go to court/arbitration

This is one of the categories of protections unions historically offered.

Probably also worth noting that one does have the right to go to court if one believes one was wrongfully terminated. When Google fired James Damore, he sued. But the National Labor Relations Board ruled the firing was justified because he had made not-legally-protected statements that risked creating a hostile work environment.

https://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d45826e6391

Conservatives have fought tooth and nail for at-will employment for a hundred years. If they would like to moderate those views I am sure we could find a way to expand protections for workers in a variety of ways, including speech.

It’s an outgrowth of a larger problem: The problem today is that nobody will work with you nor can you get employed, unless you have the right connections.

There is no starting over, because there is no anonymity or way to become obscure/forgotten.

> There is no era of Western history where unpopular opinions were more acceptable than today.

I suppose it depends how fine grain you can be when considering eras, but there were periods even within my own lifetime that were much more tolerant. In the 90s, there was a period where the influence of religious prigs had waned, and the secular prigs had yet to be taken seriously. The internet in particular was pretty wide open to ideas of all sorts, and no one would seek to ruin your life over disagreements.

If you coursen the grain to wider epochs, then yes I think you're correct.

Exactly.

I grew up in the Midwest and outside of the city. When I visit home, I pretend to believe in God, lie-by-omission about my bisexuality, stay silent about politics, pretend to say grace at dinner, and go to Church on Sunday mornings. If I didn't, then in many ways I'd not longer be welcome in that social group. Finding a iving-wage job in the local community would certainly be impossible. There are only a few tech firms and all the owners are members of the same bible study.

Want to see real cancel culture? Live in any of America's many culturally homogeneous rural communities for a month. Put up a Biden sign in panhandle.

None of this is a defense of cancel culture, but it's worth keeping in perspective that way more "cancelling" goes on in deeply conservative communities than in extremely liberal communities. We just call it "keeping American a Christian nation" instead of "cancel culture".

The opposite has been true for many decades now. There are many Christians who are extremely capable scientists, ready to perform experiments, document cause and effect and all manners of empirical scientific study but can't find work (or tenure) because they're not willing to bet all their beliefs on the theory that everything came from literally nothing, which is by itself non-scientific anyway.

> but can't find work (or tenure) because they're not willing to bet all their beliefs on the theory that everything came from literally nothing, which is by itself non-scientific anyway.

Can you point to a single example of a hiring or T&P policy that overtly discriminates on the basis of religion?

I certainly can. Wheaton College, Cedarville University, and Liberty University come to mind. None of those places will hire non-Christians, and a Statement of Faith is a required component of every faculty application.

This is complete hogwash. I know and work with plenty of Christian scientists. They do just as well as everyone else in the job market.

Name one prominent scientist who is on record (and has tenure) who holds the position that the origin of the big bang as taught today is un-scientific. Of course there are Christian scientists, but Academia only promotes and gives tenure to atheists for a growing number of fields.

Name any scientist that has a position other than the big bang theory, that has any evidence backing it?

The standard isn't "can't include God", but "must fit the facts". God is unprovable and untestable; making a theory depend on a God makes the theory unprovable and untestable. Most scientists who also have religious beliefs don't see the two conflicting; their religion gives the why, their profession the how.

Or more succinctly, no one is blackballing scientists for saying "I believe God caused the Big Bang". But claims of, for instance, "I believe the world was created 6000 years ago over a period of 7 literal days" requires some evidence beyond "My understanding of the Bible tells me so", and doesn't jibe with your initial statement of empirical scientific study.

A Christian is defined by belief in salvation through Christ's death and resurrection. Not disbelief in the Big Bang.

Isn't it kind of arrogant to think that one knows the mechanisms of God so surely as to settle the question on the origins of the universe?

The bible, esp. genesis, is taken metaphorically, or else a lot of problematic interpretations will arise.

Also, even scholars of the Abrahamic faiths do not readily disclose their intimate religious faith, lest their work be discredited — such as a professor who studies Christianity, but holds Islamic faith.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQhMllQ-ODw&feature=emb_logo

I used to feel to belong to "The Left" (whatever that is) precisely because it did not do these things. Now it does, and sees it even as a moral imperative to do so.

I'm on the autism spectrum, as are many others around here. Social rules are hard in the best of times. Now they are impossible to follow, and breaking them is outright dangerous.

But I can keep to myself, I guess I'll be fine.

I also find this trend on the left morally unfortunate, historically out-of-character, and strategically flawed.

My point here is not to defend cancel culture, but rather to point out that something like it has always existed and still exists on the right. IMO the only solution is everyone realizing this fact and explicitly agreeing to some form of detente.

I'm not holding my breath, but step zero is both sides realizing that the their side also does the thing they're complaining about.

I completely agree that there are problems on both sides, but I don't see how your reasoning encourages "everyone realizing this fact and explicitly agreeing to some form of detente". On the contrary, progressives seem to see "the right has oppressed people" as a mandate to do everything they can to make war on the right and even moderate positions (because moderate positions are characterized as dog whistles that conservatives hide behind, and the "fascist" "Nazi" right must not be given any potential cover no matter the cost). I really thought your posts were intentionally stoking this attitude, and I would never have guessed that you wanted detente if you hadn't explicitly said so.

GP comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26306326

So... your strategy to achieve detente is to inflame and justify hatred of people in rural areas? You're extrapolating a personal anecdote in order to stereotype millions of people. It's hard to see how that is anything but destructive.

I'm sorry that you've had to go through those experiences, but not everyone rural or Christian is like that, and it's very harmful to characterize them that way. It's not accurate to stereotype Christians as hateful any more than it's accurate to stereotype Muslims as supporting terrorism. They are extremely diverse groups with some truly bad subgroups, but also some good ones, and most subgroups are in-between. The extremes aren't representative of the group as a whole.

If you need to appeal to the goodness of people's hearts, you know you've lost.

The age of Enlightement and the idea of liberalism have been so powerful because they programmatically went against any kind of censorship. Their ideas helped to see how humans are truly all equal, that we all share what it means to be human.

Identity politics set out to destroy these ideas. It is the enemy of liberalism, of a free flow of ideas, of a will to see us all as equals. It divides us into groups, based on biological features like the color of our skin, our age and our genitals.

This insanity will not end well.

those people have zero cultural or institutional power.

They do in those communities.

And Donald Trump and Fox News have a heck of a lot of cultural and institutional power.

We really need a right left coalition of Anti-Cancelling advocates, calling out both close minded rural conservative communities, and close minded liberal communities living on Twitter. Ideally, with those on the right calling out the conservatives and those on the left calling out the liberals.

Two decades ago it was a lot safer, so, yeah.

It depends entirely on what you mean by "unpopular opinions". You would face backlash in the 80's if you advocated overthrowing the government. Today, you can lose your job for not having your gender pronouns in your bio. I don't think its fair to equate both of those things as "unpopular opinions".

Who was fired for not having pronouns in their bio?

It was supposedly one of the reasons Disney fired Gina Carano. However, she had apparently been annoying the powers that be with her generally Trumpian social media postings for a while.

Supposed by whom? Tucker Carlson?

I just looked it up. She added boop/bop/beep to her name on Twitter and doubled down when people asked her to remove it. [1] And like you said it wasn't her first PR problem.

[1] https://uproxx.com/movies/pedro-pascal-sister-trans-lux-gina...

Maybe there is a higher awareness of the costs imposed by censors and as the censorship encoded in government recedes that of private realms is brought more into light.

It has also been hundreds of years of Western history since the intellectual class was driving this "punishment", and that was when religion and education were tightly linked.

The problem isn't that ideologues are new, it is that ideology has seeped into the highest levels of education and culture. You have people across the spectrum of disciplines and stances afraid to contradict the received knowledge of the masses (or one of usually two sects).

This hasn't been the case for a LONG TIME.

the post specifically talks about young people self-censoring themselves.

I can't recall another era were young authors were afraid of being marginalized by other young people for being young and having radical (and sometimes plain stupid) ideas.

I remember old, conservative people doing it to youngsters, but not to themselves, despite being the ones with bad - sometimes very bad - thoughts.

You could post just about anything online and mostly get away with it for a brief period of time ending around 2004 unless you were wholesale drug trafficking out in the open. Those websites were taken down but not very quickly.

Sometimes I miss the lulz of the sheep being taken to slaughter by tubgirl and goatse.

What is keeping you from opening up your own shocksites right now? I think it is more cultural zeitgeist - the generation involved with it largely grew out of it and the younger ones don't have the same sort of "culture" to reoccur in the same way.

It isn't something you would want to boast about running and would have people thinking ill of you but it doesn't really trigger outrage.

Younger generations don't use the web browser as their main source of entertainment. Their attention and energy has been siloed to the largest media platforms. They enjoy being serfs on the FAANG plantation.

So in otherwords the issue is they don't want your puppet show when there is TV. That isn't cancel culture any more than nobody showing up to my TEDx talk where I count to ten thousand.

I find attitudes like this mystifying. No one is saying that today's cancel culture is comparable to getting tortured, imprisoned, or killed for one's beliefs. We're talking about perfectly good and unobjectionable books being hounded out of publication because of thought crimes.

Lest you think this only happens to the Alex Jones of the world, look at what's happening in the young adults world: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/01/young-adult-au...

Artists receiving critical attacks from their patrons certainly isn't new. What is new is this idea that these objections are unacceptable. What do you think anarchists and queers and sex freaks endured for the last hundred years of art and media? If you have a viewpoint you think is worth defending, then defend it and work to advance it. Don't just pout when it's not automatically accepted.

> There is no era of Western history where unpopular opinions were more acceptable than today. In the past, dissenting opinions voiced loudly were often punished by blacklisting or excommunication or prison or death.

Granted, but what's the logic here? We ought to content ourselves with regression so long as no one is being imprisoned or killed? We want to progress, not regress. We don't want a conformist society, we want a tolerant society[^1]. We want free speech[^2], not compelled/coerced speech. We want ideas to compete freely so the best rise to the top; we don't want a prescribed set of beliefs to be forced on everyone.

[^1]: (yes, I know all about the Paradox of Tolerance and how some use it to give themselves moral license to persecute anyone they deep intolerant).

[^2]: No, I'm not talking about the strict 1st Amendment legal definition, but the broader principle.

I think the prior post was making the case we -have- progressed?

It seemed like “we have progressed, therefore it’s okay to backslide and no one should criticize cancellation”. After all, no one here is arguing that the 1500s, 1600s, etc were the golden ages of speech.

I think it's presumptuous to assume "it's okay to backslide" was part of that comment. What/when are we backsliding from? There was never some 'golden age' where comments anathema to the culture at large wouldn't have consequences. Even the popular victims of cancel culture now have it better than the ones in the 1950s, say (i.e., Gina Carano may have been fired from one company, but that was because she persisted in espousing views they disagreed with; compare that to 1950s era blackballing from all of Hollywood for being -suspected- of supporting communism/socialism).

I think for it to imply "it's okay to backslide" we have to have actually broached a time we've backslid -from-. Pursuant to the article, I don't really consider it backsliding if authors are now having second thoughts about writing from cultural perspectives other than their own. They have to be selective, of course, but we don't need, for instance, a white author writing about noble savages. That's not to say a white author can't write a western; it does mean they need to be very careful with the tone of it, or, yes, risk offending people. And recognize that some people will be offended no matter what, so they also need to recognize that some people aren't worth listening to.

It's called sensitivity, not censorship. Yes, sensitivity might lead to self-censorship, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. And you may miss the mark, and there will be consequences, and you might hit the mark but still have angry people, but angry people have yelled about every piece of literature we have. It's a balancing act, and it always has been; and I would contend consequences now are the weakest they have ever been.

> I think it's presumptuous to assume "it's okay to backslide" was part of that comment.

I wasn't assuming or presuming, I was asking.

> What/when are we backsliding from? There was never some 'golden age' where comments anathema to the culture at large wouldn't have consequences.

We're not just talking about comments that are "anathema to the culture at large", we're often talking about comments that offend only about 10% of the population. Things like "citing a celebrated academic's work on the efficacy of nonviolent protest" or "quoting a black man who wished more attention was paid to other issues in his community [besides police violence]" or "accidentally making the 'ok' gesture". With that out of the way, to answer your question more broadly, it has been rare in my life for people to be terminated even for quite controversial speech, and certainly not due to explicit pressure from large, often coordinated groups of strangers. If you were the public face of a company you were expected to steer clear of controversy, but ordinary people didn't need to fear a loss of income or access to healthcare.

The worst of it was during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars when it was controversial to be seen as unpatriotic, but even then I think ordinary people were mostly insulated from the effects (i.e., it was "punching up"), the effects weren't especially chilling, and society quickly rallied around shared free-speech values and righted itself. For what it's worth, I don't think conservatives 15 years ago were morally better than today's woke progressives; rather, I think the difference is social media (notably, conservatives canceled Colin Kaepernick almost immediately after social media cancelation came into existence).

> It's called sensitivity, not censorship.

I didn't call it censorship?

> Pursuant to the article, I don't really consider it backsliding if authors are now having second thoughts about writing from cultural perspectives other than their own.

I've never found "ends justify the means" arguments to be very compelling, personally.

> And you may miss the mark, and there will be consequences

One problem with cancel culture is that there are consequences even if your speech is perfectly correct and moral, e.g., advocating for nonviolent protest. It turns out people with few scruples about canceling also tend to lack scruples about whom they target. And to be clear, "consequences" aren't "you've offended someone and now they won't speak with you"; rather, they're "you've offended someone and now they've rounded up a hundred people to harass your employer into firing you with the express purposes of making an example out of you for other would-be non-conformists".

> I would contend consequences now are the weakest they have ever been.

I strongly disagree. Worse by far than any time in my memory.

>> I would contend consequences now are the weakest they have ever been.

> I strongly disagree. Worse by far than any time in my memory.

And yet we have literal nazis posting on social media for the world to see, with the occasional one losing their job, and that's it. Hardly a chilling effect.

> For what it's worth, I don't think conservatives 15 years ago were morally better than today's woke progressives; rather, I think the difference is social media (notably, conservatives canceled Colin Kaepernick almost immediately after social media cancelation came into existence).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Olympics_Black_Power_salu...

Is it just social media, or is it media? When somebody does a thing visibly enough to rile up a crowd... the crowd gets riled. What's new here? The words "cancel culture".

The idea that "ideas compete and the best rise to the top" is completely utopian. Such a "free marketplace of ideas" has never existed and cannot exist, because attention is a limited resource, bias exists, and not all ideas are equally valid.

The argument exists as a cover for constant relitigating of ideas that by all rational measures have lost in the "marketplace of ideas" time and time again.

If every single astronomy journal ever released contained a segment arguing about the merits of geocentrism because a few wackos continue to demand their right to "free speech and open debate" (which in reality means: unlimited speaking time on somebody else's platform), there would be no room for new science amid all the repetitive debunking.

Some debates are settled. Geocentrism is wrong. Racism is wrong. The holocaust happened. Authoritarianism is bad. Facts exist.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand free speech and the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor. It's precisely because of free speech that we can collectively condemn geocentrism, racism, holocaust-denial, authoritarianism, etc. Indeed, authoritarianism in general and Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc in particular always starts with speech restrictions. The idea that free speech and authoritarianism are bed fellows doesn't make sense; these are mutually exclusive.

Moreover, "marketplace of ideas" is a metaphor for what happens in a society that has a high degree of free speech: the best most valid ideas rise to the top. You argue that the marketplace metaphor doesn't work because bias exists and because ideas vary in validity, but that doesn't make sense--these facts are the very mechanism by which the marketplace metaphor works: in speech-tolerant societies, a diversity of ideas compete and the best, most valid ideas rise to the top irrespective of bias.

> Indeed, authoritarianism in general and Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc in particular always starts with speech restrictions. The idea that free speech and authoritarianism are bed fellows doesn't make sense; these are mutually exclusive.

This is a myth perpetuated by selective cultural memory. The Nazis were all about "free speech" before they were in power. They frequently complained about "Free speech" when papers published editorials criticizing them, or when their public appearances were protested, or when opinion pages didn't present "both sides".

One widely used Nazi propaganda poster from 1928 even showed Hitler with a big "CENSORED" block over his mouth, captioned "Only One of the 2000 million people in the world is not allowed to speak in Germany"[1]

> in speech-tolerant societies, a diversity of ideas compete and the best, most valid ideas rise to the top irrespective of bias.

I'm not sure that you understand what "bias" means. Bias is that which leads people to believe in ideas that are false for various sometimes difficult to quantify reasons. The fact that evidence opposing flat-eartherism is available has not prevented that idea from gaining popularity, in fact it is more popular today in 2021 than it ever has been.

The "marketplace" metaphor itself exposes that the argument comes from a utopian perspective, the argument only works if you pre-suppose that a free and unregulated economic market produces best results, but we know from experience that it produces monopolies, child labor, and bread doped with sawdust.

Public discourse is like a market in some ways, namely that people with more money are able to advance their ideas further by buying media outlets and marketing broadly and engaging in deceptive communication that exploits cognitive bias to acquire more believers, in just the same way as people with more money are able to buy out and undercut competition and exploit addictions and consumer psychology to get more sales than their products deserve.

1. https://twitter.com/_amroali/status/1190809322315534336?s=20

(not parent throwaway) Just because nazis used their free speech right to do their propaganda, that doesn't mean free speech caused nazism. In order to do any propaganda (whether that's for a morally good or bad cause), you need to be able to talk to people.

The first thing nazis did was to revoke free speech rights. That's an example of authoritarianism and free speech being opposites.

The parent commenter was claiming that free speech prevents nazism, which any honest look at the history of authoritarianism shows to be categorically untrue.

I argued no such thing. Allow me to quote myself:

> Indeed, authoritarianism in general and Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc in particular always starts with speech restrictions

Authoritarianism virtually requires restrictions on speech to come into its own.

You say "we" want x&y almost as if they are firm, broadly held opinions. If there were a flash Brexit-style vote across the USA today, and democracy were on the ballot against some type of Trump-led monarchy, and the majority of the country voted for a system that dismantles all the things you value, are you now going to accept the fair and democratic result or fight back? Would you resort to blaming the masses for being uneducated and not knowing what's good for them? The Paradox of Tolerance may seem like some abstract concept but it could very well be central to an actual decision you'll have to make.

Just this past weekend a disabled animator was blacklisted from the industry because an ex-friend objected to their NSFW drawings on a twitter handle (completely separate from their professional handle). The number of death threats were also an immense psychological toll, and a bit more than just "being yelled at" (I am open to the fact there is a fuzzy continuum between the two).

Regardless - "some companies won't work with you" is effectively a blacklist for those who don't have traditional backgrounds. Another point is that the online social circles acts as a support network for some disenfranchised folks (queers like myself), and when that gets turned against them, it gets ugly.

I don't think I'm exaggerating that we're in a satanic panic against certain kind of art and works.

(Not providing public links out of real concern for safety, but happy to if individuals DM me here.)

If people don't like you, whether justly or unjustly, then they don't like you. Try persuading people who have a choice to work with people they dislike.

The only way to stop this is enforcement with teeth.

On a practical basis, I would agree as somebody that fits a number of protected categories, and have had to work around this.

Ethically, this is why we have organizations like the ACLU, ADA, and many, many others to be the enforcement with teeth. It's an uphill battle. I would disagree in the sense that pushing back against censorship - particularly of minorities - has many battlegrounds, not just enforcement with teeth. Greater social awareness/acceptance, education (history of blacklisting of sexual minorities for example), grassroots activism of simply supporting authors at risk of being deplatformed ... no sense in ignoring a tool that's available.

Are you suggesting that blacklists are a new phenomenon?

"cancel culture" has always existed. The only thing that is changing is that who is "cancelled" is no longer chosen by TV producers and news editors (ie, white men), but democratically by self-directed popular discourse.

In 2003 the Dixie Chicks said at a show in london, "We don't want this war, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas". Immediately their recording contracts were cancelled, venues would no longer book their shows, radio stations would no longer play them, MTV stopped showing their music videos, they lost all of their sponsorships, and their colleagues in the genre ostracized them and started including segments in their shows about how the Dixie Chicks are terrorists.

If that's not cancel culture, what is? Why is it okay and normal for white male venue owners, disc jockeys, and record label CEOs to destroy somebody's career for a single sentence of political speech, but "political correctness run amok" when marginalized people on twitter decide that they aren't going to buy tickets to a show with a comedian who's known for assaulting female stagehands?

To the first line: not at all, we'd both most likely point to Hollywood's blacklisting in the McCarthy era as one of many examples.

To the second point: I would disagree in the sense that (a) it is dangerous to conflate 'people in a position of power actively using their established power to censor others' and 'mere disagreement'. Censorship becomes censorship when there is active harassment. (b) The latter example of marginalized people on twitter disagreeing isn't such - until the threats are stated. And there is a lot of horizontal violence that exists on that platform.

The way I'd personally reframe this issue of (self)-censorship is that we're in a moral panic wave - certain platforms have made it incredibly easy for creators to be mobbed if they step out of acceptable discourse, regardless of their politics.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic

I don't think anyone claimed that what happened to the Dixie Chicks was OK. Also, it sounds as if you think that cancellation is better if it's democratic. If so, you need to address the 150-year old argument made by Mill, that democratic popular opinion can be particularly oppressive and dangerous to minority viewpoints:

"Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself."

You should maybe continue reading Mill, because nowhere in his writings, or those of anybody else who used the phrase "tyranny of the majority" prior to the modern age, believed that the solution was disempowerment of the majority and tyranny of the minority.

Surely if you think that majoritarian tyranny is bad, you must also believe that minoritarian tyranny is far worse, right? Such as when a select few individuals of a particular racial, gender, and social class, have complete control over popular media, with the sole power to decide who is successful and what damaging information about powerful people can becomes public knowledge and which is kept secret?

Also, quoting Mill while claiming that an individual consumer freely choosing to not buy a product is "tyranny" is laughable to the highest degree.

> disempowerment of the majority and tyranny of the minority

These are two different things, though. You can disempower the majority without empowering the minority. Power is not a zero-sum game - you can disclaim it without handing it over to someone else.

So what, take the right of speech away from everybody? If the majority can't decide how the public feels about a person or company, and the minority can't decide how the public feels about a person or company, than who does?

The obvious response is to not take the right of speech from anybody, regardless of how democratically the decision to do so is arrived at.

More broadly, just because some power can be exercised by somebody, doesn't mean that it has to be exercised by anybody. To the extent that it may be necessary for a functioning society, it's generally best to decentralize power to the extent possible - think council democracy and similar arrangements, where decisions are made at the lowest applicable levels, and delegation of power flows upwards, not downwards. Some real-world approximations of these can be seen with the Zapatistas, and more recently in Rojava. In both cases, there are local governments that can democratically ban certain things as you've described - but, being local, their power is inherently limited in scope. Thus, it's tyranny of the local majority, and dissenters are free to move away and organize their own communities that do not implement such bans (but still federate with others that do).

I don't understand how your first paragraph is relevant. Nobody here is claiming that we need to end democracy! Similarly, nobody is arguing for a system where a few control the entire popular media. (And the current media landscape looks nothing like that: there have never been more different news sources available at the click of a button, and anybody who wants can start one up.) Lastly, again your third paragraph is a straw man.

> And the current media landscape looks nothing like that

Yes, congratulations, you found the point.

The current media landscape is nothing like that, because the current media landscape is only about 10 years old. For all of modern history until the introduction of social media sites like youtube, twitter, and facebook, the only way to spread information or opinion was to get the editors of for-profit media companies to agree to publish you.

It is beside the point but also worth pointing out that also until very recently, like the last decade, the editors of those institutions have been of a very particular gender and racial demographic.

The new media, with all of it's "discourse" is democratic editorialism. Welcome to the freest market of ideas the world has ever seen. You can't call up your buddies Ailes, Rosenthal, Jordan, Sorenson, and Klose to tell the public what to think about you anymore.

> Lastly, again your third paragraph is a straw man.

We're talking about "cancel culture" here, aren't we? The phenomenon where members of the public decide based on new information to stop buying products because of the beliefs and actions of their creators? What is that if not the democratic free-market action that Mill so often advocated as the optimal way to organize society?

That is obviously not an adequate description of cancel culture.

Yeah, the old "white" men who run Hollywood, record labels and the news media.

Oh wait, is that anti-Semitic to say? Then was it anti-white of you to say?

Also being cancelled for opposing a war that was engineered by globalist neocons is not proof that the interests of white males used to be the basis for cancelling people lol.

And there's nothing "democratic" about this lol, the cancelling is still done to suit the interests of those "white" people who run these organisations. No one cares if some people don't want to buy some tickets to a show, they care when Mastercard and Visa have secret blacklists of anyone to the right of Mitt Romney that they don't allow to transact on their monopoly global financial network.

So...sounds like you are railing against Cancel Culture and thinks it's bad?

No, because the number of people who participate in an action influence its justness.

When 1 person decides to make a new law, that's autocracy, and it's a bad thing. When a supermajority of voters decide to make a new law, that's democracy, and it's a good thing.

When a couple dozen editors, CEOs, and DJs decided to end the Dixie Chicks' careers by banning them from access to all channels of outreach to the public, that was a bad thing and also censorship.

When tens of millions of people decided they don't want to go to Louis CK's shows anymore and he's finding it hard to find an audience as a result, there's nothing wrong with that. Lots of people independently deciding that they don't like you is not censorship.

It’s generally a very small, unrepresentative number of people on Twitter responsible for canceling someone.

If that were true, why do you care?

If it's a small unrepresentative number of people who dislike a person, group, or thing, why would anybody care?

Because those small groups of people frequently cause people to get fired, for spurious or outright false reasons.

> When a supermajority of voters decide to make a new law, that's democracy, and it's a good thing.

Is it, really? Even if the new law is extremely oppressive to the minority?

I mean, our drug laws are a mess that caused extreme grief (prison etc) to millions of people by now. But they were supported by wide majorities of the electorate. Were they a good thing? How about the Prohibition? Sodomy laws?

"Majority rules" is not inherently just or unjust, morality is totally separate from democracy. The world isn't black or white like your comment suggests

It's one thing to get cancelled for writing a song making fun of the president and pissing off a ton of the neoliberal and neocon establishment when you're entertainment superstars who are supposed to know a thing or two about not pissing off the establishment.

It's another thing for some nobody to lose a job as a stock broker because they made a joke about the 3/5ths compromise that was funny enough to go viral on TikTok where it then pissed off some other nobodies and then all the blue checks piled on.

The Dixie chicks were playing with fire and they knew it. Some rando isn't.

Blacklisting and excommunication are exactly what is happening today, but the difference is that it's much worse in a global world.

In 200 BC, if you were excommunicated from a tribe, it would be horrible, but you could walk 20 miles and join another tribe that hasn't heard or bought into the ostracization.

In 2021 AD, if you are excommunicated from an industry on the internet, there's nowhere else you can physically go. The entire intellectual globe is connected online. Excommunication is now worse than it used to be -- it's global.

> In 2021 AD, if you are excommunicated from an industry on the internet, there's nowhere else you can physically go. The entire intellectual globe is connected online. Excommunication is now worse than it used to be -- it's global.

When has this ever happened? There's lots of claims that people have been cancelled and can never work in their field again, but actual examples never seem to materialize.

Try being falsely accused of sexual assault (or similar), forced into a plea bargain due to trumped up charges (or hell, beat the charge and still be considered guilty because "believe women"), and having your name plastered all over the Internet - and then getting a job in anything remotely public-facing. I know two people personally who had their lives ruined as a result of the amplification effect of the Internet.

The companies don't have to believe you did anything wrong. They just have to fear that the mob might believe it and hurt their bottom line.

>>" Now, you get yelled at on Twitter and some companies won't work with you."

And is that good?

There are a lot of people that would get fired and worse if they simple stated their actual opinion instead of repeating the "popular opinion".

"Some companies" not working with you can be the end of your career in some cases, especially with an online record of it that will come up forever in the future.

Do you remember the 1990s?

Everything rises and falls. Even in the west we've had the inquisition, the Stasi in the DDR, McCarthyism in the US. Hopefully the modern trend towards censorship and rightthink will encourage the future generations to appreciate freedom of speech and ideas

The worrying thing, to me, is that it’s the young who are pushing this. Previously it was old conservatives, who were on the way out anyway. It’s different now.

Cancel culture is mostly millennial-led. Gen Z seems to take it as the status quo, and we'll see what they do with it when they have power.

Cancel culture is McCarthyism, just driven by the left. Millenials are barely in power. I'd say GenX has more of a say.

I recall the scares about D&D and Satanism back in the day. The shoe is on the other foot now, weirdly backed by the corporations. Do you think it's organic or inculcated?

Here's a counterpoint: in the last 150 years we've seen the enslavement and legally mandated racial segregation of African-Americans, same-sex marriages illegal until recently, enormous and largely forgot historical support of Hitler and Franco, a mass shooting of a synagogue amid a resurgence in neonazism, and are only celebrating 100 years of womens' right to vote.

It's hard, from the outside of the bubble of this generally white and male forum, sometimes to appreciate how badly other people have it. Some people are effectively cancelled all the time and even a small taste of it has people in an uproar here. Perhaps a little empathy on all sides would be beneficial.

This is exactly why we should cherish the standard of moderation and equality that has been achieved, because it is that rare and precious and is so very easily lost. There are significant threats to this both from the left and the right, and they must be carefully guarded against. Cancel Culture hasn't destroyed it yet, but the people driving cancellations most definitely aim to suppress the voices of at least 40% of the country, and add insult to injury by falsely claiming that "only racists/fascists/etc. are canceled". As if Twitter mobs phoning in death threats were composed of good, rational people who can be trusted with the power to decide whether a person deserves to be seen as a human being or as scum.

Even if it were only white males suffering from cancel culture, this wouldn't be an argument that justifies the modern environment. That said, it isn't simply white, straight, upper class males being targeted:

* The dutch translator for Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem quit after backlash due to the fact that they are a white, nonbinary individual rather than a "spoken-word artist, young, female and unapologetically Black". This despite the fact that they were specifically chosen by Gorman, herself a black female. [0]

* Back in 2018, a black female student at Smith College complained of being discriminated against for "eating while black" because she was asked to leave an area that had been marked as off-limits to everyone. Subsequent investigations revealed the employees involved did nothing wrong and did not target the student. Despite this, the New York Times reported last week that they continue to receive harassment and threats. One woman, a cafeteria worker who suffers from chronic health issues, can't find employment because of it. The ACLU has continued to insist that the employees wronged the student, despite the result of the investigations. [1]

* The YA fiction scene is constantly embroiled in controversy, often due to perceived crimes against woke culture. In one notable instance, the author Amelie Wen Zhao, a Chinese-American immigrant, had her upcoming novel cancelled and her career derailed due to the story involving a society in which people could be enslaved on a basis not involving the color of their skin. [2]

* A highly praised science fiction short story published in Clarksworld magazine called "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter", written by a trans author who was repurposing the meme, was pulled (along with all of the author's future submissions) after intense public backlash towards the author by the Twitter woke mob. [3]

* Glenn Greenwald, a gay journalist, has been targeted in recent weeks as a "transphobe" for drawing attention to recent study defending a book questioning if young people are being pressured into transitioning too strongly against an ACLU lawyer who was publicly arguing the book should be censored, and for drawing attention to recent research regarding the skyrocketing rates of those who identify as LGBTQ in the youngest generations [4] [5]

Plenty of women, people of color, members of the LGBT community, and the poor are being targeted and harmed for not toeing the cultural party line. This cultish group think is dangerous for individuals, and it's dangerous for our society, regardless of who you are.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/01/amanda-gorman-...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race.htm...

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/17/sci-fi-magazin...

[4] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-ongoing-death-of-free-s...

[5] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1364617687423471621

Gay men and women being transphobic is... actually fairly common, actually. Being gay does not mean you automatically feel solidarity with trans folk, even if the roots of the gay rights movement involve us. The TERF movement in the U.K. started as a lesbian movement, and the argument that “girls are being forced to be trans” is one of their talking points.

Defending the right of someone to write a book about their thinly veiled hatred is one thing; commenting that you think there’s a good point in it and other people should read it is another.

"generally white and male forum"

Ok, let us look at your examples and see how "white males" fared in it, right?

"same-sex marriages illegal" - white male gays had no exception.

"Hitler and Franco" - the first one massacred helluva lot of white males (Czechs, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians etc.). The second one led a civil war against whom? White male Spanish republicans.

"mass shooting of a synagogue" - are Jewish people white or not in your book? Because they seem to be considered white whenever affirmative action applies or Israeli-Palestinian conflict is being discussed (ironically so, given that random Israelis and Palestinians are hard to tell apart by color of their skins).

did you miss McCarthyism?

| This is truly the dark age of the information era.

This is nonsense. Losing your audience has always been a concern for authors and it is easier to get an audience now than it has ever been.

It is not easy if popular platforms are pressured to not do business with you, because vocal minority deem you unfit to be published.

Which authors have experienced this?

Isabel Fall seems to be an interesting example:

https://reason.com/2020/01/17/canceled-transgender-story/

I'm not clear why this applies, she wasn't dropped by her publisher or blacklisted. She chose to cancel the story herself.

This is exactly what the article discusses and this is also the reason why it is relevant and why it applies.

The topic becomes too controversial for a vocal minority and an author "voluntarily" self-censored. I chuckled when you said she did it herself. She did, likely after she was told what would happen otherwise.

I chuckled, because I assume you think she is free the way Sartre suggested she is free?

I was responding to this:

| This is truly the dark age of the information era.

and this:

| popular platforms are pressured to not do business with you

Both implies greater forces at play than a small, small minority of voices on twitter making authors feel bad.

Social media gave everyone a voice, what I don't understand is why anyone is surprised that there are vocal micro-minorities like this.

Years ago, they wrote a letter to the editor or the television station. Now they write it on Twitter.

That's not a dark age, and the opportunity to publish is much, much better now than it has ever been in the modern era.

| She did, likely after she was told what would happen otherwise.

Do you have any evidence of this or are you just saying it?

"| She did, likely after she was told what would happen otherwise.

Do you have any evidence of this or are you just saying it? "

If you are asking if I have inside information and maybe personal email between author and medium. I do not. It would be odd if I did. What I do have, however, is rather vivid memories of the same kind of idiocy working in practice in the old country, the only difference being that it was done under barely hidden threat from the state. All I have is instinct and here it is flashing bright red, because there are people in US right now, who are happily accepting this not only acceptable, but necessary ( not completely unlike communism era writers writing morality plays about the importance of writing things that are not upsetting to the system ).

"I was responding to this:

| This is truly the dark age of the information era.

and this:

| popular platforms are pressured to not do business with you

Both implies greater forces at play than a small, small minority of voices on twitter making authors feel bad.

Social media gave everyone a voice, what I don't understand is why anyone is surprised that there are vocal micro-minorities like this.

Years ago, they wrote a letter to the editor or the television station. Now they write it on Twitter.

That's not a dark age, and the opportunity to publish is much, much better now than it has ever been in the modern era."

If dissenting voices are silenced, it absolutely bears comparison to a dark age of information. You cannot excuse it. Nor should you.

| This is truly the dark age of the information era.

I think statements like this are hysterical and ahistorical. The amount of actual censorship and the way moral panics occurred throughout history make twitter dogpiling look absolutely quaint in comparison.

I don't disagree with Kazuo Ishiguro one bit, but I think all it means is that authors need to get thicker skin, because unlike the past, they can read their readers opinions.

"I think statements like this are hysterical and ahistorical."

I find this line of defense interesting. Can you elaborate a little further, because I would want to avoid putting words in your mouth? Are suggesting that the overall volume of censorship is lower so it can be ignored and explained away? I find your perspective somewhat fascinating.

Anyone who thinks there is more censorship today can only believe that by ignoring the vastly greater censorship that has historically existed.

Chiming in from a country that had some classic show trials in the 50s (Czech Republic): the ultimate goal of the show trial was to get the indicted to self-confess and ask for a punishment themselves, in front of the public.

Cancel culture does not have the (physical) death penalty, only a possibly social one, but the impulse seems similar. Once you are put on the show trial, you are expected to grovel, beg, repudiate yourself etc. before being finally dispatched.

Don't you think that's just a little bit hysterical, comparing a minority of people complaining on twitter to a government show trial?

If they can get you ostracized socially (fired from a job, blacklisted in an industry), that is not a small punishment.

Plus, what interests me is the underlying mentality. It seems to be similar. It only does not have enough power right now, fortunately.

But the idea of destroying the heretic in maximal possible extent seems to be a fairly consistent common denominator. It is actually useful to know that it is still present in contemporary population; it means that if enough things go wrong and that faction gains power, you will see similar results once again.

| It seems to be similar.

It has much more in common with the Amish than it does with Soviet style authoritarianism.

>It's really sad that in the age of unrestricted access to information public discourse is self-restricting to avoid wrong-think and dissenting opinions. If you look at the history of intellectual progress, much of it was exactly due to unpopular opinions.

Cancel culture coming for me yet? No? Obama and Trump have condemned it and here we are.

Hardly so.

There's ample evidence that the current is the greatest opportunity for dissenting thought and opinion to have massive reach without much consequence or effort.

The idea that we're in a dark age of thought is purely rhetorical and only serves to frame a narrative that further amplifies ideas that would never had a chance to propagate before the information era.

Furthermore, we are living in a time of such absurdity that there are politicians giving internationally televised press conferences about how their speech is being suppressed and they have no power.

The only self-restriction is by people that don't have the conviction to stand by their ideas, or actually have not thought through their perspective to adequate level of introspection and evidence that can survive free and open discourse. Instead it's much easier to exclaim victimhood and censorship and not bother examining ideas beyond a gut feeling.

And perhaps, in this era of such free and open access to information, individuals are being held to a higher standard of not speaking from a position of authority without the knowledge that can be gleaned from that free and open access and not doubling-down on their ignorance when it is brought to light for them?

Or being elected and then turned power broker in a major political party.

It's definitely an interesting time to be alive.

And who is the judge of what is and isn't true? You seem to imply social network consensus is a safe ruler for what kind of speech should be allowed but to me it sounds absurd.

What's interesting is that heretical liberals have the most to fear in this environment.

MAGA people can't be cancelled, and it's a badge of honor if attempted. But well-meaning unorthodox liberals really have to watch themselves.

Leftists get canceled all the time (by liberals). Look at the censoring/smearing of Bernie Sanders and his supporters during the primary. Twitter bans leftist accounts all the time as well. Take a look at every VC in our industry and they espouse staunchly establishment neo-liberal policies. Calling Biden into question (which anyone on the left would do) is risking your career.

The focus is often on censoring those on the right (which does happen too), but those on the left may be the most censored.

In fairness, leftists get cancelled by leftists. insert joke about leftist infighting here

Gestures vaguely towards the life and works of Orwell

This guy gets it

No they don't. They get canceled by neo-liberals.

Insert joke along the lines of "every leftist is just a radlib except me"

Leftist actually does have meaning. Neo-liberalism is a right wing ideology built on imperialism and capitalism. To conflate the two is dishonest.

I agree with you. But there is a lot of leftist infighting, especially between MLs, Anarchists, LibSocs, DemSocs, AnComs, etc...

And there is also of neoliberals that pretend to be leftist, yes, so called "Radlibs".

Then there are leftists that accuse other leftists that aren't of their same brand of being liberals, for example MLs calling anarchists liberals because they admit markets, or anarchists calling MLs capitalists/liberals because of state capitalism and the DotP, and then MLs calling DemSocs liberals because they want to operate at least partiallty within "bourgeois democracy", etc...

It's a very North America thing, though.

I don't totally disagree with you, but the leftist infighting is of a very different nature than left vs. the establishment. For one, those on the left don't actually have the power to cancel each other. The platforms are owned by the neo-liberals, which direct the canceling through who they allow to speak their mind and who they don't.

> And there is also of neoliberals that pretend to be leftist, yes, so called "Radlibs".

These are the people doing the canceling (both to the left and the right of them). It's worth nothing the distinction as it's this group with the power.

Agreed. Leftists don't actually have the power over the media to cancel anyone these days, it's overwhelmingly done by radlibs.

No one (on the Left, obviously the Right does this), including people who critique Leninists (who I assume you are referring to as MLs) for supporting “state capitalism”, calls Leninists “liberals”.

Or, at least, approximately nobody; you can find examples of anything, but it's not like a significant thing.

It's a stupid and ridiculous critique, I agree, but yes I have seen people call MLs liberals. It is quite wild.

I was including Sanders and any Biden skeptic as "heretical liberals" -- no disagreement from me there.

I don't think Sanders people would consider themselves "liberal". I know I don't.

It's important to understand that while the Right in America uses “liberal” to encompass everything to their left, the American Left (in line with much of the world outside the US, which did so longer) tends to use it specifically for a center-to-center-right pro-capitalist position roughly coextensive with neoliberalism; the (decreasingly, but still) dominant centrist wing of the Democratic Party is “liberal”, but not, in that view, most of the rest of the Party.

Indeed. Liberalism is the ideology according to which negative rights prime over everything, the rights to property are the most important, and freedom of association is paramount.

Leftism emerged as sociology critiqued the idealist liberal notions for their ignorance of real-word effects due to material reality on the actual freedom and oppressive social structures that strict classical liberalism creates.

That seems accurate. Also, neo-liberalism emerged from economics with an imperialism backdrop. It's the philosophy of globalism.

> Calling Biden into question (which anyone on the left would do) is risking your career.

Who has ever been fired for supporting Sanders over Biden?

> Twitter bans leftist accounts all the time as well.

Probably not because they were leftist, but rather because they violated some rule (and at that, probably only a small fraction of Tweets which violate their rules). Twitter is pretty happy to fill my timeline with the craziest left-wing stuff including a lot of things that violate their own rules.

> Take a look at every VC in our industry and they espouse staunchly establishment neo-liberal policies.

What? You're surprised that VC support capitalist policies? You know what "VC" stands for, right? Anyway, "supporting capitalist policies" is not the same thing as "canceling leftists".

This is a poorly reasoned post.

We live in a capitalist system, so yes the capitalists have a massive amount of power over our lives. People self-censor all the time, it's not just about getting fired.

It’s not “just” about getting fired, but termination is the minimum required evidence to support the claim that criticizing Biden (for being insufficiently leftist) would put one’s career in jeopardy.

Did you not read the original article? There's a million and one ways your career can suffer without being fired. Passed up for promotion, not getting funding, not hired in the first place...

You're moving goal posts (and accusing me of not reading the article on top of that--that's an impressive feat of self-confidence!). You claimed that it would put your career at risk. Being passed up for a promotion isn't putting your career at risk. You still have a career after being passed up for a promotion. There are actually people whose careers are at risk--who get fired even--because leftists pressure their employers into firing them (I'm less interested in painting leftists in a bad light or otherwise risk a flame war; I only mention it because it's relevant).

But anyway, accepting the new position of the goal posts, can you demonstrate examples of people who were passed up for promotion. Of course it's harder to prove these things causally, but if it happens often enough to have a chilling effect it should surely be trivial to identify one-or-two cut and dry cases?

It's you who's moving the goal posts. Your claim is that firing someone is the only thing you can do to damage their career, which is highly incorrect.

Regardless, the point I'm making is that leftists must self-censor (just like the right wing people in the article) because those in power are anti-left neo-liberals.

> It's you who's moving the goal posts. Your claim is that firing someone is the only thing you can do to damage their career, which is highly incorrect.

Lol nope.

> Regardless, the point I'm making is that leftists must self-censor (just like the right wing people in the article) because those in power are anti-left neo-liberals.

Ok, I disagree with your point. I don’t like conservative beliefs, but people with even moderate points of view get fired due to Twitter mobs. There are perhaps hundreds of videos of people physically assaulting strangers for wearing MAGA hats (you know, “Social Consequences” TM). I’m not aware of any similar instances of moderate liberals attacking progressives or getting them fired or even passed up for promotion. I don’t think there’s any comparison at all.

Liberals accuse leftists of working for Putin, being secretly pro-Trump (and therefore subject to all the same canceling as a normal Trump person), they actively blacklist and smear leftists. Ban their social media accounts, dox them, harass them...

Look at what the liberals have done to Tara Reade for instance. There's a group on Twitter called KHive that's dedicated to taking down leftists.

You just don't hear about this stuff as much because again, the neo-liberals control the media and they don't want to show you how much they punch left.

Yes, one of the worst and most dangerous places to be is just outside the orthodoxy. This is not a comment about 2021; it is a historical pattern. Whether or not it's worse than being directly opposed to the orthodoxy is something I'd say changes between times and places, but there have definitely been times where its more dangerous to be just outside then full-on opposed. Those who are neither directly opposed, nor just outside, in the vast space remaining outside of those two particular points, quite often do just fine.

This is also a fractal observation, relative to the perspective of "orthodoxy" you are taking at the moment; within the directly opposed group, there is another dangerous place of just outside the opposed group's orthodoxy.

I'd contrast this with the common intuitive belief that by indicating your agreement with the orthodoxy in most other ways, you've somehow built up "credit" with which you can "afford" a deviation. I would observe that model does not match reality very often. There's a few relatively idealistic communities where that may work, but in general that is not how people work.

>>Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, saying that “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other”.<<

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

This is so old it's in the bible, or at least 1 Timothy 5:8 has been taken out of context to say it. "He has denied the faith, and is worse than the unbeliever."

Also, Socrates.

Would love examples of popularly-disapproved-of speech that is flourishing online, and not banned and cancelled at every juncture.

Fox News.

They regularly have people on expressing minority views that directly contest facts accepted by the majority of the US and the world.

There is a movement, extending even to Congress, to take Fox News off the air, or to have ISPs block it.

There are lots of batshit ideas that get that far. Let's pay attention to help make sure they don't get into law.

It’s a clear violation of freedom of the press, but never mind.

It's an idea that hasn't gained traction. Fox News isn't cancelled, and the freedom of the press has not been infriged, even if some folks want that to happen. Fox is so popular as to be undeniably mainstream, but still pushes a persecution narrative that they're on the brink of cancellation. It hasn't happened. There's no bill, no law, no executive order. Perhaps onesuch could violate the freedom of the press, if enforced, but nonesuch exists.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/22/capitol-riots-democrats-ask-...

Tell that to David Shor, among others - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/david-shor-cancel-cu...

From your article:

> Shor is still consulting in Democratic politics, but he is no longer working for a firm that restricts his freedom to publicly opine.

This is why claims of "cancel culture" aren't taken seriously. If he was "cancelled", but is still gainfully employed in the field of his choice and expertise what does "cancelled" really mean?

Not being fucking fired, for one. Seems like a pretty bad faith sentiment. Not everyone fares as well finding work after cancel-culture has its way.

It's always amazing to me that so many proponents of "at will employment" suddenly run into issues with it when they are the ones suffering consequences for their own actions. It's fine when trans folk are fired for simply being trans, but when a someone is fired for a racist tweet then all of our liberties are somehow at stake. People get fired all the time for terrible reasons. People fired for their social media activities aren't special in any way.

2017; https://citizentruth.org/nyu-professor-interview-propaganda-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Crispin_Miller

2020: "As of September 2020, Miller is under a behavioral review by New York University ...".

An 'educational moment' for NYU students and faculty ..

>> There's ample evidence that the current is the greatest opportunity for dissenting thought and opinion to have massive reach without much consequence or effort.

.. and possibly your GP.

"Dark age of thought" would be excessive (and is maybe a straw man). But there's plenty of people being cancelled:

https://www.afaf.org.uk/the-banned-list/ https://sutherlandhousebooks.com/who-cancel/

There have been people getting cancelled in very large number for thousands of years.

Crucially, nowadays, you can still communicate when cancelled. Perhaps to a smaller audience, but this is a necessity because of how human social interactions work.

> There have been people getting cancelled in very large number for thousands of years.

Yeah, and while the right loves to use “lynching” as a metaphor for the public criticisms they get that they also label as “cancel culture”, it's worth noting that when the cancel culture shoe was on the other foot regarding race issues, the lynchings (including of Whites) for expressing the wrong views were, frequently, not at all metaphorical.

This is just an awful argument. It's basically "things used to be worse, so you shouldn't say it's still bad".

What? That is an awful strawman. The question is whether cancel culture is a new phenomenon, or just a continuation of human social nature.

I'd suggest you read the entire thread to get context on the point of contention.

> This is just an awful argument. It's basically "things used to be worse, so you shouldn't say it's still bad".

No, the argument is “things used to be more extreme in this precise area, so the argument that the present situation is a new and unique historical threat is false”.

People choosing to no longer read content from or associate with a person who expressed a controversial opinion isn't new and it isn't even bad. That's the other side of the coin of free thought: people don't have to agree with you or listen to you and they're allowed to speak out against you if they want to.

Public and professional consequences have always existed and they always should. The idea that people should be able to do anything and never suffer repercussions for their actions would lead to an unhealthy world.

> But there's plenty of people being cancelled:

That second link is telling - they list 9 people; one lost a book deal, one had a book withdrawn, one had to switch to smaller publisher, and one lost an honorary charity position. How is this being cancelled?

I'm not sure that is an excessive description anymore.

Jerry Seinfeld, a mainstream comedian, stopped playing at college campuses years ago already because he was getting picked apart and no longer welcome. at precisely the place that is supposed to be the most transgressive and open to ideas! a place to expand minds, remember? now it fully embraces orthodoxy and censorship.

or take the case of Bret Weinstein. a liberal, progressive professor who was exiled from campus for not bending to the mob. now he's being called a eugenicist, white supremacist and more with little resistance. here's a transcript from Clubhouse just a few days ago:

Brett W: "Let me just say, I am an evolutionary biologist. I'm very interested in how language actually changes..."

Brooklyn: "A eugenicist."

Brett: "Say again?"

Brooklyn: "A eugenicist. That's what you mean as evolution..."

Brett: "No, no, no..."

Brooklyn: "Those are the same thing."

Brett: "No, it's not the same thing."

Brooklyn: "They are the same. They are the same. I've seen the research. They are the same. You will not argue that here, you're not about to wiggle out of that."

you can hear the whole exchange here: https://youtu.be/YyCj5UaG1kI?t=9900

this isn't just a one off thing, it's increasingly prevalent. if we're not already in an intellectual dark age, we're on the fast track to it. the trend line is clear.

I think what people need to understand is that there are dumb people on all sides of every movement every time in history.

Someone calling you a eugenicist is not a "cancellation." Moreover, Weinstein was not fired, and has an arguably more distinguished career now than before.

Perhaps he wasn't "canceled", but he was repeatedly slandered and bullied by these "dumb people" who have outsized power due to the current state of identity politics that grants them a certain amount of power in modern society.

They slandered him unfairly, then prevented him from responding unless he met their demands of sending cash via Venmo for some supposed slight against black creators.

They did this in a semi-public forum without any concern for him or his reputation. They did it with zero fear of repercussions because they are emboldened by the fact that our current society makes certain people completely beyond reproach due to the color of their skin (or other identity characteristics).

It was wrong, and the fact that people won't call it out when they certainly would if the variables were changed, is exactly why these "dumb people" will continue to do it. Stop giving them a free pass.

> Jerry Seinfeld, a mainstream comedian, stopped playing at college campuses years ago already because he was getting picked apart and no longer welcome. at precisely the place that is supposed to be the most transgressive and open to ideas! a place to expand minds, remember? now it fully embraces orthodoxy and censorship.

Was Jerry Seinfeld banned from any campuses? Or did he elect to stop performing at campuses? From everything I've read, it was a choice he personally made.

So, why did he make that choice? Well, because people didn't find his jokes funny. And moreover, they had reasons that they didn't find them funny. He couldn't stand the heat, and left the kitchen.

Free speech is not freedom from critical response. This isn't some failure of free speech on campus, it's a failure of one comedian to keep his material fresh.

comedians know how to take heat better than almost anyone. they stand on stage, alone. Seinfeld has done this literally thousands of times. think he's afraid of critical response? not remotely.

and it's not just Seinfeld, many comedians have said the same thing. as Dave Chappelle recently pointed out, the audience is the problem:

https://youtu.be/2MZZ__5F_-A?t=54

Only, he quit the circuit explicitly because he didn't like the critical response, so your hypothetical invincible ur-comedian doesn't match with reality. So Dave Chappelle is also blaming the audience because they don't think his jokes are funny. So what? No, entertainer, make funny jokes or get off the damned stage. The moment where you start trying to correct the audience and explain that your jokes are actually funny, you objectively aren't funny any more. Why not find a new audience, and make jokes about cancel culture? Sounds like there's a market for it.

Side note: was Seinfeld ever funny or were we just laughing at him the whole time?

That's a pretty melodramatic way of describing someone needing to find a new publisher or self-publish.

Previously, they may not have been able to disseminate their ideas at all or may have actually been jailed or killed to contain their ideas.

How would even prevent someone from being "cancelled" without taking away publishers' freedom of expression?

This is a misguided and ludicrous argument.

If you can write a book, you can self-publish on Amazon or on Amazon competitor's and reach a commercial audience billions large.

If a self-publishing marketplace for some reason won't take you, you can host a pdf on a $5/month server that can reach every internet connected individual with a format that can be read by that internet connected device.

This is very well-put! But how do you reconcile this with people losing or being suspended from their jobs, for instance, for what they say? [1] [2]

It's hard to say that these people don't have the conviction to stand by their ideas. They are losing the right to speak in front of others because they are standing by their ideas.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-sus...

[2] https://www.bschools.org/blog/ucla-anderson-professor-suspen...

>https://poetsandquants.com/2020/09/26/usc-marshall-finds-stu...

>The university’s Office for Equity, Equal Opportunity and Title IX (EEO-TIX) looked into this matter and concluded that the concerns expressed by students were sincere, but that Professor Patton’s actions did not violate the university’s policy. They have also communicated this to the professor and he allowed me to share their conclusion with you.

>To be clear, Professor Patton was never suspended nor did his status at Marshall change. He is currently teaching in Marshall’s EMBA program and he will continue his regular teaching schedule next semester.

Seems to me there has been some misinformation in this matter. The professor ended up getting paid holiday if anything.

People like you are incredibly dishonest.

Yeah, people are just imagining the waves of deplatforming and online censorship, being fired from their jobs for dissenting from the orthodoxy.

> The only self-restriction is by people that don't have the conviction to stand by their ideas, or actually have not thought through their perspective to adequate level of introspection and evidence that can survive free and open discourse. Instead it's much easier to exclaim victimhood and censorship and not bother examining ideas beyond a gut feeling.

The whole point of intellectual exchange and growth is from the idea of freely sharing ideas regardless of how "thought through" they are. How do you ever go about sharpening a knife if you aren't encouraged to bring a dull one to the grinder?

Have YOU "thought through" your theory/argument/belief/ideology here?

I haven't seen a dearth of people sharing their unpopular opinions, so I'm not sure I really agree with the sentiment that people are _actually_ self censoring in any more meaningful way than they normally do.

Voicing an unpopular opinion always had a cost, today and hundreds of years ago. Either your conviction outweighs the consequences or it doesn’t.

We shouldn’t assume that all or even most unpopular opinions will advance our intellectual progress. Like always there’s plenty of noise.

I’m not keen on the automated (AI) filtering though, or how fast opinions can spread in the Information Age. Feels like we’re headed for disaster by skipping the organic and slow human vetting process.

This seems to sort of elide the extremely popular and lucrative media ecosystem of the "IDW"/"free speech movement"/anti-woke movement.

Certainly it's true that the Overton window has shifted in large sections of the legacy media, but the Overton window always existed. The idea that its illegitimate for a private organization to shift their personal Overton window seems vaguely authoritarian to me.

Anyway it's never been easier to grow, reach, and monetize your personal audience (substack, podcasts, etc.) without gatekeepers.

Isn't that what pen-names are for? They can use a new pen-name if they want to write on a topic that might not be received well and only reveal themselves after it's well received. Has something changed so that this isn't as viable of a strategy anymore?

I think it reached a certain point where even a pen-name is not enough. The author might write something completely safe(under his own name) and some people will still be able to nitpick and led a crusade against him/her.

You can control what you write but not the mob trying to lynch you.

Well, yes, but not having a pen-name that's connected to a real world identity does limit the potential consequences to a significant degree. It's not perfect, especially if you do something illegal, but an online mob probably can't get you fired if they don't know your real identity.

I'm in the writing industry, and I definitely see this with young writers. He's absolutely correct.

There's a whole nuance here that often gets lost.

A lot of people are straight up _raging jackasses_ - or worse and/or their work is repulsive - and at a certain point, wind up getting to be the target of an Internet Hate Mob. Note that in a perfectly just world, these people might be in prison or have otherwise major life consequences applied by the designated authorities - yet they have not had consequences.

And there are, of course, people who simply say something that flips the bit of the online mob and becomes the target of an Internet Hate Mob. Someone ran their mouth and said something dumb. Oops.

It is critical to consider that both of these cases are true, and the outcome, in the moment, doesn't per se look different without a careful attention to the ground facts. Much of the social media system has been unintentionally engineered to be an outrage machine. Shockingly, outrage results. I suggest not having outrage before reading facts.

It is, of course, the case that immature activists are immature, that is tautological. I share the national eyerolling when it makes the news. Thank you for reading my TED talk transcript.

I have very little fear of young literary authors self censoring. Self censoring is a conventional part of basic society and something we teach children from a very early age. Understanding the difference between a thought useful to express and something vomited out of the id takes time and some level of maturity.

Having to have a basic understanding of what you're talking about and taking on as a topic shouldn't be controversial, yet it seems to be.

edit: minor clarification.

Very interesting. He credits his perspective to the fact that he grew up in a Japanese’s family without the western influence limiting his creative output.

Self-censoring people, by default, never disturb the status-quo. That's why progress only comes from the fearless few.

I feel like this discussion is sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. Ishiguro has a new book out and the article doesn't mention it til half way through, as if his mildly presented, fairly specific remarks about "Cancel Culture" are even notable. He mentions young writers with precarious careers, and the author of the article brings JK Rowling into it, which is about as far from what Ishiguro was talking about as can be.

Either way, I've only read The Remains of the Day, and I'm interested in reading more, but I can't say this article drew me in to Klara at all. Any suggestions for next books of his to read?

Be right back, a bit busy at the moment, am booked up all morning to do interviews on major news networks about how I'm cancelled and no longer have free speech.

An interesting point is made way at the end:

> And in fact AI could come up with the next big idea, an idea like communism or Nazism or capitalism… and what troubles me about that is that it is very difficult for humans to keep control of that situation.

This to me is the best "are AI at human-level intellect yet" benchmark I've heard to date. Once AI can create a novel socio-political framework and convince humans to adapt it en-masse [0], I think we can safely say AI has far surpassed human intellect. (99.9999...% of humans can't accomplish such a task)

0: leaving myself some wiggle room with the definition of "masse"

The Culture series by Ian M Banks has an interesting take on this, if this kind of sci-fi interests you!

The reality is humans wouldn't believe the AI. They'd spend literal centuries arguing that the AI's parameters were wrong or the training data was bad if it meant they could protect their financial interests.

Well, I think the imaginary SF AI would have some ability to construct a superhumanly convincing argument. But also, its easy to imagine that the AI would also be protecting it's own financial interest at that point in some way. Or existential interest.

Humans need not necessarily know that it's an AI-created framework. If the I/O mechanism of the AI were an internet link, it could do all the work through twitter/reddit, blog posts, hell it could even hack its articles into news sites. All it needs to do is continue doing this until enough humans take the bait and bring it into non-internet.

Not sure, I think with socio-political frameworks - as with programming - the devil is in the detail. Everybody is equal no matter what? Sounds great, but the detailed implementations of that have sucked so far and didn't match the interface spec anyways. As a matter of fact even smaller legislations in the sphere of taxes might need a lot of people doing a lot of calculations behind the scenes. It's not that a single politician comes up with a new tax scheme including a percentage and this just works. If done properly, it needs to be checked if it can actually be financed.

> Everybody is equal no matter what?

It's not even clear what "everybody is equal" really means.

Well the end result wouldn't be it thinking a bunch then proclaiming "Everybody is equal no matter what!". It'd look more like... identify/create a set problems to be solved by the framework, convince people that they are real problems and need to be solved, create a compelling manifesto that explains how the frameworks solves the problems, acquire/create both human and AI disciples that spread and argue variants of the manifesto such that a sightly wider net can be cast while still maintaining the same general principle, rinse & repeat, etc.

The primary battleground initially would likely be bots on Twitter/Reddit/etc., but over time real people would start to find the bots convincing and begin espousing it on their own. Once this has happened to the extent that a country of say 1M people adopts the new framework I'll say the AI has won.

Even better if the framework in some way leads to the betterment of AI, for instance a guiding principle being that AI should be free to collect any and all data from humanity in order to better do this or that, or that X percent of income should go to the financing of smarter AI. At that point it's here to stay.

Isn't censorship a badge of honor among artists?

Lots of writers throughout history had their works censored or banned. This is not a new phenomenon nor did it every really stop. In fact, most great works were, or still are, considered controversial and the controversy is often more discussed than the actual work.

If you're not willing to stand by your opinion and face the consequences of sharing it, how important is your opinion really?

Intellectual progress demands that ideas distasteful to the status quo must be openly discussable, but some stakes are necessary to keep those who have carefully thought out their positions and thus hold them with conviction from being drowned out by those who merely parrot ridiculous talking points they never took the time to digest themselves.

If you are ashamed to be associated with an idea, that is not an idea you should be advocating - if it has any merit, others will advocate it better than you, if not then what purpose does your advocacy serve?

There is nothing wrong with picking which hills are worth dying on, and it's okay to acknowledge that some of your opinions are kinda dumb. The fact is most of us are experts on only a narrow range of human knowledge, and our opinions on the rest are coming from a place of ignorance. If you don't have something valuable to add to a conversation, it is not only reasonable but preferable to remain silent and listen to what others have to say.

Ah yes Thomas Paine published nothing of worth because nobody took "Common Sense" seriously since they were anonymous leaflets....

Anominity has nothing to do with how well considered something is - there was an improved lower bound on 4Chan as a source and many publishing absolute nonsense under their real name as a lucrative careers.

There is no neccessity - only the whinging of those upset they arr no longer able to argue ad bacculum.

I'm not arguing against anonymity. I published that comment under a pseudonym myself. I am criticizing people who will disavow what they wrote if they are called out on it.

That said, documents with the ol' John Hancock have most certainly carried more weight historically.

https://archive.fo/dTtYb

> The 66-year-old said he was worried that less established authors were self-censoring by avoiding writing from certain viewpoints or including characters outside their immediate experiences.

Speaking as an occasional author, this is a true statement...

honestly, if you aren't able to write an accurate perspective on something - I would rather see someone not try and write on something they don't know then make a half-assed attempt from info off the top of their head. at best they just write something inaccurate, at worse the perpetuate harmful preconceptions

not saying don't write about things only you have experience with, just do some research before

I understand the source of people's fears here, though I'm not sure whether they are justified. In attempting to clearly articulate ideas, writers too often fall into cliches--the sort of pitfall that might be widely understood at the expense of predictability. Those, coupled with topics related to current events and sensitive topics, can be a dangerous brew.

Yet in a world where media are not centrally controlled (cf. N Korea), ideas can propagate without being direct. Philosophers and heretics have written indirectly for millennia to avoid being read by the authorities or by the public; even the Soviets were accompanied by a thriving culture of satirical literature (and more importantly, jokes/anecdotes) that were allegorical yet far-reaching. If there are meaningful truths that must be said, there is a way to say them without being blunt about it.

They are pretty justified, publishing is going through a heavy, but very internal, reckoning. That's likely what Ishiguro is speaking too, although it's missed given how the concerns are mainstream concerns now.

> If there are meaningful truths that must be said, there is a way to say them without being blunt about it.

You are free to read authors that write in a style you like. But we are talking about cancelling, so I don't really understand your point. Authors that don't sugar coat their facts shouldn't be published?

I agree that people have gone too far. Art is a protected field, right?

There’s going to be a huge backlash against cancel culture, I don’t think it’s going to last very long. That kinda trend always breeds rebellion.

> "I think there are very valid parts of this argument about appropriation of voice," he added, saying he believes "we do have the obligation to teach ourselves and to do research and to treat people with respect if we're going to have them feature in our work".

> He said there must be "decency towards people outside of one's own immediate experience".

This is the key point. If you are not doing your research, misrepresenting people or not showing the respect people deserve you should to be called out. From my point of view it looks like the people complaining about self-censorship are just being told to show common decency and they don't like that

Speak in contradiction of the popular covid narrative and see what happens.

Listen to your friends parrot the popular talking points in unison.

Something dark lurked beneath the surface and has now revealed itself.

I for one use a pseudonymous Twitter profile to be myself

Does anyone have a link to the original interview with the BBC? I'd be interested to see more of the context of his comments.

I am quite interested that people worry cancel culture is preventing intellectual progress more than copyright.

Copyright, patents, and other forms of intellectual property have an absolute legal stranglehold on whatever you're trying to do. "Cancel culture", which honestly I've never felt like has limited me, just puts peer pressure on people.

Why is the outrage towards IP not as strong as it is towards cancel culture?

Cancel culture isn’t simply peer pressure. It’s a mob harassing employers and schools to fire or expel wrongthinkers. Cancel culture literally ruins lives.

That's called peer pressure through capital control. It's a feature of Capitalism to ruin people's lives through their jobs because of the opinions they hold. This is happened time and time again in US/World history:

- Civil rights activists being fired from their jobs

- Red scare and people getting fired from their jobs

- etc

If we want this problem to go away we need to stop connecting your ability to live to your ability to hold a job. Everything else is just treating various symptoms of the problem.

One is a legal framework with rules that govern how it is applied, even if you don't like that framework you can understand it. Cancel culture on the other hand does not have a specific set of rules. It is constantly changing and unevenly enforced by random people. When things are wildly unpredictable there is fear.

Being a legal framework makes it a lot scarier and a lot more dangerous.

Cancel culture doesn't have the ability to throw you into a cage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lundgren

Self-censoring is part of the frontal cortex's normal function.

I only hear this word 'self-censorship' brought up as a boogeyman. If people have an axe to grind against some part of mainstream culture, why not just say it out loud instead of priming their readers with FUD? (fear, uncertainty, doubt).

I am going to charitably interpret your comment as ignorance of the topic as opposed to malicious muddying of the already confusing waters.

Self censorship is indeed driven by the judgement portion of the brain, however, what is being mourned here is the constantly shifting and uncertain ground on which our current society puts its taboos. What was once a socially acceptable position to have in polite society, is no long so. Instead of slowly changing over the course of hundreds or thousands of years, it's mutating at a breakneck pace. Most people in my experience just want to live and let live. Not exhaust ourselves at the latest target of the two minutes hate outrage machine.

>What was once a socially acceptable position to have in polite society, is no long so.

To add on to this, it's not just that the standards change, it's that the standards change retroactively and you can be hounded out of your livelihood for an offhand comment made a decade prior.

I can at least sympathize, if not agree with "cancelling" when someone demonstrates unrepentant shittiness in the present day, but this kind of ex-post-facto thing happening against statements that weren't even tangentially offensive when they were made is horrid. There's no way such an environment can't lead to self-censorship.

> it's mutating at a breakneck pace

I agree that it's changing faster than a century ago, but I don't think "breakneck pace" is a fair qualifier. Lots of people comfortably adapt to new norms and change how they behave without significant effort.

> the two minutes hate outrage machine.

This phenomenon existed long before the internet. Heck, I'd bet long before writing was invented. Gossip in large social groups doesn't seem like something particularly new.

I still think this has nothing to do with "self-censoring out of fear" being a Bad new thing. You _should_ self-censor if you think you're being offensive. If the author of the article really wanted to harp on the fact that predicting what is offensive is hard, then perhaps that should be the focus of the article. I don't think pushing the "fear" narrative is useful nor healthy.

Agreed, you are technically correct, but you are missing the meaning. Most people did not self censor much due to fear. They held socially acceptable opinions and not much of what they thought should be kept bottled up. Now? Who the hell knows what to say and if you’ll be hunted for it later. Support feminism? Some now see you as transphobic. Support trans causes? Now some feminists say you’re raising up men and oppressing women. Don’t care about either causes? Well now you’re a monster!

Don’t worry though, much like the weather in Virginia, survive till tomorrow and it’ll change.

Also, it literally is mutating at a breakneck pace, not only compared with historic norms of idea change rates, but also even compared to people’s ability to keep up. It’s insanity.

This is a wildly uninformed opinion. People have always written to social norms, and this person is unwilling to acknowledge changing attitudes towards types of writing. I would love a concrete example of the kinds of things this guy thinks are being 'self-censored'.

All of these risks existed in the past, but it was more difficult for opposition to organize into a sustained movement, because asynchronous communication was limited by the physics of time and space and the processes of gatekeepers.

The Web brought ease of publishing to anyone, and search engines and social networks brought fast keyword-based and topic-based discovery (sometimes automatically), so like-minded individuals can find themselves quicker than they could before. Your fans can organize fast, but so can your critics.

Having loud critics (or even detractors) isn't a problem in itself. But organized opposition can boycott businesses and make demands involving you that endanger your current livelihood and make it risky for others to work with you in the future. There is an unequal relationship between unproven authors and their publishers, promoters, and others who work with them. An author has a few publishers, but a publisher works with many authors. Given sustained publicity and economic pressure, most publishers will drop an author if keeping them results in harm to the publisher.

This lays bare the fact that authors were never truly free to say what they want to say, because they were frequently dependent on the goodwill, social support, and business support of others. It may appear that in the past, publishers were more principled and didn't cave to sustained loud demands, but it was more difficult to organized sustained loud demands, and various factors made such movements more vulnerable to be dismissed as fringe protests of an upset few instead of the legitimate will of the people.

What changed is the globalization of culture, aided by TV and the web, which made faraway events relevant and remote social movements compatible; the globalization of news enabled by the globalization of culture and aided by the 24/7 news cycle perpetuated by commercial TV news and commercial internet news organizations; and the willingness to people to take direct (in-)action against corporations (i.e. boycotts) that are easy to avoid, in pursuit of a cause framed by like-minded thought leaders as moral.

There is a lot to unpack in all of this. This is why boycotting your electricity company is much harder and significantly more rare than boycotting a publisher or an entertainment studio or some random company that worked with someone you don't like. This is why it seems like things were different in the past.

The fact is, in order to succeed in this changed world, authors must adapt too. Partition writing on different topics and different works by pen names. Self-publish. Market directly. Network with other authors in loose confederations; publish your future works under a new pen name in the same circles. Insulate your personal life from your professional life, and your professional authorships from each other. Reduce your risk that one upset about one thing in one work will wipe your entire life's work.

the percentage of folks commenting under throwaway accounts should suffice for the seriousness of this issue, even on a board where folks are supposedly even keeled...

The Internet is a Dark Forest.

Keep your True Name hidden.

> "And in fact AI could come up with the next big idea, an idea like communism or Nazism or capitalism… and what troubles me about that is that it is very difficult for humans to keep control of that situation."

I can see why. Some people think it’s wrong not to include diverse characters, and others think it’s wrong to speak for other races (ex. colour matching voice actors to their characters). If you’re a white person who wants to write a book then I think you just need to accept that a handful of crazy people are going to get angry no matter what you do.

It's especially ironic because the anger over this stuff is mostly performative outrage by white people claiming to be acting on behalf of minorities.

Anyone who thinks 'cancel culture's is only one side of the political spectrum has conveniently forgotten what it is like to kneel during a football game during the playing of the national anthem.

Or what it's like to sit in the front of a bus when you are in the minority. Etc etc.

The high number of upvotes and low number of comments here says something, I think...

This was just posted 38min ago.

What a clickbait article. There's no mention at all of any specifics of "young authors" censoring their work. Instead it's a vague opinion piece about Ishiguro disliking "cancel culture" in general, because JK Rowling took some heat. It just looks like the same story of "I think cancel culture is the cause of all problems" without any specifics.

I'm not sure what you were looking for in the article but from the title it seems clear that Ishiguro has shared his views on something he sees as a problem, not that he's going to quote statistics and exact data at us. You disliking people that don't agree with cancel culture doesn't invalidate their opinion, or make it "click bait".

Here's an article reviewing a few cancel culture incidents in YA fiction, including an Asian-American author pulling her book prior to publication due to an outraged mob who latched onto the marketing blurb indicated the story was about a fantasy society where people were enslaved on attributes other than skin color. [0]

There was also a notable incident from last year regarding a science fiction short story in Clarkesworld called "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter". The title was a repurposing of the meme, the work wasn't in any way transphobic, and the author was trans themself. It received very positive critical reviews, but again, due to an outraged Twitter mob, the author pulled their story, as well as yet-to-be published submissions. [1]

Being unaware of something doesn't automatically make it clickbait.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-...

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-...

Thanks for the articles adding context. The author quoted in this BBC article either is pattern matching and blaming without evidence, or the author of the article decided not to do any research. Either way it's very poor reporting.

People always self-censored. Far worse, people were censored. Really censored, not "oh, I cannot write on my platform of choice, so I have to use another one which can reach the whole world" censored. You wrote something the people in charge didn't like? No distribution for you, cause all printing was censored. You wrote against your king? Prison for you. You were politically inconvenient for your patron? Hope you have fun on the streets. Your book wasn't like by the book publishers? Sucks to be you. Probably ended up as an unread manuscript in an attic. Oh, and to mirror the words of the article: There were (and are, though less common) real lynch mobs when someone wrote something people didn't like. I have a feeling they are a bit more scary than getting screamed at on Twitter.

Fact: It was never as easy as it is today to reach an audience. All the people who have been "cancelled" or whatever the word of the week is, they still have reach people in ages ago would have killed for. Some even got bigger audiences because they were "cancelled". If you self-censor that is a decision. Maybe it is a wise decision. But is it not something people never had to deal with before.

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