> Let the free-markets determine who should be cancelled.
What would that look like though?
I think there's a somewhat valid conversation to be had about cancel culture, but this point comes up over and over, and I'm constantly wondering: if people criticizing speech in public places like Twitter isn't the free market, and Netflix employees collectively advocating that they don't want to host the speech isn't the free market, and if users boycotting or voting with their wallets isn't the free market, and if advertisers pushing for higher standards on the platforms they're advertising on isn't the free market, and if platform-holders and publishers deciding what content they want to promote isn't the free market, then what is the free market?
When we talk about cancel culture, a lot of the mechanisms of canceling use free market actions; freedom of association, the right to criticize, the right to filter and to share filters with other people, the right to choose how we spend our money and time. And it's valid to look at the free market of speech and say that sometimes it's overly harsh or that it censors the wrong people or that it can be intolerant, but I don't see how it's possible to simultaneously say that the marketplace of ideas is the correct way to sort out good and bad speech, and also that people being mean on Twitter or calling for boycotts is fundamentally the wrong way to tackle conflict.
What do people think the marketplace of ideas is, and how should it act? When the marketplace of ideas deems an idea unpopular or bad, should it still be given equal weight and equal investment and promotion alongside other ideas, even though the marketplace doesn't want it?
That's not how the real economic marketplace works; in the economic marketplace if you can't convince people to buy your product, then your company dies and investors stop giving you money and putting you on store shelves. Nobody says that it's a violation of the free market if people badmouth a company online and stores stop carrying their products as a result. Nobody argues that I'm "canceling" Facebook when I tell people to stop using it, or when I argue that Facebook's future VR products are likely to be bad just by virtue of being made by Facebook.
What's different about the marketplace of ideas? Is it that Netflix has too much power and it's a pseudo-monopoly over entertainment? I can buy that argument for situations like Facebook or the Apple app store, but I don't really buy it for Netflix.