But what if cancel culture doesn't let you? What if the very act of having any sympathy at all with the cancelled, let alone creating spaces where they can continue to thrive, marks you out for cancellation as well?
To put this into the context of the Cerf-Auden exchange, what if Cerf, on finding that Auden "sympathized" with the cancelled Pound, had not responded as he did, but instead had tried to get other publishers to refuse to publish Auden's work? Or had hired some private investigators to get some dirt on Auden? Or had, by devious routes, gotten someone to form a mob of rioters and vandalize Auden's house? Those things seem a lot more like what "cancel culture" is these days.
The era of the Internet means that so many things are marginal cost. Now, refusal to carry just means they can go somewhere else. This is going to expand. Decentralization means power to the common man.
Actually the biggest problem with "polarization" in my book is that there are only two poles, at least in the US. And the only real reason for lamenting "echo chambers" is some sense that "we all" need to get along. But that's only because "we" are "all" cooped up together, forced to associate and to share large and insufficiently flexible political organizations -- whether it's the too-few nationally-viable political parties or the too-big nation itself. In other words maybe it's still just a problem of insufficiently-free association. If I could freely associate, at not too great a cost, with some political party or nation that aligned perfectly with my values, I would do it and probably should.
But then cynically I suppose those nations would then start warring with each other if you didn't separate them strongly like little kids on the fucking playground. Sigh, time to get drunk.
While people have the right of free association, that right needs to be exercised responsibly. Is refusing to work with a man who apposes gay marriage is responsible? How about refusing to work with a Trump supporter, or evangelical Christian?
Things that I think are borderline but should be protected are stuff like religion. This is a tough place for me because I know that because of correlation in ethnicity and religion you can proxy discrimination for race through these so I take the L on the fact that I don't want them protected but I don't have a way to reasonably differentiate them from race-discrimination.
Political affiliation is a protected class in California, and I struggle with this a little. It isn't hard to imagine that there is a world where some race, let's say Centaurians, are generally discriminated against and they have a party: The Equal Rights for Centaurians Party. Discrimination against ERC affiliation is discrimination against Centaurians, just proxied through political affiliation. I don't think that's good for our society.
Any way, my ultimate guide star is free individuals being able to achieve their greatest freedoms without non-consensually intruding on others, so based on how society is organized at any given moment, I think the practice might be to protect political affiliation or to not do so. Ultimately, it may just be the case that sufficient of us decide not to use your product because you're a Trump supporter and then you die. That's life. You can't make me buy your product. That's a much greater sin. Maybe the law constrains your employer to not fire you and so we keep boycotting and you then die and are replaced by a company that doesn't act like you. FWIW, if it were me, it would depend on the situation.
Perhaps that's why it's good for CA to do so, because it is overwhelmingly Democrat-voting. If there were many powerful parties, one could imagine it would be less necessary.
Someone that cannot be promoted to be in charge of other people (that they are most likely bigoted against) or even be trusted to give a fair accounting of who worked hard today and who didn't?
How would it be responsible whatsoever to hire that person to work alongside, much less promote, the diverse cultures that the United States is composed of?
This is a common sentiment, and it's easy to agree with it. But it doesn't really hold up with the idea of a right. If you're "irresponsible"--you exercise your right in a bad way that you shouldn't--should you face consequences? If so, and those consequences prevent you from exercising your right, then you don't really have a right, do you?
Cancel culture and deplatforming just are consequences for "bad" free speech, and the argument against cancel culture is very much "you should tolerate bad speech just because the actual right to freedom of speech is more important than your hurt feelings."
Ultimately, I see most modern de-platforming as being very similar, with the significant difference that it is not at all civil (which is ultimately easy to factor out for me).
For what it's worth, I may well choose to not use some piece of software because I dislike the leadership. That is a free choice. I may well tell my friends why I made this choice and they may well go along with me. The company may then choose to fire the leadership and alienate those who like them, or choose not to and alienate me and my friends. It's all free choice.
So, overall, I'm not too upset about cancel culture. It's for those of us who sympathize with the cancelled to create spaces where they can continue to thrive. And if we do it right, and if we are right that they are unfairly cancelled, then we will have a weapon that will beat the uninformed in the market. If not, we fail, and the rest of humanity thrives.
Ultimately, the Brendan Eich situation is like this. I don't like that he donated against gay marriage. I didn't stop using Firefox over it. I didn't start using Firefox over it. But by my principles of liberty, I could reasonably have said "I will not work at Mozilla or use Firefox so long as they permit this unless they end their association with him" and they can reasonably have said "Okay, don't. Your loss." or "Okay, we fired him". After all, we are just free people choosing whom we would like to associate with.