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...
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'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.
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!
“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.
Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!
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?
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.
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.
Companies burry all kinds of misdeeds for their staff. So it’s not at all congruent.
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.
At the end of the day you can decide to argue with angry people or not. Another perk of being social media free
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Don’t be surprised if no one appreciates or even cares about your work besides your employer. It’s part of the package.
People will learn to distrust video evidence.
I wonder if this is going to hold, especially as 4K video is becoming the norm.
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.
You mean like zoom recordings? Yeah nobody has those.
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.
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.
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.
They hated the Simpsons, which is now the longest running show in US history, I believe.
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.
Even if that’s accurate, doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinion of the broader public.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Look on the bright side: If we manage to win against the fourth reich people will remember, maybe for one generation.
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.
Also, twitter needs to go. Humans can't handle it.
I wonder if we ever properly reach that level. And if after a few big attempts social media companies would put stop to that...
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.
Is boycotting Goya in response to that a bad thing? Should #boycottgoya hashtags on social media be deleted, for example?
[0] https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/1395314/Andrew-Ne...
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.
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.
[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-...
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
You had a question and I answered in good faith. I accept your concession.
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.
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.
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.
They aren't so much afraid of women, as they are afraid of consequences for their actions.
Anyone you hear complaining about it is the very kind of person who needed to be on notice in the first place.
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.
Jesus Christ. No it didn't.
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/.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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?
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.