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?

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.

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.

> 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).

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

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

"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

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.

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.