>"Our failure to have a serious discussion about defining “cancel culture” encourages this. When some people vaguely complain about “cancel culture” in a way that lends itself to promoting this constant partisanship, other people not unreasonably see it as partisan."
Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity. It rarely, if ever, does. Each one of us has our own conception of a term - wordfeel, if you will - and virtually no one actually knows or holds to the literal dictionary definition. We hear words and apply them if they seem right to us. Even if you managed to precisely define cancel culture, people would easily try to claim that some alleged cancelling event it is actually something else, "accountability", "showing you the door", etc.. Never underestimate someone's ability to lawyerly redefine what something is or isn't.
Additionally, I think Popehat is dead wrong here:
>"Saying we should “end cancel culture” means we’re saying some people should refrain from some exercises of speech and association to promote other people feeling more free to speak."
No rights are actually being infringed by this. It is possible to have cultural mores that are in the spirit of free speech. The opposite stance, not calling on people to end cancel culture, is also accepting a reduction in speech. Even so, by Popehat's own worldview, because the government is not restricting cancel culture this shouldn't be seen as some infringement of liberty. I don't know what Popehat actually wants here.
For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start.
People not wanting to patronize or associate with you when you cause harm to people they care about is really not a bad thing, and it's not new either, and yet it is what gets called "cancel culture" by a lot of people.
Contextless social media that encourages misunderstanding, a lack of ability to find retractions, and the ability to dig up old sins and present them as present views are an issue, and result in people piling onto others over misconceptions. It's a real problem. That's almost never what actually gets talked about, it's just "I should get to say whatever I want without people disliking me".
As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new, the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new, and that's exactly what "cancel culture" refers to. The underlying mechanism of Twitter is what gave birth to the term, regardless of whether it's used by haters to justify hate speech.
One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings. Coupled with the new notion that hurting someone's feelings constitutes a form of harm tantamount to violence, this allows proportionality in punishment to be abstracted away. If measures of harm are arbitrary and shifting depending on how much mob traction one particular issue recieves or how sensitive one person happens to be, then proportionality is impossible, and "cancel culture" captures a state where cancellation is the answer to any grievance of any severity which manages to find cultural purchase.
I think you're making White's point for him. You're implying that free speech should be at least as important as other people's feelings. He agrees. Which is why appeals for a new norm of shutting up critics is so problematic. This is what he's talking about with his "First Speaker Problem" thing: the "free speech" you're alluding to is virtually always a response to someone else's speech. How do you coherently isolate the speech that must be protected --- the supposed "first speaker" --- from the speech that shouldn't (critics of that first speaker)?
It's funny to see all the shifts on this. 18 USC 1001 was "chickensh-t" that they wouldn't pull back in his day to Ken... at least until it wasn't. We talked about chilling effects and heckler's vetoes, but now they're well-deserved social sanctions?
I've been reading him for probably a decade now, so it's hard not to notice how things change whenever the shoe is on the other foot.
It's extremely hard for me to imagine how anyone who's read or listened to a lot of Ken's commentary could walk away thinking that he was suddenly in favor of 18 USC 1001 just because of the existence of the Trump administration. He regularly criticizes the statute.
I don't know, I really just don't see it.
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Also, quick sidenote on the heckler's veto:
> We talked about chilling effects and heckler's vetoes, but now they're well-deserved social sanctions?
The heckler's veto isn't really the right term to use when talking about cancel culture or shouting down speakers. The heckler's veto is more about the government shutting down speech under the assumption that it might cause a riot or disruption in the future.
But for whatever it's worth, Ken also regularly criticizes shouting down speakers in public forums. I really just don't see this change in his opinion that you're talking about.
Oh, he hates the statute normally. He just failed to even express mild criticism of it when it was abused and he was discussing the trial, which stood out when he was literally discussing the merits of a trial centered on one. Maybe he made up for it on some episode I didn't listen to, there are a lot of them and there's no way I heard them all, but I was kinda surprised to see him fail to mention a hobby horse of his in a discussion of a trial centered on said hobby horse.
> The heckler's veto isn't really the right term to use when talking about cancel culture or shouting down speakers. The heckler's veto is more about the government shutting down speech under the assumption that it might cause a riot or disruption in the future.
You say that as if nothing got shut down or forced to pay huge security fees due to other people being moved to violence against the speakers, but there were and have been lawsuits over the same. One of which I think even involved Clark, though I didn't follow that particularly closely.
> He just failed to even express mild criticism of it when it was abused and he was discussing the trial
I don't know if I need to dig through however many X podcasts exist here to find examples, but for whatever it's worth I know that Ken criticized criminalization of lying to the FBI during the Trump investigation. You can believe me or not about that, short of digging through a bunch of transcripts I'm not sure what else to say about it other than I didn't notice the silence you're talking about.
> You say that as if nothing got shut down or forced to pay huge security fees due to other people being moved to violence against the speakers, but there were and have been lawsuits over the same.
Ah, first of all there's a difference between private companies doing this and public forums doing this. Not to say that it's never a bad thing if private forums do this, but it's not a heckler's veto in the legal sense. Second of all, it's still improper to characterize things like shouting down a speaker as a heckler's veto, because regardless of whether or not public forums violate that standard and are guilty of allowing a heckler's veto, it's still the case that actual heckling is not a heckler's veto.
But regardless, this is something that Ken criticizes regularly, so I just don't get what the point is. I have seen Ken criticize shouting down speakers and threatening them even when he doesn't like the speakers.
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Edit: Okay, I did do a real quick 3-minute search online and not only do I see multiple instances of Popehat criticizing 18 USC 1001, I also see multiple instances of Left-leaning readers accusing him of being too critical of the statute when it's applied to Conservatives (https://nitter.42l.fr/Popehat/status/966388695505952768#m). Again, take from that whatever you'd like. I even (since you brought up the word) found a pretty recent example of him literally calling it chickenshit (https://nitter.42l.fr/Popehat/status/1486410486258102273#m)
I think White has been pretty consistent about 18 USC 1001 being chickenshit, even when it applied to Trump employees. It's important to distinguish between normative and positive arguments; whenever White talks about 18 USC 1001, he's making positive claims. If you're, for instance, talking about the All The Presidents lawyers podcast, he was there to handicap what was actually going to happen in cases against the Trump administration. He wasn't running the prosecution.
And, when he does, he virtually always points out how that statute is more often used to harass people we find sympathetic, even when it's being aimed at e.g. Trump's former lawyer.
(18 USC 1001 for non-Pope-Heads is the statute that criminalizes lying to the FBI).
I watched that podcast and didn't see it. Given that it was a prosecution over a difference of opinion over what constitutes discussion of "sanctions" in a call they had a recording of, with only an FD-302 for evidence of what was said, where the only copy was from months after the fact.
I don't know that I listened to every podcast, so you an point out a quote if there was one, but I sure don't remember anything like the word "chickensh-t" coming up. Instead, there were a lot of longwinded debates over who had the better substantive argument for how long a prosecution that was dismissed could be maintained by the court.
Which seems patently absurd given that they are violating separation of powers there. But it's political, so concerns about a judge playing prosecutor were simply tossed out the window? What was the end result of that supposed to be, anyway? A criminal referral... to the people dropping the case?
Those seem like awfully big concerns to sweep away in a mealy-mouthed discussion of substantive factors where he honestly didn't sound like he was taking a side.
And I'm pretty sure we've both been listening to him for a long time, since I sorta think it was one of your comments a really long time ago that made me start reading his stuff. Do you really not see any changes?
I'd say his tone started changing about the time he had that feud and split with his former friend Clark.
Not going to defend Clark here, just using that as a point of time reference and possible explanation for the notes of bitterness, since that was an ugly feud for former friends.
I was thinking of All the President's Lawyers in particular during the end of the trial (e.g. between dismissal & pardon).
What feud? He was removed from a moribund group blog, and then spent the next several years launching attacks on White's mental health and the propriety of his having adopted children from Asia. Are we sure any of us are better off digging into this? I think we're not.
I don't need someone gaslighting me about an article that I've just read. Here is what it says:
"The Times also errs by utterly failing to grapple with the problem that “cancelling” represents free speech and free association."
It's a strawman conundrum that White constructs all on his own. It might seem very clever to people who think freedom of speech is some kind of mechanistic rule to puzzle over. Not clever at all when one considers the reason why it became a value for modern societies.
Not only White conflates the two behaviors I mentioned in my post above, he reinforces the confusion by equivocating a riot at Berkley with ridiculing someone.
It's an aspirational norm, but it's nobody's practiced norm; virtually everybody has lines they draw. So what does it tell us that we can aspire to having that norm? I'd argue: not much.
I'm saying that society hasn't consistently had that norm, and flourished anyways, so the supposed norm is probably not as causative as it's being made out to be.
My opinion is that Joe Dingleberry* should shut up, because I've already heard his opinion and find it uninteresting. Are you open to my opinion, or just Joe's?
It’s always criticism about speech that parrots Republican talking points that rises to the level of cancel culture, not that people are fired for discussing worker power.
>modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new, and that's exactly what "cancel culture" refers to
Wonderfully written, noduerme, and I comment first to expand on this part. The mob includes friends and family. To be shunned, or ostracized by friends and family can and does happen because of these incidents. To become associated with an ideology, even against your will, can put your employment at risk, as your employer does not want to be seen as supporting you. These are very dire consequences, equivalent to significant jail time, IMHO.
Second, I want to note that the phenomena is a failure of the justice system. That in an ideal world there would only be one justice and it would be fast and easy to access, and handle even the smallest matter promptly and fairly. These antics are wrong, but they point to a demand for righting wrongs that isn't being met by the current justice system.
>One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings.
Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity less than 60 years ago. The civil liberties around speech went through a series of challenges and expansions very recently. The ACLU used to defend nazis. Now they prefer not to, to the chagrin or dismay of more traditional civil libertarians.
The one thing that's remained constant from times when civil rights activists were imprisoned for "offending" people to now when right wingers are canceled for offending people seems to be that the bulk of the population is incapable of, or unwilling to, set the principle of speech over their own feelings about that speech. I think it's because most people just can't imagine themselves being on the wrong end of a censorship regime (civil, corporate, or otherwise).
This is why the ACLU was so important; that was the entire point of it. It was started by a Jew. I'm a Jew, and I contributed to it. Not because I like nazis or think for a moment that they'd give me the same chance to speak. But because inevitably, narrowing of speech will come for those who believe themselves immune. We will have a far-right government again, and whatever liberties we allow to erode now because it suits us will be used against us. Only the very young and those with very short memories think that silencing opinions they don't like is a winning strategy in the long run.
> narrowing of speech will come for those who believe themselves immune.
True, but on other hand, history has shown us the Paradox of Tolerance.
"Liberals" have learned this lesson. When I was growing up, people who I would consider socially liberal generally supported the "I disagree with what you say, but will defend your right to say it" position. These days, the same people are less confident. I'm one of them.
I want a free and open society where people can discuss ideas and those ideas are weighed on their merits and the ridiculous ones (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc) are laughed at.
But that's not what's happened. The Overton Window in the US has dramatically shifted.
I don't know how to fix this. I don't even know that there is a fix for this. But I can certainly understand the mindset that says "maybe we don't need to defend nazis?"
> I want a free and open society where people can discuss ideas and those ideas are weighed on their merits and the ridiculous ones (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc) are laughed at.
> But that's not what's happened. The Overton Window in the US has dramatically shifted.
Any evidence for this? To me it seems like things went in the right direction and never really stopped. That things are getting worse and therefore we need to police the people harder is just a lie, don't listen to them.
Example, a little over a decade ago the general consensus was that gay marriage shouldn't be legal, in what way was the overton window of gay rights better back then? Authoritarians always try to convince you that evil is growing so they need more powers, but they are wrong regardless if they are right wing or left wing authoritarians.
You miss the concept that gay marriage was controversial. Obama was against it. Therefore if that debate was held in the current environment proponents of gay marriage might be silenced and banned
That is the point, restricting speech isn't a good thing. The poster I replied to argued that restricting speech is a good thing since things are getting worse, even though we can see that things has steadily gotten better. There is no need to restrict speech to make things better, instead things are likely to get much worse by restricting speech as your example shows.
For the record, that is not at all what I was arguing.
I was arguing that completely unrestricted speech allows ideas that we really don't want (Nazism, etc) to become normalized.
This isn't even controversial; it's a well known phenomenon.
It's also very difficult to discuss this without talking about Trump and that instantly derails any conversation, but to address the elephant in the room, can you imagine even GW Bush saying "there were fine people on both sides"?
I also said that I don't know what the correct fix for that is.
I would say that the debate over transgender rights (bathrooms, etc) is in a similar cultural position to gay marriage a few years ago (i.e. liberals are fine with it, centrists are coming round to the idea and hardline conservatives are having a "moral panic"), yet no one is being silenced there.
This idea just struck me reading your post, but I think it's something novel. I've read a lot of responses here, and yours encapsulates the argument that speech is subordinate to tolerance better than most. As someone whose immediate family are the only survivors of mass genocide, I'm keenly aware of the dangers of giving intolerance a platform to poison innocent minds, or of tolerating it at all. But not tolerating it, to me, means taking the time to address it rather than attempting to silence it by another act that could be portrayed as intolerant and thus give ammunition to the enemy. So I think it's succinct to say I look at the Overton Window concept like this: Anyone who wants control will try to put the window of debate where they want it, and narrow it as much as possible. The solution is not to move the window but to stand by the value of widening the window and keeping it as wide as possible. The fact that it has shifted in directions some agree with and others disagree with is useless as an argument for restricting or expanding it. Where it is wide and debate flows freely, there will be more tolerance. Where it's narrow - wherever dissenting opinion, even intolerant opinion - is treated as beyond the pale, eventually your own opinion will be treated as beyond the pale, and no one will be left to speak for you. My grandparents were communists and their family was murdered in the Holocaust. To me the primary lesson of the 20th century was that all ideology is a source of horrific torture and murder. Only by absolutely widening that window of speech as much as possible can individuals hope to fight the excesses of whichever ideology happens to be in the middle of the window at the present moment. And living through several fascist-leaning American administrations has made me realize just how temporary the current leftness of that window is, so I really shake my head when I see people of the left attempting to narrow it.
I hope that makes sense programmatically, as an algorithm, if not emotionally.
Edit - because I'm just formulating this. I'd say there's no place the Overton Window can be which is tolerant. Some centers maybe more than others, but actual tolerance only exists where it is wide, and surely wherever it is narrow it will end with suppression of valid dissent.
Of course we don't have to defend Nazis but we can defend free speech. We should attack Nazis' inhumane poisonous speech and misinformation. And especially we shouldn't amplify it. Twitter should not amplify the spread of fascist ideology in the name of "fairness". They should ban it. People still have their freedom of speech but Twitter has the right to not propagate hate and lies.
You are equating government imprisonment with public cancellation here because they both have a chilling effect, but we very quickly run into the paradox of tolerance: do you restrict the expression of "cancelling" to protect other speech?
Those Nazis you use an example of abhorrent speech that must be allowed were calling for communists to be rounded up and killed for their views. Surely that is partaking in cancellation?
Who cancels the cancellers of the cancellers? You've hit the nail on the head: Cancellation is not a viable means of stopping criminal calls to violence, and it's pretty much useless as a rhetorical tool. For the former we have a legal system which should be shored up rather than undermined by vigilantism; for the latter we have a democratic political system which, ditto, should be treated with respect rather than undermined by stooping to the same dirty tricks one's political enemies pulled. Which is probably why cancellation usually appears like virtue signalling, since it serves little purpose in either stopping violence or improving the system, let alone convincing anyone but potentially violent imbeciles in one's own camp to holler and mob up on a target of rage for the benefit of whoever controls the mob.
It has nothing to do with justice. No matter how shitty a human the target of it is. It's always just a really transparent attempt for someone to collect "likes".
Who gets "likes" for calling for civil debate rather than attacking the group's enemies?
No one. Anyone who dares to would be cancelled too. That should tell you all you need to know about the nature of intolerance toward intolerance. It's categorically intolerant as well, and it is no longer on the right side of anything.
Explicit threats, defamation, calls to violence, harassment, inciting riots, fighting words … these have a legal precedent for the reason that cause and effect are traceable.
By the same token, ‘cancellation’ if it leads to loss of livelihood etc. is questionable.
Being offended or hurt by someone’s words are much harder to quantify.
I was watching the news this morning and they were talking about the latest company that's boycotting Russia in response to the social media storm. It occurred to me that governments are becoming increasingly irrelevant. They don't have to impose sanctions (and their own rules make it difficult to do so) - the Twitter mob is deciding who to banish. It's a form of democracy, I guess - but one without any checks or balances or regulations.
The counterargument to that, of course, is that a handful of tech companies can't actually make your speech illegal, make their competition illegal, arrest you, imprison you, ban your speech across an entire country, burn your literature or have you and your ethic/religious/political group shot and dumped into shallow graves.
I mean, sure... getting banned from Twitter is momentarily annoying but Twitter having far more power to regulate speech than the entity that writes the laws that define Twitter's existence, that claims a monopoly on violence, and that in many cases directly controls the media and censors the internet? No.
It's a common argument but I've never really found it a compelling one.
> It's a common argument but I've never really found it a compelling one.
You can literally make your own twitter any time you want. My charitable view is that people are actually complaining about a monopoly on attention. It's an interesting subject but doesn't have anything to do with speech.
Epik was hosting platforms that contained extremist content, encouraged and celebrated mass violence and allowed conspirators to plan sedition against the government. Yes, if you're doing that, you should expect that some businesses may choose to reconsider their relationship with you.
It's not a problem even most garden variety racist assholes on the internet are likely to have, though.
Hopefully Russia banning FB will be just the start. I say that even though my highest upvoted submission since I've been on this website is a denunciation of my than Government apparently wanting to censor FB posts related to protests against it. That was back in 2017, I've since changed opinion when it comes to social networks and their vicious effects on our polities (be it a democracy or an autocracy).
Is it really companies boycotting Russia? Or is it that they're no longer doing business with people in Russia due to the sanctions (and therefore the likelihood that there would be no way to get paid), with some pretty marketing speak wrapped around it?
> It occurred to me that governments are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
I've been thinking this for quite a few years now.
>the Twitter mob is deciding who to banish. It's a form of democracy, I guess - but one without any checks or balances or regulations.
Or swarms of bots shaping public opinion run by just a few people? As long as Govt's allow encryption, over the telecoms networks in their countries, the sooner govts become irrelevant.
> As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new, the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new. … One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings.
They used to kill people for advocating for integration and civil rights. Actual mobs used to assemble to kill black men accused of hitting on white women. Not internet “mobs”, actual ones with guns and pitchforks.
Literally nothing you’re talking about is new, in fact it has gotten way less bad over the past few decades. In fact, arguing that its new and pernicious requires us to purposefully ignore the history of political and speech based violence throughout the 20th century and earlier.
They used to imprison people for sending information about birth control through the mail. I don't know what planet the "it wasn't like this in the good old days" people live on. The most common phrase quoted by people to describe a hypothetical rational limit on speech[*] was cribbed from a case that found it was ok to imprison people for passing out pamphlets against WWI.
There's a huge lack of education and cultural understanding about just how much freedom of speech we have today compared to what it was like in the past. Overall, people in America are more free today to say things than they used to be in the past, period. They have more mediums that they can publish to, it is easier than ever before for them to get support and to connect with communities, and legal protections have literally never been better.
I think part of it is that dominant parts of culture were never in a position to experience past censorship. Some of it might just be short memories. Some of it is probably bad faith, or that attacks on Twitter feel more real for some people. But the lack of perspective is a real problem. You don't have to go far into the past to find out that there were tons of taboo topics and ideas that could not be talked about, both because of legal restrictions and gatekeepers, and because of a lack of tolerance from society, and because the mediums through which to talk about them were just so much more centralized and exclusive than they are today.
Even today, I find that free speech advocates (and I consider myself to be a free speech advocate) are often uneducated about the scale of censorship that happens outside of mainstream culture.
It's really disappointing and frustrating. Academics get a tiny, tiny sliver of the kind of backlash that marginalized groups get when they protest dominant narratives, and it's the end of the world -- because many of them have just never encountered real, hard censorship before and they don't have a frame of reference. Or less charitably, they just don't care about having a frame of reference and it's all just a narrative tool for them.
They have more mediums that they can publish to, it is easier than ever before for them to get support and to connect with communities, and legal protections have literally never been better.
Yes. Now everybody has a megaphone and it's too noisy to hear anything. This leads to heavy self-selection of inputs. The real battle today is not over who can say what. It's what people should be listening to.
For the current war, not much is being censored after the source. You can read all the positions: Russia Today, China Daily, South China Morning Post, One America News Network, CNN, Fox, the Voice of America, the BBC, Reuters, the office of the President of Ukraine... Plus vast amounts of stuff on Twitter. Few people do that. They tend to obtain info from one source they more or less agree with.
> The real battle today is not over who can say what. It's what people should be listening to.
This is why the characterization of all speech criticism as cancel culture is so problematic. We have a segment of the population now that believes that free speech means not only that they can say things while being shielded by laws from government retaliation and by cultural norms from unreasonable forms of cultural retaliation; they now also believe that free speech requires them to be given exclusive, privileged priority on platforms and for them to be given extra control over what people hear. For them, it is cancel culture that their voice isn't louder than everyone else's.
Notably, they don't view it as censorship that other segments of the population don't have the same platform privileges in the first place. To them, the normal position of free speech is that their voice should always be specially audible, and they are less concerned about making it easier across the board for people to filter through the noise or about democratizing curation, and more concerned with making sure that their microphone is never threatened by other people's speech or association.
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It is very important for us to talk about how people get information and about how to further decrease gatekeeping around curation and subscription of information; I think that's one of the next fronts in increasing free speech in America.
But it's also important for us to recognize that most people don't have exclusive contracts with major media networks and tons of advertising and promotion, and that demanding that people retain access to privileged speech platforms while their critics are characterized as censors for even just criticizing them or boycotting those platforms -- it's essentially the same as walking into a public gym and getting mad that everyone doesn't stop their own conversation and only listen to what one person has to say.
I think Popehat really hits the nail on the head when he talks about privileging the first speaker; some (not all, but some) of the backlash I see around online communication and criticism is coming from people who were used to being major voices that couldn't be ignored, and are mad that the increased noise means they no longer have that same level of exclusivity or respect, and are mad that opposing voices are increasingly given the same level of volume and attention and that those voices have more ability to respond to their speech. They're mad that their critics are on more equal footing with them in public debates and have similar levels of reach and volume.
This is why it's also so deeply important to express that there is a difference between a rando someplace getting fired from their job for a Twitter opinion they gave 10 years ago, and someone getting disinvited from an semi-exclusive speaking role at a conference because they are actively expressing bad or harmful ideas. Those are really not the same thing; one is a cultural retaliation against speech that might cross the line into unnecessary harm and mob justice, and the other is just people getting mad that they don't have a special right to an exclusive megaphone.
> I don't know what planet the "it wasn't like this in the good old days" people live on.
Obviously not always, but often because you are viewing it through the a different lens: there is an unspoken "for people like me" missing from the end of their statement.
I think thats a big part of why powerful writers and journalists are complaining. They’re not used to the masses talking back to them, and they don’t like it very much.
I'm not convinced that history is just repeating itself. There does seem to be something qualitatively different about the possibility that nowadays a non-celebrity can spout an offensive joke or political take and have it be much more likely to be recorded and broadcast to the whole world with permanent consequences for them everywhere they go. Bad decisions are far more likely nowadays to be permanently recorded, and moving over to the next town, state etc is no longer enough to escape your history. There were implicit safeguards before in that most people were much less likely to have a wide audience that would remember what they said. It was much easier to change your mind about something and then pretend it was your opinion the entire time and save face. There are organizations with pet issues that dedicate themselves to recording offensive social media posts by college students and then making profile pages for each student on their site to publicly shame them. In the past these kids could graduate and then change their mind years later and no one would be the wiser as long as they never became celebrities or politicians.
> There does seem to be something qualitatively different about the possibility that nowadays a non-celebrity can spout an offensive joke or political take and have it be much more likely to be recorded and broadcast to the whole world with permanent consequences for them everywhere they go
Just don’t do it on Twitter.
Or any social media for that matter. The only difference is that people hadn’t learned yet about vitality and the truth is the statement that “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”
You can still make all the crass offensive jokes you want around your friends.
Eh, ‘it depends’ - plenty of people got harassed, sent to jail, or outright killed for being openly gay during that time, among many other things. Not everywhere, but a great many places in the US.
Anti-obscenity laws were also going nuts around that time.
The internet was relatively mellow on that front, but that was because it was mostly unknown and super niche.
society was still trying to apply it’s rules to it, it was just far less competent at doing so.
I can see an argument for it, but it's worth noting that there was quite a lot of censorship in the 90s that people don't often remember nowadays. Remember when MTG and D&D completely removed "demon" and "devil" from their lexicon? Remember when Nintendo localization policies required removing every cross from every game?
How old were you in the 1990s? I’ve noticed that for a lot of people, the golden age of no strife just happens to be right before they became aware of how people actually behave in public.
I too looked fondly back on the 1990s, but I was also a child. Looking back as an adult I can tell that my recollection of the era was colored by my inexperience. To draw one example, I totally missed all the moral panics of the 1990s, and how many people that harmed just for liking D&D.
Can't speak for parent but I have refrained from discussions of things people have been cancelled for even when I agree what is leading to the cancelling is horrific, because the consequences of getting misinterpreted are too grave. Even asking a clarifying question for something you genuinely don't know could be misinterpreted as a dog whistle. It's hard to blame people for that because sometimes clarifying questions really are feigned ignorance meant to sink time or provoke, but at the same time there is a growing sentiment on Twitter and elsewhere that choosing the most charitable interpretation in discussion is actually bad and empowers bad actors. What you get is a situation where nobody trusts anybody.
In the 90s the culturally most influential people tended to mock censors and championed being “politically incorrect”. Al and Tipper Gore were roundly mocked for the record rating system they championed.
R rated movies were far more successful at the box office, with lots of questionable content by today’s standards.
Pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable to say was considered cool.
Today, the academic and cultural power brokers are the biggest champions of shutting down “objectionable” speech.
> In the 90s the culturally most influential people tended to mock censors and championed being “politically incorrect”
There is a sizable industry still doing that exact same thing today. Instead of saying that they’re “politically incorrect” they say that they’ve been “cancelled”. It seems like this line of discussion is not only alive and well, it is quite lucrative too, which more than a tiny bit undermines the core premise of what being “cancelled” means.
> R rated movies were far more successful at the box office, with lots of questionable content by today’s standards.
As a sibling comment pointed out, this is factually incorrect. You also need to adjust for the fact that the internet exists, and various social and economic pressures are sending more R rated content directly to streaming.
Are there fewer R rated movies in theaters because of how sensitive we are, or are you just preferring to watch R rated content at home rather than in the theater?
> Pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable to say was considered cool.
Given the rise of the alt right and the dirtbag left, pushing boundaries is still very popular and lucrative.
> Today, the academic and cultural power brokers are the biggest champions of shutting down “objectionable” speech.
> Al and Tipper Gore were roundly mocked for the record rating system they championed.
Which has a direct mirror in the mocking of Republicans who are currently trying to ban books and ideas (CRT) they don't like. A lot of your idea rests on the concept of "culturally influential people" pushing these actions. Again, I don't see the evidence of that, seems like a boogeyman.
> R rated movies were far more successful at the box office, with lots of questionable content by today’s standards.
Odd to compare 90s box office to today's box office given the impacts of COVID and streaming. We didn't have Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, HBO Max, Disney Plus, and more. You would need to add all the R-rated movies from those platforms to make a comparison. Either way, 4 of the 5 highest grossing R-rated movies (inflation adjusted) came out after 2000 [1].
> Today, the academic and cultural power brokers are the biggest champions of shutting down “objectionable” speech.
We definitely hear more complaining about it, today. I haven't seen evidence that it actually occurs more frequently. If anything, I see the opposite influence in the race to ban scary books and transgender people. Those ideas aren't coming from "cultural" leaders or "academics".
That said, it is far easier to be gay or transgendered today than the 90s. We also just had a President who described people as ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals.’ He also 'told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees …” [2] I don't think that would have been a good electoral strategy in the 90s, probably would have gotten him "cancelled."
The link to R rated movie statistics shows a steady drop in marketshare, excluding a weird blip in 2020. Probably an artifact of Covid?
Trump is the chief catalyst of Cancel Culture, in my opinion. His violation of every norm of decency and blatant cruelty created a backlash and a desire for retaliation for anyone seen to be in the same camp as Trump.
The drop in R rated movie share in the box office is almost certainly a result of streaming, not a change in cultural taboos. The linked chart only includes people who paid money specifically to watch a movie in a theater, and does not include movies watched on Netflix or Hulu.
> created a backlash and a desire for retaliation for anyone seen to be in the same camp as Trump.
Trump also demanded basically anyone who was ever insufficiently nice to him get fired. If anyone was for “cancel culture” it would be him. But like everything else in his life, he wasn’t very good at affecting those changes.
That was, for many of us, our ability to be heard. Our ability to speak was not hindered by fear of having our lives ruined for holding an unpopular opinion or asking an incorrectly phrased question.
The most common battlefield on which these "cancellation" debates happen is people's access to Twitter, a service that did not exist in the 1990s (you could, obviously, get banned off a BBS for any or no reason). You see it in this very thread: people writing appeals to the amount of control tech companies have over speech, and how unprecedented that is.
I consider Twitter just a very successful BBS, and I'm all for them banning the shit out of most of their idiot users. It's ridiculous that people who couldn't figure out how to set up a modem in 1993 now think they have a right to post and be heard as if God stepped down and gave them a megaphone. I don't have any sympathy for their complaints about being banned. What I do have a problem with is services allowing people to be brigaded and have their families and jobs threatened, which as a sysop I would have shut down the brigaders for, not the asshole who wrote the inflammatory thread, even if I disagreed with him.
Sure. And there are certainly disproportionate social and economical responses to speech, such as Colin Kaepernick finding himself unable to sign anywhere as a free agent after Donald Trump called for him to be fired for kneeling during the National Anthem, or David Shor losing his job at Civis Analytics after questioning the political effectiveness of violent riots protesting police misconduct. I'm sure if we dig, we can also find economic responses to speech that we'll agree aren't disproportionate.
The point isn't that these processes are never abused, or even that they're rarely abused. The point is that the problem we're trying to nail down isn't "there can be economic consequences for unpopular speech", but rather "there can be disproportionate consequences for speech". People on the right and the left are scrambling to find a simple bright-line rule, such as "speech should never cost you your job". But push to shove, almost nobody really believes that; we can all generally think of viewpoints you can loudly advocate for that will rightly make you difficult to employ.
I could write more, but I'd just be relaying my own personal beliefs about what speech is or isn't OK. Instead, I'll note that Ken White was pretty careful not to do that, or really to try to resolve this dilemma at all. Again: he's just pointing out that the NYT editorial's effort to resolve this was poorly reasoned, and itself a threat to free expression.
As for what I wrote upthread, I'm just pointing out: one major impetus for this debate is people losing their Twitter accounts. That seems germane, since you yourself brought up that one issue at play here is the enormous influence tech companies have on access to audiences for speech. My point was, of course, that the access you're talking about didn't exist at all as recently as 20 years ago. What access there was at the time was governed by... large corporations, who (for example) deplatformed Bill Maher when he questioned the orthodoxy around the moral weight of terrorism compared to US military interventions.
And they were "canceled" like crazy. People spoke up about all these issues, and were fired, beaten, jailed, killed, and worse. But a white dude totally could say what he wanted to, kinda.
This is a really toxic, ahistorical attitude that pays no attention to the many individuals of all races and genders who sacrificed for greater equality. It also fails to address the situation of a nonwhite person now who is cancelled for disagreeing with woke sloganeering, or explain how that's justified just because someone else was evil to someone else in the past.
I disagree. Believing the 90s were more free speech and ignoring the context of that era is the toxic, history-ignoring attitude. That's not to say we don't have problems currently, but it is better than it was in the 90s, overall.
- Culturally, the 90's were ripe with moral panics over satanism, gender expression, obscenity, etc... That could be a longer conversation, but the short version is that there was a ton of speech suppression happening in the 90's and early 2000's.
- Technologically, our mediums today (as problematic as they are) still allow for a greater ease of communication with a wider audience than they did in the 90's. There are developments online since the 90's that I don't like, and I worry about centralization online. But the earlier decentralized Internet was also very insular and inaccessible to a lot of people, and I think that gets lost from conversations about Internet freedom. More people have access to the Internet today and more people have access to publishing platforms today.
- In terms of mass media, there is again worrying consolidation happening, but it is nevertheless still the case that getting your message out to a wide audience in 2022 is easier than it was in 1990. Podcasts, video streaming, site deployment, etc... is all easier to do today than it was in the past.
Stuff like game development, music production, and so on are also easier today than they were in 1990. That's not to say that they're perfect or can't be improved, but I think back to the Flash boom, and that didn't really start until the early 2000's and it really was a different level of accessibility for making games, including games about political and social topics. In the same vein, a quick reminder that Youtube as a site was not founded until 2005 and until 2010 the max video length was only 10 minutes. Podcasts didn't really start to catch on among the public until the late 2000's. Patreon was launched in 2013, providing a very simple, mainstream way for at least some creators to self-fund their own work by directly interacting with fans.
----
I think people forget sometimes how new all of this stuff is. And again, that ignores how much straight-up censorship and how many moral panics were happening during that time period, but even just from a technological perspective, if I have a message I need to get out, I would rather do it in the 2020's than the 1990's.
I could maybe see an argument that we're on a technological downtick from the 2010's, but honestly I don't even believe that. Even with all of the platform problems we have online (and it is a problem for our online communication to be so centralized and there are problems about where some platforms are headed), I still feel like almost everything today about media production and dissemination is just so much easier than it used to be. About the only thing I really miss is Flash, and I don't even really think that's a tech problem, I think many of those developers have just moved over to programs like Unity.
Not to say everything is perfect or everything has gotten better, just... I think people have rose-colored glasses that they wear when looking back at those times.
> reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others
This is what is at issue. What does "reasonable consequences" mean for "harm to others"? Sometimes the harm to others is disputed, as the harm is almost always considered emotional. Sometimes what is considered "reasonable consequences" is something as significant as loss of livelihood.
Of course, it depends on what you view as harmful, and who's opinions you agree with. There is no obvious right answer. Pretending we can say "so this should never happen" is absurd in my view, it implies people have to give their money to people that will use that money to fund harm.
The core of free speech is that even abhorrent views should not face censorship by the government, because democracy requires it. If this is true, surely the right to not support people who's views you disagree with is just as necessary? (If not, is every Republican cancelling the Democratic party by not donating to them?) The answer, as with democracy and freedom of speech, is to make the better argument, get people to agree with you, and then use that to support the things you think are right.
We don't have a better answer than that.
I think there are obvious cases we can personally make better choices: seek context and clarity, don't jump to conclusions and pile on just because others say something without checking it is valid and proportionate, but again, that's never the "anti-cancel culture" argument.
> The answer, as with democracy and freedom of speech, is to make the better argument, get people to agree with you, and then use that to support the things you think are right.
I find this difficult to agree with but not because of the sentiment but because of the environment. If a bad faith actor wants to smear even totally reasoned speech by spouting complete fabrications, so long as they have the bigger platform/microphone on social media no amount of making a correct argument will resolve the problem. I agree in a perfect world without these sorts of algorithmic effects, this would be the ideal solution— but if you simply aren’t favored by the algorithm how can being reasonable save you from someone who is spewing lies?
Yeah, of course that's a problem, having a bigger platform gives you more political power.
This... isn't new. Money is the classic way to attain platform, and the US has repeatedly doubled down on the freedom to spend as much money as you want politically, as a core freedom.
Fox News is constantly broadcasting what I would classify as complete fabrications to their bigger platform, should the government be stepping in to stop that?
I agree these things are a problem, but that's the cost of free speech, the two choices are the government deciding who's speech is right, or individuals deciding who's speech is right.
Please note I never advocated for censorship. I’m only saying the ideal solution won’t work. I don’t want censorship either, but also I don’t believe simply more speech is the solution. I don’t know what the solution is.
If you define anything other than "simply more speech" as censorship, as many seem to nowadays, then a solution either cannot exist or must involve censorship.
> If this is true, surely the right to not support people who's views you disagree with is just as necessary?
Totally agree, but I think one of the nuances here is that what "support" means can be pretty narrow or very broad.
For example, if you don't like someone's message and they're speaking at your college, you can show your disapproval by choosing a point on a spectrum of refusals. You can start light by going to hear them speak but refusing to agree with them, and get a little more intense by attending and listening and then rebutting their arguments (i.e. refusing to approve the message). Sliding further along the scale, you might refuse to go to the talk at all. Further, you might refuse to attend the college that allows them to speak. Further, you might refuse to use any social media that allows them to post. And so on.
The further you go on that spectrum, the more your actions cause other people not to be able to support the speaker (or even hear them without supporting them), even if they want to. Not attending the speech yourself may cause the speaker not to be invited back if there is low enough attendance, which is just about the most minor form of that. Further along the spectrum, refusing to use social media that gives them a platform could get them banned if enough people do it, which is a more intense form of denying others access.
That's really long-winded but I hope my point is clear. I think "cancel culture" isn't so much about retaining the individual's choice to not support something, but rather denying that choice to other people. And it's not even about supporting really; the ACLU that defended Nazis because they realized that if Nazis' rights can be taken away then so can any minorities' be taken away might not exist any more. Certainly they didn't support Nazism, but they felt that they didn't have to in order to defend them in a court of law.
I think someone once said something like "it's the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it" and I feel like at a certain level you have to trust people to do that if you want to live in a democracy. My interpretation of opponents of cancel culture is that they don't want other people to keep them from entertaining ideas just because accepting them would be bad. You have to be able to entertain an idea to destroy it as well. The more you know about racist beliefs, for example, the more easily they're destroyed. The less you know, the more appealing they are. Best to bring them out in the light and let them be destroyed by the truth (would be their argument I believe).
I guess it's a difference in world view. Some think you can put people on the right track by focusing on providing them with the right information, and others think you can put them on the right track by keeping them from harmful information. The latter might be the way you can instruct a child, but for adults, the former is the only way it can work healthily (they would say).
Not sure whether any of that makes any sense, I could be completely wrong, would like to hear your opinion.
People have a right to expression, but not a right to a platform. Not everyone can go on TV every day to talk about what they believe, so it must be curated, and that curation is an expression in and of itself.
Should we try and be proportional and fair in our responses to people personally? Of course. Should we as a society try to limit people's responses? No.
There used to be literal lynching, and clearly active violence is over the line, but we allowed racists and other bigots to boycott places that employed people they didn't like and express their views like that.
Now that the bigots face being denied employment because of their bigotry, suddenly it's wrong to boycott and deny them their jobs.
Is it wrong to refuse to spend money at somewhere that employs (and therefore uses the money I spend there) someone who seeks to deny human rights to someone I love? It may get them fired if enough people take that stand. Does it hurt others if they can't access that bigot's speech? You can argue it denies them an opportunity, but then the fact I can't go to their boss and make my point is denying that person an opportunity to.
The reality is you are talking about pitting two pieces of expression against each other, and just because one came first and the other is a response to it seems entirely meaningless to me, neither should be restricted.
What do you think of the argument that the nature of boycotting has changed? In your example, people might boycott a restaurant they didn't like, but there were a ton of small restaurants, no one restaurant was very big. Now, we have a handful of websites that like 90% of all written human communication goes through, and people aren't boycotting a Twitter handle, they're boycotting Twitter itself (so to speak) to force it to deplatform someone.
I guess it's somewhat related to the other argument of proportionality of punishment. Is it right to boycott someone to an unlimited extent if they're bigoted? What is the limit? would be the questions along that line.
This seems like an argument to have better "public squares" and better regulations against monopolies, rather than enforcing private entities to platform others.
The case we're talking about is I accuse you of calling me a fatty and get a bunch of people to tell your employer that they'll boycott, costing a bunch of people their income, people who didn't do anything, unless they fire you.
Note that I said "accuse". Maybe you called me a fatty, maybe you didn't.
Note that "get" is too strong. There appear to be people waiting for an excuse to go after "your employer" for pretty much any value of "your employer". I may not even be bothered - someone else may do the "get" even if all I do is mention that you called me fatty/thought that you thought of me as a fatty without any intent that someone do something.
I’m not convinced it’s different from “cancel culture as it is”. One common theme I’ve seen — including in this thread! — is people creating a dichotomy between “free speech” and “feelings”. Usually that means they want to say something controversial, but their own feelings get hurt when they receive pushback, so they try to reframe the debate in such a way that they’re the aggrieved party.
The “insult my boss” is a good thought experiment because it reveals that motivation. Is it really about “free speech” vs. “feelings”, or is there something else going on?
The boss situation is a lousy experiment because its result tells us nothing about what the result should be in the situation we're discussing. (For one, my boss isn't going to fire me by threatening the business if I call him a fatty.)
For example, it's relatively easy to figure out who the person is behind this account. The mob could decide that I've "done wrong" and go after my income. That's no where near me screaming at my boss that he's a Nazi or a fatty.
FWIW, "free speech" might not be the right hook - toleration might be more accurate. After all, many of the cancelers justify their actions as "we tolerate everything except intolerance."
The answer to "must my boss tolerate me calling him fatty?" is probably different from "should my fellow employees lose their income because A says that I called B 'fatty'?"
And then there's the fact that the cancellers go after everyone who might employ me. My fat boss doesn't have that kind of reach.
It's not really an informative example. You're not losing your job in this case for emotional harm. It's because you insulted your boss. You could lose your job even if he didn't care.
If you had to let an employee go and caused even more emotional harm (brought on by their no longer being employed), you wouldn't receive a reprisal.
Why are you pointing out that speech sometimes is reasonable to punish? How does this clarify the question of whether we have become too punitive regarding political and controversial social speech.
I think it's broadly considered acceptable because insulting your boss is an aggresive behavior directed at a colleague. Simply stating an opinion is not.
To me "consequences" are sought when someone wants to alleviate their own burden or guilt over the situation. Rarely is "restitution" sought. It seems to me that the latter would be a far more useful trend if we're going to continue trying to deal with social problems using the awesome power of the internet.
> For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start.
Someone having an opinion different than you does not cause you harm.
This is the Big Lie underlying a lot of the rhetoric that has been labeled "cancel culture".
The potential harm at shutting down the opportunity to find out you were wrong about something by hearing viewpoints different from yours, is far greater than whatever harms you fear from the words themselves.
Nobody is getting cancelled for having a different opinion on tax rates or foreign policy.
There are very specific and narrow types of speech that lead to 'cancellation,' and it's almost always speech that attacks people's identity, race, and sexuality. Historically that type of speech has been equated with harm.
Nah, someone just needs to claim you are attacking someone’s identity. It doesn’t have to be true.
Commonly it’s someone attacking some progressive policy, and then progressives claiming it is an attack on identity, even when many people of the identity supposedly under attack share the same views.
I agree that’s there’s a pattern for what gets you cancelled, but there is absolutely not a list published somewhere that tells you what subjects to avoid.
I said "for actions they take that harm others", and you jumped to some trivial difference of opinion. If the difference of opinion is supporting policy that hurts me or people I care about, then yes, of course it can harm me.
You are saying that someone can use freedom of expression to say people I care about should not have human rights, but I can't say those people shouldn't be employed by some company.
Freedom of expression swings both ways. I agree we should think about the harm done, ensure it is real, and what level of consequence is reasonable before acting, but that doesn't mean there are no situations action is justified.
> "You are saying that someone can use freedom of expression to say people I care about should not have human rights, but I can't say those people shouldn't be employed by some company."
Like unborn fetuses? (I am pro-choice by the way.) The pro-life side care about them and feel they should have human rights and, by the silly paradox of tolerance people seem to love to quote, they're even justified in not tolerating those who don't tolerate their beliefs. So do you really believe that freedom of expression swings both ways and are willing to allow them to enact their consequences on those who don't agree with them?
Maybe you should rethink the implications of what you are saying.
Yes. I believe that those people should be able to judge me and socially shun me, including calling for my firing, if I express that I am pro-choice.
I think they are wrong, but it's on me to try and persuade enough people that I'm right.
If they see it as I support murdering innocent people, then how can I possibly demand they hand me money, interact with me normally, etc...? I'm certainly not going to employ someone who says "I think we should kill <group of people>".
I think they are fundamentally wrong about the core concept, I don't think it's right for them to "cancel" people over that as a result, but that doesn't mean it should be illegal to do so, because forcing people to support behaviour they find abhorrent is worse.
How do you draw a distinction between writing an NYT op-ed to, say, support same-sex marriage, voting for a candidate who supports same sex marriage, and signing a bill to allow same-sex marriage? In every case you're "just" writing something down. When does one cross the line from "just" sharing an opinion, to advocacy for that opinion to political action on favor of a policy?
Phrased differently, if someone advocates for a policy that I believe will be harmful, why should I treat that differently than a stated intent to harm me?
Then debate them, run against them or campaign for politicians that will prevent or change those policies.
Which is exactly how same sex marriage came to have such broad support, by the way. Andrew Sullivan in particular tirelessly made the case for same sex marriage, including to exactly the kind of people you describe, and changed many minds.
Sure I can do all of those things, but you didn't address my question. If I think someone will harm me, I can do all of those things, but why not also do more?
> Phrased differently, if someone advocates for a policy that I believe will be harmful, why should I treat that differently than a stated intent to harm me?
For the same reason you shouldn't treat someone who wants to raise your taxes and give it to other people as if they intend to steal from you.
Isn't that generally a conservative opinion though, that taxation is theft?
Like the reason I don't object to taxes (in general) is because I think I get value from them, even in the redistribution sense. If someone proposed to raise taxes and give all the proceeds to Jeff Bezos, I would consider that a proposal to steal from me.
> Isn't that generally a conservative opinion though, that taxation is theft?
Yes, but you don't see conservatives fire outspoken democrats for thievery, or give them the ultimatum that either they acknowledge that taxation is theft or get fired. If conservatives did that then I would tell them to stop, say that what they are doing is against free speech ideals and if abuse got too bad I'd advocate for laws against it.
> while the views that usually result in people being fired are fringe and, in a word, vile
That is not true, a large majority don't agree with many radical lefts views, but would still get fired if they voiced those opinions publicly.
For example, should trans people compete in sports of their chosen gender? Almost two thirds thinks that they shouldn't, but saying that will get you labelled anti-trans and fired from many jobs, even though you might support trans-rights completely in every other regard.
> It would be deeply unpopular and ineffective, but I don't see why it should be illegal.
It would be extremely effective as most business owners are right wing. They just don't do it because they don't care what their workers thinks, they care more about profits. But if they banded together and made this policy at every right wing owned business you would see huge consequences, as the workers can't really choose to go somewhere else.
What jobs would that get you fired from? Name one.
(this is precisely the issue with "cancel culture" discourse that Popehat identifies: there's two phenomena, one of people being removed from their jobs or facing actual life consequences. This is thankfully usually rare, and usually applies only to relatively powerful people who say relatively awful things[0]. There's also a second phenomena of people receiving any sort of criticism for a controversial statement, and panic-mongers conflate the two, to suggest that any criticism is an attempt to silence you or ruin your life. That's simply not the case. Yeah, you'll get criticized online for saying trans-women shouldn't compete in women's sports. You'll probably also be criticized for the opposite view. You're not going to get fired for either, unless you're explicitly making an issue out of it in your workplace, and then the issue isn't the particular view, it's being disruptive).
[0]: And to preempt this, yes I know it sometimes results in normal people losing their jobs. This is unusual, even among the relatively rare aspect of people losing their livelyhood.
When I mention that I don't understand what Popehat actually wants, I'm looking at it in the context of the concept of "competing rights" that he writes about.
>"People complaining about “cancel culture” frequently suggest that it chills speech. Perhaps. But so does a vague denunciation of other people’s speech."
My confusion stems from the fact that Popehat seems to want to have it both ways. On one hand, he entertains the idea that "cancel culture" has a chilling effect. It is not a stretch to say that "cancel culture" is a kind of "denunciation of other people's speech". But he's simultaneously criticizing people who want to end "cancel culture" because he sees them as also committing a "denunciation of other people’s speech".
If Popehat's main gripe is that the liberty of speech is being limited, both "cancel culture" and "anti-cancel culture" lead to speech being denounced and limited. With this contradiction in mind, I don't understand what Popehat hopes to achieve.
>But he's simultaneously criticizing people who want to end "cancel culture" because he sees them as also committing a "denunciation of other people’s speech".
Right, but I think his criticism here is not that "they should not denounce other people's speech", it's that they are being hypocritical in their reasoning. He's arguing against the soundness of their denunciation, not arguing against their right to make it.
He's pointing out that many (not all) people complaining are asking for criticism - other peoples' speech - to be shut down.
There are a few sincere people out there. But most whining about cancel culture are just asking to be free from criticism. Sometimes it is blatantly obvious [1], more frequently layered with complaints about legitimately out of line acts and misdirects.
The answer to bad speech is more speech. End of story.
>"But most whining about cancel culture are just asking to be free from criticism"
This assessment doesn't sit right with me because I don't sense the people 'whining' about cancel culture are trying to get out of ideological critique. I sense they're calling for tolerance because the 'critique' is laden with threats to livelihood and societal standing.
From that perspective, I don't believe that calling on people to be more tolerant of other people's speech is a substantial reduction in speech. One could say it results in a net gain of speech.
I don’t know if tolerance of speech is always a net gain of speech. Communities can enter death spirals where only extreme speech exists because everyone reasonable is so turned off by the extreme speech that they leave. (Edit: I’m not saying that tolerance of speech is always a net negative either. I’m just saying it might be too complex to say.)
>Communities can enter death spirals where only extreme speech exists because everyone reasonable is so turned off by the extreme speech that they leave.
This never happens in a country, people will not abandon their land and their social networks because $MEAN_PERSON said something bad about trans people. What you describe only happens in online communities or hobby clubs, and not all of them at that.
In practice, fears from "unpolite" speech is almost always hysterical reactions by those unprepared and/or ill-equipped to counter speech with speech.
I’m super confused where I ever invoked the idea of what this looks like outside of online communities. I’m sorry if I caused you to misunderstand my speech.
> People not wanting to patronize or associate with you when you cause harm to people they care about is really not a bad thing, and it's not new either, and yet it is what gets called "cancel culture" by a lot of people.
Although nowadays, soft penalties scale and can be automated. So it feels sensible to explore regulatory frameworks that could rein in the worst excesses.
I'm not saying they don't exist: if I advocate for gay rights, and turns out my employer has a bunch of homophobic customers who get me fired because they don't want to spend money that ends up in my pocket, that would be deeply wrong in my view.
The question is, what does the "regulatory framework" do there? Force those customers to spend money that ends up funding someone that fights for something they see as morally wrong? Force my boss to employ me even though I hurt their business?
The whole point of freedom of speech is the government doesn't get to ban views they don't like. Not supporting someone because of their views surely needs to be as much of a protected view as any other.
> Force my boss to employ me even though I hurt their business?
Well probably the answer would be stronger wrongful termination regulation and then if they fire you for advocating for gay rights then you would probably get paid a reasonable amount of money for the loss you suffered, and your boss would have more of an incentive to think over if they really need to fire you to avoid losses to their business or if they should stand up to the people trying to force their hand.
OK, but then the government is deciding what speech should be allowed without losing your job.
If it's any speech, then do I get to tell people my company sucks and they shouldn't shop there without being fired? What about telling individual customers they don't deserve human rights? That very quickly becomes obviously absurd. So the question becomes "where is the line", and if they government gets to draw that line, then that no longer looks like freedom of speech to me.
But who decides what "actions they take that harm others" is?
If you look up if there are nazis in Ukraine army in US news, it will claim it's false, but international news sources say it's true.
Since nazis are the worst ever, don't you think it's important to get this right? And how can we tell if we can't have openly opposing sources that don't get cancelled?
Individuals make that decision, just as they do when it comes to democracy as a whole. That's the point of freedom of speech: we can't have an authority on the truth.
The alternative is you aren't allowed to dislike and refuse to patronize someone because of their actions, which is obviously absurd.
Everyone agrees people shouldn't face disproportionate responses, so arguing for that is nothing. Either you need to argue there are general things causing that (e.g: not looking into context, retractions, etc... before making judgements, which is a real problem) or argue the ethics of the particular situation, which is unique to a case.
Almost always, I see "cancel culture" used as a shield to avoid having to defend the actual harm done.
The harm done is very clear: the indented implication that Ukraine is controlled by Nazis is intended to justify Russia's illegal and unjustified war which is about control by Russia, and helps no one in Ukraine.
>For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start.
That's never going to happen. Such people have a vested interest in gaining sympathy for their views and actions by discrediting their critics as nothing but a hateful mob or a conspiracy to silence and oppress them, and clearly their efforts are working. "Cancel culture" has itself become a moral panic akin to the Red Scare.
> For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start.
What about people facing unreasonable consequences for actions that don't harm others?
The type of people who complain and lash out when they face reasonable consequences for harming someone else are the least likely to follow any such guidance here though?
> For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start.
the article is about free speech, but you sneak in the word actions, and then you label the damage (of free speech) as harm to others, and the consequences as reasonable. Therefore, I'd say you fit what this editorial is about, "many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech."
> Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity. It rarely, if ever, does. Each one of us has our own conception of a term - wordfeel, if you will - and virtually no one actually knows or holds to the literal dictionary definition.
I really disagree, I think he addresses this very specifically at the end of the article, where he writes, "I believe more specificity — action items — is the answer":
> Pointing to specific instances of “cancellation” and debating why they are inside or outside of our norms is a productive action item. Saying “colleges shouldn’t disinvite speakers because of controversy” is a good specific action item; we can debate it. Saying “Ken, stop piling on 20-follower Twitter accounts when they say stupid things” is an action item; I can debate it. [Shan’t.] Saying “stop demanding that businesses fire people for what they say off the job” is an action item. I might not agree but we can discuss it.
He's not at all falling into a definition trap! I think that misses the point of the article, which is one of the most coherent articles I've ever encountered on the subject.
That's a more specific and coherent definition of cancel culture, but it's certainly not the current consensus definition: many "cancel culture" debates --- probably most of them --- are about speech or opinions that the individual stands resolutely behind.
And, of course, "for offenses that are minor in comparison" or "speculative" is almost always subjective; it just shifts the debate to a different set of words, but it doesn't narrow it or offer us any guidance. People think all sorts of things are minor, or world-ending; proven, or fabricated.
> And, of course, "for offenses that are minor in comparison" or "speculative" is almost always subjective.
They really aren't. I used the word "historically" for this reason. Years ago, for example, people would openly espouse directly racist views. Today, you can get fired for using a slur in the "mention" category, rather than in the "use" category.
And speculative inference isn't anything more than saying, "this person said x, y, & z... which means they _must_ also believe horrendous things a, b & c" when it is in fact logically possible to believe x, y & z without believing a, b, & c.
You can get fired for having the wrong hairstyle --- that is a thing that in fact happens more often than firings because of cancel mobs. So we're not really saying much yet. Similarly, you can use the logic in your second paragraph to insulate any kind of speech at all from approbation; if you take what you're saying to its clear conclusion, what you're really saying is that it's never OK to boycott anything over speech. That's far beyond what even the most vigorous anti-cancel-culture advocates are saying.
Cancel culture is like vetocracy: the most censorious opinion wins. Speech norms are nuanced and subjective and ought to be subject to community debate. The same for specific alleged violations of speech norms.
We manage this alright with even very serious crimes. It is okay to take the position during a murder trial that the killing was an act of self defense or that you believe the defendant’s alibi. It is also okay to take both pro and con positions about strengthening or weakening the laws in homicide edge cases, such as the castle doctrine or vehicular negligence.
In a cancel culture, onlookers feel they must echo the condemnation, or at least not challenge it, even as they privately offer support to the accused. Ideas like “even though three people are offended, this ought to be allowed” or “actually the context makes this not transgressive” are themselves outside the Overton window.
There's (topically enough) a NYT article about Hough's incident[1], which I will briefly excerpt:
> “In a series of now-deleted tweets, Lauren Hough exhibited what we believed to be a troubling hostility toward transgender critics and trans-allies and used her substantial platform — due in part to her excellent book — to harmfully engage with readers and critics,” Cleopatra Acquaye and Maxwell Scales, Lambda Literary’s interim co-executive directors, said in a joint statement Monday.
[...]
> Hough said Monday that she could not recall whether she had deleted any tweets, and denied that any of her tweets had been transphobic. Lambda did not provide examples of the posts they were most critical of. The Times has not reviewed any deleted tweets.
...now, my sympathies were honestly with Hough until I saw "could not recall whether [I] had deleted any tweets" attributed to her. Which, if she said that to a reporter, is not a good look. Because it makes my mind jump immediately to "I certainly did delete some tweets, but I don't want to admit to it because then I'll be asked what they said".
Nobody being willing to actually say what she's being judged for so that we can make our own minds up does leave us in the awkward position of having to rely on these proxy inferences.
> Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity. It rarely, if ever, does.
Certainly it leads to more clarity. Two parties talking "past" each other is one of the most common sources of disagreement in my experience. Of course it isn't a panacea and there will still be disagreement on when the definition is being used correctly, and bad actors, and .... But it is an excellent (and I would argue necessary) starting point for any meaningful discussion.
> Additionally, I think Popehat is dead wrong here:.... I don't know what Popehat actually wants here
The headings of the sections work pretty neatly for me to distill this down (skipping the intro).
1) (Why) Working Towards A Definition Is Important -> dont just handwave
2) Propaganda Drives Perception -> rethink what you think cancel culture is
3) Everybody’s Rights Matter -> The person being cancelled may have been out of bounds and trying to cancel someone else too. Context is important
4) We Need Action Items -> stop these stupid articles that simply clutch pearls and propose something anything that can actually be considered
> Two parties talking "past" each other is one of the most common sources of disagreement in my experience.
A prime and recent example of this is "defund the police". You could talk to 10 people at a protest and get 10 different answers on what that means, and that's among supporters. Any actual conversation on the topic has to start with "well what do you mean?". You would often hear a refrain of "nobody is talking about completely defunding the police." but there was plenty of actual support for that in just-outside-of-mainstream groups.
So many movements are united behind such vague slogans that they garner widespread support because everybody has a personal and reasonable (to them) interpretation of it's meaning.
"Cancel culture" just the next "Occupy Wallstreet", "Black Lives Matter", "Defund the Police", etc. It's a leaderless grassroots phenomenon with no stated objectives or goals.
I think people are much more concerned with finding a community to fight with rather than actually winning the fight.
Yes, the "vague idea anyone can attach meaning to" is often an intentional aspect of these movements to gather larger support. Its also easy to subsequently exploit and I think the venerable CIA handbook from the ~60s goes into detail on that. Of course having a narrow focus doesn't really stop exploitation from a motivated counterparty with sufficient resources, especially when you need broad source support (e.g. large political reform issues).
Without the definition, White says, the appeal to an "end cancel culture norm" is, overtly, a call to broadly restrict people's speech. If you dismiss the demand for clarity, you can't coherently rebut his assessment of what "end cancel culture" means.
>"If you dismiss the demand for clarity, you can't coherently rebut his assessment of what "end cancel culture" means."
I'm dismissing his standard of what counts as "clarity" because I sense he's expecting a lawyerly definition based on something akin to precedent and case law. In other words, he's seeking past examples of alleged "cancel culture" and trying to define what made each event count as, or not count as, "cancel culture". And then from that formulate a rigid definition. I believe such a rigid definition is flawed because it is reactionary, because vernacular consensus is not formed this way, and because the definition can easily be skirted around.
It would be like me demanding clarity on what makes something "cool".
I'm not sure I'm trying to do that. I chose "cool" as an example because none of us came up with the term, no one can confidently define it and have everyone agree on it, and it's a word we all seem to use without truly knowing what it means.
At the risk of stretching an analogy too far, I would not need to define what "coolness" is in order to confront people who I perceive to be overly critical and who are trying to get people to stop expressing themselves in ways they perceive as "uncool". In other words, if I tell someone "If you have nothing nice to say don't say anything at all", it does not seem reasonable to expect me to define what "nice" means in order to justify chiding someone for not being nice.
You're getting to Ken White's point, which is that we can't reasonably call for clear norms about "cancel culture" given how poorly defined it is. Without that definition --- and maybe we'll never have it --- "cancel culture" is mostly just an undisciplined tool for shutting down criticism.
White writes at length about the fact that disproportionate responses to objectionable speech happen, and are worth discussing. His take is that you have to talk about those things in their particulars, rather than trying to write staff editorials and open letters about the phenomenon of "cancel culture" (or, in the NYT's case, a [nonexistant!] right to express thoughts without fear of shame or shunning).
White's essay is about the NYT letter. It is not an attempt to end the "cancel culture" debate once and for all. I'd ask you to scroll through this thread and try to pick out the arguments here that recognize that fact, or the ones that are clearly premised on the notion that White believes he's "solved" the cancel culture problem (or doesn't believe it's real).
> No rights are actually being infringed by this. It is possible to have cultural mores that are in the spirit of free speech.
What do you mean by “rights”? Legal rights or moral rights? If legal rights, under which law in which jurisdiction? I agree very many cases of “cancellation” are not illegal, and as such not violating anyone’s legal rights - but a lot of people seem to approach this with a narrow focus on the US 1st Amendment (hereafter 1A), when this isn’t a US-only issue, and even in the US there are other laws involved than just 1A - a private company firing someone for their publicly expressed political views cannot violate 1A, but it might violate state laws against political discrimination in employment (such as California Labor Code section 1101), and those state laws can also be understood as creating (or recognising) legal rights. Also, law is not static, it evolves through case law and legislation, so something which is legal today might not be legal in the future-people who believe that we have a problem with “cancel culture” are likely to lobby for laws against it, and we’ll see if they succeed.
If one acknowledges the existence of ethics/morality independent of the law, it follows people may have ethical/moral rights which are violated even if their legal rights (in a certain jurisdiction at a certain time) are not being violated.
"Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity."
It's not a trap, it's essentially true. Clarity doesn't mean solvability, but reducing ambiguity, or at the very least getting some better consensual agreement on terms among adversaries usually helps flash out the discourse beyond tropes and jabs.
> defining something will lead to clarity. It rarely, if ever, does
US politics is full of ambiguities, word games, and of course attacks that exploit these clarity gaps. See a list [0] of them below.
Of course slogans are useful, and trying to hold hypocrites to account by using their slogan against them, yet at the same time it seems the political discourse is extremely low signal-to-noise, and there's almost no general need/demand for clarity. For example the both the "rich people pay no taxes" and the usual "XY corp last year paid 3.50 in taxes" memes are just that, catchy memes.
And all of this puts a brutally counter productive shouting at the late night game feeling on politics. (Sure, there's a reason why political discourse is like this... we probably have to go through the catchy meme arms race.)
[0] BLM, defund the police, liberal and classical liberal, gender/sex, socialism, recently critical race theory, equality vs equity (equal outcome, equal opportunity), free speech vs. selective publishing/hosting of content free from government interference; safe space vs. safe space from certain ideas/trigger vs. safe space for expressing ideas free of consequences, and maybe also "no child left behind" too. (Of course a few of them are proper slogans, but then due to the ambiguity in semantics folks try to use these as concrete promises.)
> The opposite stance, not calling on people to end cancel culture, is also accepting a reduction in speech.
I'm not sure that accepting certain spaces becoming unwelcome is the same as a reduction in speech.
The quote toward the end of the article really hits the nail on the head for me:
> The room felt tense... I was shaken, but also determined to not silence myself. Still, the disdain of my fellow students stuck with me. I was a welcome member of the group — and then I wasn’t.
Feeling tense and unwelcome in a space where people disagree with you is totally normal and to be expected. A huge fraction of people grow up feeling exactly like that in virtually every space they inhabit.
(BTW, I'd be unsurprised if the tenseness in this case was more about annoyance with a loudmouth once again derailing a seminar with what they think is profoundly courageous iconoclasm but is actually annoying low-effort culture war trolling that's spoiling a quite expensive educational product for the rest of the paying customers...)
I grew up non-straight and atheist in the midwest, decades ago, and not in a city. The feeling of tenseness described here is totally normal. Gays are not entitled to a complete absence of tenseness in midwest churches or sports bars. That tenseness and unwelcomeness will result in lost opportunities for socialization, employment, etc. even without overt discrimination.
Not everyone will feel comfortable in every space. Not everyone will fit in everywhere. That's life. It seems like literally everyone except a certain brand of conservative hothead understands this.
To me, the entire cancel culture thing can be summed up as: "apparently some people went through a lot of life without ever desiring to inhabit a space where they weren't 100% welcome and, unsurprisingly, react in an emotionally stunted and frankly embarrassing way when encountering this situation."
IDK. Half the country -- and a much larger percentage of its landmass -- is wholly hostile to anyone who isn't a died-in-the-wool conservative. Whence the entitlement to also fit in perfectly everywhere else with zero friction? As a queer person, I don't even have that much sympathy for fellow queer people who try to get along in conservative religious communities. You have a right to free association. If you don't like feeling tense and unwelcome, exercise that right. If you choose to inhabit spaces where you aren't welcome... well, I can sympathize up to a point, but I'm mostly going to roll my eyes if you complain too much.
I'm going to preface this by saying that I'm a dark-skinned POC straight man that grew up in poverty (and that in the SFBA I feel like a unicorn, especially in my climbing gym where sometimes I'm the only dark-skinned POC for my entire workout).
> Feeling tense and unwelcome in a space where people disagree with you is totally normal and to be expected. A huge fraction of people grow up feeling exactly like that in virtually every space they inhabit.
I grew up very used to the idea of feeling unwelcome because of my skin color. I didn't and still do not feel the most comfortable in many spaces. That uncomfortability has made me keenly aware at how alienating the feeling is. When I see other people feel uncomfortable, I don't think "good now you feel how it's like to be me", I feel that humanity has lost yet another victim to intolerance. I do not think that normalizing this feeling helps anyone, even if the person feeling this pain is a straight, white man.
Moreover when someone hates me for my skin color (and perceived behaviors associated with my skin color), I certainly become uncomfortable and angry, but at the end of the day I realize it's something I cannot fundamentally change. My skin color and body type will stay with me for the rest of my life. But when people become uncomfortable by _my ideas_ that's what hurts more; I feel that people disapprove of the fruits of my own agency. It's why I've always felt so keenly for transgender folk who endure endless discrimination for simply choosing how to live their own lives.
> I certainly become uncomfortable and angry, but at the end of the day I realize it's something I cannot fundamentally change.
This is the point on which we agree. When I say
>> Feeling tense and unwelcome in a space where people disagree with you is totally normal and to be expected. A huge fraction of people grow up feeling exactly like that in virtually every space they inhabit.
I'm not excusing intolerance. I'm simply saying in my own way what I quoted from you above. One must choose: either avoid discomfort or grow some callouses.
As far as I can tell a lot of the noise around cancel culture is from folks who were climbing 5.12 in a soft gym and are now demanding the guidebook author soften the grades because they can barely huff up a 5.9. The ground shifted and they aren't willing to put in the work but feel entitled to the send.
Is the area sandbagged? Sure. Does that suck? Sure. We can commiserate for a bit. But eventually I expect that the complainer will either suck it up, leave, or write their own book. Endless complaining about not being comfortable in all circumstances eventually becomes tiresome and comes off as entitled.
> Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity
No, he’s very clearly making the argument that vigorously avoiding defining it at all while trying to argue about it prevents any coherency or utility, not that precisely defining it leads to clarity.
This completely leaves out that the tolerance for speech, even minor offenses, which used to be acceptable are now being weaponized to destroy each other in visceral, tribal fashion.
You can have an accountable society and cancel someone for crossing the line. That line used to be for things such as Pedophilia, encouraging violence, promoting rape-culture, etc. Truly terrible things.
I hope people will wake up or we'll end up with a worse place than ever.
Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity.
He does seem to be obsessing over nomenclature. A more useful question is, what happens if you express an unpopular opinion? Do you get fired? Arrested? Lynched? Torn to bits by a mob? Shamed on social media? Blocked by social media companies? Can't get published in major media? Attacked by TV pundits? Not invited to the good parties? Also, how long does this go on, and is it retroactive for things said in the past?
Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity. It rarely, if ever, does. Each one of us has our own conception of a term - wordfeel, if you will - and virtually no one actually knows or holds to the literal dictionary definition. We hear words and apply them if they seem right to us. Even if you managed to precisely define cancel culture, people would easily try to claim that some alleged cancelling event it is actually something else, "accountability", "showing you the door", etc.. Never underestimate someone's ability to lawyerly redefine what something is or isn't.
Additionally, I think Popehat is dead wrong here:
>"Saying we should “end cancel culture” means we’re saying some people should refrain from some exercises of speech and association to promote other people feeling more free to speak."
No rights are actually being infringed by this. It is possible to have cultural mores that are in the spirit of free speech. The opposite stance, not calling on people to end cancel culture, is also accepting a reduction in speech. Even so, by Popehat's own worldview, because the government is not restricting cancel culture this shouldn't be seen as some infringement of liberty. I don't know what Popehat actually wants here.