Comment by pkulak
2 days ago
First off "cancel culture" is way too unserious a phrase to warrant a response, but I will anyway.
> The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.
No they weren't. "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist, but despite your assertion that he was terrible "even for his day", I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.
John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery. Now you can get "cancelled" for supporting it. The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest. It's actually one of the best times to be a horrible person. Hell, you can be president.
> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences)
cancel culture isn't a synonym for shaming.
cancel culture is a modern phenomenon that is facilitated by modern media formats -- it could not have existed earlier.
shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow.
You shame a child who stole a cookie by telling them that now they need to go brush their teeth, and that they won't get one after dinner , and that you're disappointed that you found them to be sneaking around behind your back.
You don't kick them out of the house and tell the neighborhood not to hire them under threat of company wide boycott from other moms.
Blackballing, in Victorian English society, strictly meant to vote against a proposed member joining a club (above the working classes club memberships carried great weight wrt social standing).
It was also synonymous with ostracism, to be excluded from society, to have little to no chance of regular financing or loans, to have debts called, to be fired and have little hope of being employed.
It was socially networked suppression, operating at the speed of club dinners and afternoon teas.
Such things go back in time in many societies, wherever there was a hierarchy, whispers, and others to advance or to tread down.
If we are looking for synonyms with related effects we should include banished, excommunicated, shunned and interdicted.
They have all slightly different meaning, used in slightly different contexts, with a slight different effect on the individual and community. They can't be used interchangeable without loosing that distinction and creating slight misunderstandings (as well as originating from different cultures and religions). We might say that someone should be banished from polite society, but we can't say they should be interdicted from polite society.
> cancel culture is a modern phenomenon that is facilitated by modern media formats -- it could not have existed earlier.
> shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow.
Eiji Yoshikawa's 1939 novel depicts a woman who follows Musashi around Japan waging a campaign to smear him over something he didn't do, ultimately preventing him from being hired into a lord's retinue.
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I won’t miss Scott Adams. I won’t shed a tear for anyone who is racist and misogynistic, no matter the size of their platform. We need less racists and in this case nature canceled him.
If I come across a Dilbert comic, I might still read it and laugh.
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> The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest.
Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said.
Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them.
If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.
If that’s the ‘only’ thing he was canceled for, then how do you explain content of the comics he started making after he was called out, once the mask came off?
Do you think he was driven to that by cancel culture? Or do you think he just got tired of pretending to care, and started ‘telling it like it is?’
Being cancelled for saying "it's really scary that half of all black people don't agree it's ok to be white" would radicalize anyone. The fact itself radicalizes people, the hysterical reaction of the left radicalizes people even more.
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> Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said.
Nah, he continued to grift off the right wing while saying more and more unhinged shit until he shuffled off this mortal coil.
> Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them.
Could it perhaps have anything to do with the fact that that's a 4chan-originated dogwhistle that was hyper-viral at the time? Why do you think they were asking about it in the first place? It was in the context of the fact that the ADL had identified it as secret hate speech, in the same line of the 14 words.
> If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.
The president of the most powerful country on earth and the richest man in the world say things like that all the time. Why the victim complex?
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It seems that you're not very familiar with what actually happened. The phrase "It's okay to be white" had become associated with white supremacists, And black people's responses to the pole had nothing to do with their opinions of white people as a whole. You, as well as Scott Adams, decided to misinterpret it. Scott Adams took things a step further and decided that he wanted nothing to do with black people on the simple basis of this poll, which is absolutely wild.
I wonder who gets to decide when something is "associated" with something else in a way that makes any and all uses of that thing a cancelable offense.
This mechanism sounds more dangerous than useful.
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> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences)
Those aren't the same thing. The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob.
> I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.
GP wasn't referring to people of the time but rather people of the present day. There have been some surprising contradictions in what has and hasn't been "cancelled".
Cancel culture is simply social consequence. That's it. It can be harsh and at times probably too harsh. But I don't see how you can't have cancel culture w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.
I don't think this is true. "Cancel culture" is distinguished from normal social consequences by many things, including the perpetrators going to others outside of the perpetrators' and victim's social group to attack the victim.
If I say something racist at home, my friends and family will shame me - that is social consequence. If I say something racist at home and the person I invited over publicly posts that on Twitter and tags my employer to try to get me fired, that's cancel culture, and there's clearly a difference.
There are virtually no social groups where it's socially acceptable to get offended by what an individual said and then seek out their friends, family, and co-workers to specifically tell them about that thing to try to inflict harm on that individual. That would be extremely unacceptable and rude behavior in every single culture that I'm aware of, to the point where it would almost always be worse and more ostracizing than whatever was originally said.
We don't have to accept or reject all manner of social consequence as a single unit. That would be absurd.
> w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.
Indeed it would be exceedingly difficult to legislate against it. But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it. I'm not required to be accepting of all behavior that's legal.
For example, presumably you wouldn't agree with an HN policy change that permitted neo nazi propaganda despite the fact that it generally qualifies as protected speech in the US?
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> The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob.
what would your alternative be?
Why do we need an alternative? Why should behavior driven by a mob mentality be desirable?
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> John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery.
John Brown got "cancelled" for leading guerilla raids and killing people, not for being an abolitionist.
I think cancel culture is a pretty serious and meaningful concept. 20 years ago I got drummed out of an organization I was a part of for saying I thought people should be allowed to argue that this organization didn't need race quotas.
Note I didn't say race quotas (i.e. hire minimum 50% non-white) were bad. I just said, there are people who oppose this idea, they should at least be permitted to air their views, a discussion is important.
I was drummed out for that. To me that's cancel culture in a nutshell. Suppression, censorship, purge anyone who opposes your idea but also anyone who even wants to discuss it critically (which is the only way to build genuine consensus).
Now 20 years on what I see when I interact with younger people is there are two camps. One of those camps has gone along with this and their rules for what constitutes acceptable speech are incredibly narrow. They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech. Mind you what the First Amendment protects as legal speech is vastly, vastly vastly broader than what these people can handle. I worry for them because the inability to even hear certain things without freaking out is an impediment to living a happy life.
Meanwhile there is a second camp which has arisen, and they're basically straight up Nazis. There is a hard edge to some members of Gen Z that is like, straight up white supremacy, "the Austrian painter had a point," "repeal the 19th" and so on, non-ironically, to a degree that I have never before seen in my life.
If you don't see the link here and how this bifurcation of the public consciousness emerged then I think you're blind. It was created by cancel culture. Some of the canceled realized there was no way for them to participate in public discourse with any level of authenticity, and said fuck it, might as well go full Nazi. I mean I presume they didn't decide that consciously, but they formed their own filter bubble, and they radicalized.
We are likely to soon face a historically large problem with extreme right wing nationalism, racism and all these very troubling things, because moderate views were silenced over and over again, and more and more people were driven out of the common public discourse, into the welcoming arms of some really nasty people. It's coming. To anyone who thinks "cancel culture" is not a serious concern I really encourage them to rethink their views and contemplate how this phenomenon actually CREATED the radicalization (on both sides) that we are seeing today.
> They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech.
I say this with sincerity: I have met precisely zero young people who I think come anywhere close to this description over the last decade.
I’ve seen it in the online world, yes, but this tends to amplify the very very small minority who (on the surface) appear to fit your description. And I see it across all age ranges and political persuasions.
I've seen it in person once with a former coworker, everything created anxiety, everything was problematic, she spent her entire time looking for a reason to be offended (especially tenuously on behalf of someone else). It was exhausting trying to work with her. She took so much time off too, at very short notice, as she just couldn't cope with working that day.
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> It was created by cancel culture
I think that's a far too strong. I can see how grievances can be exploited to promulgate these views, and unfair cancelling might be one of those, but I don't see that as the main driving grievance that has been exploited - what I see is the timeless 'times are hard and it's some other groups fault' grievance as the main engine.
I'd also argue that extreme right wing views are on the rise in many places in the world, and I'd argue most of them never got anywhere near the US level of cancel culture - and indeed things like positive discrimination are still just seen as discrimination.
I think it's unlikely to be one factor - but if I had to choose one, I'd say there is a better correlation between the relatively recent rise in day to day internet use and the rise in prominence of such views.
> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist
I want to reinforce this fact. Consider the origins of the term "ostracism", where a sufficiently objectionable individual could be literally voted out of the village. If that doesn't count as being "cancelled" I don't know what does.
I'm still upset over the canceling of Socrates. Never forget.
Cancelling doesn’t affect people’s lives or careers? Are you serious?
No one is entitled to being rich or famous.
That doesn't mean we should accept that people censor themselves for fear of having their livelihood ruined because someone takes a statement out of context. I'd rather live in a world where people feel safe in being honest with their opinions so that we can work out differences before they become an issue.
It's also not against the law to be a racist. Only discrimination itself is.
True, but it is an effect.