Astral Codex Ten

cancel culture

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cancel culture

Article

cancel culture is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 12 times across 12 issues between May 10, 2021 and December 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as ""The other relevant phrase is ‘cancel culture’""; “If cancel culture is the equivalent of the 1950s American consensus”; “if we’re arguing against cancel culture”. It most often appears alongside Trump, America, Barack Obama.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 12
  • Issue count: 12
  • First seen: May 10, 2021
  • Last seen: December 17, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
The other relevant phrase is "cancel culture". SJWs aren't bad because they get basic facts wrong, quash free speech, bully their opponents, or make unfair generalizations across diverse groups. They're bad because sometimes they get your favorite TV show cancelled. I hope you'll excuse me if I sound bitter, but it really disappointed me how, of all the criticisms of social justice, this was the one that really got traction. But I think it got traction precisely because it had no connection with any substantive criticism of social justice. It wasn't coded conservative.
I think "woke" and "cancel culture" encode ideas that have been present in anti-social-justice discourse from the beginning. From the beginning, people who weren't pro-racism or pro-sexism have been complaining that social justice is going too far, or that SJWs were terrible people. But for some reason it didn't work then, it does work now, and part of it working now is using different terms than people used back then. I think the fashion cycle is the best explanation. You can only start a new fashion after the old fashion has spread to so many uncool people that it's no longer useful to the cool people anymore. In 2012, that wasn't yet true. Now it is.
Theses On The Current Moment
May 12, 2021 · Original source
If cancel culture is the equivalent of the 1950s American consensus, we should remember the fact that that consensus eventually failed. You’re now allowed to promote gay rights, cite scientific research showing marijuana isn't a deadly poison, campaign as a socialist, et cetera.
Still, it might be worth having coherent principles, at least in order to assuage our own consciences. Are we actually committing to never exerting social pressure on anybody in any way? Like, what about boycott campaigns? It seems intuitively obvious that if Coca-Cola is using child slaves to pick cocoa beans or something, boycotting them until they stop is a perfectly acceptable and even commendable thing to do. And if it's okay to boycott them yourself, surely it's also okay to use social media as a platform to ask other people to join your boycott. But once you're using social media to arrange boycotts of companies you don't like, how is that not "cancel culture"? Is it just because child slavery is actually bad but the occasional offensive tweet isn't? A lot of people I know got really angry at Gawker when their CEO said that that bullying nerds was good and people should keep doing it until the nerds shut up and removed themselves from the discourse - were those people morally obligated to continue giving Gawker money anyway? Was that offensive tweet actually bad, but the one where somebody uses the n-word or something not so bad? Good thing everyone agrees on objective standards for badness!
Or - some straw man libertarians have argued that the government shouldn't have banned discrimination against black people, because individual companies could choose whether or not to discriminate, and ones that didn't would succeed on the free market. Cancel culture itself has shown us how wrong that is - when the culture is pressuring companies to behave a certain way, they'll all cave in together, and nobody will dare try profiting off bucking the trend. Less straw-mannish libertarians (including myself) have occasionally made a weaker version of this argument, that if you've got a powerful enough voting bloc to make the government ban discrimination, you also probably have a powerful enough voting bloc that companies will pander to you without you doing that. Cancel culture has proven that one wrong too - a small minority of very dedicated people can impose a heckler's veto on the entire rest of the culture, and nobody else will stand up to them. But does this mean we should get the government to force companies to do things? Getting eg the government to eg ban colleges from having ideological litmus tests seems pretty violation-of-everything-we-believe-in-y. But what is the government's responsibility in breaking cultural strangleholds, and when is it appropriate to appeal to that? Again, it's a good thing we have objective standards for goodness, so we don't need to wrestle with these questions.
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
November 17, 2023 · Original source
It would help if Girard could come up with some specific way that wokeness went too far and became qualitatively different from the Christian imperative. The best he can do is sort of (very weakly, I almost feel like I’m reading subtext here) gesture at a kind of meta-victimization. Cancel culture is, in a sense, a return to the single-victim mechanism and Satan. Once again, we organize our ethics around a pantomime where if we could just get rid of these Bad People doing Bad Things, society would be safe and everyone would be happy. We have new names for the Bad People - racists, colonialists, fascists, “the alt-right”. But the fact that they cause all our problems and we have to suspend the normal rules of tolerance and civil rights in order to get rid of them stay the same.
Not that I can figure out, and I’m not sure he even has anything new to say about the cancellation mobs. People don’t use cancel culture to relieve mimetic tension - otherwise it would happen at times of mimetic tension, instead of whenever a celebrity is revealed to be bad. Cancellers never kill anybody, just drive them off Twitter for a while; usually they’re back after six months. Cancellers certainly don’t deify their victims afterwards. And none of this temporarily rejuvenates society; people are just as happy to cancel another celebrity the day after cancelling the first one.
Contra DeBoer On Movement Shell Games
November 30, 2023 · Original source
One answer: don’t have opinions on movements at all, judge each policy proposal individually. Then you can support freeing the slaves, but oppose cancel culture. This is correct and virtuous, but misses something. Most change is effected by big movements; a lot of your impact consists of which movements you join and support, vs. which movements you put down and oppose.
Maybe a better answer is to judge movements on the marginal unit of power. An anti-woke person believes that giving anti-racism another unit of power beyond what it has right now isn’t going to free any more slaves, it’s just going to make cancel culture worse.
How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?
March 07, 2024 · Original source
In particular, I think this is a story about cancel culture. When people talk about the “planet of cops”, they mean that people import some the norms of law - zero tolerance, inability to consider extenuating circumstances, social unity in enforcing brutal punishments - into the sphere of morality, without also importing the other norms of law that make it possible to do those things justly (like independent judges and jurors who aren’t at high risk of being punished for their decisions, or people hammering out what the laws are beforehand).
Inline links: “planet of cops”
I don’t know, I don’t have a great conclusion here. I wrote this post because everyone else was mocking Hoover and saying it was great that she was finally “caught”. Unless I’m misinterpreting her story, that doesn’t seem right to me. She seems like someone who’s been victimized by a perfect storm of our culture’s weird beliefs about cultural appropriation, intellectual/artistic focus on racial experience, cancel culture, and affirmative action. Whether or not you usually support these things, this was a unique case where a lot of seemingly-justifiable heuristics came together and destroyed someone’s life for no reason. I don’t know if we can do better, but I hope we think more about how we could.
My 2024 Presidential Debate
June 27, 2024 · Original source
Alexander: Wow, I’m having a hard time finding any real points of disagreement tonight. Let’s stay on cultural issues, where I know the two of you have clashed before. President Biden, a lot of conservatives are worried that your administration promotes “wokeness” and “cancel culture”. What do you have to say to them?
Biden: Scott, I think about these things through the lens of Sir James Frazier’s seminal work on anthropology, The Golden Bough. Frazier writes that all rituals descend from the same ur-ritual: sacrificing the king to restore the fertility of the soil. As time went on, instead of sacrificing the literal king, societies changed this ritual into more and more figurative forms. In one common instantiation, typified by the Roman festival of Saturnalia, a commoner was chosen as the “mock king” or “king of fools”. He would be feted for a time, given the finest goods and the most delicate foods, and then sacrificed to the gods in place of the true king. I think of cancel culture as an outgrowth of this phenomenon. We take undeserving commoners and promote them to celebrities. For a time they bask in limitless wealth and the adoration of all. Then we destroy them. This may seem harsh to the uninitiated. But without it, the corn would fail in Iowa, the grapes would wilt on the vine in California, and the apple trees of New England would wither and die. Our celebrities know by what bargain they have gained their ephemeral reign. Let none mourn the inevitable consequences.
Alexander: Mr. Trump, your response? What’s your position on wokeness and cancel culture?
Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
July 23, 2024 · Original source
Moral of the story: despite everything, there’s apparently still a norm against assassinating politicians. But some on the right interpreted this as meaning something more. A sudden vibe shift, or impending Trump victory, has handed conservatives the levers of cancel culture! This sparked a right-wing blogosphere debate: should they be magnanimous in victory, or descend into an orgy of vengeance?
Sorry, I don’t know how this one got in there. The most complete response was by Postcards From Barsoom, which recommended Right Wing Cancel Squads. That there are so many of us who feel queasy at the thought of getting low-level proles fired from their jobs for sounding off online is a very good thing. It speaks to the fact that, unlike the enemy, we actually have a moral centre. Notably, this was never a serious debate on the left. Those few left-wing voices in the early teens who championed classical liberal principles of freedom of expression were summarily cancelled themselves, and are largely on our side now. In an ideal world, we would all give one another vastly greater latitude. No one would get mobbed, fired, forced to resign, kicked out of school, or ostracized from their professional networks for the non-crime of an unpopular opinion. No one would have to worry about people combing through decade-old social media posts looking for gotcha words that weren’t gotchas when they were written, but became crimespeak ex post facto. In the long run, it’s essential that we aim for permissive social mores regarding public and private discourse. This is a simple matter of technological context. Social media means that there is a more or less indelible record of your every public utterance; sure, you can try to scrub it, but that won’t stop screenshots; sure, you can try to cloak yourself behind a pseudonymous identity, but that just means you need to worry about doxxing. Cell phones mean that your private conversations can be recorded. We live in an electronic surveillance society now. We’re all watching one another, all the time, and short of a Carrington Event knocking us back into the iron age, there’s no realistic possibility of that changing. If we keep holding one another to impossible standards of public discourse, we will live in a totalitarian hell; that is, indeed, precisely the world that we have all lived in, for the last decade. The only way we avoid this is by adopting a public ethos that is exceptionally forgiving. But we do not live in that world yet, and that is entirely the left’s fault. [...] If we are going to arrive at a social compromise in which we do not punish people for their speech, a reaffirmation for the Sand Age of the ancient Saxon right to plainly speak one’s mind, it is necessary that everyone develop a keen appreciation of just how horrible the alternative is. This can only be grounded in a visceral revulsion at the very thought of cancellation, the way the world has looked at chemical weapons ever since the Great War, which in turn must come from direct, personal experience of what it feels like to be on the receiving end. To this end, distasteful as it may seem, the liberal’s face must be pressed down into her own steaming pile of excrement. She must be made to taste it, and gag, and swallow nonetheless. She must be made to weep burning tears. She must be traumatized, and made to understand that this is what she did, that these are the rules of engagement that she established, that these are the consequences of loss in this awful game that she has forced all of us to play. She needs to beg for the game to end, for the rules to change. Take a second to sympathize. From the Right’s perspective, the Left has beaten, shamed, and terrorized them for at least a decade. Now, the moment they get some chance to retaliate, their enemies say “Hey, bro, come on, being mean is morally wrong, you’ve got to be immaculately kind and law-abiding now that it’s your turn”, while still obviously holding behind their back the dagger they plan to use as soon as they’re on top again. I won’t be able to convince anyone of the ethics of seeking vengeance vs. turning the other cheek. But a few thoughts on the specific practical arguments being deployed: 1. Nobody Learns Anything Useful From Being Persecuted Going back to that excerpt from the Postcards From Barsoom blog: If we are going to arrive at a social compromise in which we do not punish people for their speech, a reaffirmation for the Sand Age of the ancient Saxon right to plainly speak one’s mind, it is necessary that everyone develop a keen appreciation of just how horrible the alternative is. This can only be grounded in a visceral revulsion at the very thought of cancellation, the way the world has looked at chemical weapons ever since the Great War, which in turn must come from direct, personal experience of what it feels like to be on the receiving end. To this end, distasteful as it may seem, the liberal’s face must be pressed down into her own steaming pile of excrement. She must be made to taste it, and gag, and swallow nonetheless. She must be made to weep burning tears. She must be traumatized, and made to understand that this is what she did, that these are the rules of engagement that she established, that these are the consequences of loss in this awful game that she has forced all of us to play. She needs to beg for the game to end, for the rules to change. You mean like you’re doing now? The right-wingers admit that they have suffered terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs. Okay, check. They admit it’s made them so mad that they want a bloodbath of cancelling liberals harder than anyone has ever been cancelled before. Okay, check. And now they say . . . that lefties must suffer terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs, because it will teach them that cancellation is wrong? If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy. 2. This Isn’t Tit For Tat, It’s The Nth Round Of A Historical Dialectic “Given that liberals invented cancel culture ten years ago, shouldn’t we get ten years of conservative cancel culture, just to be fair?” asks someone totally divorced from historical reality. Modern progressive cancel culture is the successor of the 1950s establishment that would cancel you for being an atheist pinko peacenik. Curtis Yarvin calls cancellation “the Brown Scare”, by analogy to the Red Scare that came before. And Arthur Miller called the Red Scare a “witch hunt”, by analogy to actual witch hunts, the Spanish Inquisition, and the history of burning heretics at the stake. And what was Diocletian’s persecution of the Early Church if not cancel culture? People joke that “cancel culture began with Socrates”, but I don’t buy it. Seen on Wikipedia: [In 1345 BC], Akhenaten … ordered the defacing of Amun's temples throughout Egypt … Archaeological discoveries at [Amarna] show that many ordinary residents of this city chose to gouge or chisel out all references to the god Amun on even minor personal items that they owned, such as commemorative scarabs or make-up pots, perhaps for fear of being accused of having Amunist sympathies. When the Priests of Amun came back into power, they took the low road: This culture shift away from traditional religion was reversed after his death. Akhenaten's monuments were dismantled and hidden, his statues were destroyed, and his name excluded from lists of rulers compiled by later pharaohs. And since righteous vengeance had been attained and both sides now had experience with cancel culture being morally wrong, everyone agreed the ledger was balanced, and nobody ever tried cancelling anyone else ever again. No, seriously, we got the entire rest of history. Aldous Huxley famously described the state of things c. 1944 as: Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are—there we are in the Golden Future. Just one more indispensable cancellation, and there we are! Instead, I think of unfreedom of conscience as a scourge that has troubled humanity throughout history, like famine or plague or war. As with all scourges, very-long-run progress coexists with occasional disastrous relapses. The solution isn’t to get the other side and balance the ledger, it’s to keep developing the physical and social technology that’s gradually improved things in the past. 3. You’re Not Debating Whether To Become Like Woke People, You’re Already Like Woke People An old psychoanalyst’s trick: if somebody ruminates too much over some decision, it’s to distract from some other decision they’re trying not to notice. The hidden decision here is whether to treat people as collectives or individuals. One of the fundamental problems with wokeness was that it believed in collective guilt and collective punishment. White people caused slavery, therefore white people stood condemned. No matter that the actual white person involved was 150 years removed from slavery, or was a Polish immigrant whose family hadn’t even been in the country at the time, or whatever. They have some excuse like “well all white people benefit from white supremacy in tangible ways, or at least didn’t speak out against it”. I hate to say it, but “some left-wing journalist got people cancelled, therefore I should be able to cancel a left-wing Home Depot employee because The Left endorsed cancel culture” is the same kind of argument. “But wasn’t the Left monolithically united behind cancel culture?” You can find some data here. I’m presenting a representative sample of questions, but check the rest to keep me honest: Unless you really lay on the tribal signifiers, it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it! (the above poll probably overestimates support for cancel culture, because it talks about saying “things widely considered hateful” instead of, like, one tweet expressing a widely-shared opinion at the wrong time) Liberals invent a fictional entity called “The Right”, which is full of all of the most racist and fascist things that NYT was ever able to produce an out-of-context quote showing one Claremont guy saying, then believe that any action is justified against “The Right” because it’s an ontological threat against democracy, then rile up a mob against a Google guy who sends the wrong memo. Likewise, conservatives invent a fictional entity called “The Left”, which is full of all the most horrible woke things that FOX was ever able to find one Gender Studies professor saying, then believe that any action is justified against “The Left” because it’s coming for our children, then rile up a mob against a Home Depot woman who makes a bad tweet. 4. Nobody Is Ever Both-Sides-ist Enough I hate this because I’ve fought with these people on the Left, and they sound exactly the same. “If you feel like compromising with the Right, it’s important to remember what they’ve done. They separated families and locked children in cages. They forced 10-year-old rape victims to carry their rapists’ babies. They murdered our grandparents by refusing to mask in the middle of a pandemic. They killed thousands of American soldiers in a war over fake WMDs, then cut VA funding so the soldiers they wounded would die on the street. At this very moment, they’re boiling our planet alive to protect fossil fuel barons’ profits. How dare you suggest it could possibly be wrong to cancel someone like that!” This isn’t a knock-down argument. Sometimes you’re right when you think your enemies are bad, and they’re wrong when they think you’re bad. I can’t say for sure this isn’t one of those times. But: The fact that your enemies are just as sure as you are should make you less sure.
Inline links: Postcards From Barsoom, Right Wing Cancel Squads, calls, Wikipedia, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kWBR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F091055e1-265a-4c3d-88ed-8e18d1a73d09_642x355.png, find some data here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PFOa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a2ecad6-df80-45a9-ae36-1da9cacf9392_604x312.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DsK8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1b2b376e-c9f7-4a20-a586-cc337448475a_620x302.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!uN26!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe3e18655-04f5-4f11-bdaa-314c09084ced_819x324.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!nmE9!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5cd863a-f067-4c6f-909c-994a6f331a94_655x303.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xvzc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6a0440e6-548d-4b3a-9e35-97e62a515515_667x311.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HKLM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc536a7a3-0a21-4978-8024-221253c4dddd_601x450.png
Instead, I think of unfreedom of conscience as a scourge that has troubled humanity throughout history, like famine or plague or war. As with all scourges, very-long-run progress coexists with occasional disastrous relapses. The solution isn’t to get the other side and balance the ledger, it’s to keep developing the physical and social technology that’s gradually improved things in the past. 3. You’re Not Debating Whether To Become Like Woke People, You’re Already Like Woke People An old psychoanalyst’s trick: if somebody ruminates too much over some decision, it’s to distract from some other decision they’re trying not to notice. The hidden decision here is whether to treat people as collectives or individuals. One of the fundamental problems with wokeness was that it believed in collective guilt and collective punishment. White people caused slavery, therefore white people stood condemned. No matter that the actual white person involved was 150 years removed from slavery, or was a Polish immigrant whose family hadn’t even been in the country at the time, or whatever. They have some excuse like “well all white people benefit from white supremacy in tangible ways, or at least didn’t speak out against it”. I hate to say it, but “some left-wing journalist got people cancelled, therefore I should be able to cancel a left-wing Home Depot employee because The Left endorsed cancel culture” is the same kind of argument. “But wasn’t the Left monolithically united behind cancel culture?” You can find some data here. I’m presenting a representative sample of questions, but check the rest to keep me honest: Unless you really lay on the tribal signifiers, it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it! (the above poll probably overestimates support for cancel culture, because it talks about saying “things widely considered hateful” instead of, like, one tweet expressing a widely-shared opinion at the wrong time) Liberals invent a fictional entity called “The Right”, which is full of all of the most racist and fascist things that NYT was ever able to produce an out-of-context quote showing one Claremont guy saying, then believe that any action is justified against “The Right” because it’s an ontological threat against democracy, then rile up a mob against a Google guy who sends the wrong memo. Likewise, conservatives invent a fictional entity called “The Left”, which is full of all the most horrible woke things that FOX was ever able to find one Gender Studies professor saying, then believe that any action is justified against “The Left” because it’s coming for our children, then rile up a mob against a Home Depot woman who makes a bad tweet. 4. Nobody Is Ever Both-Sides-ist Enough I hate this because I’ve fought with these people on the Left, and they sound exactly the same. “If you feel like compromising with the Right, it’s important to remember what they’ve done. They separated families and locked children in cages. They forced 10-year-old rape victims to carry their rapists’ babies. They murdered our grandparents by refusing to mask in the middle of a pandemic. They killed thousands of American soldiers in a war over fake WMDs, then cut VA funding so the soldiers they wounded would die on the street. At this very moment, they’re boiling our planet alive to protect fossil fuel barons’ profits. How dare you suggest it could possibly be wrong to cancel someone like that!” This isn’t a knock-down argument. Sometimes you’re right when you think your enemies are bad, and they’re wrong when they think you’re bad. I can’t say for sure this isn’t one of those times. But: The fact that your enemies are just as sure as you are should make you less sure.
Inline links: find some data here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PFOa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a2ecad6-df80-45a9-ae36-1da9cacf9392_604x312.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DsK8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1b2b376e-c9f7-4a20-a586-cc337448475a_620x302.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!uN26!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe3e18655-04f5-4f11-bdaa-314c09084ced_819x324.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!nmE9!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5cd863a-f067-4c6f-909c-994a6f331a94_655x303.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xvzc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6a0440e6-548d-4b3a-9e35-97e62a515515_667x311.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HKLM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc536a7a3-0a21-4978-8024-221253c4dddd_601x450.png
Your Book Review: Real Raw News
July 26, 2024 · Original source
If you’re a follower of U.S. news outlets, you’ve seen some big stories unfolding over the past year: The unprecedented four criminal indictments lodged against former President Trump. The ongoing AI explosion. The backlash against “DEI,” “woke,” and “cancel culture” as exemplified by Elon Musk’s purchase and rebranding of Twitter to “X.”
Lukianoff And Defining Cancel Culture
August 21, 2024 · Original source
In a recent post, I said that part of opposing cancel culture is to rigorously define it. Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, took up the challenge. His definition, first mentioned in his book Cancelling Of The American Mind, is:
Inline links: a recent post, took up the challenge, Cancelling Of The American Mind
Cancel Culture is the uptick, beginning around 2014 and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is — or would be — protected by First Amendment standards, and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick.
It makes it clear that cancel culture is about speech. Even though we might colloquially say someone got “cancelled” for sexual harassment, this is a different issue and not part of the pressing problem of viewpoint discrimination.
Open Thread 345
September 02, 2024 · Original source
4: Greg Lukianoff has responded to my response to his definition of “cancel culture”.
Inline links: has responded to my response to his definition of “cancel culture”
ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein
October 30, 2024 · Original source
You don’t get from a flourishing democracy to Hugo Chavez in one leap - at least not without a politician younger and more vigorous than Trump. But our democracy isn’t entirely flourishing right now, and frogs are easily boiled. My threat model is less “Trump himself is exactly like Chavez”, and more “Trump’s election shows there are minimal consequences for violating norms; he brings us 10% closer to a banana republic; during the next election, both candidates violate the norms, the next guy brings us 20% closer to a banana republic, and so on.” The Republicans are already arguing that the Democrats’ authoritarian experimentation with cancel culture means it’s only fair that they get to have a mobocratic censorship regime too, if they ever get back in power. Once Trump escalates a bit, the Democrat after him will feel the same way and escalate even more. There will be plenty more chances to stop the cycle - but, like the proverb about planting the tree, the best time was ten years ago and the second-best time is now.
Inline links: that the Democrats’ authoritarian experimentation with cancel culture means it’s only fair that they get to have a mobocratic censorship regime too, if they ever get back in power
Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
30: Related: we talked before about various edge cases of cancel culture. Here’s a real-life one: crypto company Coinbase has said they’ll end their relationship with any law firm that hires lawyers who have previously opposed crypto. Is this cancel culture? My position: doesn’t cross a bright line, since it punishes action rather than speech. But if you generalize it across all ideologies and professions, you get - what was that phrase again? - “an unending chain of takfir.”
Inline links: about various edge cases of cancel culture, Coinbase has said