[hakka-nyu-su]

As I understand the term "cancel culture", it mostly relates to celebrities who were already controversial or polarizing in some way, that were finally able to be organized against.

And in many cases, the same celebrities are still able to have a career that is sometimes even boosted by their ability to campaign against "cancel culture" generally.

Do you have any books/articles/resources for thinking about "cancel culture" as it would relate to an ordinary person writing an ordinary blog?

[DenisM]

There you go, a truck driver didn't even write anything: https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

Also think about this: people who were not in the limelight and were "cancelled" would never appear on your radar simply because they were not in the limelight.

[hodgesrm]

Wow. Thanks for posting that.

[nitwit005]

People will happily attack you without even reading what you have to say. People have done experiments with headlines which demonstrate as much: https://www.upworthy.com/comments-didnt-read-the-article

There have been a number of incidents where people have gone after individuals, only for it to be very clear later on they'd done nothing wrong.

[joubert]

I'd be curious to know what % of us here:

read an article fully, then

give it due consideration, then

read the entire HN comment thread, and then

add thoughtful comments in the HN thread

[devalgo]

>As I understand the term "cancel culture", it mostly relates to celebrities who were already controversial or polarizing in some way, that were finally able to be organized against.

This massively understates the problem. One could easily put together a list of non-celebrities who have had their lives ruined after making some completely anodyne comment.

[celestialcheese]

"so you've been publicly shamed" by jon ronson goes into this, I don't remember if there's specific stories about personal bloggers, but there's stories from normal, everyday people.

[hakka-nyu-su]

Ok, I understand now that people are taking "cancel culture" to mean online shaming generally. In that case, I think it is reasonable to take precautions like blogging anonymously.

I was specifically thinking of how "cancel" is used as a verb to mean "boycott a cultural product from an entertainer", "boycott a product from a company", or something like that.

[throwaway894345]

It's not just "online shaming", it's also harassment such as trying to get someone fired from their job.

[dnissley]

Regular folks who were "cancelled":

- David Shor

- Justine Sacco

- James Damore

- Adria Richards

A full list would be a mile long

[joshuamorton]

Of those, the last three didn't suffer any long term consequences (all three were employed relatively soon after they were fired), and the first happened too recently to really analyze.

[throwaway894345]

I never understand these kinds of arguments. Is the idea that "because there are still enough good and decent people resisting the mob in order to prevent long term consequences for their targets that we should not condemn this mobbing at all"? What point are you making?

[a1369209993]

> What point are you making?

Presumably something to the effect of "It can't [currently] be a especially horrible problem if all the listed consequences were quickly fixed.". On the other hand, see (https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2278).

[ThA0x2]

FWIR:

Justine Sacco still suffers from severe PTSD and has to attend regular counselling.

Adria Richards fell off the face of the planet, was chronically unemployed for a while, then finally ended up at a no name company, probably making peanuts compared to where she was.

James Damore was also similarly unemployed for a while, was in several lawsuits with Google, and claims to be working at a start-up, but he may also just be freelancing since he's effectively unemployable.

Those are all long term consequences, so, you're effectively wrong here.

[footlose_3815]

James Damore threw away an engineering job at Google with a long, generalized, and internally-shared rant about women, listing off their "Qualities". He then tried to start a lawsuit making it about his politics, which never went anywhere.

Why is there sympathy for this man?

[ThA0x2]

>He then tried to start a lawsuit making it about his politics, which never went anywhere.

Settled out of court for a non-disclosed amount. That's somewhere, so, you're wrong.

>Why is there sympathy for this man?

Data-driven adults place a high value on facts and truth. Virtue signalers don't.

[friendlybus]

It was scientifically sourced and he did not spread it himself, others did that on 'his behalf' whilst also stripping out the sources.

[footlose_3815]

He sourced things from scientific journals, but he pieced them together to fit a narrative that he knows better about what women want. It wasn't a good argument.

[joshuamorton]

Adria Richards is actually an interesting case. She was "cancelled" for cancelling someone else. One of the major criticisms of the Harper's letter is that people speaking out about injustice have historically faced severe retribution, and that the recent concern about cancellation is only in response to this retributory cannon being pointed toward those "in power".

I can't see the people who are today concerned about Cancellation standing up for Adria Richards were that to happen again today. See the recent argument between Yann LeCun and Timnit Gebru for a somewhat analogous situation.

The backlash against the person perceived as trying to cancel someone else was much greater than the initial "lash", so to speak.

> James Damore was also similarly unemployed for a while

Not a very long time though. And the lawsuits were ones he chose to file.

[ThA0x2]

>Not a very long time though.

It was for a long time. He may actually still be unemployed.

>And the lawsuits were ones he chose to file.

No one said otherwise.

[plzbo]

Good that they didn't suffer any long term consequences, but that does not diminish the point made.

[joshuamorton]

Yes and no. One of the concerns about cancel culture is that it results in people's lives being ruined/ended. This (usually) is not the case, even among the most egregious examples that people can come up with.

[65536]

And how about the psychological effects on these people of being bullied by a large group of people online?

I don’t know what I’d do if it happened to me, but I know it would leave me in an even worse state mentally than I am in, because I know how it feels like to feel that other people don’t want you around.

[joshuamorton]

I agree that online bullying of individuals is bad.

[throwaway894345]

Because social protections haven't eroded enough to get to the point where lives are actually ruined. Why wait to speak out against cancel culture until it's actually ruining lives?

[joshuamorton]

If your entire concern is based in a slippery slope, it's more difficult to take it seriously, especially when the concern conceals a disregard for actual harm happening now.

"Cancellation" is a democratization of power. It allows the little guy to push back effectively against the bigger guy. Saying "look there's the possibility that it might eventually have bad consequences" rings hollow when it's also actively having good consequences right now.

[sky_rw]

I would describe having your name included in such a list and immediately recognizable by a huge percentage of the population as a seriously detrimental long term consequence.

[friendlybus]

Analyzing the consequences is only half the ethical story. Doing the right thing sometimes is different to what the consequences are. If you don't do the right thing in the first place regardless of the outcome, you let weaknesses in the system grow.

James damore's memo was created and went nowhere within google. It's some people fretting over the consequences who took it, spread it among the company and got a good engineer fired, sowing distrust in the community. Should have just left the memo to be forgotten in somebody's email account somewhere. A deontological ethic will come to bite back if you are determined to ignore the fact that sometimes you have to do the right thing regardless of the consequences.

[joshuamorton]

> James damore's memo was created and went nowhere within google.

I'm not sure what your mean here, but this applies most readily to James himself. He posted the memo to larger and larger mailing lists until finally it spread.

[friendlybus]

No he discussed it with peers and it died in discussion

>"There was no outcry or charge of misogyny. I engaged in reasoned discussion with some of my peers on these issues, but mostly I was ignored," he wrote, of the initial response to his document.

It went viral later on.

[joshuamorton]

This is incorrect. I worked at Google at the time and commented on the original document. He posted it in a few small groups related to diversity. Nothing happened. Then he posted it in a relatively large public group unrelated to diversity. There was discussion in that group, and as part of that discussion it went viral (being linked elsewhere and posted around).

It was specifically because of the "mostly ignored" that he chose to escalate to a larger group where he felt he'd get more feedback and response (and agreement).

[claudiawerner]

>- James Damore

Regular as compared to a celebrity (well, I suppose he is a celebrity now on HN and tech places on Reddit), but being regular is no panacea agaianst criticism.

[dnissley]

No one said that.

[ytrytr]

(I made this standalone comment somewhere else because of you so I might as well reply directly to you)

HN is filled with people who are hardly ever on the receiving end of abuse bemoaning "cancel culture". Yeah yeah, cry me a river.

People are really out here using Justine Sacco, who spoke about going to a country and getting AIDS and got rightfully attacked by the citizens of that country, as a poster child.

Lol it seems like a lot of you have lived lives without consequences for your actions and are suddenly surprised that this is how the real world works. I personally wouldn't cancel anyone but I hope cancel culture lives forever.

[dang]

Please don't use HN for ideological warfare. It's not what this site is for and will eventually get your main account banned as well.

[ytrytr]

Can you explain what ideological warfare is according to the rules please? And how my comment is ideological warfare but not the people complaining about cancel culture?

[dang]

I don't like definitions because every definition has loopholes and then people treat the loopholes as if they are sanctioned. Hacker News is supposed to be a spirit-of-the-law, not a letter-of-the-law place [1]

However, look at it this way: ideological battle is when people use HN to smite enemies rather than for curious exchange. Particularly, to smite enemies on hot topics. Those sorts of threads are predictable, tedious, and quickly turn nasty. They not only crowd out the quieter, more curious conversation this site is supposed to be for—they burn it to a crisp. For that reason we have no choice but to moderate it [2].

It always feels like the mods are against you; whoever your enemies are, I guarantee they feel just as strongly that we're against them [3]. This seems to be some sort of hard-wired bias. In reality people on both sides of the ideological divide get the same moderation messages. If someone was breaking the rules and we didn't moderate it, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here [4].

Accounts that have been created primarily for ideological battle are against the rules here and we ban them [5], so I banned this one. Please don't do that. As I said, it will eventually get your main account banned also.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[082349872349872]

Dan, you may be interested in Orwell's Notes on Nationalism, in which he attempts to tease out "smite enemies rather than for curious exchange." I certainly noticed some poor tendencies of mine[1] in his taxonomies!

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part30

[1] notably, what I would call "picking on hegemons" looks incredibly biased because the last two have been the US and the UK, and so Orwell would file it under "anglophobia". I need to broaden my criticism to the dutch, the spaniards and portuguese, the romans, etc. Unfortunately all of my lifetime, and most of recent history, has been under those first two...

[jmalicki]

In James Damore's case, at least, he engaged in the "problematic behavior" at the workplace - it wasn't like he was participating in a group outside of the workplace which then led to him being fired.

Regardless of what your beliefs are, harassing your coworkers about them isn't going to make your coworkers, or bosses, happy.

For a second, forget about the content. "Hey coworkers, your decision to use a NoSQL database is stupid, you VPs should change the way you're doing things" when not asked for comment and when the decision is well outside of your role is always risky, and can quite often lead to conversations where the targets of your rant can say "I can't deal with this person anymore, I'm ready to quit over this."

[dnissley]

If that's what you think happened, you need to go look at the facts. No harassment occurred. There was no emotional outburst. Only a solemnly worded paper that was written in response to a request for feedback and wasn't even meant to be spread around as much as it did.

[jmalicki]

I did not mention harassment, or an emotional outburst.

The most controversial part of cancel culture is the blurred lines - is something in your private life grounds for you losing your job, is a tweet outside of the context of your job grounds for losing your job, etc.

If someone wants to boycott sellers of JK Rowling's books for her tweets about transgendered people, that is reasonably called cancel culture.

If someone wants to boycott sellers of JK Rowling's books based on hypothetical comments about transgendered people within the books themselves, that is something quite different.

[someguydave]

“Regardless of what your beliefs are, harassing your coworkers about them ”

You did mention harassment though?

[stevens32]

It's mind boggling that someone who doesn't understand a term and asks for clarification of it be down-voted like this.