| I appreciate so many of you are willing to crusade for free speech. But the reality is that platforming isn't free, and the process of deciding who gets platforms is political. The first amendment doesn't govern this process, nor can it—no one can reasonably consume every piece of intellectual content, from every angle, and process it. My point is, cancel culture definitely exists. There has always been, and always will be, political processes for selecting views we consider acceptable discourse. Arguments against cancel culture that don't grapple with this reality are missing the point. Canceling isn't about using the power of the state to crack down on free speech. It's about deciding who gets access to a scarce resource: their platform. The way this get decided is unavoidably political, since it's about who wields power. A good example is this website. While most posts are technical, Hacker News hosts a significant amount of discussion regarding social issues. If you read this site using hckrnews.com, which preserves posts flagged off the front page, it's easy to notice that there are political trends in how moderators and users select what posts get prominence. This post, which espouses a more centrist perspective on cancel culture, was briefly flagged, then restored. Many, many other posts espousing more progressive views are systematically downvoted or flagged (search for DEAD on hckrnews.com), many of which are far longer and more carefully developed than Taibbi's piece. Regardless of how you feel about confederate statues, I think it's hard to consider that this 538 post (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate-statues/) isn't comparable to this post in terms of quality, sophistication, and merit to be on the front page of HN. For those of you who agree with Taibbi... do you think those posts aren't "canceled"? If you think this example is contrived, because the nature of this cancellation doesn't involve a visible mob, that's because of power differences. The nature of "cancellation" against minorities looks different. Mob justice isn't necessary when people in power can just fire you. And progressives are fired or otherwise censored for advocating for inclusion, against police violence, for progressive social policy all the time. You don't see mob justice in these cases because this kind of canceling is often enforced by institutions. A mob isn't necessary. The effect is the same: people are regularly censored and excluded from mainstream prominence because their views are considered unacceptable. The reason this latest wave of (attempted) cancellations (nyt editorial, jk rowling, adam rapaport, countless people resulting from #metoo etc) have garnered attention is twofold: 1. They require popular support. Lots of people support holding rapaport, the founder of crossfit, Tucker Carlson, etc to account. No institution wanted to punish these people, so a popular movement formed. 2. They cancel views formerly considered to be within acceptable bounds. Anti-trans speech, implicitly discriminatory pay practices, military crackdowns on protestors, even if they weren't popular, are believed by many to be "newspaper publishable". It's shocking to people like Taibbi that people who share their views can get fired and singled out on social media—things that happen to people with progressive views on a regular basis. 3. Oftentimes, the people making the speech are civil and ostensibly in good faith, even if their views are onerous. To understand cancel culture, you need to define cancellation as "people whose views are censored", and you need to look at people who espouse progressive views. That "cancel culture" is prominent today means that our definition of acceptability is changing, that powerful people require mobs to be held accountable, and that we increasingly believe that how you present the argument (good intent, good faith etc) is less important than what you present. Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that cancellations are sometimes off the mark. Mob justice is often unfair and harmful. It is often disproportionate (the shor incident is the best example I can think of). Holding people accountable for hate speech or discriminatory practices should be the job of institutions. But they're not doing the job—this is what progressives are protesting. If you want to stop mob culture, change institutions to fairly enforce the injustices that the mob is necessary to enforce today. |