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I understand why you would not think it is a problem. Unfortunately the only evidence for something like this is anecdotes, so unless you personally experience cancellation or are a member of a community where someone is cancelled, you won't notice. The lack of concern about the cancellation narrative makes sense in this respect. Beyond "random people being fired", there are a number of notable examples in the programming community, like James Damore, Stallman, and Donglegate. After CoCs were added to open source projects, there are a handful of accounts of people being removed for their views expressed outside of the open source community. In the wider world, things like the Harper's Magazine letter criticizing cancel culture (signed by many notable individuals, including Noam Chomsky), Obama's criticism of the "circular firing squad", leading philosophy researchers decrying sanctions for expressing ideas [1], the Joe Rogan discussion between Twitter Exec and Tim Pool on online censorship, the Evergreen College fiasco, and the rioting of Berkeley students into a Ben Shapiro lecture, paint the picture of a worrying trend: some subset of people on the left respond to argument not with argument, but with censorship, boycotts, and sometimes violence. Hell, one from a few days ago: https://statenews.com/article/2020/06/michigan-state-geu-cal... [1]: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/07/22/philosophers... |