However cancel culture is 100% going to evolve once you create an internet, and then leave things to the market to solve.
Cancel culture is ... i guess the best democracy in a broken system. Its people realizing the lever of power that is left is the levers as a consumer. So by choosing what they consume, they are sending signals to the system of society.
For some reason, I am not bugged by cancel culture, for me its an inevitability. As is the natural irritation and opposition which would appear to it. I suppose, all of it, cancel, counter cancel, is just the invisible hand at work?
One huge problem with cancel culture is how mercurial it is. So we get to witness spectacles like an attempt to cancel Nike for selling products in Israel[1] or for hiring Colin Kaepernick[2] instead of for their ongoing record of labor abuses. And, in general, "cancelling" often seems to focus on topical, hot-button issues instead of deeper-rooted problems.
The whole phenomenon is ripe for manipulation and viral marketing - leveraging short-term outrage to build brand identity[3]. One could argue it's the commodification and commercialization of "real" protest. It's less democracy and more idiocracy.
I agree people are reaching for the limited power available to them, but the objections to cancel culture aren't usually around voluntary consensual boycotts but rather the use of "social force". Destruction of reputation, demands for firing, deplatforming, doxxing, swatting, etc... the methods of harming a person over the internet.
>Destruction of reputation, demands for firing, deplatforming, doxxing, swatting, etc
That last sentence comes across as disingenuous; you've mixed in things which are crimes, dont by individuals with things that are ACTUAL parts of boycotts.
Destruction of reputation is the reason why demands for firing appear, as do deplatforming.
Doxxing and swatting are different beast, both compared to the reputational losses and work losses, and when compared to each other (dox vs swat).
> Destruction of reputation is the reason why demands for firing appear, as do deplatforming.
No it isn't, if you say something bad to a random person you just hurt your reputation with that person a little bit. But if that person now starts to organize a hate campaign against you over what you said, that is what we call cancel culture and that is what destroyed your reputation, your reputation was fine until they started that hate campaign.
For example, lets say you tell a coworker you vote republican, that coworker then posts a mail to to everyone "Hey this guys voted for republicans, can we have a sexist racist around here? We must fire him!", who destroyed your reputation? You or them?
Such hate campaigns only creates conflict, it doesn't make people change it just creates fear and resentment that leads to electing people like Trump.
How do you think people in smaller communities work? Why do you think the town gossip is well known, and how social boycotts worked before?
Analogy: I’m making the point that if you leave these logs in the river, eventually they will hit this point, and they will create a log jam.
You can argue that this is or is not the definition of log jam, which is an issue of definitions.
Cancel culture is how the average person was told for decades to wield power. Capitalism would fix it. Finally, people started doing precisely that, and that was the start of cancel culture.
In your first example, isn’t this how people get into trouble in small communities, or villages? You were immune to this in bigger cities because you didnt have smaller communities.
Your second example is entirely dependent on people not liking Republicans. If people are OK with republicans that email dies in shame and embarrassment. If you are a repub, in a place where people are highly antagonistic to republicans, then your reputation is already at risk!
The other person broke your trust, you lost your anonymity. Same if you changed switched the party names.
> Such hate campaigns only creates conflict, i
The conflict is already there man. Republican strategy since the 60s has been high partisanship, and a full on media and information war. It’s been take no prisoners for a long time. Even if you tried to make peace, and have reasoned discussion, the deeper information tides wash out those efforts with the evening news. This is publicly stated by repub strategists. Hell Bannon talked about flooding the zone in the past few months!
The left is CATCHING UP to the right, and still has a way to go before it can match the alt right pound for pound in political power.
For some reason, I am not bugged by cancel culture
To someone whose formative years came before the internet, cancel culture looks a lot like plain old boring boycotts? So there would be a lot of confusion as to why it's so big a deal?
I tend to agree. You need cancel culture. You need people who oppose cancel culture. You need it all. If you don't have any given one of these kinds of civil freedoms, then you actually don't have a democracy.
So a lot of it is just branding. You have to call it cancel culture, because if you were to try and ban the organizing of boycotts, people would laugh at you. It's plainly obvious that you need the freedom to boycott and you need the freedom to oppose the boycott to have a democracy.
Haidt's argument in this regard is non-sensical in that boycotts are, pretty much, a democratic norm in and of themselves.
Yes, this is how social boycotts worked. They aren’t nice. Ostracized is an OLD Greek Civ word. Shunning is another.
I am beginning to suspect people are unaware of how messy any form of mass activism ends up being. Mass being the keyword here.
The point being made was about the inevitability of this form of collective action.
Cancel culture is fundamentally about the little guy exerting collective power, based on the older rhetoric limiting people to consumers. That bell has been rung.
Never said that the little guy is going to get it right, or that it’s easy to wield this power.
>Never said that the little guy is going to get it right, or that it’s easy to wield this power.
It's worse than that. For instance in the UK the Establishment itself is dominated by people who regard themselves as victims in one way or another. As victims they are the de facto little guys and act with impunity.
I felt you could see this be figured out in real time, if you looked at how people spoke online. You had many phases online, like the Libertarian phase, and people constantly talking about capitalism being great, and markets being great etc. Then you had 2008, and people started learning about things worked, and you started seeing people and different age brackets coming to terms with their reality and agency.
The agency that had previously been defined in market terms! So with everything from anonymous to flash mobs, people put two and two together and figured they could boycott things that they disagreed with.
The only time this became an issue is when it started exerting ACTUAL social force. At that point people had to have the difficult conversation of what people were mad about, AND the new manner in which people were exerting force.
As is inevitable with any use of force, it gets enmeshed with other people who weild force and power and it becomes just another thing that is seen as oppresive and broken.
But its essentially effective (or ineffective) social boycotting.
This seems highly revisionist. Cancel culture isn't just about boycotting or being selective about what one consumes. It's not even about holding people accountable.
It's about destroying people and tearing them down in order to make examples of them. It results in antagonists showing up at people's homes, writing letters to employers, creating petitions, attacking people in the nastiest ways possible with out engaging with ideas or arguments.
It's the disproportionate and graceless reactions that distinguish cancel culture from past methods of accountability.
What do you think happens when people get boycotted in villages or “back in the day”? Collections of people get MANY things wrong. Just see relationship advice vs AITAH vs CMV.
Are people used to some benign, harmless, ineffective version of social boycotts? Grace? The Scarlet letter describes what society did to adulterers.
see what happened in 2008 when large groups got together, or the police protests or any number of movements. They start when there is something easy and clear to work with, and soon smash into (and past) nuances.
I agree with the parent poster, these are modern day boycotts, influenced by the malaise of being seen primarily as consumers, and super charged by the emotional polarization of the internet.
Cancel culture is ... i guess the best democracy in a broken system. Its people realizing the lever of power that is left is the levers as a consumer. So by choosing what they consume, they are sending signals to the system of society.
For some reason, I am not bugged by cancel culture, for me its an inevitability. As is the natural irritation and opposition which would appear to it. I suppose, all of it, cancel, counter cancel, is just the invisible hand at work?