One thing I think about a lot is how a piece of criticism from one person can be painful but well-taken, but the same exact piece of criticism delivered by 1,000 strangers is basically just a campaign of stochastic harassment.
In terms of adapting our culture to the technology, I've long thought one or both of these principles ought to be generally applied: 1) if someone else has already made a similar criticism/complaint, "like/heart/upvote" their comment to express agreement instead of adding an essentially redundant comment of your own. 2) only offer unsolicited criticism to people with whom you have some sort of pre-existing relationship.
I think the other big difference is what I call "the asshats".
Basically, it used to be extremely hard for asshats to troll you. Now, they're everywhere. So people filter them out using different heuristics now - it's not, "Here, let me listen to an idea I might disagree with, in order to extract important wisdom", it's "OMG WHY ARE ALL THESE ASSHATS BOTHERING ME?!? BLOCK BLOCK BLOCK".
I think it’s important that people always have an incentive to do better; it should never be too late to start doing the right thing. If people own their past mistakes and make genuine effort to do better, that’s a good thing and should be encouraged. Whether someone is welcome back in a particular circle should be the decision of people in that circle whom they’ve harmed.
You did the impossible—you wrote a “cancel culture” article that doesn’t completely drive me crazy! Cancel culture discourse is usually so dominated by two sides who both seem to be operating out of pure self-interest and don’t have any desire to engage seriously with what the other side is saying, and it’s very frustrating to have this huge rhetorical conflict where very few people are interested in nuance. (Though I guess, in that way, it’s no different than most issues we face these days.)
It just drives me batty when people on the left (who I am generally quite sympathetic with!) say things like “cancel culture is just consequences for your actions” and then refuse to have a conversation about which consequences are appropriate responses to which actions. It sort of feels like the prevailing sentiment is that *any* consequence faced by anyone who has ever said or done a bad thing is, by definition, just. It’s such a striking departure from the left’s general approach to criminal justice issues. (Though I do know and recognize that “people saying mean things to you on the internet” is very different than the state locking you up.)
But it’s not like I can jump into the right’s position here either, because it’s basically “everyone should be able to say anything they want, no matter how Nazi-like, without consequence” and that’s even worse! (Plus, in practice, it tends to mean only conservatives should get to say what they want; they don’t seem particularly keen to defend left-wing speech against cancellation.)
Anyway, I’m rambling at this point. But I think understanding the technological changes that have enabled something called “cancel culture” to develop is a really interesting angle to discussing these issues that I hadn’t really considered. How our speech norms should evolve when technology makes speech more far-reaching and accessible than ever before in human history is a very interesting question I’d like to see far more people engage with.
Really perceptive stuff Noah. By the way in the UK our favourite pastime is saying you are shit and then accusing you are bullying and putting a #bekind hash tag on the tweet.
Just the phrase "Cancel Technology" was intriguing enough to make me subscribe.
Now having read the article, I'm comfortable saying that were you to never write another word it was worth every dollar. (Please don't do this.)
The model of Cancel Technology as an innovation to which human cultures haven't yet adapted clarified for me why "cancelling" feels at once so modern and also so familiar. I suspect I'll find this useful for understanding social media society for a long time to come.
A few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced a plan to have Facebook shift focus from a public feed, to supporting smaller, relatively private groups, which would be encrypted.
I don’t know what happened to that plan or if they’re actually sticking to it. But it seems like he was also anticipating a shift away from total context collapse, back to small private spaces.
I agree with just about everything here, but this analysis doesn't explain one of the main aspects of this phenomenon: it appears to be highly asymmetric in that very few people are cancelled for expressing left wing views in high status institutions. Such views are extremely common in all highly educated segments of society (academia, journalism, silicon valley etc.) where expressing even moderate views (opposition to affirmative action etc.) could result in social punishment or worse.
There seems to be an additional social shift that has accompanied the tech-enabled dynamic that you've correctly analyzed here. I would suggest that the missing piece is that, as a society, we used to "cancel" people for extremely unpopular views (e.g. support for Nazism, communism, or maybe atheism in generations past) but this ostracism typically took place in a context of broad, supermajority consensus about our values with regard to these things.
By contrast, the phenomenon people seem to be reacting to is driven by a social change in which highly-educated liberal people no longer socialize with less-educated conservative people and have come to regard the latter's values as unacceptable, despite there being no broad societal consensus about many "cancellable" views -- some of which have ~ 50% support among the public at large. I suspect that everyone agrees that we should "cancel" people whose views are truly beyond the pale, but if people are punished for commonly held views, they will regard the punishment as unjust
Technology has certainly enabled this to become a more powerful force in society, but explaining the dynamic requires a theory for why some people are much more willing to use this to their advantage. Richard Hanania offers the plausible explanation that, by all available metrics, the left cares a lot more about these issues https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-liberal?s=r and is willing to use social pressure much more in pursuit of moral imperatives.
John Eckstein wrote in that thread about the singer who lost followers:
“Say "cancel culture" and some hear: I got fired for saying Lincoln freed the slaves and others hear: some Oberlin kids got mad at me for being racist”
What I find interesting is that (I think unknowingly) he succinctly described a theoretical Cancel Culture event: Someone says something that was anodyne two minutes ago, gets tarred as a racist by extremely online people, who also demand they get fired, and their employer obliges.
““Cancel culture” is a terrible term seeking to describe two distinct problems.
1. Snitch culture: never before have so many people on the right and left felt comfortable trying to get people in trouble with their bosses.
2. An employer-side confusion about the meaning and power of social media outrage that leads them to fire people because of bullshit.”
“I have been 100% lucky and blessed to work for bosses that understand the profound emptiness of Twitter demanding you get fired.”
That some employers can see through the bullshit of Twitter tantrums is good to see, but even having it reach that point means that a wall that held us in good stead for a half century has been breached.
Up until around 2013 (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/jon-ronson-why-we-should-forgive-infamous-tweeter-justine-sacco-102123/), norms were in place that protected us from fear of catastrophe for saying “the wrong thing”. In the culture I grew up in, NYC of the ‘70s and ‘80s, nobody had a problem telling you that you were being an asshole, or just were an asshole full stop. However, almost nobody would think to increase the consequences beyond that. It wasn’t “live and let live” so much as letting the satisfaction of a good retort be its own reward, and any action to try and change society was separate from telling some random stranger who pissed you off to go fuck themselves (see the reviews of Sarah Schulman’s recent oral history of ACT UP for examples; they came at people with actual power *hard*, “actual power” being the relevant phrase to this conversation). “Snitch culture” is part of it, but there seems to be a genuine belief that casting out anyone for wrongthink really will lead to a better world. It’s also self-reenforcing: If heads didn’t roll, would so many people keep doing it?
In addition, we have the norm of reserving “racist” for the worst acts being expanded to much more, while keeping the heavy stigma that anyone who says something “racist” is beyond the pale: As with the example above, “Lincoln freed the slaves” becomes “racist”. Even as I agree that the history is far more nuanced than that statement reveals, calling it “racist” says more about the accuser than the accused; it is a claim to power by using the worst pejorative in our society. Again, it’s incredibly effective: “You’re not going to keep hiring a *racist*, are you!?!”
And so, when the pandemic hit, Cancel Culture (say something you don’t even know is wrongthink->get ratioed->get fired) made it harder for institutions to get their bearings, or for outsiders to use the Fourth Estate as a correcting mechanism. Zeynep Tufecki has said that when she wrote her op-Ed on masks in the New York Times, she thought it could be the end of any opportunities for her writing for the New York Times. Even if you disagreed with her at the time, should that really be a concern for submitting a thought-out piece?
The “culture” part of “Cancel Culture” is what is broken. Enough of us still remember what it was like before this unforgivable hellscape, and while “ignore them” is the right answer, I want us to actually get there before societal forgetfulness sets in permanently.
I'm wondering if Elon Musk includes calling a rescue worker a pedophile among the fun he's asking for. Of course he wants to ban "cancel culture"; he's often taken to task for being an open shitheel in the marketplace of ideas.
Look, I think tolerance and forgiveness are good things, but I think certain ideas should never be tolerated, forgiveness is not owed, and generally people have to have shown some sign of growth in order to deserve it.
I'm mostly talking about someone like Elon here, who I think is mostly desirous of getting rid of "cancel culture" for his own benefit; the way he treats his own workers doesn't lead me to believe he cares much about lower-profile people who can be genuinely harmed by some random Twitterer digging up years-old tweets and demanding that person be fired. Someone like Elon is too famous and rich to really be touched by cancel culture, and therefore I'm really uninterested in what he has to say on the subject. When he says it just sounds like he wants to be terrible and never be called on it.
Honestly, you're writing is always a refreshing perspective, I think "Cancel Technology" is one of the main pieces to understanding the whole discourse around cancel culture. However, I think there needs to be "Cancel Labour Market Policy" (I'm not the best with making catchy names.) So many examples, from the position of Harald Uhlig as a UChicago Economist in accusasions of racism, the firing of a labourer for a supposed white power symbol made from his resting hand and the reporting of a nurse's offensive joke to his employer by prominent follow rx0ricst, all used the explicit threat of second hand firing. These cases, while lighten up by the power of the panopticon of users, is made powerful by the truth of employment being threatened. There needs to be discussion whether at will employment means that gives the lack of justifcation and paitience required to fully investigate any misconduct. I'm not sure about your position on at-wil employment, and would love to hear. As well, the lack of communication of non-redunancy consequences (retraction of bonuses, impact on promotion timeframe, formal apologies) means that employers go to the most drastic of consequences. In summary, a second force of "Cancel Redundancy" may make the small town that watches over you much harder to ignore and more consequential, and may represent the policy failure to protect accused rights.
Agree with everything above, but is there really a "solution" that we can intentionally implement?
Seems a case could be made that this distributional disruption of how we trade in information/opinions based on technological innovation has happened a few times in the past of human history and there is little single actors can do other than wait to see how society reorganizes itself.
Invention of language, invention of alphabet, growth of literacy, printing press, postal systems, telegrams, telecommunication, etc, have all disrupted distribution and memory of ideas in massive ways that we may not be fully conscious of yet or have culturally memory holed. I'm not sure if I mean we "need to see how things shake out" or if there are ways we can actively influence how society reorganizes? Do we think there were conscious measures to control this reorganization when the printing press increased the distribution of books outside of traditional circles (reformation...lots of war).
One thing I think about a lot is how a piece of criticism from one person can be painful but well-taken, but the same exact piece of criticism delivered by 1,000 strangers is basically just a campaign of stochastic harassment.
In terms of adapting our culture to the technology, I've long thought one or both of these principles ought to be generally applied: 1) if someone else has already made a similar criticism/complaint, "like/heart/upvote" their comment to express agreement instead of adding an essentially redundant comment of your own. 2) only offer unsolicited criticism to people with whom you have some sort of pre-existing relationship.
I think the other big difference is what I call "the asshats".
Basically, it used to be extremely hard for asshats to troll you. Now, they're everywhere. So people filter them out using different heuristics now - it's not, "Here, let me listen to an idea I might disagree with, in order to extract important wisdom", it's "OMG WHY ARE ALL THESE ASSHATS BOTHERING ME?!? BLOCK BLOCK BLOCK".
I think it’s important that people always have an incentive to do better; it should never be too late to start doing the right thing. If people own their past mistakes and make genuine effort to do better, that’s a good thing and should be encouraged. Whether someone is welcome back in a particular circle should be the decision of people in that circle whom they’ve harmed.
FWIW I agree with the cowbell take. F that skit.
You did the impossible—you wrote a “cancel culture” article that doesn’t completely drive me crazy! Cancel culture discourse is usually so dominated by two sides who both seem to be operating out of pure self-interest and don’t have any desire to engage seriously with what the other side is saying, and it’s very frustrating to have this huge rhetorical conflict where very few people are interested in nuance. (Though I guess, in that way, it’s no different than most issues we face these days.)
It just drives me batty when people on the left (who I am generally quite sympathetic with!) say things like “cancel culture is just consequences for your actions” and then refuse to have a conversation about which consequences are appropriate responses to which actions. It sort of feels like the prevailing sentiment is that *any* consequence faced by anyone who has ever said or done a bad thing is, by definition, just. It’s such a striking departure from the left’s general approach to criminal justice issues. (Though I do know and recognize that “people saying mean things to you on the internet” is very different than the state locking you up.)
But it’s not like I can jump into the right’s position here either, because it’s basically “everyone should be able to say anything they want, no matter how Nazi-like, without consequence” and that’s even worse! (Plus, in practice, it tends to mean only conservatives should get to say what they want; they don’t seem particularly keen to defend left-wing speech against cancellation.)
Anyway, I’m rambling at this point. But I think understanding the technological changes that have enabled something called “cancel culture” to develop is a really interesting angle to discussing these issues that I hadn’t really considered. How our speech norms should evolve when technology makes speech more far-reaching and accessible than ever before in human history is a very interesting question I’d like to see far more people engage with.
Really perceptive stuff Noah. By the way in the UK our favourite pastime is saying you are shit and then accusing you are bullying and putting a #bekind hash tag on the tweet.
Just the phrase "Cancel Technology" was intriguing enough to make me subscribe.
Now having read the article, I'm comfortable saying that were you to never write another word it was worth every dollar. (Please don't do this.)
The model of Cancel Technology as an innovation to which human cultures haven't yet adapted clarified for me why "cancelling" feels at once so modern and also so familiar. I suspect I'll find this useful for understanding social media society for a long time to come.
A few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced a plan to have Facebook shift focus from a public feed, to supporting smaller, relatively private groups, which would be encrypted.
I don’t know what happened to that plan or if they’re actually sticking to it. But it seems like he was also anticipating a shift away from total context collapse, back to small private spaces.
I agree with just about everything here, but this analysis doesn't explain one of the main aspects of this phenomenon: it appears to be highly asymmetric in that very few people are cancelled for expressing left wing views in high status institutions. Such views are extremely common in all highly educated segments of society (academia, journalism, silicon valley etc.) where expressing even moderate views (opposition to affirmative action etc.) could result in social punishment or worse.
There seems to be an additional social shift that has accompanied the tech-enabled dynamic that you've correctly analyzed here. I would suggest that the missing piece is that, as a society, we used to "cancel" people for extremely unpopular views (e.g. support for Nazism, communism, or maybe atheism in generations past) but this ostracism typically took place in a context of broad, supermajority consensus about our values with regard to these things.
By contrast, the phenomenon people seem to be reacting to is driven by a social change in which highly-educated liberal people no longer socialize with less-educated conservative people and have come to regard the latter's values as unacceptable, despite there being no broad societal consensus about many "cancellable" views -- some of which have ~ 50% support among the public at large. I suspect that everyone agrees that we should "cancel" people whose views are truly beyond the pale, but if people are punished for commonly held views, they will regard the punishment as unjust
Technology has certainly enabled this to become a more powerful force in society, but explaining the dynamic requires a theory for why some people are much more willing to use this to their advantage. Richard Hanania offers the plausible explanation that, by all available metrics, the left cares a lot more about these issues https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-liberal?s=r and is willing to use social pressure much more in pursuit of moral imperatives.
John Eckstein wrote in that thread about the singer who lost followers:
“Say "cancel culture" and some hear: I got fired for saying Lincoln freed the slaves and others hear: some Oberlin kids got mad at me for being racist”
What I find interesting is that (I think unknowingly) he succinctly described a theoretical Cancel Culture event: Someone says something that was anodyne two minutes ago, gets tarred as a racist by extremely online people, who also demand they get fired, and their employer obliges.
Ben Dreyfuss laid this out recently:
https://bendreyfuss.substack.com/p/i-have-been-snitched-on-but-i-have
““Cancel culture” is a terrible term seeking to describe two distinct problems.
1. Snitch culture: never before have so many people on the right and left felt comfortable trying to get people in trouble with their bosses.
2. An employer-side confusion about the meaning and power of social media outrage that leads them to fire people because of bullshit.”
“I have been 100% lucky and blessed to work for bosses that understand the profound emptiness of Twitter demanding you get fired.”
That some employers can see through the bullshit of Twitter tantrums is good to see, but even having it reach that point means that a wall that held us in good stead for a half century has been breached.
Up until around 2013 (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/jon-ronson-why-we-should-forgive-infamous-tweeter-justine-sacco-102123/), norms were in place that protected us from fear of catastrophe for saying “the wrong thing”. In the culture I grew up in, NYC of the ‘70s and ‘80s, nobody had a problem telling you that you were being an asshole, or just were an asshole full stop. However, almost nobody would think to increase the consequences beyond that. It wasn’t “live and let live” so much as letting the satisfaction of a good retort be its own reward, and any action to try and change society was separate from telling some random stranger who pissed you off to go fuck themselves (see the reviews of Sarah Schulman’s recent oral history of ACT UP for examples; they came at people with actual power *hard*, “actual power” being the relevant phrase to this conversation). “Snitch culture” is part of it, but there seems to be a genuine belief that casting out anyone for wrongthink really will lead to a better world. It’s also self-reenforcing: If heads didn’t roll, would so many people keep doing it?
In addition, we have the norm of reserving “racist” for the worst acts being expanded to much more, while keeping the heavy stigma that anyone who says something “racist” is beyond the pale: As with the example above, “Lincoln freed the slaves” becomes “racist”. Even as I agree that the history is far more nuanced than that statement reveals, calling it “racist” says more about the accuser than the accused; it is a claim to power by using the worst pejorative in our society. Again, it’s incredibly effective: “You’re not going to keep hiring a *racist*, are you!?!”
And so, when the pandemic hit, Cancel Culture (say something you don’t even know is wrongthink->get ratioed->get fired) made it harder for institutions to get their bearings, or for outsiders to use the Fourth Estate as a correcting mechanism. Zeynep Tufecki has said that when she wrote her op-Ed on masks in the New York Times, she thought it could be the end of any opportunities for her writing for the New York Times. Even if you disagreed with her at the time, should that really be a concern for submitting a thought-out piece?
The “culture” part of “Cancel Culture” is what is broken. Enough of us still remember what it was like before this unforgivable hellscape, and while “ignore them” is the right answer, I want us to actually get there before societal forgetfulness sets in permanently.
I'm wondering if Elon Musk includes calling a rescue worker a pedophile among the fun he's asking for. Of course he wants to ban "cancel culture"; he's often taken to task for being an open shitheel in the marketplace of ideas.
Look, I think tolerance and forgiveness are good things, but I think certain ideas should never be tolerated, forgiveness is not owed, and generally people have to have shown some sign of growth in order to deserve it.
I'm mostly talking about someone like Elon here, who I think is mostly desirous of getting rid of "cancel culture" for his own benefit; the way he treats his own workers doesn't lead me to believe he cares much about lower-profile people who can be genuinely harmed by some random Twitterer digging up years-old tweets and demanding that person be fired. Someone like Elon is too famous and rich to really be touched by cancel culture, and therefore I'm really uninterested in what he has to say on the subject. When he says it just sounds like he wants to be terrible and never be called on it.
Honestly, you're writing is always a refreshing perspective, I think "Cancel Technology" is one of the main pieces to understanding the whole discourse around cancel culture. However, I think there needs to be "Cancel Labour Market Policy" (I'm not the best with making catchy names.) So many examples, from the position of Harald Uhlig as a UChicago Economist in accusasions of racism, the firing of a labourer for a supposed white power symbol made from his resting hand and the reporting of a nurse's offensive joke to his employer by prominent follow rx0ricst, all used the explicit threat of second hand firing. These cases, while lighten up by the power of the panopticon of users, is made powerful by the truth of employment being threatened. There needs to be discussion whether at will employment means that gives the lack of justifcation and paitience required to fully investigate any misconduct. I'm not sure about your position on at-wil employment, and would love to hear. As well, the lack of communication of non-redunancy consequences (retraction of bonuses, impact on promotion timeframe, formal apologies) means that employers go to the most drastic of consequences. In summary, a second force of "Cancel Redundancy" may make the small town that watches over you much harder to ignore and more consequential, and may represent the policy failure to protect accused rights.
Solution? If you’re a professional journalist or politician, you cannot escape this. The rest of us need to delete our social media accounts.
Agree with everything above, but is there really a "solution" that we can intentionally implement?
Seems a case could be made that this distributional disruption of how we trade in information/opinions based on technological innovation has happened a few times in the past of human history and there is little single actors can do other than wait to see how society reorganizes itself.
Invention of language, invention of alphabet, growth of literacy, printing press, postal systems, telegrams, telecommunication, etc, have all disrupted distribution and memory of ideas in massive ways that we may not be fully conscious of yet or have culturally memory holed. I'm not sure if I mean we "need to see how things shake out" or if there are ways we can actively influence how society reorganizes? Do we think there were conscious measures to control this reorganization when the printing press increased the distribution of books outside of traditional circles (reformation...lots of war).
Anyways...thoughts?