321–330 of 643 posts
The internet is enabling a new norm in reducing the cost of calling out behavior. Some of this is good, e.g. calling out sexual abuse. Some of this is bad, e.g. cancel culture that has no means of forgiveness.
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I've seen this take quite a bit lately with respect to cancel culture and I'm a bit confused about it. Since HN is amazing, I'm hoping someone here can help me understand without it turning into a flamewar. I don't understand how "cancel culture" is substantially different from what we used to call "boycotts", just with the internet for more social lubrication. I suppose theres a risk that the allegations at the cent…
The surface level distinction is that a boycott is aimed at an organization while canceling is aimed at a person. That has deeper consequences because our mental model of organizations and people is different. With a boycott, the intent is to change the organization's behavior. Once the organization stops doing the thing you don't like, you can stop the boycott. Problem solved. But with canceling, there is an assumpt…
I like an artist named DojaKat.
A while ago a video surfaced of her singing a song with a racial slur in it.
I saw the video and said to myself "Oh man, I don't want to support a racist artist, this sucks, but I don't think I should stream her on Spotify anymore (In my mind, that was the cancel).
Some weeks later, DojaKat released a video in which she apologized, talked about how much she's grown as a person, and promised to do better. It seemed sincere to me, so I added her work back to my Spotify playlists.
Am I correctly interpreting that as a cancel?
what interests me is: how do people maintain their integrity in such a foul environment? I mean if you can't look yourself in the mirror then how do you keep on creating anything?
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Thousands of employees devote already 1/3 of their life doing a work they despise just so they can avoid starving. Getting literally fucked to save 40 years of bad work doesn't sound too bad.
It's a race to the bottom though. Once one person does it, everyone else has to do it too, just so they don't fall behind. In the end you are back to where you started, except you have to sell yourself in addition.
It's hard to avoid this situation when the supply so greatly exceeds the demand and a small number of people control who gets to win; corruption is almost inevitable.
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Roman Polanski won an Oscar after pleading guilty to drugging and raping a 13 year old girl. Look at all these vile people applauding this villain, who couldn't accept his Oscar because he fled the country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXnNOBj26lk In some ways I think we may have over responded (Aziz Ansari is not Harvey Weinstein), but it was shocking what behavior people were excusing from the powerful even in r…
Whenever discussing Polanski's late career and the acclaim or scorn he has received, it must be mentioned that the girl in question has (later, when she grew up) expressed that she does not wish that Polanski be prosecuted or further punished by the industry.
I'll be bold and say it's the media industry has a problem. I remember family members having problems/reservations with Weinstein's behavior back in the 90's . People like Corey Feltman have been speaking up for years. But nobody cares because we're getting good cinema and TV, right? A huge part of these industries are based on 'favors' and 'networking'. Toss in the theory that you have a higher-than-baseline level o…
Roman Polanski won an Oscar after pleading guilty to drugging and raping a 13 year old girl. Look at all these vile people applauding this villain, who couldn't accept his Oscar because he fled the country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXnNOBj26lk In some ways I think we may have over responded (Aziz Ansari is not Harvey Weinstein), but it was shocking what behavior people were excusing from the powerful even in r…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of...
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> Look at all these vile people applauding this villain Acknowledging the artistic talent of a villain does not make you vile. Not at all. Imagine a clearer example. Imagine that somebody is on a life sentence convicted of a murder that they have commited. Do you think that this person has the right to write a book? Can this book be sent for participation at a literary contest? Can it win? Does the jury that gives th…
I can see why this might be considered debatable, but I firmly agree with the parent comment here. People who do vile shit should not be celebrated at all. To me, it's a requirement: if you want to be considered a person of great accomplishment, then you should be an upstanding citizen. I also think that celebrating vile people is a reflection on the "jury" here as well. If I discover someone celebrates the works of…
I saw comments talking about a hypothetical utopia where no one needs to go hungry and where talent gets notice without having to sell their body or soul. As with many things, the problem is not technological. We have the technology to create such a utopia (there would still be other problems, but the world would be utopian from those aspects). The problem is sociological. In order to do this we need to both all work…
Re: Texas had the money to buy snowplows. They didn't. Texas had the money to winterize wind turbines. They didn't. They worship tax-cuts and D.I.Y. social Darwinism (survival of the fittest). So when the weather gets bad, many there are okay with social Darwinism per survival. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/17/texas-mayor-... Note I didn't say all are happy with it, but enough that they tend to lightly…
On the upside some very rich people got way richer than they would have under a traditional regulated utility situation.
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> Look at all these vile people applauding this villain Acknowledging the artistic talent of a villain does not make you vile. Not at all. Imagine a clearer example. Imagine that somebody is on a life sentence convicted of a murder that they have commited. Do you think that this person has the right to write a book? Can this book be sent for participation at a literary contest? Can it win? Does the jury that gives th…
I can see why this might be considered debatable, but I firmly agree with the parent comment here. People who do vile shit should not be celebrated at all. To me, it's a requirement: if you want to be considered a person of great accomplishment, then you should be an upstanding citizen. I also think that celebrating vile people is a reflection on the "jury" here as well. If I discover someone celebrates the works of…
Good luck being the one with the power to decide what an upstanding citizen is. This is cancel culture in a nutshell.
There’s a reason “don’t meet your heroes” is a saying. The problem is not appreciating the good works of someone who has also done bad things —- the problem is when we assume prima facie that just because someone is celebrated for one thing, that they are an upstanding citizen in all other areas of their life.
There would be a lot less Harvey Weinstein’s in the world if our fallible human herd mentality didn’t elevate someone to sainthood because they were a bigshot in one aspect of their life.
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I think one thing that I've noticed is that defamation laws seem really hard to enforce on people speaking on the internet, especially when one can hide behind a pseudonym or straight anonymity. I guess overall for "cancel culture", I see it similar to boycotts, but often boycotts edit are /edit of a specific individual, and also without the stipulation that the boycott will stop if a behavior changes. AFAIK, the civ…
Thats a fair take. I hadn't considered the sort-of agenda that boycotts tend to have. I bet a lot of cancels also have a salient agenda, but since the movement is so democratized it gets lost in the noise. Just a gut feeling. _____ You lost me a bit on: > Much of "cancel culture" I guess wants an organization's policy to change, but often that policy is to excommunicate an individual... I've been conceptualizing the…
I appreciate this point. I think sometimes these waves of calls for cancellation play into larger movements that have more clearly defined goals, such as #metoo, which I think focused on shedding light on sexual violence/abuse/harassment and to get individuals and organizations to create more policies to prevent it from happening. Maybe when I think of "cancel culture" I think less of the underlying structural goals of it, but you've helped me step back to think of that.
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I think a lot with the call to "cancel" someone (I don't know why I feel compelled to put it in quotes but I keep doing it) is often to specifically tell the organization(s) to remove the individual from participating. E.g., wanting Netflix to fire Kevin Spacey in House of Cards (and other Hollywood production firms to no longer hire him), wanting radio stations to ban R Kelly's music, etc.
So I think it's the idea that for a person to be cancelled, someone has to do the cancelling.
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I guess for me, I wouldn't see that so much as how the phrase "cancel" is being used in the "cancel culture" idea. Yours seems to be you, the individual consumer, doing the cancellation, and also you being open to giving her a second chance through forgiveness.
I see a "cancel" of DojaKat in this instance being people demanding that her record company, her agent, TV stations, radio stations, and others agree to break relations with her and when she apologizes, to not forgive her and to not give her a second chance.
So in summary, I see "cancel culture" as more about trying to rally others, especially groups and institutions, to break off relations with that person (or sometimes a group) and to do so permanently.
I personally don't like it because I believe much more in restorative justice than I do retributive justice, and I also believe that by distancing ourselves from these people, through the power of the internet, they may find other people who feel alienated and cancelled and they could form into more and more radicalized groups.