Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

I don't think we should lose sight of just how batshit insane the NYT editorial was.

We can continue to talk about Cancel Culture, but the opening assertion of the editorial was that we have a right to, "...speak [our] minds and voice [our] opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned." That's gobsmackingly wrong.

It's the kind of sentence that, to me at least, grinds my mental gears to a halt. I just... I have a very hard time thinking generously about the author of that sentence.

I'm glad people like Ken exist, to put into words something more coherent than what I'd ever be able to create.

> Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity

No, he’s very clearly making the argument that vigorously avoiding defining it at all while trying to argue about it prevents any coherency or utility, not that precisely defining it leads to clarity.

> The real battle today is not over who can say what. It's what people should be listening to.

This is why the characterization of all speech criticism as cancel culture is so problematic. We have a segment of the population now that believes that free speech means not only that they can say things while being shielded by laws from government retaliation and by cultural norms from unreasonable forms of cultural retaliation; they now also believe that free speech requires them to be given exclusive, privileged priority on platforms and for them to be given extra control over what people hear. For them, it is cancel culture that their voice isn't louder than everyone else's.

Notably, they don't view it as censorship that other segments of the population don't have the same platform privileges in the first place. To them, the normal position of free speech is that their voice should always be specially audible, and they are less concerned about making it easier across the board for people to filter through the noise or about democratizing curation, and more concerned with making sure that their microphone is never threatened by other people's speech or association.

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It is very important for us to talk about how people get information and about how to further decrease gatekeeping around curation and subscription of information; I think that's one of the next fronts in increasing free speech in America.

But it's also important for us to recognize that most people don't have exclusive contracts with major media networks and tons of advertising and promotion, and that demanding that people retain access to privileged speech platforms while their critics are characterized as censors for even just criticizing them or boycotting those platforms -- it's essentially the same as walking into a public gym and getting mad that everyone doesn't stop their own conversation and only listen to what one person has to say.

I think Popehat really hits the nail on the head when he talks about privileging the first speaker; some (not all, but some) of the backlash I see around online communication and criticism is coming from people who were used to being major voices that couldn't be ignored, and are mad that the increased noise means they no longer have that same level of exclusivity or respect, and are mad that opposing voices are increasingly given the same level of volume and attention and that those voices have more ability to respond to their speech. They're mad that their critics are on more equal footing with them in public debates and have similar levels of reach and volume.

This is why it's also so deeply important to express that there is a difference between a rando someplace getting fired from their job for a Twitter opinion they gave 10 years ago, and someone getting disinvited from an semi-exclusive speaking role at a conference because they are actively expressing bad or harmful ideas. Those are really not the same thing; one is a cultural retaliation against speech that might cross the line into unnecessary harm and mob justice, and the other is just people getting mad that they don't have a special right to an exclusive megaphone.

> It's a form of democracy, I guess

It's not much different than the old historical mobs with pitch forks and torches, only there's a slightly lower potential to physical harm.

The most common battlefield on which these "cancellation" debates happen is people's access to Twitter, a service that did not exist in the 1990s (you could, obviously, get banned off a BBS for any or no reason). You see it in this very thread: people writing appeals to the amount of control tech companies have over speech, and how unprecedented that is.