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What it's like to be cancelled

noahbradley.com

151–160 of 613 posts

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#151

Earlier this year when Richard Stallman was re-instated to the Board of the FSF, there were a lot of tweets expressing dismay. To one of them, I replied that I personally don't think he has done anything wrong at all - and linked to a well-known article by a woman who defended him better than me. While I found some support among a few people, the amount of hate I received shook me a bit. People started adding me to l…

Good for you for doing the right thing.

Let me ask you - did you feel like the hate thrown at you on Twitter was completely organic? Was there anything that made you question the motives of the involved Twits?

I ask because the whole smear job vs Stallman felt quite manufactured to me; from the initial Vice article horrifically misquoting him, to the weirdly rabid hate towards anyone defending him on forums like this and Reddit.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got triggered by "Twitter knows". It doesn't. It's just a bunch of mostly toxic wannabe-in-group imbeciles. There are lots of exceptions, sure. But still. I lost count by orders of magnitude where the twitter mob-opinion was simply totally wrong (be it "masks are not useful" or whatever you name it). Thanks to the collective Alzheimer's, despite archive.org etc., this somehow doesn't hurt the mob mentality at all.

Twitter as in the company/software platform, not the group of people who respond to a particular tweet. Twitter's database could show how many people were shown the tweet. It could guess at how many of their users would react in this way. And you could do some surveys to find out what fraction of our cultural spectrum/Overton window Twitter users occupy.

How can you separate Twitter the company from Twitter the results? Serious question without any snark. I don't get this argument.

Oh gal, just leave a message if you downvote. I love to learn when I'm wrong, and I guess others as well.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Originally, the Internet (including, but not limited to, the World Wide Web) was a place where nobody was interested in who you were as a person. It was and is geared towards structuring and disseminating knowledge. In that sense, the entire somesphere is a tumor to the Internet.

That's a very tunnel vision view of the early web. You're ignoring BBS's, AOL, usenet, IRC, etc. which were all created with the explicit purpose of people connecting and talking to other people. You can go even further back to things like Community Memory and the Homebrew Computer Club--computing has firmly been embracing people connecting to other people since the early days.

I was huge into the BBS scene for years. I had a handle. Only a few close personal friends knew my name.

I think most of us here are anonymous.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#154
My life ended on June 21, 2020

Who wrote this post then? I know you go on much later to say that not everyone gets a chance to start over again but I have, so do you have some perspective. At a high level, you got fired from your job, lost some friends, got depressed, but found light at the end of the tunnel and are working again, a year later (a year where a lot of people found themselves out of work for many reasons, mind you). I've got some news for you, like the chairman of the board says, that's life.

But to say your life ended for mistakes you admit to making when so many people's lives are actually ended in situations that have nothing to do with them (Matthew Shepard, George Floyd, etc.), you have the temerity to say your life ended? This shows you have a lot of perspective to gain.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#155
I appreciate where he goes into what people latched on to and recontextualized. We shouldn't have to pre-parse everything we say and do for any possibly uncharitable read, but it can feel like it's necessary sometimes, and maybe others can learn from stuff like this.

I was on the receiving end of smaller versions of this back when Twitter rage mobs were new and no one knew what to make of them. It was impossible to sort good faith criticism from people blasting their generally poor disposition at you even when it was only hundreds of people screaming. I can't imagine how it feels with a modern swarm.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't grope anyone and I'm not sure where you've heard that, but it's 100% false.

Actually while you're responding here, can you verify that you had these '48 laws of power' as your desktop? https://twitter.com/arvalis/status/1274765367957573632/photo...

FTA:

> The 48 Laws of Power mess I feel like an idiot about this one.

> I’ve read the 48 Laws of Power and I found it an interesting book. I naively saw it only as a way to understand & categorize the crazy power plays historical figures have made. I made some desktop wallpapers to remind myself of those various laws because I have a poor memory and wanted to remind myself of them while I was reading a bunch of history books. I didn’t make this clear and people dug this up later while I was being cancelled. They inferred that these were laws I based my life around and viewed everything I had done (including my apology) through this lens.

> I kick myself for this one a lot. I should have realized that it didn’t look like I was sharing a useful resource but instead a handbook on how to be a sociopath. To clarify: I don’t think this is a good book to base your life around. I think it can be used abusively and I see that now and I was too wrapped up in the “more knowledge can’t be a bad thing” to see how likely it would be that people would use it badly.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#157

It seems it's better to stay away entirely from certain sensitive topics. No matter your intentions, no matter what you actually think, it just takes a bit of misunderstanding or bad faith and the whole thing explode.

No, just post anonymously. Way better. Then your voice is heard, but you don't have to suffer personal consequences.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#158
Maybe the author could consider an alternate title for his article.

"I engaged in sexual misconduct with multiple women. This behavior may imply life long psychological consequence for them. Yes they are the victims but let's take a minute consider its made me feel."

I think we all know the answer...who cares.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Netflix really did him dirty throwing him under the bus like they did as have many companies/schools/organizations simply on hearsay alone. Ehm... https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/02/media/house-of-cards-kevin-... . There were eight people working on the "House of Cards" who alleged/confirmed he was predatory. There is of course still a chance that it's one big witch hunt, but this is definitely not a case of 100 Twit…

...according to someone.

According to a good friend of mine who witnessed it first-hand.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#160

Twitter is vile. I thought that the day the company started, and never created an account; nothing good can come from a platform like Twitter. It's a failure of our laws that there's no recourse to this kind of libel, either against Twitter for basing their business model on it, or the individuals responsible for spreading it. Lives are consistently destroyed and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and goes "aw-shuc…

Who are “our laws”? Twitter is a global corporation.

Nice, so that excuses lack of any regulation of this monstrocity?
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