cancel culture IV

[JGP]

Raja is a woman, Stego. And I'm pretty sure she he was going for humor there, because she he got name dropped by Trisk for liking one of my posts, which was another attempt at humor.

edit: Great, I misgendered Raja. Sorry. Not sure who I was confusing you with there. 

[DanteGabriel]

33 minutes ago, Knight Of Winter said:

Taking the supposition that losing a job is the adequate punishment for fuckups and alleged fuckups (which I personally disagree with, but found it reasonable enough to be a starting point), how do you mean to accomplish that? Give power to the internet mob, but then restrict to only to certain kinds of punishment? Remember guys, getting someone fired is fine, but death treats are not. Nor is online harassment or doxxing. Be nice. And do it only to the people who really deserve it. Ok? such

 

No. I have no plan to change anything. No one gives power to the internet mob besides the companies or employers that listen to them. There is no way to stop online mobs from forming and shouting a person out if their job and having the most deranged members send violent or abusive messages. I don't think it's a good thing, it's just a thing that exists that I am commenting on. I've said this time and time again. I find this obsession with "how do we fix it" to be either fatuous or something akin to concern trolling.

Maybe the solution is to get the owners of social media platforms to engage in some meaningful control over the shit they allow to flow through our national discourse. But I've seen what it's like for online community managers in video games, so I know that's only a band-aid, because the real problem is that we suck. 

How we fix it is to instill a less cruel and more compassionate spirit in our culture, or enact broad and powerful social change so that millions of people don't feel so powerless and bitter in their lives that they need to pile on some obscure asshole (or, as more commonly seems to be the case by the evidence I examined from that cancelled people website, a person of some prominence who misused their platform and invited the free speech reactions of large groups of people). Make America kind, for the first time. Or take away their tools to hurt each other from orbit.

So much of our culture is based on shame and cruelty. It is, I suppose, the easiest way to get attention and engagement, which means money, fame, and power for those shameless enough to make their living there. Our President is a conspicuously consumptive fraud and cheat who is as close as it gets to legally proven to be a racist and misogynist, who had his failed-from-third-base life redeemed by a TV show where the highlight was watching him fire someone on TV every week, a feat he has never actually managed in real life. That such a man became our leader and has been untouchable legally and is as widely admired as he is tells me a lot more about the rottenness of our culture than the fact that a bunch of people yelled on Twitter long enough to fire someone.

 

[Knight Of Winter]

18 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

How we fix it is to instill a less cruel and more compassionate spirit in our culture, or enact broad and powerful social change so that millions of people don't feel so powerless and bitter in their lives that they need to pile on some obscure asshole (or, as more commonly seems to be the case by the evidence I examined from that cancelled people website, a person of some prominence who misused their platform and invited the free speech reactions of large groups of people). Make America kind, for the first time. Or take away their tools to hurt each other from orbit.

 

Wow. I mean, I agree with this approach wholeheartedly - but wow, what you're talking about here are deep and fundamental problems of an ill society, whose illness manifests all the time in all the different directions: one time it's Trump as president, other time it's furious mobs, third time it's something else. If you're correct, I'll have to take whole "how do we combat cancel culture" question a level of two higher than just angry twitter nobs.

[Derfel Cadarn]

1 hour ago, JEORDHl said:

Hmn. 

Maybe it's just me [just starting my morning coffee here] but internet harrassment [nasty anonymous emails, death threats, etc] are en entirely different thing and shouldn't be conflated with this idea of cancelling.

Perceived slight and scale of response is a sadly [not sadly in some cases] human thing. The internet has just lengthened the reach. I mean yeah, of course, I guess that's definitely a part of cancel culture, ie: the increased range to gather and increase organized outrage, but death threats and the direction of nasty personal invective?

Not buying the relation.

 

edit: fucking phone

 

What you do to your phone in the privacy of your own home is your business. Please feel free to never tell us about it ever again.

Thanks.

Phone fucker.

[JGP]

57 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

What you do to your phone in the privacy of your own home is your business. Please feel free to never tell us about it ever again.

Thanks.

Phone fucker.

Son of a... lol

[Martell Spy]

I agree with much of the above regarding employers, etc. People are playing fast and loose with the definition of cancel culture, which is why it should be narrowly defined. A lot of people for example think keeping racist speech off Facebook is cancel culture. Do you agree with that? What about the rights of the random Facebook user to not be traumatized and/or intimidated just by logging on to Facebook? (Not talking about being merely very offended as some random white liberal might be, but something more visceral)

[Heartofice]

I've said it before but the incentive structure within social media (and the internet in general) encourages the sort of partisan pile on culture we are seeing. Would 'Cancel Culture' exist without the internet, no way to the same extent. 

It's probably far too late to do anything because the horse has bolted, but social media needs to do more to break down it's echo chambers for one thing. Go onto Youtube, make a new account, watch one video of a talking head from left or right and your entire internet wormhole future is set out for you. Good luck seeing anything like an opposing opinion. 

I know Twitter is trying to break those echo chambers by pushing alternative opinions at you, but I don't really see it working without some harder actions.

And then when talking about incentives, there is no incentive to writing a balanced, thought out argument on twitter, or to make a new site that appeals to a less opinionated middle ground. If you want clicks, views and likes then it pays actual money to tailor your content to one side or another and to tap into people's emotions by making them angry. With the way Google works and the way that advertising models work at the moment, that isn't going to change any time soon.

I don't know what the alternative to that model is, but the current one doesn't really work. So while it would be great if we could somehow fix people and change human nature, I really don't think that is possible. But maybe we can create an internet that isn't designed to take advantage of the worst aspects of human behaviour and amplify it.

[Zorral]

You all seem to think this cruel, mean, nasty state of culture is something that arrives in a vacuum when it has been fostered deliberately in every corner and niche by those who now own it all.   They sponsored and mentored and did so consciously and they did it with massive amounts of money they also got out of OUR pockets.  How else do you think Fox and Rush and the all the associated mouths were made for and who do you think made them?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/15/rick-perlstein-reaganland-donald-trump-nixon-republicans

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/15/rick-perlstein-reaganland-donald-trump-nixon-republicans

We allowed them to buy us all -- we refused to SEE or to BELIEVE, So now we're all bought and sold and delivered, no matter how virtuous we think we are bemoaning the meanness of the society we live in, and believe we had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

 

 

[sifth]

On 8/14/2020 at 12:45 PM, JEORDHl said:

Have any of you actually run afoul of this though? 

 

Something like this happened to me a few weeks ago, when I was having dinner with my family. Nearly all of them are hardcore Democrats, while I'm only a moderate one at best. I told them that I really didn't like Al Gore and nearly my entire family turned on me on a dime. How they ganged up on me was insane, almost to the point where they were saying, "how dare I don't like him" and "he was such a visionary for environmentalism". Not sure if this counts, but it really did leave me feeling unconformable.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

9 hours ago, JEORDHl said:

Hmn. 

Maybe it's just me [just starting my morning coffee here] but internet harrassment [nasty anonymous emails, death threats, etc] are en entirely different thing and shouldn't be conflated with this idea of cancelling.

 

 

 

 

It makes me think of Jon Ronson's book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed. If you haven't read it, it's a great book. I recommend the audio version--I could listen to him read all day.

[karaddin]

I find it curious that when dredging up examples of this, a previous iteration of this thread went over the case of James Damore and so many of the examples raised have pronounced ideological slants between the alleged victim and the baying mass of rabid social justice crusaders, yet the more recent (with respect to Damore) example of Jessica Price hasn't got a mention.

She was a developer for ArenaNet who hit her limit of ecelebrity streamers and men generally acting like she didn't know how to do her job (clearly interpreting it as being because she's a woman) and snapped at one of them from her personal Twitter account. I emphasise that point because she's a developer and community management isn't part of her job. In response a GGate-esque mob mobilised to demand her firing which it promptly obtained. That seems to be both the sort of example that would be latched onto for this argument, but instead we had pages litigating whether the guy that sent an all company memo dismissing the place of women in the company - despite that being not even close to part of his job - could have cultivated a hostile work environment for his women colleagues.

Yes there are problems with call out culture (a phrase I'm much more comfortable with) and they're frequently intra-group as well as inter-group, but buying into the "cancel culture" framing and typical examples used here is falling for a propaganda technique that is positioning this as primarily a problem with social justice movements, and by association with the concept of social justice itself.

This example also falls in line with the recent comments about it being an industrial relations issue (ie it's too easy for companies to fire people).

[TrackerNeil]

40 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Yes there are problems with call out culture (a phrase I'm much more comfortable with) and they're frequently intra-group as well as inter-group, but buying into the "cancel culture" framing and typical examples used here is falling for a propaganda technique that is positioning this as primarily a problem with social justice movements, and by association with the concept of social justice itself.

I didn't think I was falling for propaganda--my comments in this thread, whether or not one agrees with them, are pretty thoughtful, and come from genuinely held beliefs--but I guess we'll just have to leave it there.

[karaddin]

3 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

I didn't think I was falling for propaganda--my comments in this thread, whether or not one agrees with them, are pretty thoughtful, and come from genuinely held beliefs--but I guess we'll just have to leave it there.

My views of what qualifies as "falling for propaganda" may be somewhat wider in scope than yours. For a different example I judge my own view of WW2 Nazis as being competent and efficient in their enactment of their disgusting evil as falling for the aesthetic of their propaganda that lived on in movies etc several works removed from the likes of Triumph of the Will. It doesn't have to make me agree with them for it to have had an effect, just convince me that they weren't a bunch of corrupt incompetent fucks that were too busy geeking out over shit like building the "best" tank to worry over actually being able to build the thing at scale.

And that aesthetic propaganda is still having an impact, because it makes it much harder to see that the current crop of Nazis are actually very similar. If you think the ones of the past are distinguished by their competence, then you can fall into the trap of dismissing the modern ones as less of a threat. 

So I'm not judging you when I posit that discussing the phenomena on those terms is falling for propaganda, I'm suggesting that having the argument in those terms is conditioned ground that will serve them despite your best and sincere efforts and that reframing the debate might enable you to address the problems you see without that unintended effect.

[Stubby]

[MOD]

I think 4 threads of this topic is enough, so this is cancel topic time.

Also, remember to keep away from the personal, please.

[/MOD]