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Scott posted Lukianoff And Defining Cancel Culture. He takes one of the given definitions of cancel culture and tries to see how it applies to edge cases, and whether it makes sense as a definition. I thought the comments on the slatestarcodex reddit thread were pretty good. I tried to post a synthesis of the ideas I got while reading the comments:
Cancel culture is speaking about and coordinating your disassociation with a person.
You have the right to not associate with people. You should feel free to exercise that right when you personally notice them doing something you don't like.
To avoid being a part of cancel culture:
Supplemental section.
Applying these to Scott's examples:
A1-A6 are not cancel culture. The actor is taking personal steps to change their association with someone they don't like.
A7-A12 are cancel culture. The actor is trying to coordinate and spread their disassociation with someone.
The other ones are a bit more complex.
B1-B2 The university admin isn't really the prime source of "cancel culture" in this example. It is the newspaper that is trying to publish a juicy story. I think the university admin is fine to resist as much as they feel comfortable resisting, but is not obligated to resist at all. The newspaper is bad, and you should cancel your subscription from that newspaper (and only tell the newspaper why you are cancelling).
B3-B5 It is cancel culture to write the article and focus it on the grad student or any particular person as the problem. If you are able to anonymize the grad student and others involved then it is not very cancel culture. If others then dig deeper and de-anonymize the grad student, they are cancel culture. If you wish to be part of the anti-cancel-culture alliance, probably don't write it at all. If you just wish to follow politeness norms anonymize the people involved to the best of your ability. If you want to be a part of cancel culture make the article entirely about the grad student.
C1 The New York Times was doing cancel culture against Scott. His friends did cancel culture against the New York Times. Scott in his articles about the situation did not encourage cancel culture. Tit-for-tat strategy can be good for getting people to not do things. But it needs to be handled carefully. Retaliate for specific instances against exact people. Do not retaliate for general attacks by generally attacking the other direction.
C2 Scott can personally cancel his subscription and never associate with the Atlantic again. That is not cancel culture. Telling us about it is cancel culture.
I think one of the comments was also on to something when he said that cancel culture is also about action out-of-proportion to the perceived transgression. Which is now not only about the loss of reputation and resulting disassociation, but also deplatforming or in extreme cases firing from the job. Potentially also debanking or who knows, maybe in the future your heating or electricity could be shut down.
I think the problem with adding "action out-of-proportion to the perceived transgression" is that it sort of absolves everyone of responsibility and doesn't really solve the cancel culture problem.
@YE_GUILTY also discusses this point below.
If someone says something that annoys me, its not really out of proportion for me to say "hey that thing you said annoyed me, and I don't really want to talk with you anymore".
Now, imagine a million other people also say what I said. And the person that said the naughty thing has a public facing job where they need to talk to random people. The company would probably be justified in firing them, since they will be worse at their job if they ever run into one of these million people that refuse to talk with them.
No one individually took an action that is out of proportion to the transgression. The million people only expressed their right to not associate with people they don't like. And the employer responded appropriately to mildly pissing off 1 million people. But the person who said something naughty still gets punished in a way that is out of proportion. So how do you stop the out of proportion punishment? My answer is that you need to avoid the point where a million people are saying "I'm never gonna talk with you".
What usually happens is that a hundred people expressed their right not to associate and the employer fires the person anyway.
I'm not understanding your point
What I think @Jiro is getting at is that companies often have itchy trigger fingers and mistake Xitter for real life, and erroneously believe that, because they've received 100 DMs in the last hour urging them to fire Alice, this is representative of a broader trend outside of Xitter and Alice has seriously embarrassed the company. When in fact most (if not all) of those DMs came from people who have never done business with the company (and never will, regardless of how they handle the Alice situation), and Alice's ability to perform her job would not have been impacted in the slightest.
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