Social media has massively amplified the penalty for making a mistake or offhand remark. People used to make tasteless jokes all the time and it was treated as it was, just a joke and life continued. Now anything out of the pale that catches the attention of some sort of influencer spells doom. Anyone caught at a bad moment on camera is pilloried, made out to be the anti christ and have people actively seeking out their employer in an attempt to cost them their job. No one is allowed to have a bad moment anymore where as before we were all acknowledged as flawed beings and that was ok. Publicly espousing an unpopular opinion now can be career suicide even if done outside of the work environment.
And the worst is kids. If you think you can go off track and say dumb things as an adult, think of the 14yo self. I thank God I was a teenager before the modern internet. There is no forgiveness. The doors of college education can be shut on a whim for a bad joke. Where and when I grew up, your political opinion was irrelevant to your college admission. You didn't have to demonstrate your committment to the polical cause of the moment to apply.
Kids nowadays can't party like we used to - because they need to consider that everything mildly interesting they do will be uploaded to our machine overlords for monetization. Bare breasts probably monetize well, so they were one of the first "casualities" of ubiquitous social media.
I grew up with internet, and had to deal with cyberbullies long before most knew what internet was. I think my inclination to clean up after myself and natural aversion for exposing too many personal details (I.e. didn't sign up for any social media, nor any (local) precursors) helped me steer clear of the worst of this. I'm surprised that so many are so blasé about this, while it's raining stories of cyberbullying, measurable increases in youth depression and lonelyness, identity theft and then regular theft.
I wear a seatbelt, a mask, and I take care of myself online as well. Seems like the facts are clear on all of those.
> Where and when I grew up, your political opinion was irrelevant to your college admission. You didn't have to demonstrate your committment to the polical cause of the moment to apply.
And... is this the case today? Do universities exclude your application or scrutinise your political beliefs?
I have heard from interns that colleges want to see engagement for social justice or diversity causes during the application process.
I have also heard that for research grants you need to show “diversity and inclusion” efforts. One guy I talked to from a Nevada school said these are often won by rich colleges who are almost purely white but know how to talk diversity whereas poorer colleges that are actually way more diverse don’t rate well on the diversity and inclusion scale.
> I have heard from interns that colleges want to see engagement for social justice or diversity causes during the application process.
It's been 15 years since I did the college admissions dance, but I do remember that most of the superstitions about the application process don't apply if you score above a 33 on the ACT (perhaps you'd need a perfect score to have the velvet rope lifted if you're applying for MIT). All the rules of thumb about taking at least three years of a foreign language and balancing between 2–4 extra-curricular activities are for the students who won't be immediately offered merit scholarships.
Still a spectacularly better proposition than most of US history, where admission were far more restrictive. Many Ivy League schools did not admit women until the 1960s and 1970s. Weird how we forget this stuff and somehow pretend we're living in the more restrictive era.
I can forgive kids, but it is fully adult humans that engage in this type of cancellation.
This is a typical witch hunt based on insecurity. At least academics should have enough self reflection to question their behavior, but they don't and they are the worst offenders here. And some of them even say they want to display leadership. What a sad joke...
> Where and when I grew up, your political opinion was irrelevant to your college admission
I agree that people should be forgiven for mistakes they made as children, and that the internet should be more anonymous in general, but you lost me there. You sound like a right-wing conspiracy theorist decrying "Cultural Marxism".
For grad school across fields a statement supporting “equity and inclusion” is becoming the norm. While this does not sound political, the use of the word “equity” vs “equality” is political.
Specifically, equity explicitly entails redistributing resources based on lack of privilege. This is instead of equality, which entails providing everyone with the same resources and opportunity.
Now we are left with question of how to fairly distribute resources. These are centralized decisions made by career bureaucrats. If the distinction was made along economic lines, this would not be all that political. However, lines are commonly drawn along race, gender, and sexual orientation. Now those making these decisions have decide based on belief structures about what groups are the least privilege. These structures are inherently political and a poor proxy for economic status.
I want to add from anecdotal experience that this conformist ideology spans beyond just university applicants. I have had to declare my views and positions on "equity and inclusion" at job interviews for software development positions here in the Bay Area. I'll call them out; it was DoorDash in SF.
At Google, a couple years back they swapped out one of the technical interviews for a G&I interview, which is really just a behavioral interview. But the questions come from an approved question bank, with each question tagged with a different attribute it's supposed to probe. One of these tags is DEI, and you're required to ask at least one question tagged DEI when conducting one of these behavioral interviews.
Usually the question does not explicitly call out race or gender, but the grading rubric definitely dings the candidate if TC doesn't reference them in their answer or says anything about political, economic, or regional diversity instead.
The one saving grace of this system is that no one expects any meaningful hiring signal to come out of these interviews unless TC is a total idiot when answering the questions.
Just had two nieces start college last year. Both in Large midwestern state colleges. These were not Ivy League or staunch liberal arts colleges.
Both put a huge emphasis on extracurricular activities which needed to be focused on social justice areas. Both were petrified they didn't have enough activities to get accepted.
In the end, they got accepted to where they wanted to go, but the shift to tow the line for social justice, inclusion and other hot topics of the day has been surprising to me. When I applied in the early aughts, the only thing my classmates were worried about were our SAT/ACT scores. Nobody cared at that point about your political leanings. Seems like today that is a greater focus than ever before.
It's not like there is some peer reviewed study I can cite for you, but in my own anecdotal experience one of my admissions essays needed to be about "what Diversity means to me". I, of course, said it was the greatest thing since sliced bread because I can't help but think a neutral or contrarian viewpoint would instantly get my application rejected. One of my Gen. Ed. requirements was to take a course that was flagged as co-curricular with "Human Diversity". And, the school I went to isn't even considered that liberal.
On the sections for extracurricular activities, volunteering, etc. where you try to make yourself look saintly. Just guessing, but six months volunteering at a homeless shelter for refugees will probably help your admissions more than six months volunteering to catalogue 19th century clogs at a museum.
Coming from country where even behavioural interviews are rarity and only very specific fields have something beyond entrance exam the whole extracurricular activity thing feels extremely strange. Why should that have anything to do with academic performance.
> The difference now is that visibility is more uniformly distributed across the population.
And that you don't necessarily have to chase said visibility. Before, visibility was a goal very few people could attain. Now it's a bomb that can be thrown at you without warning.
I am not sure if humans can exist without blacklists. Some people definitely have the instinct to create them.
But nowadays it is fairly easy for every employer out there to check out whether there is a 'controversy' in your past or not, even if you are not a traditional celebrity.
Being less employable in Miami is one thing. Being less employable in the entire Anglosphere is another.
Let's not pretend the scale of the phenomenon today and mass surveillance capacity of today plus mass exposure and permanent public record of social media, web forums, even public spaces and events (e.g. with someone recording a video) is in any way comparable to the McCarthy era.
Or the the "offenses" people get social-mob-attacked, pilloried, and fired are in any way comparable to the offenses (even if BS) people were prosecuted for in that day: being considered an enemy of the state working to overthrow the government.
Most of the people I'm seeing get actually cancelled are... being considered "an enemy of the state working to overthrow the government".
I'm also seeing a lot of base-rate fallacy and availability bias issues (surprisingly, from many of the same people who complain about other people falling prey to the base rate fallacy w.r.t. Covid). That you can think of a few instances where people were loudly pilloried for, say, weaponizing the state use of force to racist ends, doesn't mean that it happens that often.
Except that I never had a chance of being on a hollywood blacklist in the first place. I don't even use social media, and it's still possible I could say something off-color somewhere and find myself canceled.
Poor kids couldn't get a job in Hollywood. Oh the humanity!
What's going on now is being blacklisted by multiple industries. People who get marked as such never work in "normal" companies again and have to move continents to find work.
You are comparing being blacklisted by a group of people to being blacklisted by society at large.
> People who get marked as such never work in "normal" companies again and have to move continents to find work.
Who?
Maybe I'm just not paying attention to the news, but I somewhere missed the great wave of American software developers migrating to Europe for a better life for their families.
This is a distraction and diversion from the original comment.
Hollywood is not at the scale of the internet. Some privileged people got cancelled in Hollywood, who cares. When a hard working person gets cancelled by saying something stupid, the consequences are back breaking.
While I agree that ordinary people being cancelled for saying something stupid is a bad thing that should be condemned[0], I'll play devil's advocate: however unfair these events may be, are they truly statistically significant? Or is concern about "cancellation" of hard working people itself a moral panic amplified by the nature of modern media?
Sure, we've all heard of donglegate, or about that guy whose hand did an "OK" gesture on his car door and was accused of "far-right" symbolism, or about that teenaged girl who once said the И-word in a video celebrating her driver's licence which resulted in her rejection from university, and many many more. Yes, these things are injustices and they should not happen, and they should be stopped. But on the large scale of things, does saying something stupid really pose a significant risk of disproportionate public shaming to a normal person?
The online hatemob only has so much attention span to dedicate to its latest victim(s), and there is only so much airtime and tweets to be dedicated to the latest outrage. And, in the meantime, hundreds of millions of people live their lives as normal, with more-or-less online presence, saying, doing and posting things which may well be "cancellable" according to this or that neopuritanical value — and yet, nothing happens to them. And this is good.
Don't get me wrong, I do think that fear of "cancellation" inhibiting people's openness to express themselves and their mental well-being is itself problematic, however statistically irrational this fear may be. However, focusing attention on these rare events, even if it is to criticise the phenomenon, may only make the problem worse.
If you'll forgive the somewhat melodramatic analogy, it's a bit like terrorism. Just like disproportionately instilling fear of terrorism only serves to help the terrorists' objective to instil fear, so does disproportionately insisting on the unfairness and disproportionate consequences of "cancel culture" only serve to help the cancellers themselves in their desire to influence society.
[0] For a given meaning of "cancelled" and "saying something stupid", that is.*
I don't think it matters whether its that statistically significant. You can increase expected-value by increasing likelihood of occurrence, or increase the value of the outcome.
Take a loan shark, for example. You don't need to take a leg every time a loan is late. You just need to do it to enough of them, visibly enough, that everyone gets the message -- you can miss a payment, and maybe get away with it... but you also might get seriously fucked up.
And suddenly, no one's missing payments. Because the % chance of failure might be low, but the damage done is dramatically high (potentially infinite, if you escalate from taking legs to taking heads) -- giving you a very a high expected-value.
You only need to expel a few people from society for espousing wrong-think, to get most people to fear speaking wrong (accidentally, or intentionally). And it's perfectly rational.
Regarding terrorism, it's the same thing. You don't need to have that many terrorist events for it to be rational to defend heavily against them -- if they do enough damage (e.g. 9/11), they've made up for their rarity. The problem with defense-against-terrorism is that it's used to justify things that have nothing to do with it, or very weakly related (eg invasion of countries, elimination of security protocols, invasions of privacy, etc) and is used as a scapegoat for all sorts of nefarious activity.
The part that's irrational is not the fear of terrorists, but rather the mindless interpretation of anything that claims to help resolve that fear.
Forget Hollywood. Imagine trying to build the career of your choice as a black person, or a woman or an out gay person in that same era. Society was casually blacklisting the literal majority of Americans from most professional realms.
Yes, but that was the case for most of history, and America (and the world) at the time did it progressively less and less (first the abolition of slavery, then women right to vote, civil rights, de-seggregation, and so on).
Whereas today it's a new phenomenon, that gets progressively worse even though the problems you've mentioned (regarding blacks, women, gays, etc) are at their historical lower point.
So while America was progressing then, this is a regression now.
And it also affects blacks, women, gays, lesbians, republicans, demoracts, old-style lefties, and so on -- all of those categories have had members cancelled or mob-attacked for wrong opinions... (even someone like Dave Chappelle, who is a comedian of all things, has been attacked on such grounds).
> (even someone like Dave Chappelle, who is a comedian of all things, has been attacked on such grounds).
Dave Chappelle, with his recent $8-figure deal with a prominent pop-culture/FAANG company, who keep publishing and promoting his specials, seems like he's actually a counter-argument to your point.
If there's an actual blacklist where YC employees can just arbitrarily ban founders from working with certain companies that's quite surprising and maybe pretty bad for YC's reputation.
If you mean YC has a strong community of founders who share war stories of how people and companies were difficult to work with, and the other YC founders pay attention to those stories though, well, that's not a blacklist.
About the blacklist, I don’t know exactly how it works, who specifically has access to it or who can add entries to it, but I know it exists, I know people who have been affected by it, know people who have been told explicitly about it and know that at least some partners have access to it.
I have no idea what you're referring to, and if you're going to make such insinuations you should be specific and concrete. Otherwise it's impossible to answer, and that makes it a smear.
YC competitors go straight to shownew to minimize visibility and they have no hope of landing on the front-page. Whereas YC companies go straight to the front-page.
That's not even touching on the dirty tricks the YC network plays with the VC community. They will work hard to ensure that no YC competitors get funded, including spreading false dirt on founders of competitive companies.
/shownew and /show are clearly explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html ("Every Show HN appears on shownew. Once it clears a small points threshold, it will appear on the show page in the top bar.") and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ("All submissions appear on newest, and all Show HNs on shownew, but there is a small points threshold before a post appears on ask or show.")
The stuff you're saying about how YC works is not only made-up, it's the opposite of the truth. YC often funds competitors to existing YC startups—first because if you're funding 1000 startups a year, that's inevitable; and second because startups don't usually die because of competition, as PG and YC have been explaining to founders for many years. A startup that's building something people want will almost always find a way to differentiate itself.
We don't moderate Show HNs to favor YC startups or disfavor other startups. We do give YC startups the chance to post Launch HNs that get placed on HN's front page (as explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). But these don't go on the /show tab (they used to, but I disabled that so YC startups wouldn't get too much of an extra advantage). Plenty of Show HNs make the front page, and the overwhelming majority have no connection to YC—in fact, I can't fathom how you'd have thought otherwise, since this seems quite obvious.
When a non-YC startup is having a successful Show HN, I often help them and also encourage them to apply to YC. When a non-YC startup posts a Show HN that isn't successful, I often email them with suggestions about how to rework it so the community will like it better, and if they do that, I often put their Show HN in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it gets a random placement on HN's front page.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28810941 I gather that you're upset about something that happened to a specific Show HN. Rather than jumping to false conclusions about what happened, you should post the link so that (a) we can look into it and respond, and (b) readers can make up their minds for themselves. Since the comments you're posting contain no specific information, the more you post dramatic claims, the less likely readers are to believe you.
There could be a ton of reasons why your friend's Show HN got demoted, ranging from setting off the flamewar detector, the voting ring detector, getting flagged by users for some reason, getting downweighted because it broke the Show HN guidelines, getting downweighted because it broke the HN guidelines, various kinds of spam or abuse behavior (the worst of which is buying upvotes from spammers, which people unfortunately do but which typically causes their post to get buried immediately, and their account and site banned on HN). I'd need a link to say for sure which of those, if any, it was. Or maybe it just didn't get enough upvotes to clear the hurdle from /shownew to /show. That often happens. It happens to YC startups too.
If your friend(s) didn't do anything bad, you or they should email us so we can look at the post and possibly help. That's what people do when they assume good faith, and that approach has a much higher expected value than the approach you've been taking with these comments. You/they should do that out of simple self-interest if nothing else. Even when people did do something bad, we usually forgive and unban them if they take responsibility for it and promise not to do it again.
Not only do we not lie to the community, we try never to do anything that isn't clearly defensible to the community. To do otherwise would be not only wrong but stupid, since it would risk losing the good faith of HN users. Why would we do that? That's the only value HN has. It's precisely by not doing it that we can keep HN in the high esteem of this audience, and therefore keep YC in a kind of special relationship with users here. That's what makes HN valuable to YC (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
> There could be a ton of reasons why your friend's Show HN got demoted, ranging from setting off the flamewar detector, the voting ring detector, getting flagged by users for some reason, getting downweighted because it broke the Show HN guidelines, getting downweighted because it broke the HN guidelines, various kinds of spam or abuse behavior (the worst of which is buying upvotes from spammers, which people unfortunately do but which typically causes their post to get buried immediately, and their account and site banned on HN).
"We have half a dozen opaque excuses" isn't the argument you think it is. The fact is this site shouldn't even exist due to the crystal clear conflict of interest between running a vc firm and a startup "news" site. That's not just journalism 101, it's common sense 101. It's not defensible.
> Not only do we not lie to the community, we try never to do anything that isn't clearly defensible to the community.
If you take one step outside the HN/YC echo chamber, you'll find that most people know that this site is a scam and heavily weighted toward promoting YC companies as that's the only reason it exists. Only a very, very foolish person would believe otherwise.
Also LOL that you hid this reply! It's because there is no defense for a vc firm pretending to run a "news" service and you know it.
I didn't hide any of your posts - I've been unhiding them*. They are getting filtered by software. I've also been turning off the user flags that you've been attracting.
This has become repetitive, though, so I'm going to stop doing that now unless you have some specific information to offer.
* because we moderate HN less, not more, on YC-related topics [1]. Less doesn't mean zero, though.
You're lying. Next time you nuke one of my friends Show HNs off the front page, I'll send them a link to this comment so they can call you out publicly. YC partners don't hold grudges and work their network against people who have damaged their ego??? Bull fucking shit. I know YC companies call in hits all the time on people as they brag about it relentlessly. You have all kinds of levers to pull here and you pull them without hesitation. The YC network spreads false information about competitors all the time. They kill deals, focus companies against those they don't like and generally are one of the least ethical group of people operating in the tech space (and that's saying a lot). That you'll get on here and make an outright brazen lie saying that this doesn't happen is very par for the course.
None of this is true. I mean, I suppose there could be an invisible YC cabal acting completely out of character in ways the rest of us never observe, but that's so unlikely, it would be a Russell's teapot. I have never observed anything along those lines, and I've observed countless things going the other way.
I've also helped many (dozens if not hundreds by now) non-YC startups with their Show HNs, so the truth is actually the opposite of what you say. The goal is to have HN be the most interesting community it can be, because that's how HN serves YC's interests in the long run (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). The global optimization is worth more than the sum of any local ones. We try never to do things that aren't defensible to the community, because the good faith of the community is the only asset HN has. Risking that would be dumb.
You should really supply specific links if you're going to post accusations, so that readers can make up their minds for themselves. Otherwise the community here is going to compare the extremeness of your claims to their lack of any specific information, and discount them.
But there is no comparison to a small population being affected (ironically in the USSR, lots of artists and authors got not only blacklisted but sent to the Gulags --gee, I wonder if they wrote to Stalin on behalf of their brethren) to potentially anyone and everyone being a potential subject at any moment for something otherwise innocuous.
What’s more this is much worse. It’s not about a singular subject (communist sympathizer) but just about anything at any moment. It's a shifting landscape so much so that there is internecine sniping among all groups.
Today you can’t even make a genuine faux pas without the risk of someone coming down on you and risking your livelihood. That’s quite different.
If Pelosi said off handedly, you know Trump did a couple of things right, or you know I don’t agree 100% with everything BLM she’ll be in trouble and she’s the top politician outside the president. Imagine a school teacher…
> But there is no comparison to a small population being affected to potentially anyone and everyone being a potential subject.
If I may paraphrase... there's no comparison between oppressing a minority I don't belong to, and the entire population being subjected to the same risk.
If you say "tax the rich 95%." That's bad. "Tax everyone 95%" That's really bad. I don't understand how you cannot see that. The fewer people affected by something, the less evil it is even if it's evil.
I mean, what are you saying, H-wood blacklisting was bad, therefore what we see in social media ostracizing is acceptable? That seems... strange.
Of course not all sympathizers of communism also agreed with death camps, re-education, stifling of progress, etc., etc., but they tacitly contributed to to those bad things. A young person, or someone who thinks they are being funny or whatever caught in a bad moment is different from someone who knowingly supports tyrannical forms of government.
Modern bidirectional communications tools make it easy to wide-cast a message and then have that message responded to by potentially millions of receivers.
I think we don't respect the power we wield often enough. That's a terrible capability to provide via a system that also encourages you to blurt something out in 280 characters or less. Every single tweet is a shout from a mountaintop (and since it's time-stamped and on the timeline forever, that shout echoes perpetually).
Additionally, that infrastructure incentivizes gravitation towards some flat-mass-"centroid" of acceptable cultural practice, and there's no particular guarantee that such a thing across the bulk of humanity is either possible or desirable.
Where do you draw the line though? Are we never allow to criticize someone for their opinions or "jokes", regardless of content or context?
It's easy to just state "People should be able to make jokes or have a bad day." and while maybe that's true, I don't think we should be able to brush off all behavior by just labeling it a "bad day".
You draw the line at where it has an actual, measurable impact on other people. “Joe Schmoe has an opinion you don’t like” doesn’t impoverish anyone, it doesn’t prevent anyone from getting food or housing or any other need. It’s just a person having an opinion.
Going into hysterics over trivial nonsense that ultimately doesn’t matter is not helping anyone. It’s not making the world a better place. Quite the opposite.
The early US had many people of the opinion that black people were inferior, more akin to animals than humans. Do you think that led to anyone not getting food or housing, or to anyone living in poverty?
Indeed, and in that time people having the opinion that black people should be free would have been considered to have “wrong” and “dangerous” opinions that would cause great damage to society.
Would we be better off today if those in power then had been able to silence unpopular opinions?
It is pretty clear which opinions that are accepted by many people today well be unacceptable tomorrow. So why not examine that further? It feels like you're denying your conscience.
If enough Joe Schmoes have bad opinions it does in fact impoverish people and prevent them accessing necessary goods like food and housing. Many ideas are in fact wrong and if widespread terribly dangerous.
There are two issues being discussed here: the ability to speak/censor opinions, and the ability to control unspoken opinions.
First, every individual has what should be a rather obvious and fundamental right to think whatever thoughts and have whatever opinions they like. Nobody gets to decide what opinions an individual holds, except for that individual.
Now, as for the spreading of those ideas:
Power to censor is frequently used to silence good ideas and allow bad ones to flourish - see modern-day censorship in China, Russia, North Korea, India, and Australia, or older censorship around the Vietnam War and slave liberation (back when owning slaves was in fashion).
The fact that someone is silencing an opinion has very little to do with whether or not that opinion is actively harmful - and, at the very least, those in power have a strong tendency to use their power (including censorship, if available) to gain more power, and those in the public realm will use their own speech and censorship (including via "canceling" aka mob justice) to benefit their own group, regardless of whether their cause is just or their tactics are fair.
So, it's all well and good for you to say "this opinion is harmful", but that's not really well correlated to whether that opinion is actually harmful. Even when the majority of the country agrees that an opinion is harmful, that doesn't actually mean that it is - but, as a democracy, we choose an imperfect system that works most of the time. That system, however, involves passing laws that declare some speech harmful, based on representatives elected by majority vote of their constituents. Twitter-based outrage from a tiny fraction of the population defining "bad opinions" is so antithetical to the idea of democracy that it shouldn't even be considered in the first place.
tl;dr we have an existing mechanism for controlling "harmful speech" and it's the government, not social media mobs.
I think context, rather than impact is the most important thing.
Private dialogue among friends is just that.
Unless they are actively plotting violence or some kind of action, or making unambiguous bad statements such as 'I hate people of this group' or an admission of a crime, then otherwise, it just shouldn't be news.
Sure we are allowed to criticize someone and if that person has voluntarily posted their content then that person opens themselves up. So much of what happens now is someone filmed without their consent and that video is then posted to social media and the person is doomed. Think of your worst moment and then imagine it was filmed and posted to social media where 100k other people shared it. Very hard to recover from something like that. Imagine for the rest of your life whenever an employer googles your name, the video of that worst moment is the first result. Unless someone is actively doing something that endangers another person, its very rare that the punishment meted out by social media is warranted by the transgression.
it’s unfair that what used to be a passing mistake has turned into the permanent record of your failures. and i think this is much worse for kids than adults
How often does someone, let alone your potential employer, actually know (or care) the name of the person in some embarrassing viral video? It seems like a rare exception for someone to face meaningful blowback from this scenario.
In a post-Donglegate world, I don’t know how interesting this question is. I don’t know exactly where to draw the line, but it seems like we’re so far over it that most people could take “don’t gossip” as a reasonable heuristic.
If you don't know the person, why do you care? Unless it's a politician why do you care? What does it bring to your life to criticize someone on twitter for a bad joke?
Should you care about jokes made by people you have never met in a city far away?
In the real world you would pull your friend aside and criticize him for making these 'jokes'. Now the jokes happen on the internet and instead of criticism from friends, family and neighbors you get attacked by strangers you have never met.
I would say that criticism of opinions or bad jokes is still OK, but given the dynamism of virtual mobs, one should be more careful how it is done. Triggering an avalanche is rarely a good thing, in mountains or on Twitter.
As far as I am concerned, a personal "between four eyes" criticism goes the longest way.
I just maintain an anonymous one and never comment. Lets me follow whatever topics I care about and no worries about anything coming back to bite me. I make sure to try and include people I disagree with as well to a certain extent as its a good way to see other points of view and also to reinforce why I disagree with them in the first place. Lets me know I am not in an echo chamber and at least 51% of my opinions are probably my own... maybe.
Exactly. I'm surprised by the downvotes because, while it is not mandatory (yet?), I have definitely seen financial institution forms with an optional field for social media accounts.
People will downvote you for any number of reasons - some good, mostly bad. Ignore it, don't comment on it - "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." Inquisitive and thoughtful HN readers will read your comment anyway, think about it, and comment on it.
I maintain a professional account, that occasionally posts job related materials as well as shout-outs to the local sportsball franchises. Oh and puppy pictures.
While not that widespread yet it is there in some context. For instance regularly miss out on news and updates from.various organizations I was once very active in because they have almost completely migrated to Facebook. A lot of extracurricular activities as well as schools require some sort of social media be it Google, or Facebook to stay plugged into events and check one students progress.
You and I agree. Don’t use social media and this won’t be a problem. I think the disadvantages outweigh.
But… what about when Hackernews or Reddit or Discord whatever formerly anonymous some-degree-of-social-network is made not so anonymous? I have a Reddit account that I’ve surely said things if someone was motivated they could make life hard for me - true things - but who cares about that anymore?
It’s not the same thing, but we might not be sure in what ways they are similar.
It depends what your risk appetite is. I see it as layers.
So an organization with skill and motivation, like government agencies vs some specific person with a limited skillset and motivation Who are you trying to "hide" from?
Simply having a different username for each website helps with that. Personally for Facebook / Linkedin I never list my current employer. Enough of a layer to make it harder to track my employer for the casual lookup, but not impossible given enough time/money/competency.
The purpose of my question was to lead to the inevitable question of what the purpose of identifying a senator's gender was, at least in the context of the comment I was replying to.
>Like the differences between waiter/waitress, masseur/masseuse, actor/actress, and countless of other examples.
I would ask the same question for those, but at least those might be used simply because they are frequently used and it might be habit. But I have never seen the word "senatress" used in 30+ years of living in the US, and I read a ton of political news.
Although, I id not know about masseur and masseuse. I thought all people who gave massages were masseuses. But I am not familiar with the massage scene. I can see a possible purpose for clarifying a woman performing massages versus a man performing massages since someone might prefer a massage from one rather than another.
>The purpose of my question was to lead to the inevitable question of what the purpose of identifying a senator's gender was, at least in the context of the comment I was replying to.
There’s the other side of the spectrum as well: what the influencers seek to gain by amplifying criticisms for any odd remark.
Just think of the whole anti-vaccine movements and the spread of misinformation. Folks come out of the woodwork and claim a myriad of side effects but they have no background to scientifically vet the published vaccine research.
Influencers leveraging fear and confusion as a way to amplify bias and shame people making positive comments on a vaccine.
And this generates them massive followings and potentially increases “social status”.
Curiously I’m seeing somewhat of a proportional trend: as peoples ability to amplify misinformation increases, so does the value of censorship. This is kind of scary to be honest—to say that censorship has inherent value in our society.
All it takes is one climate-science denier to change 50% of the population’s opinion. Or to convince the public that one pro-vaccine comment is the scourge of humanity.
EDIT: Just got a downvote and reflecting on how the down-vote makes me feel; how should I proceed? Should I defend my comment? Do I want more social karma on this website? Am I being punished for my opinion. How’s that for some introspection…
> People used to make tasteless jokes all the time and it was treated as it was, just a joke and life continued.
Except it was only ever "just a joke" for the perpetrators. What we're seeing more of now is the voice of the previously unheard and ignored, and it turns out they don't like being the butt of racist or sexist or bigoted "jokes". This is the same energy as dismissing sexual harassment as "boys will be boys".
"We can't give girls a friendly pat on the ass and compliment anymore. The liberals have taken over and ruined everything!"
He said "People used to make tasteless jokes all the time" and you equated it to "why can't we physically assault girls anymore".
There are shades of gray to all huuman interaction, and thanks to behaviour like yours where people jump to prove they are good, anything can be considered "bad".
Why should people in position of power get to choose what others should and shouldn't be offended by? Both with physical and verbal abuse, minorities and women have been told by people in positions of power to toughen up. All we're seeing now is the repercussions of those marginalized folks getting their voice. I'm sorry you don't like it when they complain about being abused, but telling them to just toughen up is absolutely the losing position to take here.
Why do they have to apologize to society for making a mistake in a local setting? Social media has created this bizarre environment where a simple interaction between a couple people offends the entire world and then the entire world crushes the transgressor, ends their employment and demands an apology? That is insanity. Normal people should never be thrust into the position where they are forced to apologize to society for a normal mistake or face complete annihilation. Additionally, its not like social media waits for their target to apologize before wreaking havoc on their ability to feed their family. They just attack and then the apology is used as an additional attack vector because no matter what the apology is never enough.
Looking at the scandals of the last decade, apology usually does not help the target at all. It is just part of the expected sick show before being fired or punished anyway.
One day, we will wake up in a world where apology has died out because it was never rewarded by forgiveness.
In my opinion, this social cooling is the strongest argument in favour of privacy.
Imagine there's a camera in your living room. You don't know if it's turned on, whether anyone is watching, or why they would be. However, I guarantee that air guitar solos will be fewer and further between. You won't walk around naked, pick your nose or watch questionable content anymore. You might even avoid certain conversations. Even without known consequences, you will police your own behaviour, just in case.
Digital surveillance is a lot like that, but you know that someone is watching. You just don't know whether they are paying attention, or what their motives are.
Even worse, if the people who watch get greedy, if the government forces their hand, or if their security is breached, there's no telling how your data will be used. This sword will always dangle over your head.
that’s the concept of the panopticon, as described (but not originated) by foucault, who recognized that self-discipline is the most powerful force shaping our behaviors, especially as it actualizes our perceptions of external coercion into internalized self-discipline.
A few years ago, I couldn't have said I thought about it at all. For better and for worse, it wasn't part of the discourse. Now, I'm not all that different, yet it comes up again and again. I'm often forced to choose a side, even when it's all hypotheticals and virtues. I feel forced because online media is permanent, each statement is my closing argument. When the litigation tries to bend toward actual experience, the thorny truths are much too thorny to accept. I've seen this play out time and time again, on a vast number of subjects. We summarize the sad state of things as "lacking nuance". It seeps into my personal life as well now, having become a part of my personality.
Fact is, it's not just a lack of nuance and it's not just conformity. It's hard boiled fear. Fear of the repercussions, fear of the judging eyes, fear of any reaction at all. Conformism requires something of a leader to follow, but with "social cooling" it's simply following nothing into the depths of atrophy and despair. Many don't even notice.
So there's those who challenge and those who accept, like always. The winners will be the charismatic and successful, but I have still yet to hear one from any side I'd follow. Am I blind? Am I missing something critical to living in this fucked up world? Am I being too rhetorical, too demanding, too focused on the issue outside my control?
At the end of the day I sleep poorly, wake restlessly, and like anyone still holding on to sanity, I find my own distractions.
Perhaps it's where I live, but for me - it's just the internet. It doesn't have any resemblance to my reality. As someone who's been on the internet since a teen, watched it evolve, etc, it makes me kinda sad. Because I feel forced out. But that's ok.
As online communities, emboldened really by tech companies themselves, try to gain control by silencing dissent via mob behavior or 'canceling', I just find myself leaving. And in doing so make both myself and presumably the community happier for it. Take a walk in the park, or go sit on the beach a while. Make small talk with people walking by. In doing all this, I realize I never meet or see the type people who are so 'in control' and loud and/or threatening online. Most people seem friendly enough in person.
So my questions become - are these people even real? Do they live somewhere I'm just unfamiliar with? Or did the internet give them some loud voice that otherwise doesn't exist in person? Why are these voices the loudest - does controversy really sell this well? Is social media purposefully putting controversial things on the forefront because it increases engagement?
Not actually expecting answers, just rambling really - apologies.
Hi. I realize you're not looking for answers, but I would like to give my 2 cents. Now, this is just my opinion and I welcome constructive criticism.
> are these people even real? Do they live somewhere I'm just unfamiliar with? Or did the internet give them some loud voice that otherwise doesn't exist in person?
Yes. Most, but not all, of these "loud" influencers are real. Social media has become their platform to voice their opinions extremely loudly. And it has given them a reach that wasn't possible before. One public tweet on Twitter is instantly available to all the users and "lurkers". The algorithm pushes it based on engagement and it propagates through the filter bubble it "fits" in. Now they know that there are others who agree with them, but the only way to reach them is through social media. So most of them just keep their opinion online.
> Why are these voices the loudest - does controversy really sell this well? Is social media purposefully putting controversial things on the forefront because it increases engagement?
Yes. The main goal of Big Social (is that even a real term?) is to increase engagement and then sell ads. Fixing this "most engaged content goes to the top" approach will cut into their profits which will spook investors.
P.S This is my first comment outside of my own post (yes, only one post). I am a lurker
I also escape from the computer to reality like sports or walks. The people are real. Corporations like to install degenerate or mentally ill people in lower positions of power to humiliate the high performers and keep them under control.
The higher positions are still occupied by the jocks, who watch the whole theater with great amusement and joke about useful idiots (I have contact with a few of them).
No apologies needed. The internet gives people a platform to speak without the same(but not necessarily less) social accountability that exists in meatspace. The change in accountability implies a change in the access that participants have to social scripts. What we are experiencing is a mismatch of social script access between meatspace and the digital space enabled by novel digital mediums and increased connectivity.
That is the current contradiction. My bet is that neither the meatspace social construct nor the digital social construct wins. The resolution is in their synthesis. That probably means that some meatspace social norms change and some digital social norms change. Finally, any resistance to those changes in inherently reactionary.
These people always existed, it is just an uncomfortable change. It used to be holier than thou people at church now it’s holier than thou suburban teenagers on social media. It’s uncomfortable because many people did and still do think these people are liberal and “on their side” and don’t get that this toxic human behavior has existed forever and goes between groups.
I grew up around fundamentalist religious folks and I am glad that someone else sees the parallel here. And it's hard, because besides the more sociopathic types that are 100% motivated by social status, there are many who really mean well and just don't understand how destructive dogmatic thinking is, and how it tends to mainly help bolster the aforementioned sociopaths in their goals of domination rather than any intended good effects in the world.
> I'm often forced to choose a side, even when it's all hypotheticals and virtues.
In what situations are you forced to choose a side? In conversations with your friends/family? At your place of employment (in whatever form that may be)?
As the presentation notes, in some circles it is. I absolutely conduct myself in public under the presumption that people in the background could jump in at any moment to make a viral video. I don't necessarily want to defend that as a matter of risk assessment, I'm probably being too neurotic about it, but the idea that I might become the country's punching bag if I say the wrong thing is just deeply distressing.
I deleted my Facebook, stopped using Twitter, and even gave up projects on GitHub. I recently wrote a little rant about the death of my iPhone [1]... to be honest, I don't know how to live anymore. As much as I try to solve my problems, I find new ones in isolation. It's complicated and sad.
> Pretty rich, coming out of an organization that assaulted and chased Vincent Canfield out of CCC for . . . . owning trollish domain names.
Are you sure it wasn't him being an open and virulent racist[1]?
Edit: I should say that I have the dubious distinction of actually haven spoken to vc for several years on IRC. He might have started as a troll, but he's failed in the way that every bad troll fails: by getting high on his own supply.
There is video of the security assaulting him and some others, including the person taking the video.
Even if he is an outright nazi (debatable, but he sure uses nazi stuff for "trolling" and "humor" as he puts it), and even if he refused to leave (he said he was in the process of leaving, CCC said he refused to leave) etc, this is not OK nor is it legal. You call the police and, file trespassing charges and have the police remove him and the courts sanction him.
Even if he was physically violent in the time prior to the video (which nobody alleges, just a hypothetical), he clearly wasn't anymore at this point, and you do not get to retaliate; you file assault charges and have the police remove him or arrest him.
If he screamed nazi salutes or demanded the murder of ethnic groups (which nobody alleges either), then... you call the police for trespassing, and since this was in Germany, for using prohibited nazi signs/slogans (§ 86a StGB) and or "incitement of the public" (Volksverhetzung, § 130).
If he was filming (he said he did start to film once security became aggressive, CCC said filming in the space is a big no-no in general), then you still do not get to assault him.
The only legitimate reason for security to use violence would be if they had to defend themselves or others from physical attack. And no, words and disobedience are not the kind of violence that entitles you to violent self-defense.
If he's an open and virulent racist you should have better proof than a twitter account. I read all the tweets he made this year. He posts on Gab, posted a clip from an offensively named Danish satire film, and generally seems about as unpleasant as I'd expect for someone who owns the type of domains he owns but he does not seem to be openly racist.
If you're going to label someone as an "open and virulent racist" you should at least have some evidence to support it. It's unwise to make such extraordinary claims without evidence beyond "trust me bro", particularly on an account linked to your real-life identity as this could reasonably be seen as libellous if it's untrue.
> If he's an open and virulent racist you should have better proof than a twitter account.
Sure.
Here's vc calling someone who isn't nonwhite a "creature" and implying that they would discriminate against whites[1].
Here's vc hanging out with a bunch of people wearing white nationalist apparel and holding a sign that references a racist meme[2].
> It's unwise to make such extraordinary claims without evidence beyond "trust me bro", particularly on an account linked to your real-life identity as this could reasonably be seen as libellous if it's untrue.
I fortunately live in a country with strong protections against frivolous libel and defamation claims. What an ironic threat to make!
> hanging out with a bunch of people wearing white nationalist apparel and holding a sign that references a racist meme
Getting a rise out of the easily-offended is as old as time. Your Mom jokes go back centuries. Satirizing those who take themselves so seriously that they take offense at words and images is downright Shakespearean. Late 20th century stand-up comedy relied on inducing offense. Andrew Dice Clay was particularly good at this.
The elevation of negative subjective feelings as the primary determinant of moral wrongness in the last couple decades has basically killed comedy.
I'm tickled pink that VC and others are still doing the Lord's work, here.
> Getting a rise out of the easily-offended is as old as time. Your Mom jokes go back centuries. Satirizing those who take themselves so seriously that they take offense at words and images is downright Shakespearean. Late 20th century stand-up comedy relied on inducing offense. Andrew Dice Clay was particularly good at this.
Sure! I don't believe anybody can object to these historical claims.
The problem is as old as satire itself: if the only people listening to your jokes are the ones who genuinely believe the positions you're lampooning, you're no longer the comedian. You're now either a fool or a willful pundit among fools.
Shakespeare is deeply funny because he knew his audience was overwhelmingly poor & common Londoners; people aware of England's class system receptive to irreverent treatments of nobility. "Get thee to a nunnery" is funny because the commoners are laughing at the portrayed impurity of the nobility; it's transgressive.
4chan's humor is transgressive, and I love it. But vc's claim to continuity with that tradition doesn't bear scrutiny: scrape away the thin layer of racist language, and there's no wit or insight. That's why only racists find it funny, and why vc finds himself in the company of & doing the work of fools.
Bonus Point: The CrewCrew (Congress Security) is a barely documented all-female "security" gang. Men are not allowed to join. There are rumors that the President of the CCC controls it directly. Questions of accountability are still not answered.
Thats why i said "barely documented". Its mentioned on https://help.ccc.de/security/index.html and definitely present at the congress and related events like the camp, they wear characteristic shirts.
I am not agreeing with the tinfoil "controlled by the CCC president" rhetoric, but a lot of CCC events including their Congress indeed use an all female (identity) volunteer group calling itself "CrewCrew" as security.
They are known to be a bit "paranoid" sometimes, can act "overly aggressive" sometimes and like to disguise their faces during "enforcement". That said, I did not have first hand interactions with them, so that's just my impression of them seeing them around and some hearsay from people who had minor interactions with them.
But they do not seem very accountable, and they are in my humble opinion a bit of a sore on the otherwise very well organized Congress. Especially considering this in the context of the CCC, who for years ran and runs campaigns for more police accountability.
Until the escalation at 36C3, we thought the incident at 35C3 was: A random guy from the CrewCrew (new security persons) came to our assembly and got offended by VC's domain. They parted without reaching conclusions.
Only after the escalation at 36C3 i learned that:
- that guy at 35C3 was the CCC's president
- seemingly being an exception of the "all-female" rule
- the "CrewCrew" are not just some activists, but some sort of authorized force
- that the incident at 35C3 included a house ban, this came as a surprise to the auditory witnesses
- the president believed that this was Vincent Canfields assembly (it was fuwafuwa by lesderid, there never was a cockmail asm)
The internal CCC email the president wrote in January 2020 consisted mostly of smearing VC because he was one of the "bad guys" and it was justified in beating him and kicking him out. It turned out they actually stole VC's phone and had to give it back later. No details on what actually caused the differences between the president and VC. We can't even rule out a personal feud.
There were rumors that the CrewCrew was not certified for 35a Gewerbeordnung and thus illegal to be official security. Its references were scrubbed from the 35C3 and 36C3 wiki around the same time, in early 2020.
The whole story is very fishy and gave me the last straw to part with the CCC. Excuse my tinfoil hat, but there are some serious things going on in the CCC mothership.
>- the "CrewCrew" are not just some activists, but some sort of authorized force
Legally, they would be "Ordner"[1], and are thereby "authorized". It is perfectly legal for organizers of "assemblies" to recruit and use volunteers to keep order and peace, as long as these volunteers are unarmed (by law). The Gewerbeordnung does not come into play here. I am not quite sure they were up to snuff when it comes to identification, tho, as legally they have to wear a white armband saying "Ordner", and I do not think they did when I saw them (they did however have those t-shirts and other swag if memory serves right). But I might be wrong.
I am sure some people, maybe even the CCC president, were offended by Vincent's websites - to be offensive is a goal Vincent stated himself - and the CCC leadership then decided to ban him. We may debate if this was justified or free speech or whatever, but at the end of the day, the organizer of the Congress told him to fuck off. There might have been misunderstandings along the way, and/or the CCC may have changed their initial decision and/or fucked up their communication (they are human, after all). But the end result was a ban from the venue.
As I said in another comment, I find the assault of Vincent that then occurred extremely problematic, probably outright illegal assault (I see no evidence of justified self-defense by the security in the video). At the same time, I respect the CCC's decision to ban an "undesirable". The club members have to figure out for themselves who they want at their events and in their spaces.
And as I also said earlier, I find the lack of accountability of the security "crew" very disconcerting. You cannot have people running around playing police (their Congress-internal
DECT phone number even is "110", same as the police has in the public telephone network) who beat up people and cover their faces to hide their identities, all the while the CCC which these security people represent runs campaigns to get laws changed to make police more accountable by having officers to clearly be identifiable (by a number on their uniforms), wearing bodycams and raising the limits on when police is allowed to use force.
I don't think Versammlungsgesetz is likely to be relevant to Congress. It's a regular event with paid tickets (primarily restricted to a somewhat limited audience), access control etc, not a public event open to all. Versammlungsgesetz is more relevant for public protests and such, which everyone can just go to (which in turn have stronger legal protections).
Are you attacking the presenter or CCC? On first read it might seem as you are mixing them together and it can be quite unfair to the presenter if you are only mad at CCC.
I have no idea why he got thrown out, but he apparently provides anonymous email that's used for bomb threats and had the slogan "Hitler did nothing wrong" on one of his websites (hosted in Germany, no less), so it's not hard to imagine he gave them more reason than owning rude domains.
Not saying it was justified (don't know, don't really care, I'm not affiliated or involved), but you're not giving the whole picture.
We've always been followers and joiners. Look back 1000 years, we talked to very few people and our sphere of influence was small. Look at the changes the printing press had, influence could be cheaply disseminated. The newspapers took an out sized role and increased our sphere of influence. Today, with social media, our sphere is the entire world. It isn't curated (well, except to favor things that will cause outrage to sell ads) and it is information overload. This pushes us even further down the follower path. The world is too big and too complicated. It is impossible to be truly informed on a single issue. How could we possibly be objective on everything? Especially, when there are so many people purposefully trying to deceive for "eyeballs". Instead, we tend to pick a "trusted anchor" who we are in complete alignment with on a specific issue and then just trust them on everything else. It is quicker and makes us feel safe to be part of the group. We'll trust that person to loop us in as to what we should care about.
IMO, the only way out of this cycle is a tax on digital advertising revenue. Right now this media is extremely profitable and the only way to stop it is to make that not true.
That might exacerbate the problem. When the profit margins are reduced companies will go even further to chase the limited revenue and allow even more outrageous content. The main thing that is very obvious, is that the content that does best is outrage content full of false information.
While I don't think this is a positive trend by any means, I try to take a broader historical view of this. It is only after the second industrial revolution and the invention of affordable long-range transportation technologies like automobiles and trains, that non-conformity and privacy and true individualism were ever a realistic expectation of anyone, and even then you're talking a tiny global elite. Meanwhile, for the rest of human history and in less privileged societies, people have been living in tiny groups where everyone knows everyone, and your entire life has always been based on social credit and relied upon conformity to your particular kin group's cultural traditions and expectations.
Relative to this historic norm, I don't think globalization and data hoovering is resulting in social cooling. The real issue is people are now being asked to conform not to the social norms of their parents that they were indoctrinated in from birth, but whatever becomes dominant in their online communities, and those norms may be less familiar and less stable, so conforming to them is less comfortable and more difficult.
You can sort of see this effect in the existing comments. "It used to be fine to say X, now you can't." We've always been conformists. That's how communities work. But people expect somewhat stable rules they can conform to. The unique aspect of the chilling effect we're seeing today is that people can believe they did something perfectly in line with norms, but then the norms change or they become part of a new community with different norms and some record of what they already did thinking it was okay is now no longer okay.
The thing that is unsettling to people is the rate of social change. It's not that they're being held to some standards of behavior. Everyone does that and everyone expects that. We never have been and never will be free to just ignore all laws and norms.
I don't think individualism became the norm until the early 1980s to be honest. Outside of niche sub-groups and the youth you see massive conformity when looking at footage from before then.
I think pressure has always been high to conform. Maybe even more so in the past. But if you decided you didnt care you could relocate and your past wouldnt follow you around as much. Now the worst moment of your life could be the first thing anyone who googles you finds and it will never go away.
When "smart is the new cool", and everyone wants to be seen as smart, many people (out of fear of being seen as dumb) will be pressured into agreeing with the dominant position.
The West is undergoing a form of authoritarian monitoring - a minority of people, from various groups, are waiting for someone to step out of line in the smallest way and then pouncing on them for the benefit of themselves or their group. This really only works with a complicit media, who are willing to engender clicks and engagement over the ensuing discussion wherein context is usually lost.
This seems to be happening across political and social contexts.
This is why I don't use my legal name or talk about my offline life all that much in social media. I never name drop myself just because I don't want some weirdo online stalking me or combing over my family's own social media posts for some "juicy deets" or whatever to get attention bucks on Twitter or Facebook. It's this kind of thing that really annoys me about the modern internet. Too many people try to know what others are doing when they shouldn't care even in the best of times. I don't wanna know that James Gunn did tasteless jokes about kids and I definitely don't wanna see someone's nudes they sent to their BF/GF. I think at some point social media needs to be forced back into the smaller kind of groups of the late 90s where you either knew folks by their handle or just knew them in real life so you talked online from time to time just as a convenience. Other than that, I don't want my life to be intersecting with strangers online who constantly look to have their two minutes of hate. And I say this as a leftist, trans, and a non-Christian. I'm just not up for the social media nonsense of today.
Mixing and inventing words for existing well-known concepts add more confusion to an already confusing space, but it surely helps the author to give new TED talks.
Beside, the tech amplify what is a human nature, humans manage and keep track of each other reputation since the dawn of humanity. The outliers will always face resistance and some will find a new way.
Things like this is why its important that people can be anonymous on the internet. It gives you the way out to properly criticize people without fearing needless repercussions.
And yes, I'm aware of the risks of it being abused by trolls. It is a tradeoff we are better off making.
My accounts are disposable and disposed of - my "reputation" means nothing to me, and I think people who bought into gamified reputation are suckers. Liberty.
The upvote / downvote system is at fault here too, at least with online discussion forums. Everything that doesn’t match the local culture and norms is immediately downvoted. It’s a self-reinforcing echo chamber. Reddit is notoriously bad at this.
I preferred the old forum style, where even unpopular or strange messages were still placed in chronological order.
After setting "show dead" to "on", I am rarely more enlightened than before. It seems that HN moderators are an order of magnitude better at their jobs than average and recognize value or its absence fairly well.
I agree, generally; however, I still find it (sometimes) useful to hear strong outsider views, even if only to see what patterns of thinking are propagating.
He has a song “Jail”, talking about how someone got pulled over and is going to jail simply because they have priors. I see this as a reference somewhat alluding to the aftermath of George Floyd, if you’ve been convicted of a crime it is now ok in our society for police to treat you poorly.
A right winger might cringe at that, but then applaud that in a remix of the song he brings in Da Baby, to give the finger to cancel culture.
What he is doing though is pointing out how tRey are related.
Essentially saying if you think cancel culture is wrong then you should also be opposed to someone’s prior convictions causing them to be treated poorly, and if you think it is wrong what happens to those with priors, you shouldn’t be promoting a cancel culture.
Historically speaking, this problem can be traced from me-too movement back through gamergate as its come to be known. Some will deny a uniquely gendered aspect to this phenomenon but that only speaks to the successful rebranding of cancel-culture from the original purveyors as they were known only a few year’s prior. The roots of this problem can be delineated even though we no longer seem to recognize the culprit, sjw’s as they were accurately described, indeed were self described as such. The warfare lives on but now we’ve allowed it to be rebranded as the reputation economy or some such foolish newspeak. Perhaps this is another example of history being rewritten by the victors but those of us who have aggregated more than a decade or so of experience on the net, know that this was a recent change and that things were not always this way. For sure there are people, a specific interest, that have brought us to this juncture.
Was social media ever really anything but an echo chamber that sought to recreate the mob mentality of collective lynching for dissenting voices? I mean cancel culture and wokeness have made it clear that seems like the means and methods to create (coerced) consensus amongst an incredibly vocal minority.
I'm less troubled with conformity, many Societies throughout the World have made that a part of the Social Contract where the unity and harmony of the whole is greater than one individuals happiness.
At least the reputation economy in it's current state, is mainly limited to online so you can opt out, where I think you can see how pervasively terrifying this can escalate to just look at China's Social Credit System. The guilt of association in one's social circle ensures that not just conformity is re-enforced, but that actively marginalizing those who dissent are made into 2nd class citizens as it impacts everything from access to capital/loans, employment opportunities, and travel restrictions.
> You make it sound like this only happens on the democratic side. Republicans have similar echo chambers.
I'm not succumbing to the folly to believe that such a false paradigm (Left v Right) is anything but a dichotomy that people continue to think is separate; while wokeness may be often attributed to the Left, but I think it's clear that both sides seek the same goals which is to enforce self-censorship (University campus on Sex/Gender) or impose an archaic notion about self-ownership where the State determines what you can and cannot do to your own body (abortion).
So, to be clear: I don't think their is a discernible difference between those two entities enough to make such an argument.
I don't think conformity is a natural byproduct in a free and tolerant Society; what I do believe is natural and spontaneous in Nature is order, often by incentivized consensus.
Republicans do have similar echo chambers. My personal experience, as someone who has moved from left to right but still hangs out in a lot of left leaning circles, the right tends to be more tolerant of dissent.
It's getting harder to remember life before the internet, but it was largely similar. Different pockets of people had different beliefs and tended to choose an echo chamber.
As you said, the circles are bigger now.
The other difference is that media is so less centralized now, the circles are further apart. The centralized main stream media applied a certain amount of social pressure itself that sort of kept the circles from straying to far into "forbidden thoughts". This has largely been destroyed by the internet.
> It's getting harder to remember life before the internet, but it was largely similar. Different pockets of people had different beliefs and tended to choose an echo chamber.
Before the internet, in fact, it was difficult to seek out information from outside your echo chamber. Now it is a few clicks away, even if you might prefer not to do that.
> The other difference is that media is so less centralized now, the circles are further apart.
I think it is questionable to say that. The mainstream part of the internet today is very much centralized.
> the right tends to be more tolerant of dissent.
I agree with that. I remember when the "inclusiveness" buzzword started to gain traction and I naively thought that the meaning was being welcoming to all, regardless of political opinions. Boy, I was wrong.
...some restrictions may apply. Abortion, gay rights, immigrants, any non Christian religion; especially Muslims, policy brutality against people of color, healthcare to all, living wages the list goes on...oh and Biden actually winning the election.
However, I am not trying to attack you. To give you credit, media is more extreme and biased, except for specific news outlets and sites. Of course based on your beliefs we might not agree on which ones those are.
I simply meant that my experience is that those on the right don't deploy ridicule as much when dissent is expressed. I'm not speaking to the individual issues you listed at all, of course we disagree on some of those and likely agree on others.
This is obviously subjective, but I have spent some time in 12 step groups. Addiction cuts across the normal divisions we have in life. It affects the poor, the rich, every political affiliation, and so on. It does get a person out of their echo chamber somewhat, at least the typical echo chambers a person may have been in. 12 step groups can be their own echo chamber.
I personally transitioned from left to right politically while in 12 step groups. I transitioned from left to right while being a part of a mostly left-wing family. I've seen the condemnation and the ridicule deployed against conservatives. I've deployed it!
At some point, I began to look back at what my own personal experience was with conservatives, and I saw that my ideas of conservatives didn't match up with my experience. The conservatives I had known, didn't talk about tolerance, but they certainly practiced it when a dissenting opinion was expressed.
As a thought experiment: Imagine your views on a core left issue changed. Say you had some personal experience with abortion that pushed you into a more conservative position on this particular issue. Can you tell the people in your life with whom you discuss politics with? Can you talk about it on your social media with as much gusto as you used to talk about your more left-wing positions?
Also, if you look around HN, it's not hard to find comments that are pledging their allegiance to certain ideas before then offering criticism. These comments typically look like this: "Of course, I believe __x__, __y__, and __z__, but I do wonder about this aspect of x sometimes"
Why do they feel like they have to pledge their allegiance to __x__, __y__, and __z__ before offering any criticism?
>I simply meant that my experience is that those on the right don't deploy ridicule as much when dissent is expressed.
They probably have the benefit of keeping their thoughts to themselves more often. These conservatives tend to live in rural areas where there is more likely to be people like themselves. It makes it easier to not have to express their views. Of course people like Trump have make the extremists of the right more comfortable in coming out and expressing their views.
This is just a guess.
>The conservatives I had known, didn't talk about tolerance, but they certainly practiced it when a dissenting opinion was expressed.
We have to consider the circumstances that have led up to the cancel culture in the US. The left has no real power, they haven't had it for decades and at the very least not in my lifetime (1988). The best representation the left has is corporatists (Democrats) who protect the owner class at all costs and "try" to throw meaningless crumbs at their base in terms of social progress to pretend like we aren't slipping backwards(ie. electing a black woman as VP despite her abysmal polling, kneeling in Kente cloth, painting "Black Lives Matter" in giant letters on the street in front of the White House, etc.)
Well the left lost out during the Bush years. Progress seemed to be made in the direction of what the Right wanted and the left lost ground or didn't move forward depending on the issue.
Fair enough, then Obama comes around and what does the Left get? More crumbs in the form of "social progress" while meaningful reform is left out both socially and economically. We had a win in terms of Gay rights but that was decades of fighting and only after it was politically expedient for him towards the end of his presidency (he was against gay marriage going into his presidency). All of this culminates in Trump getting elected and immediately pulling the country even further Right and undoing most of the crumbs from the Obama years.
When the Left has been powerless for decades and with no other avenue to turn to do you really have any surprise that once they discovered the power of "Cancel culture" that they would use it? What else do they have to push back against the Right and at least "try" to enact meaningful reform?
In addition to this, I am always annoyed at attitudes like what you express. I have seen this behavior from all the right wing personalities (Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro etc.). They always give the benefit of the doubt to when something controversial happens on the right but the left is scrutinized to unbelievable levels and under a microscope in every direction. The most recent stunt is them promoting a tiktok channel called "libs of tiktok" where they collect the most extreme ramblings of random people they don't like and parrot it as representative of the whole Left.
It is complete Revisionist history. Conservatives invented identity politics. It is called Slavery. Its not like Africans decided to come to the US so that 100+ years later they knew they could cancel people. These people were murdered, raped, forced into slavery and now when the left tries to push back in whatever powerless way they can, right wingers are all "I can't believe you are playing identity politics".
Thank you for the post. I can hear the frustration in your writing. Or perhaps, it's my own frustration that I'm projecting on to you.
More and more, I'm wondering about the proposition that the "left vs right" battle we (broadly) tend to engage in is just a bunch of bullshit that we get caught up in. If there are puppet masters in the world, they surely are happy when we fight amongst ourselves.
>If there are puppet masters in the world, they surely are happy when we fight amongst ourselves.
History has shown this to be true.
I think the biggest problem is that a generation of both left and right wingers have not been taught proper civics and history of how this country has and continues to operate.
Some of the left is rediscovering this history now and is fighting the right who either already know the history and seem to want to keep remnants of it (probably not a majority) and the other half that has not experienced how others live in this country.
I wish you would have actually addressed any of my points. It seems like it is a waste of time to spend the time to type these things out.
I don't have a lot of time to think about this right now, but generally I do agree that the right is learning how to ridicule and using it more.
I'm curious about your association of slavery with conservatism. It's doubly strange since the Republican party is the one that fought the Civil war and supported desegration while many Democrats fought against it. The Democrat party had a former KKK member not that long ago.
I'm not saying that this should be used to invalidate Democrats or dismiss them out of hand or anything like that. I just think it is strange that modern day people aligned with the Democratic Party speak with a great deal of certainty that conservatives are racist.
I've heard and read the arguments for the party switch and I find them to be a bit tortured personally. But, civilized people can disagree about all of this, and I don't want to drag us into a partisan battle either.
Also, my sense of your post is that you are using left and right more along the lines of European usage of left and right. I'm using them more along the lines of American politics. While Europeans might say, "you Americans hardly have any true left at all". I'm more likely to say, "Where are the true conservatives in Europe"
The republican party of today is not the same as the Republican party of Lincoln. Completely different ideology. Do you know the history of the parties? I refuse to believe that any actual informed American does not know this important history. This is a disingenuous argument and you should know better.
>I've heard and read the arguments for the party switch and I find them to be a bit tortured personally. But, civilized people can disagree about all of this, and I don't want to drag us into a partisan battle either.
What does this even mean? The history is pretty cut and dry and explains their current day actions. The ideology of the party was completely different in the Lincoln era.
I could stand to be more educated, so please give me something to educate me instead of calling me disingenuous.
I am willing to listen to arguments that explain how it is that the Democratic party has been able to shed it's incredibly racist history and instead push all of the accusations of racism onto Republicans. I've read these arguments a few times over the years, and I found them to be very tortured and to raise lots of questions.
Even though, you didn't offer any information to further your arguments, I will try to add one to further mine.
If the parties did switch somehow, how do you explain that Social Security act was passed in 1935 by a Democratic President, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House.
Should I attribute the Social Security Act to conservatives?
>I am willing to listen to arguments that explain how it is that the Democratic party has been able to shed it's incredibly racist history and instead push all of the accusations of racism onto Republicans. I've read these arguments a few times over the years, and I found them to be very tortured and to raise lots of questions.
So the following two videos provide a very brief cursory glance at the transition the two parties went through and how they got to the circumstanced that led to that transition. I recommend watching both because they are each covering one side of the story.
>If the parties did switch somehow, how do you explain that Social Security act was passed in 1935 by a Democratic President, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House.
Unfortunately one thing that the videos do not cover more is the underlying trust in government programs that were well received by the Southern Democratic base. You had techniques like redlining that began around 1934 that would block Black Americans from government programs that were designed to build up a new middle class. These programs were embraced by the majority white portion because in essence it was a generational transfer of wealth. Most families wealth is in their homes and by making it as easy as possible to obtain a home and build equity, White America was set on a path of generational wealth while the Black people at the time were systematically barred and those trickle down to this very day. The videos discuss in minor detail the idea of government starting to become more neutral in regards to things like mandating prayer in school. This began a growing mistrust in government. As the push led to Engel v. Vitale in 62, it along with other related social issues caused a massive change in mentality for social programs. Why? Because they started to view government meddling in social issues as a way for blacks to raise their status.
All of this exploded into a massive end for the relationship between southerners and the democratic party after the Civil Rights act. The idea of a good old boy southerner betraying his own people appears to have been the last straw. (Note: I am not certain if it was the final straw or if the movement was already underway but not openly.)
The video touches upon Reagan. He did what the southern racists wanted. He reduced the size of the government while also working to keep minorities behind. One example is that he introduced the idea of "welfare queens" which turned out to be a continuation of the racist policies to further hold back Black people.
At the same time the Democratic party was being decimated in election after election. Unions were being watered down and workers rights were slipping away. Democrats losing finally ended when they joined forces with the corporate overlords running the Republican party and finally they got someone in the White House (Bill Clinton). And what did he do? Be socially liberal while continuing the Republican destruction of the middle class. As a midwesterner you must know all about the consequences of NAFTA. Going back to my original comment, it does not cost the Democrats anything to be socially liberal. But when it comes to harming their corporate donors, they will be in line with the Republicans.
So hopefully that gives some simple answer to your questions. However a lot of this history requires a deep dive. Its a shame that this history has not been taught in schools or been whitewashed. Recently we had the stupid fight over "Critical Race Theory". Its just another attempt to downplay these systemic racist issues that have been in place for decades. AOC and the squad have utterly failed at pulling the Democratic party Left in a meaningful way. In hindsight, it was a fools errand. The Democratic party is fundamentally a corporatist party and until that goes away the real Left (that the rest of the civilized world would consider left) does not exist in the US, they have been completely destroyed for at least a generation now. One thing AOC gets massive credit for is creating a discussion where people are finally going back into the history books and looking at what really happened. She has started so many discussions discussion systems of oppression that have probably caused many people to finally get curious and do their own research.
Thank you for taking the time to write this detailed response. I've been very busy, I don't want to just skim it and fire of a response after you took the time to write all that out. You are a good writer. Give me some time to respond.
I am a non-American who is right of centre, and I can see "my" people adapting cancel culture tactics as well, and I resent it. IMHO such victories are rotten to the core.
"Shall there be two cities of Minas Morgul, grinning at each other across a dead land filled with rottenness?"
The only thing I can do about it is to interact civilly with like-minded people of totally different political persuasions and hope that others will be inspired not to enter the cesspool.
I live in the States but wasn't raised here. One of the things you might not know is that unless you live in a middle east or China, right of center is left in the States.
Plenty of people say that, but I think this is too simple to be true.
You have a lot less conservative Christians in Europe (perhaps with the exception of Poland), but a lot more blatant ethnocentrist nationalists - a legacy of former decades and centuries where everyone was threatened by everyone else. (Exceptions apply.)
What has happened in western countries but most dramatically in North America is that "left" vs "right" has been transformed from a strong disagreement about management of the economy to a strong disagreement about how to manage the culture.
This is because in the US especially the "left" in the traditional socialist sense -- and its allies in the union movement and among students and academia -- have lost the class war. Since Clinton and Blair, there is no political space left for serious redistributive politics and the parties claiming the mantle of "left" or "social democratic" in the west have mostly given up. I'd say anti-capitalism remains strong among their base, but for all intents and purposes there is no path towards actually enacting policy... Which is why "Medicare for All" can be insanely popular in the United States across the population and voters of parties but still neverever become successful legislation.
And it's also why I find it so hilarious to see right wingers talk about the "MSM" and calling things like CNN "left wing"; all the bitching about "wokeness" and griping about culture wars and so on and complaining that somehow the "left" dominates society... It's amazing because in the context of what "left" meant for most of the 20th century... the left lost. It's gone. And I say this as a strong proponent of its classic positions.
Content of expressions shifts over time, especially in politics.
Contemporary Pope would probably be horrified if someone suggested to him to initiate a crusade against the unbelievers. The combination of Christianity and politics has shifted over time, there is much less hard force and much more sentimentality involved.
But that does not mean that Crusaders weren't true Christians while Francis I. is, or vice versa.
The traditional left is gone because its proponents died out, but before they died, they introduced the young wokesters into their parties. The shift from blue collar workers to academia took decades to complete and there is a clear continuity in the process. So I think the label still fits, only the relevant institutions changed their priorities.
Nah, I think it's deeper than that. If the Catholic Church stopped believing in God and Jesus completely, would you still call them Christians/Catholics? At what point do we just throw our hands up in the air on a term?
Likewise with socialist/social democratic parties -- if they abandon all the tenets of socialism: worker control of capital, anti-capitalism, etc. but still keep the name... is it just that the content of the expression has changed? That seems a stretch.
However, I guess there's an argument to be made that "left wing" is so non-specific that it could do what you're saying. The phrase itself has its origins in the French Revolution with the Jacobins, etc. who were certainly not socialist. So I guess there's that.
But here's the thing. Many of the politicians called "left" in the United States don't even call themselves that. The right wing in the US calls almost everything "left wing". I stare in amazement at people who call Clinton or Biden "left wing"; they don't describe themselves that way, and actual socialists and left wingers don't support them (except grudgingly with their noises plugged when they have to vote).
But to the Tea Party and Trump types, they are "left wing." By which they just mean something pejorative
Societies with reputation economics (aka face) as the main factor, are incredibly wasteful on human resources, bad at crisis management and generally worser at innovating. Let the initial management of the Covid crisis here be a example.
Its one of the established bonus points, that cultures whos mythology in indoctrination praises martyrs (e.g. Jews, Shiites, Christians) prepares its members to stand out even against resistance and thus overcome the various obstacles when it comes to leaving local minima.
Reputation economics historically was a recipe for stagnant societies which succumbed sooner or later to disaster. Every year unchanged is a lucky coin toss.
But every year changed may be as well. For example the November-revolution in Russia. There are numerous examples that change was for the worse, especially for the masses.
And the Chinese or Roman empires outperformed any other quickly changing empire by far.
As far as i remember, the chinese empire was toppled by a small fast changing merchant nation on a island half way around the world. Beginning a hundred years were it was trampled by repeatedly including by another island nation nearby.
The roman empire died the strangest death of all, it created such a tremendous underclass stagnant in misery (slaves, woman, all non-citizens) that a religion could basically overwrite its whole culture, erasing it from existence, without leaving behind even the technological advances.
China is spiraling back down the well. They are currently closing off, like north korea.
Theire age pyramid is coming down hard on them. They have not yet a fully working info-economy, so they are running out of cheap manual labour.
So many before them, were to take the throne for all eternity, the japanese, the koreans and then they all became just another part of a connected world and on the throne remained, he who could in-cooperate change the fastest and most efficient.
