> Just about everyone I speak to about the subject agrees that cancel culture is bad but very few people seem willing to confront it. I sense that people hope the rest of society will come to its senses and we all stop being so judgemental.

I found this[1] article very interesting. Basically, only 2% of American adults generate over 80% of all tweets. "Cancel Culture" really is run by a few extremists who have a louder voice than everyone else.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...

History is written by the winners, if Cancel Culture "wins" this will just be seen as a positive embyrotic formation of the dominant culture eradicating and stomping out evil in the world via a superior tactical formation (cancellation). If they win this will be seen as a very primitive form of mob-cancellation whereas in the future it will be cancellation via sophisticated "fair" social-credit scores.

If the anti-cancel culture people win out culturally this will be seen as a historic dark age of self-censorship and a period of significantly degraded cultural expression.

All history is relative.

I don't think it's limited to just what you say in public. Videos and audio recordings have a way of triggering human emotions that writing simply does not. To tell you the truth, I live in perpetual fear that some acquaintance could secretly record me saying some non-PC thing in private, and post it to Twitter to get me cancelled. I have deleted all social media to try to achieve "out of sight, out of mind" but I still feel unsafe.

It's truly dystopian. I do feel as if I will go insane if this continues for another 10 years.

I worked hard in school and sacrificed so that I could build myself a better life. Now, it seems like the entire thing hangs on a knife's edge. Quite frankly, I would not have tried to work hard for the last 15 years if I had known we were about to go full-blown 1984.

The concept is not new, see McCarthyism.

What's new is social media's ability to amplify the voices of a small number of relatively anonymous people to "cancel" someone.

McCarthyism required a Senator to have a serious impact. Now people are cancelled, without there being a clear link back to who, exactly, did the cancelling.

> So all that being said, I genuinely wonder if cancel culture is here to stay

Insofar as “cancel culture” describes actual behavior rather than the ideology motivating it, it's been a constant part of society, from all ideological angles, for, approximately, all of human history. Shunning the heterodox is not new.

The only thing new is the right’s use of the term “cancel culture” to disparage this when it bites them; this replaces “political correctness”, which served the exact same purpose for the right from the 1980s until “cancel culture” became the new hotness.

I think that in 50 years, maybe even 20 years cancel culture will be looked at a low point in the culture of the US and its adherents will try to disassociate themselves with it by saying thats how people thought/acted back then(popular sentiment). Similar to McCarthyism and its blacklists which ruined actors/directors, that moment is taught in history books as a backwards time, cancel culture will be similar.

>I can't help but admit that it seems to work.

Really? I see it as a abject failure.

- It is universally derided by many different groups.

- It is considered a plague on society.

- Being "cancelled" is a badge of honor to some.

I used to see my society as a place where hate speech was generally taboo. People would only espouse such attitudes in private or, if they did so in public, they'd at least use dog whistles or euphemisms for plausible deniability.

Today, Facebook is full of people shouting pretty fucked up shit for everyone to hear. The attitude seems to be that you can't cancel everyone, so everyone should do it as much as possible. I know a lot of people who can't speak to their parents or other close family anymore because the hateful shit they shout on facebook all day.

Granted, this is just my person experience. Others might live in a place where people are nicer to each other than they used to be.

Eh, I don't think it's here to stay. The political correctness pendulum swings back and forth every 10-20 years it seems to me, the last time it was on the watch-what-you-say spectrum felt like the mid-90s.

That said, this feels way, way more extreme than it was then. I'm maybe less worried that it's here to stay than I am worried that the swings are getting more and more extreme

Moral panics can and do get a lot worse. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial

In retrospect, this all seems rather insane. But back then, how many people actually risked being painted as apologists of Satanic pedophiles pointing the obvious out?

The only way we'll ever be able to combat cancel culture is through online anonymity. I fear that we're drifting in the other direction, though - specifically to make cancellation easier.

Jailing anyone who owns a C++ compiler will stop all hackers, that would also seem to work.

moral panics and the resulting witch-hunting/burning is feature of humanity that comes and goes. the mob always thinks it's a good idea in the moment, but history never looks fondly upon it.

Wasn't McCarthy-ism basically proto-cancel culture?

Communism was also like this. People has the public persona, the party tasks, things they had to do and say.

Then they went home and listened to Radio Free Europe and talked with select people what they really had on their mind or used coded language to transmit messages.

What I hope this achieves is a parallel society and when it's big enough there will be some public battles.

I agree with you, nobody will do anything until it's too late.

Look on the bright side: If we manage to win against the fourth reich people will remember, maybe for one generation.

I think it will look like it is now. Long running private thread that aren’t open to new people.

I stopped using FB years ago, but have messenger groups that are super active and have been private for years.

I wonder how new people will “find the others” for how the web was so great. But I’ve met young people who do the same thing with their friends.

The easiest way to confront cancel culture is to embrace it and try to get everything cancelled for the most minor of reasons. Hopefully, people will just get fed up and ignore it. The hardest part will be to stop companies bowing to the twitter mob for fear of bad publicity.

Also, twitter needs to go. Humans can't handle it.

We're heading towards fascism. This time on two fronts, one horn from each end of the political spectrum. (perhaps a new name for it that isn't fascism because of the history of that word referring to a kind of right wing movement)

It feels like we're inside the ramp-up of a major social, political, and national conflict, all the pieces are falling into place.

Read The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig to get some ideas about how this kind of thing happened in the early 20th century in Europe and imagine how it might be happening again.

Ideology is on the rise and the willingness of people to support their cause with violence is going right along with it. The problem is not a specific ideology, but the practice in itself.

>So all that being said, I genuinely wonder if cancel culture is here to stay, because the next ideology to come along will also realize how powerful of a tool it is.

Here to stay for sure. There's an active group of people behind it. They are the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left and they still exist today. The problem is that in 1989 when socialism died. They started their rebranding effort. They became Politically Correct, "democratic socialists", culutural marxists, globalists, internationalists. etc.

The reason Justin Trudeau can do black face on multiple occasions and still win an election is because he's part of the new-left. Cancel culture is a tool of political silencing opponents. Those in the fold like Trudeau, he'll get away with literally anything.

The problem or reason why it has become so much more obvious. Increasingly desperate. What has Biden done for BLM? Absolutely nothing.

Cancel culture scared the ever living shit out of everyone, even everyday people. Whether you like it or not, it got every male in the workplace to not even breathe in the direction of women you work with. The movement permeated through normal life fast.

It was extremely efficient in bringing forth the necessary changes. I have no problem with using the chainsaw as needed, but we need to careful about when we use it. Can’t use it for everythig.

The problem with cancel culture is much the same as the problem I'm having with my QA department:

We have a very small, rock solid front end. Most of our work is simply updating content. It's very straightforward work and you have to try very hard to introduce bugs. But when you staff a team of 6 people and tell them "it's your job to find something wrong with this website", they WILL find something wrong. I have a meeting this afternoon to explain to my Product manager why the content looks different on a mobile screen than it does on desktop because the QA team thinks line breaks are a bug ("the content document didn't break the line here, but the mobile view did, it's a bug").

When you empower people to take others down via subjective rules, then it's always a moving target. You can never reach a point where people are safe and happy. Check out the shuffles deck subreddit for some egregious examples of cancel culture gone wrong, https://www.reddit.com/r/Shuffles_Deck/.

On one hand I worry about this power being abused, but it's hard for me to side with the people being cancelled because they're so repugnant.

It is hard to stand up for the rights of the bigots, the white supremacists, the science deniers, the propagandists, and the misogynists. People who spent decades denying other people access and are now finding the shoe on the other foot.

Can we find some good examples of people who were "cancelled" who were not peddling conspiracy theories or pontificating about why the white race is the natural rulers of humanity?

In some ways this may be seen as a return to the media culture in the Fairness Doctrine era. It used to be that media companies had to seriously consider the viewpoints expressed and wouldn't give crackpots a voice very often. The Internet changed that, allowing everybody a voice regardless of how crazy they might be. Now we're turning back to a more metered experience as it seems that unlimited amplifying the wingnuts is actually damaging to the country.

Nobody likes the censor, but they're a necessary evil. Without them trolls will always take over the conversation once the number of participants exceeds a fairly low threshold. Trolls can drive out honest participants, but honest participants can't drive out trolls. Moderation is necessary. It doesn't have to be third party moderation, upvote/downvote systems can do the job although they're tricky to get right and can be gamed.