
Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate - longdefeat
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/illiberalism-cancel-culture-free-speech-internet-ugh.html
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Barrin92
What I notice about the "cancel-culture" debate is that it predominantly seems
to define culture as being the sphere of the people who can be cancelled to
begin with.

When I look at American discourse from the outside, it seems like liberalism,
democracy, and so on are synonymous with the ability of a few high-profile
pundits or 'public intellectuals' to express themselves.

I think the root of the problem isn't cancel culture but the limitation of the
political to a bunch of celebrities.

I noticed this when in the US the debate about college culture wars started.
They exist here as well, but they're a curiousity. Nobody equates tenured
academics or a bunch of woke college kids going for each others throat with
democracy or liberalism.

In tech people often argue that decentralisation is a good tool against
tyranny. This simply is what democratic discourse is supposed to be. If
political discourse takes place in every home at the dinner table, in the pub,
in political parties and part of ordinary every day life between ordinary
people and not boosted on twitter then there cannot be cancel culture because
nobody individually is relevant or public enough to be cancelled.

If however political discourse is the job of the professional commentariat and
the rest of society is some sort of passive mob waiting to be activated, sure
then you get cancel culture. If however politics consists of people staring at
TV debates for months or years and you treat politics like a season of
survivor with the citizen being reduced to the role of some consumer, then why
is anyone surprised by the result.

~~~
hindsightbias
The more pundits change, the more they stay the same. For all the benefits of
the internet, and perhaps a rise of alt-voices in the twittersphere, the
talking heads on the tv all seem to be the same old people.

It should be clear from history these people aren’t there for their accuracy
but because they’re part of an established narrative and they’re “safe” for
their markets.

Even basic contrarians really aren’t heard from within a market anymore. An
example for me would be Chomsky. In the 80’s or 90’s, you could rarely see him
on the “liberal” networks, but he got cancelled long ago by them. We are
“free” to see him on foreign media or RT though, but no American would bother.

It is interesting to see foreign networks like the BBC or NHK covering US news
- the talking heads they use aren’t really high-profile in the US so I wonder
how they’re chosen.

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wutbrodo
A good sign of how intellectually bankrupt the pro-"cancel" argument is that
almost every single defense I've read grossly misunderstands the complaints.

> Have you met the internet? Chilled speech isn’t new. Members of marginalized
> groups online have from the start dealt with threats, insults, and
> harassment campaigns for the crime of articulating their ideas in public.
> But free speech defenders didn’t sound the alarm about the marketplace of
> ideas then. I’m not sure what’s changed.

Free speech defenders don't complain about "non-marginalized" groups being
hassled by a bunch of random accounts either. And nothing about "cancel
culture" complaints preclude tamping down on abuse and harassment; they're
barely even related. In fact, a common criticism of those complaining about
cancel culture is that they _overemphasize_ politeness and civility, while
allowing bad (and "bad") ideas to be expressed (the "pro cancel culture"
habit, OTOH, seems to be about sticking to the a narrow range of approved
views while acting as vile as possible).

What free speech defenders _absolutely_ did do is defend the rights
marginalized groups to say their piece; the rights revolutions of the last
half century+ have all grown out of the foundation of a society where people
fight for the right of unpopular speech to be heard.

The complaint is about extending the consequences of political speech to every
possible unrelated sphere of life, to letting those with the most cultural
power codify their biases as the only acceptable speech, and in some cases to
cutting off access to the modern public squares: "go build your own social
network" does carry some weight as an argument, but by the time you get to "go
build your own payment processor", you're making a mockery of the concept of a
society tolerant of pluralism. The fact that right now the views protected by
liberal values are rightwing is incidental: the purpose of these rights is to
defend the cultural underdog, and diminishing them just hurts the marginalized
in the longterm. This is something the left once knew: the ACLU's historical
defense of the KKK/WBC et al has been rooted in a defense of these _rights_,
not a defense of the groups.

There is probably a well-reasoned argument out there for cancel culture, and I
don't consider myself to be informed on a topic until I've heard a compelling
argument from both sides. But this article, like most of what I've heard in
defense of cancel culture so far, is pretty garbage.

~~~
aidenn0
> Free speech defenders don't complain about "non-marginalized" groups being
> hassled by a bunch of random accounts either. And nothing about "cancel
> culture" complaints preclude tamping down on abuse and harassment; they're
> barely even related. In fact, a common criticism of those complaining about
> cancel culture is that they _overemphasize_ politeness and civility, while
> allowing bad (and "bad") ideas to be expressed (the "pro cancel culture"
> habit, OTOH, seems to be about sticking to the a narrow range of approved
> views while acting as vile as possible).

While I tend towards the side of free speech myself, I think TFA is treating
Reddit shutting down certain subreddits as equivalent to marginalized groups
being threatened in terms of its chilling effect on speech.

This has been a common argument of the "new left" (is there a better term?);
an environment of ostensibly free speech is not actually free if some groups
are made too afraid to speak by the speech of others.

Through that lens, I think the rough thrust of the article is "Free speech on
the internet has failed; your choice now is whether allowable speech should be
dictated by the moderators or the trolls?"

Context, therefore, matters. If someone was lynched by KKK members last week,
then a peaceful KKK march can be threatening by context without any harrasing
or threatening language.

I'm not totally convinced by these arguments, but I think that's the general
thrust.

As an aside, the fact that the "public squares" of the internet are privately
owned certainly complicate matters; the ACLU certainly wasn't going to force
private businesses to hang up KKK banners.

