Including self-Cancelation. Used to just be ID types and some others who knew about this stuff up close:
Cancel culture operates on at least three different levels: the personal, the corporate, and the political. Each is more troubling than the next, because each casts a broader net and eliminates more and more options. It’s one thing for me to cancel my Twitter account after being attacked as morally obtuse, worse to be permanently kicked off the site because its moderators have decided I am beyond redemption, and more troubling still to have the government shut down Twitter because it allowed my awful speech.
It’s tempting to single out that last level because the other two involve individuals or private entities who ultimately should be free to do whatever they want. Only the government can engage in true censorship, surely. But the three layers work synergistically to increase the cultural and political regulation of thought and expression. To build as free and open a society as possible, we need to challenge the precepts of cancel culture at all levels…
Nick Gillespie, “Self-Cancellation, Deplatforming, and Censorship” at Reason (September 7, 2021)
and self-Cancelation?
Self-cancellations, in which individuals take the initiative to put themselves out of the public’s misery, are in many ways the purest manifestation of cancel culture, because they reveal the religious-cum-totalitarian sensibility undergirding the process. From the Spanish Inquisition through Mao’s struggle sessions, it wasn’t enough simply to damn the accused. The goal was to make them testify to their moral and ideological failings, to show they were “doing the work” and owning their sins. This move was on display when the banjoist for the fading hipster-retro band Mumford & Sons announced in March that he “was taking time away from the band to examine [his] blindspots” after he unforgivably endorsed a book that purports to unmask “antifa’s radical plan to destroy democracy.” Winston Marshall’s crime was to tweet “Finally had the time to read your important book. You’re a brave man” at the controversial journalist Andy Ngo, whose Unmasked spent time on the New York Times bestseller list and is still available for purchase at Amazon, the new arbiter of what is and isn’t hate speech. “I have offended not only a lot of people I don’t know,” wrote Marshall, “but also those closest to me, including my bandmates and for that I am truly sorry.” I’ll come back to Marshall, who announced in June that he was leaving Mumford & Sons for good. For now, let’s just note that when he apologized for his wrongthink, he felt a need to insist he was not just sorry, but truly sorry.
Nick Gillespie, “Self-Cancellation, Deplatforming, and Censorship” at Reason (September 7, 2021)
Baring your throat to the wolf is not really a good survival tactic.
The incidents are also distracting from more serious threats to freedom of expression, particularly the continuous narrowing of acceptable discourse on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and shopping platforms such as Amazon and eBay. After the Dr. Seuss Foundation made its announcement, for instance, Amazon and eBay quickly banned sales of used copies of the canceled Seuss books, the sort of prohibition more commonly applied to Nazi memoribilia. What kind of simulation are we living in where Mein Kampf is easier to purchase than McElligot’s Pool?
Nick Gillespie, “Self-Cancellation, Deplatforming, and Censorship” at Reason (September 7, 2021)
Oh, that’s easy to answer. It will be as fully an authoritarian culture as the Third Reich but with different authoritarians in charge. And that’s the way Cancel Culture supporters want it.
You may also wish to read: Berkeley Scientist and center director resigns over MIT’s deplatforming of exoplanet scientist Note how little difference facts of science make in these matters — whether Abbot has anything to say that contributes to our knowledge does not matter of the Woke are displeased. Darwinism was the original Wokeness in science — immune to fact-based critique. The people who thought that that didn’t concern them are now formally wrong. It’s everywhere now.
Science always loses in these wars because a high proportion of important new ideas are misunderstood or controversial. Perhaps actual science will only survive on the fringes.