I have anon accounts at Twitter, Bluesky, Truth Social, reddit and I can't say that there is any serious discussion on any of the main channels or topics on any of the sites.
I look at the replies that Mark Cuban gets on Bluesky for trying to hold real conversations and its basically everyone just screaming into his face telling him he is the worst person ever for being a billionaire (regardless of topic posted)
Twitter is basically Elon's playground now for his "free speech" which restricts views that might be unfavorable to his brand, companies and politics.
Truth social is basically a cult member zone for everything MAGA related. Every reply and post that I have seen on the platform is basically propaganda for the administration.
Reddits main sub-reddits idea of "discussions" is to post favorable links for progressive websites (that nobody clicks on) and every comment is basically to call everyone who they disagree with a nazi or a facist.
For all the talk that people say they use social media for (expand their knowledge, connect with other people etc) it seems to just radicalize people based on whatever platform you use.
And the amount of bots and foreign agents trying to stir things up just makes most places awful to be in.
To be honest, the less time spent on social media, the better I feel. And I question every day why don't I just delete all social media and read news/blogs instead.
Youtube would probably the hardest to quit though.
It seems baked into the model. What kind of conversation is possible when limited to a few hundred characters?
On reddit if you go to the more niche subs at least it's possible to have real conversations and get value out of them, but the popular subs are a mess.
The issue I saw with reddit was that its way of segregating people by 1 affinity and then forbidding any other topic of discussion there, went against our natural way of coalescing a small community and then being able to discuss other topics within it. (Agreed that this "natural" mode would devolve unless carefully tended though.)
I have found Reddit useful for international travel planning. For example, thread topics like "visiting Buenos Aires" or "what places to visit and what places to avoid in Bogota Colombia." Sports team (e.g., your favorite NHL team) threads are usually safe without straying into Hitler-Nazi-Fascist derp. But, not always.
Social media is a short form (and getting shorter) popularity contest, which is hardly conducive to proper argument, at least in the Greek sense. It's only a public forum if you attract enough public to your tweets or posts, and you can't do that by offering thoughtfull, sustained analyses or critique on any platform save possibly this one. Everything else is a short attention span theatre of memes gifs, snark, bots, bootlickers and bad actors, with a peanut gallery of angry trolls and purist on the hunt for heretics. There's no reasoning.
Yup... you got it... I find that all of these platforms are increasingly irrelevant. In terms of "progressives," whatever that means these days, a focus on real meat-and-potatoes issues would be wise. These issues remain remarkably consistent .. 1) health-care 2) education 3) national security 4) immigration 5) fiscal policy ...
The problem with focusing on an issue is that a politician then is expected to deliver on it when elected. It's easy to purge a bunch of wokies from the government. It's hard to do anything to improve the issues you have listed.
Excellent piece, Noah. I think about this a lot. I don't participate in SM but I experienced similar firsthand as a professor. After teaching for a decade the same topics in the same way, I had a small group of students who registered formal complaints about me because "their voices weren't being heard" in my class discussions (this was around 2018). Fortunately, my level headed superiors didn't make anything of it but it was a wake-up call that I now had to walk on eggshells in my lectures. I teach decidedly non-political topics and rarely to never stray into them. This re-flared around the Hamas attack a few years back and that was complex where students wanted to stand up in front of my class to make statements (I teach in a business school). It was very difficult to navigate.
Like you, I despise that period mostly for its shutdown of any discourse around disagreements. The hard left were really the pioneers here as you note. I wish they had a tiny bit of self reflection now that we see how they enabled the right to do the same.
I tend to ascribe to a different H (Horseshoe Theory), but I am just an average normie with similar positions to most Americans. I am a Reagan Republican, and depending on the subject,
I fall somewhere near the center of American attitudes. Occasionally, I may be further to the right on some things, yet rarely more to the left.
What we see with postliberalism from both the left and the right is a lot of performance with little substance. Mamdani and Bannon are the same people. You go further out, and you have Matthew Dowd and Tucker Carlson. Both loons. Whatever they are advocating has nothing to do with who we are as a country.
We practice liberal democratic capitalism here in America. It mostly works; sometimes it sucks.
Social Media is killing our culture.
We have seen every other form of government tried, and it has been found not to work. The old trope that Socialism can work, it’s just never been tried, is utter BS.
Mamdani’s ideas will lead us to France, which is in a dire state, and I believe it is a precursor to the problems we face. America is proof that every few decades or so, we need to relearn something. Trump will learn that tariffs are bad. Mamdani will learn that picking on a class of people to appeal to another class of people will fail. I mean, the Bill de Blasio disaster wasn’t that long ago.
Hang in there, pal, you have more friends than enemies.
Reminder : Mamdani is a candidate running to become the mayor of New York City. In what universe will a person running for a city election in a particularly unique city in America "lead us to France"? People, get a grip. If some regional politician has ideas that won't appeal to the masses living outside that region, they will never gain any national traction. I seem to remember there are some absolutely batshit crazy politicians in Congress on the MAGA side of the aisle. Why can't you feel able to say that their ideas will lead us to Russia or even North Korea?
1. The Cancel Culture Era, Peak Woke Era, or whatever we want to call it, was the most unpleasant political era of my lifetime, and I say that as a lifelong Democrat voter. Yes, Bush did awful stuff and Trump is doing awful stuff right now, but I can't tell you how alienating it felt for the left-- my home -- to descend into its own form of Moral Majority-style bullying. It made me question everything about myself, whether I'm on "the wrong side of history," just becoming another dumb conservative as I age, etc.
You and other Substackers such as Jesse Singal, Freddie DeBoer, Jeff Maurer, Ross Barkan, Kat Rosenfield, and many more have helped a great deal with getting me through this. I've sought therapy for it too. I've also had countless private conversations with other disaffected liberals about this stuff. We really really hate it. Just as much as we hate Trump. It hit a nerve nothing else could.
2. By "late 2010s," shouldn't we also include 2020 and perhaps 2021? COVID was a boom time for these folks. Summer 2020 was the absolute peak of the madness, and 2021 saw the same cancellers frothing like mad at how anyone who refuses a COVID vaccine (or who is merely skeptical about vaccine mandates) should be fired and lose everything.
I have to admit I've been bewildered by the characterization of the bluesky by this article and Nate's article. I am on bluesky as a centrist, and I have found it to be a much more polite place than Twitter. If anything, it's too boring.
But I don't follow many political people on Bluesky. I mostly use it for data science and professional stuff.
Most of my professional peers are progressive, so when they moved to Bluesky. I followed. But I still just don't see any of the same call out culture found on Twitter.
It used to be people like Bari Weiss decried cancel culture from a sort of free speech, "I don't agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
Unfortunately, most of those people have just turned into "Our turn now!" including Bari Weiss.
Yes. I looked today to see if The Free Press had anything about the USG threatening anyone who said anything bad about Charlie Kirk, but as usual when the Trump administration threatens people for speech, the FP is dead silent.
But Weiss is hardly an exemplary defender of free speech -- she calls anything even slightly critical of Israel anti-semitic.
The reaction to Charlie Kirk has been absolutely unhinged. I have nothing against him, but flags at half staff for a random guy who went around arguing with college students for a living?
Trump is the most predictable creature on the planet. Of course he's going to glorify anybody who ever agreed with him or who has an audience of people who will vote for him.
Trump is using this to create and feed a narrative about left wing political violence and the need to quash any rhetoric that could be interpreted as inciting, meaning any rhetoric critical of him or his administration. He wants to use it to justify overt restrictions on political speech. It might not work, but he's trying, and if he can paint Kirk as a national treasure and symbol he can improve the odds of success.
Matthew, would it be possible for you to flesh out this argument more? Is the right cancelling people who disagree with Kirk? (As opposed to saying bad, distasteful or hateful things about him).
Maybe I am just naive, but it seems it would have been acceptable to cancel someone like Demore if he had said he hoped women coders died. He was cancelled for saying men and women differ statistically in interests. Are you saying the right is canceling people who disagree with Kirk’s arguments?
I am saying that the Right is cancelling people who say that Charlie Kirk was a divisive figure or a bad person or that he pissed other people off or bringing up Kirk's comments a few months ago about gun deaths being an unfortunate but acceptable side effect of living with the 2nd Amendment. Or cancelling people who don't show "adequate sadness" over his death.
Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC for saying, "He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive, younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”
“And I think that’s the environment we’re in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
A Middle Tennessee State University Dean was fired for saying "Looks like Ol'Charlie spoke his fate into existence. Hate begets hate. Zero Sympathy."
A screencap was retweeted by sitting US Senator Marsha Blackburn and they were fired.
Seems to me people are distinguishing between cancelling for making light of or justifying a murder (bad taste and thus socially unacceptable) and cancelling for disagreeing with one’s political position. It is getting blurry though.
I think they're mostly cancelling anyone who said anything that could be construed as celebratory of Kirk's death.
Somewhat related, my right wing family members are raging at Tim Walz for joking after Trump dropped out of sight that he kept checking to see if there would be something in the news, implying but not saying that he was hoping for a report that Trump had died. Actually, I don't think the family members who are raging have any idea what Walz said, they're raging about what they were told he said, which seems to be quite different from what he actually said.
"I don't think the family members who are raging have any idea what Walz said, they're raging about what they were told he said, which seems to be quite different from what he actually said."
That could be applied to Kirk and even Trump sometimes. It is just an extension of gossip and rumors running out of control to generate outrage.
Seriously... Florida is basically asking teachers there not to post or say critical things on their personal social media about Kirk or they can get reprimanded. Cancel culture has always existed, but progressive or liberal application of it has and will always be more limited in power over the long term than conservative use of it imo. I think we'll see something like Trump's first time, where by the end people are just exhausted. Fortunately he's speed running this term so maybe it'll happen sooner than later and we'll all show each other more grace afterwards and own that our online personas are not the best version of ourselves sometimes...
Cancel culture is not a "right" or "left" thing. It is a mob thing. But certainly the folks calling for "cancellations and firings" of people expressing glee about Kirk's assignation were emboldened by having watched a dozen years of progressives calling for "cancellations and firings" for dumb-ass reasons like recognizing biological realty.
While I kinda get why people were pissed off at Weiss's post (as an Asian American born here, the "where are you REALLY from" questions get old), the dogpiling (including on Weiss) is so utterly ridiculous that it's one the main reasons I left Twitter.
Unfortunately for a while that cancel culture nonsense infiltrated the work place too, and I recall younger employees getting flustered when people did not immediately do what they asked (older folks on social media were probably terrified of younger, more popular accounts and bent over backwards to follow the mob). People really did lose the art of persuasion, as being asked to put in the work of persuasion itself because a sign of oppression.
Advocacy groups followed similar lines of reasoning offline in local council meetings, government stakeholder engagement meetings, etc., such that "I as a (insert demographic group here) demand X" was supposed to be sufficient to change public policy. (Inevitably, someone from the same group would have an opposing opinion, but the advocacy group would either pretend they didn't speak or accuse them of being a shill for some dark, shadowy group.) I still see this kind of behavior from time to time, but it isn't as bad as it was under Trump 1 or early Biden admins.
“ Unfortunately for a while that cancel culture nonsense infiltrated the work place too, and I recall younger employees getting flustered when people did not immediately do what they asked.”
This is interesting. Can you give any examples? Like regular ones, not necessarily dramatic ones. What would a common instance of this look like?
I ask because I only got a glimmer of it in my office. The thing is that because of the nature of my job - in-house counsel for a giant corporation, where everyone in my department is a lawyer with 15 years experience in private practice - my exposure to the younger cohort is very low. That’s not to say that woke wasn’t a huge thing - it was, and it derailed my career - but it didn’t really come from young people. I feel like whatever “it” was in the last ten or fifteen years probably presented much different in the youth than the middle-aged.
I can think of one instance that really stayed with me: after Covid, when the company told everyone to head back to the office, the younger cohort JUST DIDN’T DO IT. They yelled and refused and demanded and threatened. I’m not being critical exactly - it was incredibly impressive, and they won. It’s years later and we’re still almost entirely remote. And we’re a gigantic multinational company.
I’m 55 and have worked in a lot of different places and I’ve never once even heard of employees pushing back like this. I still haven’t really figured out what I think about it.
Prewoke, beginning of tumblr era, the most common presentation of thought was via sarcasm. Everything was 'ironic'. Its an offshoot of sitcoms and later late night television and Whedon-ism. Sarcasm morphed into negativity via the 'But actually tho.' addendum. Sneer culture took over these spaces, which continues to today.
Is there a word for “doing something really interesting and novel artistically which unintentionally created a culture that perverts it into something foul?” I feel bad from Whedon. Buffy and that space cowboy show were awesome. Firefly. But the syntax and rhythms of language he created wrecked everything forever.
There must be a word for that. Probably something in German.
Social Media has licensed a range of people with various disorders to become keyboard warriors from the safety and anonymity of their ‘bedrooms’. I worked with a guy that was one such ‘warrior’ who dished out all kinds of vitriol on-line. However, when forces to sit opposite me in my office he sat there with slumped shoulders with nothing much to say. He also couldn’t take on-line counter-attacks that brought him to task. My psychologist wife, on observing this guy in action, saw at least two disorders - narcissistic and borderline personality.
I would respectfully suggest that there is some uncharacteristic murkiness of thinking here, Noah.
What is it that these leftists should do? What do you (or I) want them to do?
Almost without exception, they are not suited for politics of persuasion. You take the online bullying a bit out of context. It's not JUST cancel culture; the same voices and their allies vehemently deny the need to alter message OR tone OR wording to try to win over voters who are not already persuaded. They believe in turnout, they believe in mobilization, they believe in maximizing attention of the evil of adversaries.
But persuasion is not their thing, for the simple reason that in order to persuade, the first thing you need to do is to understand where other people are really coming from (as opposed to your wartime caricature of them), and that is most decidedly not on their playlist.
This is not an accident, nor is it stupidity. The Left wants things that the public, outside of a few cosmopolitan pockets, would vote down decisively. Thus, waiting for these people to begin, as a group to speak in a manner designed to increase support for their causes by a few percentage points? We need to realize that this is just not going to happen.
Not so unlike the far Right, their best hope is to seize power due to chaos. Maybe if a Trump administration totally crashed and burned in such a painful way that the entire country was up in arms, while simultaneously the Left had grabbed control of the Democratic Party and nominated a president? A not-super-likely daily double, but way, way more likely than the public ever democratically choosing far Left policies.
When you see the Left attacking Abundance Democrats and other moderates so vehemently, people who could actually win majorities and then hope to make government work well enough to maintain majorities, you can see why this is not at all in the interests of the Left.
From this perspective, I do not see why we should mind if they take a large portion of their discussion off to a fairly private room and hold it there. Bluesky is not so much siphoning off useful liberal energy as it is diverting people who might (or might not) vote with us in general elections but are devoted to all manner of mischief the rest of the time. I'm not at all for canceling anyone, not even fascists, but if mischief makers choose to go into a room and talk to themselves, why should we complain?
Here too things are complicated. But it's easier to show graphs! To your point -- when a certain very popular unpleasant Princeton history professor with a plagiarism problem decamped to Bluesky, it was clear what would happen in my academic circles. The small % of perpetrators cause 90% of the crime phenomenon operates on social media. If "particular" posters "snapped out of it," as you say, and dialed it down, we'd seen an extraordinary change. That's the task.
Why are you assuming that, should the group on Bluesky move forums and change tactics, they would be capable of “ persuasion, compromise, organization, and effective governance”? When I think of Jamelle Bouie those aren’t the competencies that come to mind. Further, they don’t get to walk away from this behavior. There really isn’t a way for someone who writes posts like those you quoted to redeem themselves.
You’re on your own, like it or not. To keep looking to this group, who have been sullying themselves and their institutions for over a decade now, and begging THEM to be your saviors - come on, Noah. They’re hopelessly compromised, entirely tainted. It sucks but you’ll need to start something new.
Noah, can I ask a genuine question, what do you mean by "But beyond that, the Gen Xers who ran those companies came from an age when having a thousand people yelling in your face meant that you were in grave danger". As a Gen Xer, I can infer a couple of things you mean by this but just curious given its a key part of the narrative in building your argument.
For people of a certain age (NB, I’m one of them) the only way to process 1,000 people yelling at you is as a physical presence - more than a mob; an army. It triggers a “your life is in immediate and present danger” response.
Im not on social media; nothing like this has ever happened to me. And I’m not thin skinned. But I’m not sure I’d be able to remain calm in that situation, even if at this point I intellectually realize that “a thousand people on social media” isn’t actually what it sounds like.
Thx for that interpretation. It wasn't actually what I was thinking but, yes, the "bravery" of yelling enraged venomous things behind a keyboard is a huge element of this. Analog, we had controls on things like this including having physical ramifications or social ostracization that do not exist online. In addition, I subscribe to the theory "every town has one crazy" where their limiter was that no one around them agreed which either have them self reflect or at least kept them in check. Online, the town crazies convene, amplify and reinforce those beliefs meaning there is no longer a social check on unacceptable rhetoric like promoting violence which unfortunately provokes those in a weaker mental state like we've seen so much of recently.
I have anon accounts at Twitter, Bluesky, Truth Social, reddit and I can't say that there is any serious discussion on any of the main channels or topics on any of the sites.
I look at the replies that Mark Cuban gets on Bluesky for trying to hold real conversations and its basically everyone just screaming into his face telling him he is the worst person ever for being a billionaire (regardless of topic posted)
Twitter is basically Elon's playground now for his "free speech" which restricts views that might be unfavorable to his brand, companies and politics.
Truth social is basically a cult member zone for everything MAGA related. Every reply and post that I have seen on the platform is basically propaganda for the administration.
Reddits main sub-reddits idea of "discussions" is to post favorable links for progressive websites (that nobody clicks on) and every comment is basically to call everyone who they disagree with a nazi or a facist.
For all the talk that people say they use social media for (expand their knowledge, connect with other people etc) it seems to just radicalize people based on whatever platform you use.
And the amount of bots and foreign agents trying to stir things up just makes most places awful to be in.
To be honest, the less time spent on social media, the better I feel. And I question every day why don't I just delete all social media and read news/blogs instead.
Youtube would probably the hardest to quit though.
It seems baked into the model. What kind of conversation is possible when limited to a few hundred characters?
On reddit if you go to the more niche subs at least it's possible to have real conversations and get value out of them, but the popular subs are a mess.
The issue I saw with reddit was that its way of segregating people by 1 affinity and then forbidding any other topic of discussion there, went against our natural way of coalescing a small community and then being able to discuss other topics within it. (Agreed that this "natural" mode would devolve unless carefully tended though.)
That's the downside, true, but the upside is that subs can moderate how they see fit rather than have one giant cesspool like the X-style platforms.
I have found Reddit useful for international travel planning. For example, thread topics like "visiting Buenos Aires" or "what places to visit and what places to avoid in Bogota Colombia." Sports team (e.g., your favorite NHL team) threads are usually safe without straying into Hitler-Nazi-Fascist derp. But, not always.
Social media is a short form (and getting shorter) popularity contest, which is hardly conducive to proper argument, at least in the Greek sense. It's only a public forum if you attract enough public to your tweets or posts, and you can't do that by offering thoughtfull, sustained analyses or critique on any platform save possibly this one. Everything else is a short attention span theatre of memes gifs, snark, bots, bootlickers and bad actors, with a peanut gallery of angry trolls and purist on the hunt for heretics. There's no reasoning.
Yup... you got it... I find that all of these platforms are increasingly irrelevant. In terms of "progressives," whatever that means these days, a focus on real meat-and-potatoes issues would be wise. These issues remain remarkably consistent .. 1) health-care 2) education 3) national security 4) immigration 5) fiscal policy ...
The problem with focusing on an issue is that a politician then is expected to deliver on it when elected. It's easy to purge a bunch of wokies from the government. It's hard to do anything to improve the issues you have listed.
agree ... these are super hard problems. However, one of the ways that MAGA has gained traction is by actually talking about them.
No need to quit YouTube, just choose better content. I watch a lot of sailing and woodworking channels. It's nice.
"Youtube would probably the hardest to quit though."
Coming soon to Amazon Prime "Brokeback Youtube"
Excellent piece, Noah. I think about this a lot. I don't participate in SM but I experienced similar firsthand as a professor. After teaching for a decade the same topics in the same way, I had a small group of students who registered formal complaints about me because "their voices weren't being heard" in my class discussions (this was around 2018). Fortunately, my level headed superiors didn't make anything of it but it was a wake-up call that I now had to walk on eggshells in my lectures. I teach decidedly non-political topics and rarely to never stray into them. This re-flared around the Hamas attack a few years back and that was complex where students wanted to stand up in front of my class to make statements (I teach in a business school). It was very difficult to navigate.
Like you, I despise that period mostly for its shutdown of any discourse around disagreements. The hard left were really the pioneers here as you note. I wish they had a tiny bit of self reflection now that we see how they enabled the right to do the same.
There was an old Dilbert comic strip making fun of Trump, with one panel having 3 Trump-looking dudes shouting "You're fired!" to one another.
Would do just as well for making fun of cancel culturists if it said "You're cancelled!"
“Compromise” is the third rail of the progressive left. Great piece, Noah.
Good piece but so much American commentary is just talking about talking on Twitter, or talking about the talking about the talking on Twitter.
Politicians should get off it so they have an easier time moving to the center. Writers should get off it so they have an easier time reading books.
Noah
I tend to ascribe to a different H (Horseshoe Theory), but I am just an average normie with similar positions to most Americans. I am a Reagan Republican, and depending on the subject,
I fall somewhere near the center of American attitudes. Occasionally, I may be further to the right on some things, yet rarely more to the left.
What we see with postliberalism from both the left and the right is a lot of performance with little substance. Mamdani and Bannon are the same people. You go further out, and you have Matthew Dowd and Tucker Carlson. Both loons. Whatever they are advocating has nothing to do with who we are as a country.
We practice liberal democratic capitalism here in America. It mostly works; sometimes it sucks.
Social Media is killing our culture.
We have seen every other form of government tried, and it has been found not to work. The old trope that Socialism can work, it’s just never been tried, is utter BS.
Mamdani’s ideas will lead us to France, which is in a dire state, and I believe it is a precursor to the problems we face. America is proof that every few decades or so, we need to relearn something. Trump will learn that tariffs are bad. Mamdani will learn that picking on a class of people to appeal to another class of people will fail. I mean, the Bill de Blasio disaster wasn’t that long ago.
Hang in there, pal, you have more friends than enemies.
Reminder : Mamdani is a candidate running to become the mayor of New York City. In what universe will a person running for a city election in a particularly unique city in America "lead us to France"? People, get a grip. If some regional politician has ideas that won't appeal to the masses living outside that region, they will never gain any national traction. I seem to remember there are some absolutely batshit crazy politicians in Congress on the MAGA side of the aisle. Why can't you feel able to say that their ideas will lead us to Russia or even North Korea?
Thank you again, Noah. Some thoughts:
1. The Cancel Culture Era, Peak Woke Era, or whatever we want to call it, was the most unpleasant political era of my lifetime, and I say that as a lifelong Democrat voter. Yes, Bush did awful stuff and Trump is doing awful stuff right now, but I can't tell you how alienating it felt for the left-- my home -- to descend into its own form of Moral Majority-style bullying. It made me question everything about myself, whether I'm on "the wrong side of history," just becoming another dumb conservative as I age, etc.
You and other Substackers such as Jesse Singal, Freddie DeBoer, Jeff Maurer, Ross Barkan, Kat Rosenfield, and many more have helped a great deal with getting me through this. I've sought therapy for it too. I've also had countless private conversations with other disaffected liberals about this stuff. We really really hate it. Just as much as we hate Trump. It hit a nerve nothing else could.
2. By "late 2010s," shouldn't we also include 2020 and perhaps 2021? COVID was a boom time for these folks. Summer 2020 was the absolute peak of the madness, and 2021 saw the same cancellers frothing like mad at how anyone who refuses a COVID vaccine (or who is merely skeptical about vaccine mandates) should be fired and lose everything.
2020 was peak alright. Although some positions were the opposite of normal as well. On borders and Sweden. For instance.
I have to admit I've been bewildered by the characterization of the bluesky by this article and Nate's article. I am on bluesky as a centrist, and I have found it to be a much more polite place than Twitter. If anything, it's too boring.
But I don't follow many political people on Bluesky. I mostly use it for data science and professional stuff.
Most of my professional peers are progressive, so when they moved to Bluesky. I followed. But I still just don't see any of the same call out culture found on Twitter.
So no mention of the massive wave of right wing cancellations and firings related to people who said "bad" things about Charlie Kirk?
It doesn't seem like the HBomb was defused as much as handed over to the MAGA state.
Conservative cancel culture is only growing in power.
It used to be people like Bari Weiss decried cancel culture from a sort of free speech, "I don't agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
Unfortunately, most of those people have just turned into "Our turn now!" including Bari Weiss.
Yes. I looked today to see if The Free Press had anything about the USG threatening anyone who said anything bad about Charlie Kirk, but as usual when the Trump administration threatens people for speech, the FP is dead silent.
But Weiss is hardly an exemplary defender of free speech -- she calls anything even slightly critical of Israel anti-semitic.
The reaction to Charlie Kirk has been absolutely unhinged. I have nothing against him, but flags at half staff for a random guy who went around arguing with college students for a living?
Trump is the most predictable creature on the planet. Of course he's going to glorify anybody who ever agreed with him or who has an audience of people who will vote for him.
Trump is using this to create and feed a narrative about left wing political violence and the need to quash any rhetoric that could be interpreted as inciting, meaning any rhetoric critical of him or his administration. He wants to use it to justify overt restrictions on political speech. It might not work, but he's trying, and if he can paint Kirk as a national treasure and symbol he can improve the odds of success.
Matthew, would it be possible for you to flesh out this argument more? Is the right cancelling people who disagree with Kirk? (As opposed to saying bad, distasteful or hateful things about him).
Maybe I am just naive, but it seems it would have been acceptable to cancel someone like Demore if he had said he hoped women coders died. He was cancelled for saying men and women differ statistically in interests. Are you saying the right is canceling people who disagree with Kirk’s arguments?
I am saying that the Right is cancelling people who say that Charlie Kirk was a divisive figure or a bad person or that he pissed other people off or bringing up Kirk's comments a few months ago about gun deaths being an unfortunate but acceptable side effect of living with the 2nd Amendment. Or cancelling people who don't show "adequate sadness" over his death.
Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC for saying, "He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive, younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”
“And I think that’s the environment we’re in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
A Middle Tennessee State University Dean was fired for saying "Looks like Ol'Charlie spoke his fate into existence. Hate begets hate. Zero Sympathy."
A screencap was retweeted by sitting US Senator Marsha Blackburn and they were fired.
Nice article about it here. https://apnews.com/article/dowd-msnbc-kirk-comments-e08f349022c9d69171cd575664141075
Thank you very much for elaborating.
Seems to me people are distinguishing between cancelling for making light of or justifying a murder (bad taste and thus socially unacceptable) and cancelling for disagreeing with one’s political position. It is getting blurry though.
I think they're mostly cancelling anyone who said anything that could be construed as celebratory of Kirk's death.
Somewhat related, my right wing family members are raging at Tim Walz for joking after Trump dropped out of sight that he kept checking to see if there would be something in the news, implying but not saying that he was hoping for a report that Trump had died. Actually, I don't think the family members who are raging have any idea what Walz said, they're raging about what they were told he said, which seems to be quite different from what he actually said.
"I don't think the family members who are raging have any idea what Walz said, they're raging about what they were told he said, which seems to be quite different from what he actually said."
That could be applied to Kirk and even Trump sometimes. It is just an extension of gossip and rumors running out of control to generate outrage.
Seriously... Florida is basically asking teachers there not to post or say critical things on their personal social media about Kirk or they can get reprimanded. Cancel culture has always existed, but progressive or liberal application of it has and will always be more limited in power over the long term than conservative use of it imo. I think we'll see something like Trump's first time, where by the end people are just exhausted. Fortunately he's speed running this term so maybe it'll happen sooner than later and we'll all show each other more grace afterwards and own that our online personas are not the best version of ourselves sometimes...
Cancel culture is not a "right" or "left" thing. It is a mob thing. But certainly the folks calling for "cancellations and firings" of people expressing glee about Kirk's assignation were emboldened by having watched a dozen years of progressives calling for "cancellations and firings" for dumb-ass reasons like recognizing biological realty.
While I kinda get why people were pissed off at Weiss's post (as an Asian American born here, the "where are you REALLY from" questions get old), the dogpiling (including on Weiss) is so utterly ridiculous that it's one the main reasons I left Twitter.
Unfortunately for a while that cancel culture nonsense infiltrated the work place too, and I recall younger employees getting flustered when people did not immediately do what they asked (older folks on social media were probably terrified of younger, more popular accounts and bent over backwards to follow the mob). People really did lose the art of persuasion, as being asked to put in the work of persuasion itself because a sign of oppression.
Advocacy groups followed similar lines of reasoning offline in local council meetings, government stakeholder engagement meetings, etc., such that "I as a (insert demographic group here) demand X" was supposed to be sufficient to change public policy. (Inevitably, someone from the same group would have an opposing opinion, but the advocacy group would either pretend they didn't speak or accuse them of being a shill for some dark, shadowy group.) I still see this kind of behavior from time to time, but it isn't as bad as it was under Trump 1 or early Biden admins.
“ Unfortunately for a while that cancel culture nonsense infiltrated the work place too, and I recall younger employees getting flustered when people did not immediately do what they asked.”
This is interesting. Can you give any examples? Like regular ones, not necessarily dramatic ones. What would a common instance of this look like?
I ask because I only got a glimmer of it in my office. The thing is that because of the nature of my job - in-house counsel for a giant corporation, where everyone in my department is a lawyer with 15 years experience in private practice - my exposure to the younger cohort is very low. That’s not to say that woke wasn’t a huge thing - it was, and it derailed my career - but it didn’t really come from young people. I feel like whatever “it” was in the last ten or fifteen years probably presented much different in the youth than the middle-aged.
I can think of one instance that really stayed with me: after Covid, when the company told everyone to head back to the office, the younger cohort JUST DIDN’T DO IT. They yelled and refused and demanded and threatened. I’m not being critical exactly - it was incredibly impressive, and they won. It’s years later and we’re still almost entirely remote. And we’re a gigantic multinational company.
I’m 55 and have worked in a lot of different places and I’ve never once even heard of employees pushing back like this. I still haven’t really figured out what I think about it.
I wonder how much of 2010s social media tone was shaped by exposure to sitcoms. Everyone on Friends was nasty to each other and dismissive.
Prewoke, beginning of tumblr era, the most common presentation of thought was via sarcasm. Everything was 'ironic'. Its an offshoot of sitcoms and later late night television and Whedon-ism. Sarcasm morphed into negativity via the 'But actually tho.' addendum. Sneer culture took over these spaces, which continues to today.
Is there a word for “doing something really interesting and novel artistically which unintentionally created a culture that perverts it into something foul?” I feel bad from Whedon. Buffy and that space cowboy show were awesome. Firefly. But the syntax and rhythms of language he created wrecked everything forever.
There must be a word for that. Probably something in German.
Precisely. Snarky Whedon-ism has had a profoundly bad impact on dialogue, both in entertainment and occasionally in real life. Kill it with fire.
Ah, “sneer culture”. Love the term.
I never heard the term sneer culture but it's so appropriate
Friends ended before 2010. Maybe it had a second period of life on streamers but it doesn’t seem to have any real form of cancel culture.
Social Media has licensed a range of people with various disorders to become keyboard warriors from the safety and anonymity of their ‘bedrooms’. I worked with a guy that was one such ‘warrior’ who dished out all kinds of vitriol on-line. However, when forces to sit opposite me in my office he sat there with slumped shoulders with nothing much to say. He also couldn’t take on-line counter-attacks that brought him to task. My psychologist wife, on observing this guy in action, saw at least two disorders - narcissistic and borderline personality.
I would respectfully suggest that there is some uncharacteristic murkiness of thinking here, Noah.
What is it that these leftists should do? What do you (or I) want them to do?
Almost without exception, they are not suited for politics of persuasion. You take the online bullying a bit out of context. It's not JUST cancel culture; the same voices and their allies vehemently deny the need to alter message OR tone OR wording to try to win over voters who are not already persuaded. They believe in turnout, they believe in mobilization, they believe in maximizing attention of the evil of adversaries.
But persuasion is not their thing, for the simple reason that in order to persuade, the first thing you need to do is to understand where other people are really coming from (as opposed to your wartime caricature of them), and that is most decidedly not on their playlist.
This is not an accident, nor is it stupidity. The Left wants things that the public, outside of a few cosmopolitan pockets, would vote down decisively. Thus, waiting for these people to begin, as a group to speak in a manner designed to increase support for their causes by a few percentage points? We need to realize that this is just not going to happen.
Not so unlike the far Right, their best hope is to seize power due to chaos. Maybe if a Trump administration totally crashed and burned in such a painful way that the entire country was up in arms, while simultaneously the Left had grabbed control of the Democratic Party and nominated a president? A not-super-likely daily double, but way, way more likely than the public ever democratically choosing far Left policies.
When you see the Left attacking Abundance Democrats and other moderates so vehemently, people who could actually win majorities and then hope to make government work well enough to maintain majorities, you can see why this is not at all in the interests of the Left.
From this perspective, I do not see why we should mind if they take a large portion of their discussion off to a fairly private room and hold it there. Bluesky is not so much siphoning off useful liberal energy as it is diverting people who might (or might not) vote with us in general elections but are devoted to all manner of mischief the rest of the time. I'm not at all for canceling anyone, not even fascists, but if mischief makers choose to go into a room and talk to themselves, why should we complain?
Here too things are complicated. But it's easier to show graphs! To your point -- when a certain very popular unpleasant Princeton history professor with a plagiarism problem decamped to Bluesky, it was clear what would happen in my academic circles. The small % of perpetrators cause 90% of the crime phenomenon operates on social media. If "particular" posters "snapped out of it," as you say, and dialed it down, we'd seen an extraordinary change. That's the task.
Why are you assuming that, should the group on Bluesky move forums and change tactics, they would be capable of “ persuasion, compromise, organization, and effective governance”? When I think of Jamelle Bouie those aren’t the competencies that come to mind. Further, they don’t get to walk away from this behavior. There really isn’t a way for someone who writes posts like those you quoted to redeem themselves.
You’re on your own, like it or not. To keep looking to this group, who have been sullying themselves and their institutions for over a decade now, and begging THEM to be your saviors - come on, Noah. They’re hopelessly compromised, entirely tainted. It sucks but you’ll need to start something new.
> they don’t get to walk away from this behavior. There really isn’t a way for someone who writes posts like those you quoted to redeem themselves.
you're doing the exact same thing
"When I think of Jamelle Bouie those aren’t the competencies that come to mind."
Are we not being robbed of Bouie's "incisive commentary of which intelligent progressives would otherwise be capable"?
Pot meet kettle
Noah, can I ask a genuine question, what do you mean by "But beyond that, the Gen Xers who ran those companies came from an age when having a thousand people yelling in your face meant that you were in grave danger". As a Gen Xer, I can infer a couple of things you mean by this but just curious given its a key part of the narrative in building your argument.
I’m pretty sure he means this:
For people of a certain age (NB, I’m one of them) the only way to process 1,000 people yelling at you is as a physical presence - more than a mob; an army. It triggers a “your life is in immediate and present danger” response.
Im not on social media; nothing like this has ever happened to me. And I’m not thin skinned. But I’m not sure I’d be able to remain calm in that situation, even if at this point I intellectually realize that “a thousand people on social media” isn’t actually what it sounds like.
Thx for that interpretation. It wasn't actually what I was thinking but, yes, the "bravery" of yelling enraged venomous things behind a keyboard is a huge element of this. Analog, we had controls on things like this including having physical ramifications or social ostracization that do not exist online. In addition, I subscribe to the theory "every town has one crazy" where their limiter was that no one around them agreed which either have them self reflect or at least kept them in check. Online, the town crazies convene, amplify and reinforce those beliefs meaning there is no longer a social check on unacceptable rhetoric like promoting violence which unfortunately provokes those in a weaker mental state like we've seen so much of recently.