Essay on cancel culture

[ClaphamFox]

The Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie has published an essay on cancel culture that has inevitably caused something of a stir online. She raises some interesting points. The essay is in three parts, the third of which reads:

"In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.

"I find it obscene.

"There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.

"People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’

"People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy.

"People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. (How ironic, speaking of violence, that it is one of these two who encouraged Twitter followers to pick up machetes and attack me.)

"And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.

"I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene."

 

Full article

[Captain...]

Don't necessarily agree with all of that, but it is good to see people looking into it and assessing the damage it is having on our youth. 

 

Could we actually get to a point where governments actually look at banning Twitter? It's great that we have these hugely powerful tools for communication, just a shame they are mainly used to bully and harass people.

[Vacamion]

 

This all arose from disagreements about Gender Critical / Trans Rights Activism / Sex-based rights / Feminist issues.

 

These arguments are pointless, unwinnable and unending internet poison.

 

They always descend into the two sides shouting at each other with their fingers in their ears, accusing the other side of bigotry.

 

I try to steer clear of all that.

 

Graham Linehan ruined his life and lost his marriage obsessing about it.  

 

Beyond acknowledging that the debate is poisonous, I would suggest that this thread is probably not going going to resolve the underlying arguments.

 

 

[Izzy]

1 hour ago, ClaphamFox said:

I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.
 

Fvck me, that's my kids to a tee

[Finnegan]

19 minutes ago, Vacamion said:

 

This all arose from disagreements about Gender Critical / Trans Rights Activism / Sex-based rights / Feminist issues.

 

These arguments are pointless, unwinnable and unending internet poison.

 

They always descend into the two sides shouting at each other with their fingers in their ears, accusing the other side of bigotry.

 

I try to steer clear of all that.

 

Graham Linehan ruined his life and lost his marriage obsessing about it.  

 

Beyond acknowledging that the debate is poisonous, I would suggest that this thread is probably not going going to resolve the underlying arguments.

 

 

 

Generally agree with most of this, in particular how much of the phenomena is increasingly just two tribes yelling at each other. Both taking continued steps back towards the poles of extremes and away from a middle ground of some common sense until you've got bigots on either end. 

 

I'm not sure I can sympathise with Graham Linehan, though. He's largely just outed himself as a TERF twerp with some particularly toxic views. Which is a shame because I felt he had some valid things to say about adults force feeding gender identity to children at first. 

 

Edited 17 June 2021 by Finnegan

[Basildon Fox]

5 minutes ago, Izzy said:

Fvck me, that's my kids to a tee

My two sons too.  My daughter thankfully is one of the nicest most humble people you could ever wish to meet.

[leicsmac]

19 minutes ago, Vacamion said:

 

This all arose from disagreements about Gender Critical / Trans Rights Activism / Sex-based rights / Feminist issues.

 

These arguments are pointless, unwinnable and unending internet poison.

 

They always descend into the two sides shouting at each other with their fingers in their ears, accusing the other side of bigotry.

 

I try to steer clear of all that.

 

Graham Linehan ruined his life and lost his marriage obsessing about it.  

 

Beyond acknowledging that the debate is poisonous, I would suggest that this thread is probably not going going to resolve the underlying arguments.

 

 

Yeah, that's about right really.

 

The only commentary I have on the topic is that the author would, up until recently, not have had the chance to either educate herself on this matter or any other nor express her opinion on any meaningful platform regarding it, and that would have been because of people refusing her on account of her gender and race.

 

That things have changed and she can now do so is down, rather largely, to other people deciding that some matters are not matters of gentle debate and therefore some "canceling" had to be done.

[Captain...]

27 minutes ago, Vacamion said:

 

This all arose from disagreements about Gender Critical / Trans Rights Activism / Sex-based rights / Feminist issues.

 

These arguments are pointless, unwinnable and unending internet poison.

 

They always descend into the two sides shouting at each other with their fingers in their ears, accusing the other side of bigotry.

 

I try to steer clear of all that.

 

Graham Linehan ruined his life and lost his marriage obsessing about it.  

 

Beyond acknowledging that the debate is poisonous, I would suggest that this thread is probably not going going to resolve the underlying arguments.

 

 

I don't think the debate is poisonous it is the methods of debate that are the issue. There will always be a divide, but in a simpler time when you couldn't all pile in you would have your position and gravitate towards the establishments that reflect that. There will always be differences of opinion but if opposing views are set out clearly and calmly and with nuance and not in click bait headlines and 160 character tweets. The way we debate online just attracts the noisy extremists on both sides and the moderate but largely silent majority stay away from it.

[HighPeakFox]

Sadly, one sees the effect of this sort of thing here on FT too. I'm just very glad I chose not to have children, I stay away from as much of the toxic stuff as possible.

[leicsmac]

Previous generations feeling that newer ones are somehow a disappointment to them has been a thing since antiquity; I guess this is as good a reason as any for the current ones.

[Vacamion]

20 minutes ago, Finnegan said:

 

I'm not sure I can sympathise with Graham Linehan, though. He's largely just outed himself as a TERF twerp with some particularly toxic views. Which is a shame because I felt he had some valid things to say about adults force feeding gender identity to children at first. 

 

 

Yeah, like I said, I'm not going to debate the rights and wrongs of anything Linehan advocated for or against.

 

It just struck me that he seemed to be obsessed with this stuff, to the exclusion and detriment of all other issues, and ended up banned from Twitter, "cancelled" and separated from his missus.

 

He's made some realky good stuff on telly in the past, but if a channel announced they were about to run a new sitcom, written and directed by him, there would be a storm of online protest and it probably wouldn't proceed.

 

That guy has flushed his life down the crapper for this stuff.

 

 

[Vacamion]

19 minutes ago, Captain... said:

I don't think the debate is poisonous it is the methods of debate that are the issue. There will always be a divide, but in a simpler time when you couldn't all pile in you would have your position and gravitate towards the establishments that reflect that. There will always be differences of opinion but if opposing views are set out clearly and calmly and with nuance and not in click bait headlines and 160 character tweets. The way we debate online just attracts the noisy extremists on both sides and the moderate but largely silent majority stay away from it.

 

I won't outline my position on the debate in question, but me and my wife have opposing views on this issue.

 

We are able to accept that we disagree about it, that there are lots of other things in life to agree and disagree about and this debate doesn't define our view of each other.

 

You can't do that on Twitter or in online debate, which is why we are where we are.

 

[ClaphamFox]

31 minutes ago, Captain... said:

I don't think the debate is poisonous it is the methods of debate that are the issue. There will always be a divide, but in a simpler time when you couldn't all pile in you would have your position and gravitate towards the establishments that reflect that. There will always be differences of opinion but if opposing views are set out clearly and calmly and with nuance and not in click bait headlines and 160 character tweets. The way we debate online just attracts the noisy extremists on both sides and the moderate but largely silent majority stay away from it.

I think the key question is whether, as Adichie argues, the rise of social media has brought with it such a pressure to express the 'right' opinions (and an accompanying terror of expressing the wrong opinions) that it is preventing young people from debating and learning, and therefore from growing into adults with the ability to think about complex issues for themselves. Has public debate become more binary, over-simplistic, puritanical and emotionally hysterical since social media arrived on the scene? It certainly feels that way. The noisy extremists now get to set the terms of public debate in a way that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago. I'm not sure it's a healthy development.

Edited 17 June 2021 by ClaphamFox

[Flamey]

25 minutes ago, leicsmac said:

Previous generations feeling that newer ones are somehow a disappointment to them has been a thing since antiquity; I guess this is as good a reason as any for the current ones.

Sadly true.

[leicsmac]

7 minutes ago, ClaphamFox said:

I think the key question is whether, as Adichie argues, the rise of social media has brought with it such a pressure to express the 'right' opinions (and an accompanying terror of expressing the wrong opinions) that it is preventing young people from debating and learning, and therefore from growing into adults with the ability to think about complex issues for themselves. Has public debate become more binary, over-simplistic, puritanical and emotionally hysterical since social media arrived on the scene? It certainly feels that way. The noisy extremists now get to set the terms of public debate in a way that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago. I'm not sure it's a healthy development.

I don't think so and I would present the classic man on a soapbox with a crowd around him as an example to support this.

[Finnaldo]

I get why it’s focused on younger people, but I’ve met more and more older folks, in their 50s and 60s, taken in completely by whatever propaganda they read on Facebook and have become just as combative and intolerant to contradicting or dissenting opinions from themselves. You get it in younger teen and adults who grew up in that bubble but grown adults are very much prone to it as well.

[Bellend Sebastian]

43 minutes ago, Captain... said:

I don't think the debate is poisonous it is the methods of debate that are the issue. There will always be a divide, but in a simpler time when you couldn't all pile in you would have your position and gravitate towards the establishments that reflect that. There will always be differences of opinion but if opposing views are set out clearly and calmly and with nuance and not in click bait headlines and 160 character tweets. The way we debate online just attracts the noisy extremists on both sides and the moderate but largely silent majority stay away from it.

Heck yes. Obviously there is an issue in there that will probably take years to work itself out, but to be honest I was far more interested in how the debate was being conducted than the debate itself.

 

I lost followers on Twitter (not that I care, I've got next to sod all anyway) just because I followed Graham Linehan on there, and I only followed him years ago because he was associated with some comedy I liked. I never entered the debate or expressed any sort of opinion about it, and certainly didn't take any sides, but folk I'd known for years cut me off just for that.

 

It's all a bit rum

[Finnegan]

19 minutes ago, Vacamion said:

 

Yeah, like I said, I'm not going to debate the rights and wrongs of anything Linehan advocated for or against.

 

It just struck me that he seemed to be obsessed with this stuff, to the exclusion and detriment of all other issues, and ended up banned from Twitter, "cancelled" and separated from his missus.

 

He's made some realky good stuff on telly in the past, but if a channel announced they were about to run a new sitcom, written and directed by him, there would be a storm of online protest and it probably wouldn't proceed.

 

That guy has flushed his life down the crapper for this stuff.

 

 

 

Yeah it's become a crusade for him which is bonkers. 

 

A few months ago Reddit made a really major faux pas, they hired a woman called Aimee Knight, who is an MtoF trans rights activist, to be a paid admin. 

 

This sounds unremarkable in 2021 in and of itself and on the surface people would appreciate why a company their size would want diversity amongst its staff. Unfortunately, Aimee Knight is also a paedophile apologist whose father is a convicted paedophile, whom she made her campaign manager for a bid to get elected as an MP for the Lib Dems, whose long term partner publishes paedophile erotica stories and publicly confessed to fantasising about having sex with children on his social media. 

 

She's been thrown out of both the Lib Dems and the Green Party because of these unapologetic associations. 

 

All of which Reddit should have discovered in due diligence and they ended up having to back pedal and fire her a few days later. 

 

But how do I know all this? Because when the drama was blowing up all over Reddit and I had no idea who the fvck she was and why everyone was going batshit over it (reddit was Mass censoring all conversation and attempts at doxxing while they tried damage limitation) I did a Google search. 

 

The top result was a long, extensive bit of "investigative" blogging detailing her history. It was a complete and total (I mean justified, to be fair) assassination of the character of what's basically an early 20s nobody that no one had heard of, cosplaying as a politician. The article gave her more fame and notoriety than she'd probably managed on her own. 

 

... And that's when I noticed it was on the website of a multi BAFTA winning writer/director. 

 

I mean, what the fvck is he even bothering for? Even JK Rowling has the good sense to restrict her batshit crazy to Twitter. 

[SpacedX]

"In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications"

 

She's clearly familiar with some member's posts on the coronavirus thread. 

[Captain...]

22 minutes ago, ClaphamFox said:

I think the key question is whether, as Adichie argues, the rise of social media has brought with it such a pressure to express the 'right' opinions (and an accompanying terror of expressing the wrong opinions) that it is preventing young people from debating and learning, and therefore from growing into adults with the ability to think about complex issues for themselves. Has public debate become more binary, over-simplistic, puritanical and emotionally hysterical since social media arrived on the scene? It certainly feels that way. The noisy extremists now get to set the terms of public debate in a way that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago. I'm not sure it's a healthy development.

I think the problem is that social media, particularly Twitter, is a global platform. It is also it's great wonder. But you have so many people from so many different backgrounds and cultures and there is no one universal truth. 

 

If you take football forum, if I post on here that "Forest are shit" that is a universal truth on Foxes Talk. I'll get a load of likes, if I post it on a Forest forum I'll get a load of abuse, if I post it on a global platform most people will say who? Mahrez is a better example, post on here that he had a shit game, most people will agree as we all watched him have a shit game, post it on twitter all the Algerian fans pile in and give you abuse. Audience is key, now if you grew up in a predominantly Catholic country then you would have certain views that would be largely shared by your friends and you could say them in your local to general agreement but you put it online and it is vile offensive bigotry. Does that make you a bigot or an idiot? The big problem comes with people doubling down on it when getting called out.

 

I think we are just not ready for a global forum yet, because we are too different and seemingly unaccepting of other points of view and unable to accept our own views being challenged and even when we can any sort of nuance of debate gets lost in shouting and point scoring. You see it all the time, a long well thought out post gets picked apart because of a typo or grammatical error.

 

Personally I avoid Twitter, have my Facebook privacy settings on max.

[Captain...]

55 minutes ago, HighPeakFox said:

Sadly, one sees the effect of this sort of thing here on FT too. I'm just very glad I chose not to have children, I stay away from as much of the toxic stuff as possible.

You see it, but I do think the mods do a good job on here keeping it civil and that does steer the debate down more civil paths. I don't post as much as I used to, but generally things get stamped out before it gets too personal and bans applied when people cross the line. That is twitters only chance of salvation, much better moderation, but it is massive compared to FT and you are going to get so many differences between the thousands of moderators that would be needed.

[leicsmac]

30 minutes ago, Captain... said:

I think the problem is that social media, particularly Twitter, is a global platform. It is also it's great wonder. But you have so many people from so many different backgrounds and cultures and there is no one universal truth. 

 

If you take football forum, if I post on here that "Forest are shit" that is a universal truth on Foxes Talk. I'll get a load of likes, if I post it on a Forest forum I'll get a load of abuse, if I post it on a global platform most people will say who? Mahrez is a better example, post on here that he had a shit game, most people will agree as we all watched him have a shit game, post it on twitter all the Algerian fans pile in and give you abuse. Audience is key, now if you grew up in a predominantly Catholic country then you would have certain views that would be largely shared by your friends and you could say them in your local to general agreement but you put it online and it is vile offensive bigotry. Does that make you a bigot or an idiot? The big problem comes with people doubling down on it when getting called out.

 

I think we are just not ready for a global forum yet, because we are too different and seemingly unaccepting of other points of view and unable to accept our own views being challenged and even when we can any sort of nuance of debate gets lost in shouting and point scoring. You see it all the time, a long well thought out post gets picked apart because of a typo or grammatical error.

 

Personally I avoid Twitter, have my Facebook privacy settings on max.

There's something in that, and I also think it's obvious that we have never been ready for such a forum, so I'm not sure why some folks think discourse was somehow more polite and accepting before the advent of social media.

[Captain...]

5 minutes ago, leicsmac said:

There's something in that, and I also think it's obvious that we have never been ready for such a forum, so I'm not sure why some folks think discourse was somehow more polite and accepting before the advent of social media.

I think you rarely got into "debates" with people you didn't know. Heavy things come up with friends and you may disagree, but even if you massively disagree throughout that debate that person is your friend and a human being first and an opinion second. In Twitter you are not seen as a human, just an opinion. You are defined by what you say because people know nothing else about you and don't care.

 

But if someone you didn't know came up to you and started being offensive, you're going to tell them to fvck off.

Edited 17 June 2021 by Captain...

[leicsmac]

5 minutes ago, Captain... said:

I think you rarely got into "debates" with people you didn't know. Heavy things come up with friends and you may disagree, but even if you massively disagree throughout that debate that person is your friend and a human being first and an opinion second. In Twitter you are not seen as a human, just an opinion. You are defined by what you say because people know nothing else about you and don't care.

 

But if someone you didn't know came up to you and started being offensive, you're going to tell them to fvck off.

Yeah, agreed. And I think that if there had been a similar mechanism for human communication at any point in history, the outcome would be the same.

[James.]

What are the main arguments against requiring people to provide a form of identification (passport, driving licence, etc) in order to open a social media account?

 

The lack of accountability is surely one of the main drivers for the toxicity of much of what is posted on social media platforms.