In the Soviet Union when someone said or thought something wrong, the local party leaders would advice their employers who would then remove them from the ability to work.
Were people in the USSR getting barred from their constitutional duty to work? I grew up there and it sounds weird. You can say many other bad things but not this one.
I believe the major change is that now people lose their jobs due to online mobbing and rage mobs can cancel someone’s entire ability to avoid homelessness through Twitter assaults and Facebook campaigns.
Has anyone ended up poor or homeless due to cancel culture?
Were people in the USSR getting barred from their constitutional duty to work? I was born there and it sounds weird. You can say many other bad things but not this one.
“Remove them from the ability to work” is hyperbole or exaggeration, and literally it’s more like “ability to work at a high-status or high-paying job”, which was definitely true in China and presumably in the USSR. This is better than being unemployed/homeless but still quite terrible especially for someone used to the high status and income, enough to drive a significant fraction of people facing the prospect to commit suicide.
Has anyone ended up poor or homeless due to cancel culture?
I’m not aware of anyone driven to absolute poverty or homelessness by cancel culture, but loss of status and income seems true for most “canceled” people (except for a few who managed to leverage it into becoming a minor celebrity) and there have been suicides linked to being canceled. 123
I think the status risk is real, but also a bit overblown, because polite society isn’t the whole world. If needed, you can make money outside it, have a social circle, and lead an interesting life. When people commit suicide after being canceled, I think it’s more because none of their polite society friends would stand by them rather than signal morality. But if you already know that about polite society, and have friends and family independent from it, you should be fine for the foreseeable future.
I think the status risk is real, but also a bit overblown
This post is about trying to figure out and/or explain recent trends in epistemic conditions, for which it’s not the real status risk that matters, but the perceived risk. So this response doesn’t seem directly relevant. (Talking about something tangential here is fine with me, but I just want to make that clear.) ETA: On second thought I guess this could be part of the explanation for why people have high perceived risk so it is relevant after all. :)
If needed, you can make money outside it, have a social circle, and lead an interesting life.
Can you explain more about this? For example if you’re a professor and you get canceled, what are you supposed to do to regain comparable income/status/perks?
Were people in the USSR getting barred from their constitutional duty to work?
You could be fired from your job and then put into prison for violating your constitutional duty, and no one would care.
But in practice, you were supposed to find a job that was sufficiently low-status, or was dangerous for health, or something like that. Such jobs were allowed to hire even “politically unreliable” people. (Refusing to take one of those jobs, that would be a violation of your constitutional duty.)
The immediate example that comes to mind is when Richard Stallman was canceled in October, some people feared he was or was in danger of being homeless. I remember reading a post about this on Eric Raymond’s personal blog, which he has since apparently deleted or hidden. Part of the info was in posts on Stallman’s own blog stallman.org, which seems to be down, also referenced in this reddit thread.
I would like to think that RMS didn’t end up homeless, or not for more than a few days, since there must be many people who would give him donations if it came to that (and if he would accept them). But there has been no (very) public announcement of him being alright, for understandable reasons. The list of people and organizations who denounced him was impressively long, regardless. (I mean the ones like GNU and MIT, not the professional denouncers who decided to attack him.)
Were people in the USSR getting barred from their constitutional duty to work? I grew up there and it sounds weird. You can say many other bad things but not this one.
Has anyone ended up poor or homeless due to cancel culture?
“Remove them from the ability to work” is hyperbole or exaggeration, and literally it’s more like “ability to work at a high-status or high-paying job”, which was definitely true in China and presumably in the USSR. This is better than being unemployed/homeless but still quite terrible especially for someone used to the high status and income, enough to drive a significant fraction of people facing the prospect to commit suicide.
I’m not aware of anyone driven to absolute poverty or homelessness by cancel culture, but loss of status and income seems true for most “canceled” people (except for a few who managed to leverage it into becoming a minor celebrity) and there have been suicides linked to being canceled. 1 2 3
I think the status risk is real, but also a bit overblown, because polite society isn’t the whole world. If needed, you can make money outside it, have a social circle, and lead an interesting life. When people commit suicide after being canceled, I think it’s more because none of their polite society friends would stand by them rather than signal morality. But if you already know that about polite society, and have friends and family independent from it, you should be fine for the foreseeable future.
This post is about trying to figure out and/or explain recent trends in epistemic conditions, for which it’s not the real status risk that matters, but the perceived risk. So this response doesn’t seem directly relevant. (Talking about something tangential here is fine with me, but I just want to make that clear.) ETA: On second thought I guess this could be part of the explanation for why people have high perceived risk so it is relevant after all. :)
Can you explain more about this? For example if you’re a professor and you get canceled, what are you supposed to do to regain comparable income/status/perks?
For income, maybe try to get a job in industry. For status, if nobody spoke up against the canceling, I’m not sure such status is worth regaining.
You could be fired from your job and then put into prison for violating your constitutional duty, and no one would care.
But in practice, you were supposed to find a job that was sufficiently low-status, or was dangerous for health, or something like that. Such jobs were allowed to hire even “politically unreliable” people. (Refusing to take one of those jobs, that would be a violation of your constitutional duty.)
The immediate example that comes to mind is when Richard Stallman was canceled in October, some people feared he was or was in danger of being homeless. I remember reading a post about this on Eric Raymond’s personal blog, which he has since apparently deleted or hidden. Part of the info was in posts on Stallman’s own blog stallman.org, which seems to be down, also referenced in this reddit thread.
I would like to think that RMS didn’t end up homeless, or not for more than a few days, since there must be many people who would give him donations if it came to that (and if he would accept them). But there has been no (very) public announcement of him being alright, for understandable reasons. The list of people and organizations who denounced him was impressively long, regardless. (I mean the ones like GNU and MIT, not the professional denouncers who decided to attack him.)