The power they have isn’t over us, it’s over institutions and businesses who seem to bend to the will of the mob.
I’d like to see some data on whether a Twitter storm in a teacup has any measurable negative consequences for a typical large organization, and whether they need to listen as often as they do.
They don't have any power, other than to annoy the institution. The only power here is the power that MIT has over the people they book to speak, and since MIT doesn't want to be annoyed, they canceled the speaker.
The problem with cancel culture is a problem with bad employment law, and a problem with cultural institutions without any core ethical beliefs.
> They don't have any power, other than to annoy the institution. The only power here is the power that MIT has over the people they book to speak, and since MIT doesn't want to be annoyed, they canceled the speaker.
The ability to get others to do what you want them to is absolutely a form of power.
A large number of US universities make signing a DEI statement a precondition for employment. Some also require an annual progress report on DEI targets. Dorian Abbot had the temerity to propose an alternate framework, MFE. Some factions can't tolerate alternative perspectives, and thus Dorian had to be cancelled.
I agree. Absolutionistic ethics, of which I am a proponent of, would largely throw out “the paradox of tolerance”.
Cancel culture serves to highlight the inevitable orthodoxies that arise from proponents of “the paradox of tolerance”. Ultimately people need to ask themselves, “By what standard?”
It would be good to pass laws that make it illegal to fire someone over a twitter mob (or any kind of mob action). Anti-mob or anti-bullying laws. And/or initiate class-action lawsuits against twitter for encouraging this kind of behavior or failing to prevent it, resulting in significant damage to people's careers. It's far from being the first time this happens, so there's definitely a case to be made that twitter has known for a long time that this is a problem.
Yes, it is largely a labor law issue. Twitter mob is not just cause for terminating the employment of someone. Using anti-defamation laws against individual bullies is another possibility.
In general, in the US, there doesn't need to be a "just cause." Someone has become a headache or embarrassment for us--for whatever unprotected reason--is sufficient.
In the US sodomy was a crime too. Laws can change. Labour law is not written in stone.
And even with current laws, where there "need not be a just cause", there are protections against unjust causes (e.g. because they found out you're jewish, or you're fat, or whatever) and "because a mob campaigned against one" can be added to that. "But, under current law the business could just say they fired them for their own neutral reasons?" Sure. Let them defend that in a lawsuit, if it happened to coincide with a mob campaign.
You're arguing for something that in all likelihood requires a constitutional amendment.
Anti discrimination clauses only overrule the first amendments freedom of association due to the equal protection clause, and there's no reading that suggests that firing someone due to public pressure is implicitly discrimination.
But there is than the next obstacle in the US system: You need to have very deep pockets to actually take a case in court. "Justice" is only available to the rich in the US. (And this doesn't seem to be a construction error if you look closer. But that's another topic).
> "Justice" is only available to the rich in the US.
I disagree. I think we can all agree the government has a monopoly on violence which it is relatively inclined to use. The US system depends on the idea that someone will challenge the use of that monopoly in their particular instance, which we call precedent. It is true that people not-of-means may be subject to that violence unjustly but it only takes the government messing with the wrong person once to establish precedent. The wrong person could be rich but they could also just be a person who catches public support.
>but it only takes the government messing with the wrong person once to establish precedent.
Kind of like the case of police routinely shooting unarmed blacks and getting off scot-free?
This system seems to have worked wonders to prevent this from happening. Or maybe they just haven't messed with the wrong person yet, since Rodney King hardly changed anything, and Derek Chauvin's convinction wont either...
> Kind of like the case of police routinely shooting unarmed blacks and getting off scot-free?
That's not quite the same. Murder didn't need precedent, however, establishing some framework for grading police incidents retroactively does. What gets in the way of that is existing laws which protect police officers wholesale. If you're trying overturn an entire existing law for a new framework, that's a bit outside the bounds of precedent because you're not longer talking about interpretation.
And what about twitter mobs that point out legitimate fireable offenses (like police brutality )? Would the fact that a twitter mob raised the issue help prevent the legitimatw firing?
>Are you really comparing getting fired from your job to a lynching?
Blacks used to get fired (or not hired) from jobs, or thrown out of towns and establishments for being black on the demand of racist white mobs.
Is that serious enough for someone to make a comparison with a historical issue like lynching, or it should involve a hanging too?
Lynchings didn't always involve death, sometimes it was "just" beatings, not to mention the term has had a metaphorical issue for collective violence/threats, even merely verbal, for a century now.
And the "right to work" (not to mention feed yourself and your family) is as important as the right to live.
Lynching was part of a framework of racial terror that kept (and by its legacies, continues to keep) black people from attaining social and economic equality. I'd say that very few things meet a sufficient standard for comparison with lynching, least of which is the occasional (and generally management-class or higher) white person losing their job.
> And the "right to work" (not to mention feed yourself and your family) is as important as the right to live.
"Right to work," at least in the US, is a series of laws designed to curtail labor rights by weakening unions (i.e., the institutions that usually keep people in their jobs, particularly in at-will countries like the US). Are you sure that's what you meant?
Nobody was lynched here so anti-lynching law would not apply. Given we're discussing mobs getting riled up over the wrongs of the "other", it also seems appropriate to place the actual outcome in a less exaggerated way.
Kind of ironic that people are getting offended over my choice of words here, but we could call these anti-mob or anti-bullying laws instead. The point remains, it might make sense to make it illegal for institutions to fire people over the call of a mob.
They surely are not equal, but I find them very comparable. When twitter mobs try to get people fired they're trying to prevent them from making a living, what are they after? Do they want the target to kill tthemselves?
Also "comparing" by definition can be done between any 2 things, even if they don't have the same "value". I can compare oranges and dogs if I want to.
I think there some subliminal need for people to mention lynching when it's innapropriate. Happens far too much to be coincidence.
Guy gets protested because he says 'providing support for historically discriminated-against groups in America is just like the Nazi regime' and you can almost guarantee someone is going to call it a lynching. I initially thought people were doing it to be intentionally provocative, but it appears to be some unintended impulse, probably the same 'imp of the perverse' thing that drove the initial guy to bring the Nazis into a discussion about affirmative-action as if that was going to add some clarity to his approach to the topic.
The more decoupled an organization's or its leaders' incentives are from the "market" - the more risk averse they become. Everything is about keeping your head down and avoiding controversy.
The goal for many orgs now is not to make customers happy anymore, it's to avoid the ire of a small group, and keep rent seeking.
As we move towards post-capitalism this will only get worse.
On one hand, keep the speaker. The potential downside: social media outrage that may escalate and get covered on MSM if it gets big enough. You and your dept / uni get a lot of bad press or if things go really sideways, your job could be on the line.
The potential upside of this decision? People go to a talk and consider some issues, but it’s not like you (the committee / administrator / dean etc) get any real tangible incentive from this outcome. You basically just did your job, if you’re lucky, everyone just moves on.
On the other hand, cancel the speaker. The upside: MSM will congratulate you or ignore it, but regardless, you’ll be seen as making the “right” decision by most people you interact with. Some free speech types (a dying breed it seems) might get upset but they don’t seem to have much power over the general public’s perception or decisions about firing made by the university.
So the decision is obvious and it’s the one that gets made time and time again. And it’s the way the Twitter mobs continue to hold sway, especially because so much of the MSM lives on Twitter.
A similar rubric occurs in a large corporation by the C suite. Once the mob forms, there is everything to lose and almost nothing to lose by taking a stand on an issue seen as unwoke. If this is to change, incentives need to change, mainly creating disincentives for cowardly execs / deans and incentives for those who make principled and/or courageous stands.
(None of this is a carte blanche endorsement against activism, it’s just to say that there are reasons that no one stands up against Twitter mobs and we may want to explore ways to change this dynamic unless we desire a future ruled by mobs)
I’d like to see some data on whether a Twitter storm in a teacup has any measurable negative consequences for a typical large organization, and whether they need to listen as often as they do.