I was talking to my younger sister (college student) the other day, and she mentioned that she and her friends are very reluctant to post their opinions online, especially under their real names. This was a bit of a surprise to me, because she volunteers for the Democrats and is openly lesbian, so I would have thought her opinions are generally a great match for the current cultural milieu.
I think maybe part of the puzzle is described well by Bryan Caplan:
>Who fears the left? Strangely, the main answer seems to be: leftists. I talk to a wide range of people in academia about left-wing anger and the fear it sustains. As you’d expect, the people who are most outraged by the climate of fear are non-leftists. But the people who personally experience the most fear are leftists themselves. In my private conversations, some of the most boring milquetoast technocratic leftist scholars have grimly foretold that somehow, someday, a mob of their own ideological persuasion will come for them.
In any case, she told me about one or two of her HS classmates who were actually serious in their use of social media, and how they were weird and almost maybe even poorly adjusted relative to the rest of the class.
Point being that even the youth culture you see online could just be the tip of the iceberg. (Or maybe my sister's peer group is unusual! Hard to say.)
> she and her friends are very reluctant to post their opinions online
I'm old, but feel the same reluctance (it slips sometimes; I am only human). Not because I fear any particular reprisal, but because I cannot comprehend that that someone else gives a rat's ass about whatever random firing of neurons happens to be going on in my mind. I certainly couldn't care less about theirs.
I am okay with using my name when the post is for other people (i.e. work or occasional charity – otherwise I'm not working for you for free!). If the post is for me, then most definitely a screen name. It saves the confusion of someone who might come back to me thinking that I gave them free labour.
Maybe what they are feeling is a deep unconscious unease at the realisation that the cancellation culture the leftists have bought to life is bad karma. What goes around comes around.
Maybe what they are feeling is a deep unconscious unease at the realisation that the cancellation culture the leftists have bought to life is bad karma. What goes around comes around.
This is definitely one of the more interesting fantasies the right enjoys portraying, for sure. Part of standard playbook at this point it's becoming hard to treat these type of comments as organic.
They were rightly cancelled, but for the wrong reason. Really, the cancellation should have been for lauding his incredibly misogynistic and offensive portrayal of women.
Internet mobs have been mainstream since Kony 2012 made slacktivism a thing. Assigning cancel culture to one part of the political spectrum is not intellectually sound.
While, as other comments have said, this is the common target these days, its a red herring.
The issue and fear is as it has always been for left leaning movements: the tendency to splinter into little factions of slightly differing values and goals, and the purity testing and infighting that follows and keeps the majority of movements from doing anything remotely useful.
It’s anecdotal, but I had a friendship dissolve over one friend kind of “canceling” another for a prolonged period.
It was very much by the modern playbook, though it looked slightly different. Something offended some sensitivities, though it was a benign as an unexpected break up. My previous friend made a great effort to convince others of how immoral and cruel our other friend was, and some people kind of bought into the drama I guess.
It was a matter of reputation assassination based around some collective sense of what’s proper and what’s not. The path from reality to the conceived reasons for the cancellation was long, grey, and blurry, but they pushed hard on it.
One very common thread was how often I would think “wow, I could so easily get put in the same bucket. We all could. None of us are much better, we all make mistakes like this”. It seems true then and it’s true now. I say the wrong things sometimes. I’m accidentally insensitive. I don’t know as much as I could in order to navigate some social situations better.
What caused the dissolving of the friendship eventually was when I asked my friend why I’m any different from the person he was targeting. His response was totally irrational, unkind, and seemed almost pathological. I realized I had a very unhealthy friend who was harming my other friends and social circle. And that eventually I could be his target, too. I just had to upset him in such a way that I would be dead to him. What a precarious and unsettling way to be friends.
Anyway, all that is to say it seems familiar going back most of my life now. The only difference now is that it seems to be very identity-oriented and politically driven. It’s not as personal. That is a very eerie thing to me.
These problems seem to be limited to people who are chronically online. People who live on Facebook and Twitter. I know this is a bold claim but I’m immune to cancellation since I simply don’t have accounts on social media, and don’t use it. I live in meatspace and all of my friends and acquaintances are in meatspace, so good luck taking me down. There could be someone on Twitter right now trash talking me and telling everyone how horrible I am and how I should be fired and look! it’s not affecting my life in the slightest. Quitting these online-outrage tools is the first step.
I love the term meatspace! I feel the same way. I do have Instagram and even Facebook but I don't use either much (post travel photos on insta, use market place on Facebook). I generally feel like my friends are very much "meatspacers" first and foremost and any social media is additional and incidental.
The anecdote I'm describing wasn't a social media-driven thing at all. I agree though, social media makes it far worse. I should have clarified in the story though because I meant to indicate that these things occurred even before social media was such a major influence on this kind of behaviour.
Perhaps, but the left has the top universities, news media, popular media/Hollywood, much of Silicon Valley, the largest investors (Blackrock, Vanguard), and NGOs on its side.
(That's what makes the current meltdown/full-scale civil war on the left over Israel and Hamas—involving at least four of the above six factions—so hilarious to watch.)
"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."
This was written by a socialist (George Orwell) in 1945.
> I was talking to my younger sister (college student) the other day, and she mentioned that she and her friends are very reluctant to post their opinions online, especially under their real names
I dont know anyone who does. I think most of the 'online' is bots talking to each-other
For a time after Ukraine war began, everyone was accised of being a russian bot, and I was like 'do you think noone else has bots? Lobbyists, think tanks, dictators, secret services?
Russian bots were just low quality, and so they were obvious. The good ones would not be
Time and time again, the leftist vanguard eventually find themselves on the wrong end of ideological purity. Remember that Lenin was on the outs with Stalin at the time of his death, and Trotsky met an unfortunate end.
"like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children", Jacques Mallet du Pan said of the French Revolution.
I can’t imagine communists were too comfortable around other committed communists, being sent to the gulag was always a latent possibility if you were determined to be an ideological enemy.
Suggest to her that she voices an anti-Israeli genocide position and see how she reacts to the trucks driving around with her face on them after she's doxxed. That'll make her feel better about your fear of the left.
>>In my private conversations, some of the most boring milquetoast technocratic leftist scholars have grimly foretold that somehow, someday, a mob of their own ideological persuasion will come for them.
I saw a good description (on /r/4chan, no less) of leftist NPCs: People who constantly check in on each other to see what the latest things are to embrace/avoid. What a miserable way to live.
Caplan's quote sums up the logical conclusion of such living, and the consequent omnipresent fear of one day being on the outs from an errant word, thought, or deed.
Ironic that a good chunk of your comment history is evaluating this or that news story, conspiracy, or talking point from this or that social media outlet. What a miserable way to live.
Sorry to shatter your illusions, but unlike the leftist NPCs I mentioned I don't care what others think. I was never afraid to speak up during my time at an Ivy League university where the most common political posters were for the "world socialism" movement. In more than a decade on Reddit (or here) I have never once complained about being downvoted, and the first time I mentioned the concept of being up/downvoted at all was many years into my tenure there in response to some question/discussion not dissimilar to this.
The next time you are about to post something online, or say something to friends, or patronize a business, do you first ask yourself "What would it do to my public image if other people I knew saw me doing this?", and let that affect your behavior? Not me.
PS - I can also say that I have never up/downvoted a comment anywhere simply because I disagreed with it. I have upvoted many comments critical of me, or something I believe in/agree with, because of their eloquence or wit. I downvote very, very, very few comments, and only because they are completely useless (say, off topic), or ridiculously foul-mouthed in an inappropriate context (by the same token, I have upvoted such if funny enough). Even if few others seemingly believe in the original rationale for up/downvoting, I still do.
I think maybe part of the puzzle is described well by Bryan Caplan:
>Who fears the left? Strangely, the main answer seems to be: leftists. I talk to a wide range of people in academia about left-wing anger and the fear it sustains. As you’d expect, the people who are most outraged by the climate of fear are non-leftists. But the people who personally experience the most fear are leftists themselves. In my private conversations, some of the most boring milquetoast technocratic leftist scholars have grimly foretold that somehow, someday, a mob of their own ideological persuasion will come for them.
https://betonit.substack.com/p/leave-anger-behind
In any case, she told me about one or two of her HS classmates who were actually serious in their use of social media, and how they were weird and almost maybe even poorly adjusted relative to the rest of the class.
Point being that even the youth culture you see online could just be the tip of the iceberg. (Or maybe my sister's peer group is unusual! Hard to say.)