Read on Twitter
One flaw in the "cancel culture" letter is that the signatories can& #39;t ever quite manage to draw a line between what constitutes "robust and even caustic counter-speech" and what constitutes "censoriousness." (1/)
We can play the "I know it when I see it" game--like, a death threat is probably "censoriousness"--but this approach gets murky right away. Is it "censorious" to call for someone to resign? To say "delete your account?" (2/)
It comes across as hamstrung by an abiding irony: "open debate" is good, it claims, but only if enacted with a veneer of politesse, the rules of which go undefined. How this does not "steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said" in its own right goes unclarified (3/)
In short, the signatories come across as saying "debate is good when we [individuals with Ivy League credentials to brandish] do it, and bad when you [the rabble] do it." (4/)
The foundational bargain of social media, though, is that everyone gets a platform. Like all bargains, this has both benefits and drawbacks, but if you want to participate in social media, you have to participate in "the social," which means you& #39;re here with the rabble. (5/)
Any of these signatories could withdraw from social media in its entirety and simply publish books and NYT opinion pieces and thinkpieces in East Coast magazines and the "intolerant climate" they decry would immediately diminish to a dull roar, like a faraway sea (6/)
They remark, at one point, on our current "atmosphere," which almost gets at why it can be difficult to point out what constitutes a single "censorious" tweet. It& #39;s partly because the sense of "censoriousness" comes from many tweets coalescing into an "atmospheric" aggregate (7/)
There& #39;s an argument to be made that the problem stems not what any individual person might post, but the sum total of the voices taken en masse. The signatories don& #39;t explore this, but it& #39;s described well in Jon Ronson& #39;s book SO YOU& #39;VE BEEN PUBLICLY SHAMED (2015) (8/)
I& #39;m not unsympathetic to this problem. Hell, back in 2014, when this sort of concerted online activity was mostly trolls trying to hound women off of social media, I even brainstormed ways that Twitter could counteract this kind of activity (/9) https://twitter.com/jbushnell/status/521672947162165248">https://twitter.com/jbushnell...
(con& #39;t.) (/10) https://twitter.com/jbushnell/status/521674950034608128?s=20">https://twitter.com/jbushnell...
But by now this problem is baked deeply into Twitter, and in fact has, for many people, become part of the pleasure of the platform (behold the sheer number of "just here for the ratio"-type tweets). (/11)
If you wanted to critique Twitter: The Corporation for the ways in which it has facilitated hostile and divisive speech, there& #39;s room for that. (I& #39;d point to the algorithmic timeline as a prime offender in this regard, as it tends to amplify stellar dunks) (/12)
But the signatories don& #39;t have an interest in critiquing Twitter. They like Twitter, they just don& #39;t like the rabble, so it& #39;s the rabble that gets the brunt of the critique (/13)
Well... the rabble and some "institutional leaders," which is actually one other place where the letter could have gotten interesting. It would have been curious to see them get specific about which precise leaders they think acted in "a spirit of panicked damage control" (/14)
