This is worth listening to, but I'm frustrated at the constant invocation of "cancel culture" as a society-wide problem.
There's no evidence that Americans are less nuanced or more punitive than we used to be. The problem is online platforms that prioritize punitive speech. https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1387063623961481224

I appreciate the perspectives of all three people on this show and they got into some interesting stuff about platforms. But the conversation was generally framed around the idea that "we" (the left I guess) prioritizes shaming over persuasion.

I simply don't think that's true. (Or if it is, "cancel culture" isn't evidence for it.)
To me, the problem is simply that:
a) Twitter has become the de facto watercooler for political elites
b) This platform is uniquely un-suited to constructive conversations

Natalie makes a very good point that Reddit has structural "brakes" that can keep disinformation from spreading. If the premise is false, users can up-vote the correction. Twitter doesn't have anything like that.

Twitter is simply too much of a panopticon to foster persuasive conversations. If I'm having an in-person chat with my racist uncle, I might concede some points in the interest of moving him incrementally toward my position. You can't do that when 10,000 people are watching you.

I'm am absolutely more one-dimensional and black-and-white on here than I am in person. Twitter is a *terrible* place to think out loud. Nuance is hard to convey in text to begin with, much less in 240-character bursts (that can easily be taken out of context later).

Does any of this mean that I'm more interested in shaming than persuasion? Or that I don't think through my positions and come to complicated conclusions? No, it simply means that I understand the nature of the platform and I do those things elsewhere.

The actual problem, to me anyway, is that the platform that structurally encourages us to act like children is the primary meeting place for journalists, activists and politicians. It's how powerful people make sense of the world and it's giving them an incorrect impression.

The vast majority of "cancelations" are carried out by a *tiny* number of people. But the structure of Twitter makes it seem like those people are representative of a much larger group. That impression ends up getting reinforced in mainstream media by journalists who are on here

Again, not trying to call out the guests on the show. I think they'd all agree with me to varying degrees. But as an accidental scholar of moral panics, it's important to me to talk about societal issues at the appropriate scale.

We don't have a society-wide problem of left-wing punitiveness and over-simplification. We have an extremely narrow problem of a mismatch between the platforms we have and the conversations we need.

This is a good way to put it. A common throughline in moral panics is the idea that society is becoming less sophisticated over time, especially as influenced by the introduction of new technology. We need to resist the impulse to do this again. https://twitter.com/calebscoville/status/1387422166250139649

Another important addendum is that the *vast* majority of Americans are not public figures. Political pundits are by definition more vulnerable to online criticism than 99% of the population. "Cancelation" isn't in the top 100 problems for regular people. https://twitter.com/Casey_Walrath/status/1387428396766879745