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In practice, the real alternative to cancel culture is usually know-your-place culture for the masses. Civil-debate-culture is not an actual option. It’s what elites get to enjoy when the masses know their place and stay there quietly without getting uppity.
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There’s a weird linguistic thing here. English is a highly egalitarian language that represses know-your-place dynamics even though 2 big Anglo societies are not very egalitarian. Hindi has like a dozen ways to say “know your place” with varying degrees of violence.
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In old Hindi movies there is often a rich patriarch antagonist telling a young person or woman to “know their place.” Often followed by a humiliating slap if the person (usually a sympathetic character) persists, with bystanders not daring to intervene. Redemption drama follows.
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Note that both are violent forms of policing. What critics of cancel culture often seem to miss is that cultural policing abhors a vacuum. While there is scarcity and inequality somebody will be culturally policing somebody.
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And of course it’s no accident that people who support cancel culture also want to defund policing that is de facto based on know-your-place culture.
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Guilt culture/shame culture angle too. Anglo culture tends to be guilt based. Cancel tactics (and place-policing) are from shame-based cultures. That exacerbates things.
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Place policing vs tone policing 🤔 If there is no social mobility one or both will get weaponized until something moves
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Funny thing about those Hindi-movie dialogues about knowing your place. Often they translate to something like "how dare you come HERE and speak in that arrogant manner! Don't you know your place?" Ie entirely ignoring the content and responding to the location.
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Replying to
A fascinating solution that Anglo societies have converged on is to simply eliminate public spaces. The more all spaces become private, the fewer locations there are where those who "don't know their place" can speak without consequences.
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Note the close link between place and cancelation. "Deplatforming" refers to specific place access, and the private/public ownership of the platform matters, in a broader sense than the first amendment aspect of place.
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This is not well understood in the US because it's in the past, and remnants are not obvious, but the public around the world was historically NOT a place anyone could speak. It was very specifically an elite "platform" defined by who was NOT allowed to speak there.
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Which meant that "know your place" often meant "you can't say such things in public because it offends elites who have first right to such places; you can only say it skulking and muttering in ghetto alleys, and we'd better not hear you by accident!"
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Observation: I rarely hear loud complaints about cancel culture except from people who are already talking a lot. Makes me wonder -- who isn't talking to begin with because they unfortunately "know their place" all too well. Who are born canceled and stay that way?
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Personal angle btw... I've never felt either place or tone policed in my life. I have almost never wanted to say something and been unable to say it, or had to leave a place because I spoke out of place. And I obviously talk a lot and at great length in every place I can access.
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Either I "know my place" very well and have internalized my boundaries to the point I don't notice myself staying within them... OR I have better ways to fight when I want to than words... OR... I don't have much to fight about, and am too selfish to fight for anyone else...
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Like most people, it's probably some mix of all 3, alloyed with a healthy dose of just pragmatism of the don't-make-jokes-at-a-funeral variety... reasonable consideration for others.
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In case it isn't obvious, I'm agnostic on this whole matter -- having opinions about the morality of tone policing or place policing is like having opinions about the existence of weapons. Weapons exist. Conflict is real. Get good at using the appropriate ones when needed.
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I'm also agnostic about US gun culture tbh. I think it's really regressive and dumb in a religious way, and have no interest in getting literate in the use of guns, but don't have strong feelings about wanting it gone so long as I can stay safe myself. I can live with it.
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American English does have a bit of the explicit sort of place-policing idiom to it, like "you come into MY house and... blah blah blah" but it's a fairly weaksauce version, usable in fewer places. In America it's almost more polite to just shoot people instead of grandstanding.
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Interesting sidebar is on spaces that used to be private but are now subject to public dynamics via screenshot wars etc. For whatever reason, I've always operated in private as though whatever I say could potentially be made public in the future. Since long before culture war.
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This is quite likely a personality preference on my part. Very INTP -- do all your actual thinking in your head, anything you actually say, regardless of context, is something of a performance (what we Myers-Briggs nerds call the Ti-Ne mode).
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ie I might have a very different take if I had a different personality, of the sort that thinks best out loud, and in some cases out loud and in conflict mode (ESFJs?). In a way, being sanguine about this shit is a "free strategic option" for me. It costs me nothing to be immune.
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Good question. I think the issue being contested is that the group privileged in public spaces has changed. Now the public is *most* accessible to those to whom it was *least* accessible in the past. The access hierarchy isn't gone. It's flipped polarity.
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Replying to @vgr
really interesting thread, thank you. im a bit dumb -- so bringing back public spaces would be futile or unlikely b/c they would be based on "know your place?" and who in anglo society is driving the elimination of such spaces?
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ie, to use the cartoon example, we are heading towards the point where a black lesbian can basically say anything in public, and a cis-white-male can only speak if spoken to. We are VERY far from that actual condition, but obv. the directional trend upsets those currently on top
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This may be another reason I'm personally unable to develop strong feelings about the shift... "brown male" is sort of somewhere in the illegible middle of the totem pole whatever happens. The middle is actually the best place... no fighting needed to tread water there
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A common objection I get when I offer this kind of class-based analysis is that all this is really elite-on-elite conflict (right now, for eg. rich liberal arts educated kids without jobs who got radicalized and grifterized by the GFC and neethood). This is not that important.
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This goes back to at least Pareto's circulation of elites theory (lion elites vs. fox elites) who in turn drew from Machiavelli. The fact that currently-out-of-power elites are an intermediary in the elites-vs-masses conflict doesn't change the fact that it IS elites vs. masses.
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Eg: Trump is obviously lion elite -- born to wealth, strongman ethos. He became the voice of one kind of non-elite. The NYT is fox elites... often rich trustie kids... who speak for another kind of non-elite. This is just plumbing you can nerd-out over, but rarely important.
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So long as circulation of elites creates liquidity in the market for actual class warfare, the class warfare aspect is by far more important. Neither Trumpism, nor BLM, both of which try to place/ tone police each other's elites, is a pure elite-vs-elite conflict. Masses matter.
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In fact, arguably, "circulation of elites" is itself *caused* by non-elites practicing a sort of emergent divide-and-conquer collective action tactic. I strongly suspect non-elites have no fixed loyalties to either lion types or fox types -- they get behind whoever is convenient.
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Freedoms often have initial conditions dependency that obscures costs. For eg rules for civil debate about religion that emerge when it’s Christians debating Christians in a 100% Christian society may seem cost-free... until you try to include non-Christians for the first time.
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A lot of culture war stuff is people being in denial about the scope of a familiar freedom having expanded in a way that makes previously free things have a nonzero social cost. Usually because more people can be in more places. People hate paying for stuff that used to be free.
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One now-old SJW line I’ve never heard a satisfactory counter to is “when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” This is a special case of a free thing becoming not-free because new people have entered a space. There are now consequences.
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It’s still free as in speech. Just not as in beer. A lot of complaints about the first are actually complaints about the second. Cancelation is an extreme case, but is only different in degree, not kind, from just being called on stuff by people you’re not used to hear speak up
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But some shit, I genuinely wonder if people feel muzzled or just newly ashamed. Let’s say you came of age in all-male misogynistic milieus (as I did) and were used to participating at least passively in no-cost (free as in beer) misogynistic humor. “Locker-room talk.” ...
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Back before PC demanded it, guys *automatically* self-censored misogynistic humor a bit when women were present. Even in Mad Men era. Why did we do that before there were cancelation-type risks? Trads explain it as “respect for women” but that’s obvious bs. Consequences.
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The diff between then and now, is the diff between noblesse oblige type graciousness exhibited by the powerful to spare feelings, with mild consequences imposed by your own kind (“hey watch it bro, there are women present”) vs fear of consequences imposed by the actual targets.
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