I get the feeling that no one is talking about the real issues at
all, instead conflating wildly different things together and trying to
vaguely gesture at some underlying principle. So many of the examples
that people gesture in the direction of when talking about these issues
are way more complicated and nuanced than anyone is giving them credit
for.
And that should be part of the point! Twitter and other shitty social
media platforms blow small, nuanced things into huge, simplified ones.
Singular examples of hostile work environments get pointed to as though
they’re the only evidence, like one documented example is the
sum total of a person’s experience working at a company where the
management is, at best, insensitive.
There’s a good debate to be had about social consequences for free
speech, but what we need more than that is a talk about the structure of
platforms like Twitter to take things and twist them until they snap,
which itself is a result of a largely unexamined ethos of unbridled free
speech. If you have free speech, free association, and a free market,
then you’re going to have counter-speech, counter-association, and
people voluntarily moving their business elsewhere (whether through an
intentional mechanism of boycott or simply because a company or business
gives them a bad feeling).
It’s probably not a particularly hot take that Twitter sucks, but I
wish people were talking more about the system that gives rise to these
behaviors, rather than the behaviors themselves, which you frankly
shouldn’t be too surprised about given the premise of short messages,
people with millions of followers, signal amplification, velocity of
communication, etc. Anyone who’s been on an online forum of any kind
should understand that there need to be some limits to speech (and
halfway decent moderation) in order to keep a civil community. That goes
against the spirit of Silicon Valley though, and beyond that, costs time
and money.
> but I wish people were talking more about the system that gives rise to these behaviors, rather than the behaviors themselves
it's like you don't even pay attention to /u/marxbroshevik
It’s insane that these guys have successfully framed the issue as
being about “free speech”, when all they really mean is freedom from
consequences or even criticism of their speech. I’ve seen them argue
with a straight face that people shouldn’t be allowed to call them out
or boycott them—the biggest fucking hypocrites in existence. Fuck
them.
(Nsfw) This article helped me put words to something I’ve been trying
to articulate to myself for a while:
There is a certain style of rhetoric, a style of thinking, a style of
engaging with ideas, which holds that you can treat concepts (such as
“Free Speech”) as being entirely totemic (and thus
devoid of reference beyond being a social identity marker, like a
national flag) and as actually meaning somethingat
the same time.
Other people hold that concepts always mean something, and to them
practitioners of the former style of thinking look like hypocrites. To
group B, any speech act referring to a concept can always be engaged
with at the level of constructed meaning as the referred concept
actually means something which can be engaged with as such.
Whereas group A switches back and forth between using speech acts as
totemic rallying cries, and using them to actually mean something,
without clear distinction over when a concept is being stated in one
mode or the other; and sometimes willfully switching at their
convenience.
This is strongly related to the motte and bailey schtick, and to the
“high-decoupling” schtick. It’s like… a style of thinking where your
mind lives inside the text of a propaganda poster.
This cognitive-linguistic style is often utilized by intellectual
dark web rhetoricians, Rationalists, Fox News viewers, and NRx goons,
and I’m sure it has creeped out to the larger milieux as a copyable
style due to its effectiveness at stymieing effective debate in the
culture wars.
I want to put a name to this so it can be addressed as a
phenomenon.
Yes and if you take it seriously as an ethical norm instead of a totem, you have to look at it as [deontology even if it's from people who claim to be consequentialists](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/deontologist-envy/). Naturally [they don't like that view](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/75ipk8/deontologist_envy_thing_of_things/). So maybe it's better to just treat it as an empty rhetorical totem - a sacred cow perhaps.
Interesting.
It took me a minute to piece together the connection with ethics, because I’m a plodding thinker and not familiar with the ongoing Internet discourse, but I think I see what you are getting at.
It sounds like you are discussing the way in which people use concepts or beliefs as a font from which they derive a sense of how they should act in the world. To engage with an idea like “Free Speech” as if it were a universally ordained absolute would be to approach it deontologically, whereas to treat the idea as a relative construct with different outcomes that can be considered as such would be to approach it consequentialistically.
And some people want to be seen as practicing one type of ethics while engaging with ideas _in a manner_ that lead to them actually practicing a different kind of ethics, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I guess my perspective is that there are different “orders” or “octaves” of cognitive operations within the architecture of the mind. Ethical know-how (and the debate over different fonts of ethics, like deontology and consequentialism) operates at a fairly high order of cognition.
But it is preceded by more foundational orders of cognitive operations: In particular the cognitive operation of how the mind establishes reference and meaning in signs and symbols. The way we (as an individual) engage with signs and symbols to establish reference and meaning can differ from one person to the next, and it **sets the stage** for how we use those symbol-concepts to decide ethical questions.
So my point is that there is a cognitive-linguistic turn that engages with signs and symbols using what I’ll call “magical thinking” (for the sake of a term), where the sign or symbol is treated as an ontologically real thing in itself, but inscrutable and having no reference outside of itself as a stand-alone intelligence. This is what I mean by thinking of “Free Speech” as a totem. The alternative would be “scientific thinking” (again for the sake of a term, don’t read too much in to it) which engages with a symbol as a system of meanings that can be unpacked, read as a text, empirically investigated, and so on.
When people blur the line between “magical thinking” and “scientific thinking”, it muddles the different cognitive operations which those modes of thinking engender in the mind of the thinker — especially including the higher order operations such as ethics.
Crossing the streams between the different modes produces confusion in thought and speech at every level of cognitive operation, and would very much produce the issue you speak of: strident self-ordained consequentialists falling in to deontological moralizing and constantly confusing the two.
> So maybe it's better to just treat it as an empty rhetorical totem - a sacred cow perhaps.
Yes. I think that's the point actually. That people often have many religious habits and behaviors, and that sacred cows are somewhat inevitable. If this is the case, then it's a decent idea to pick natural rights as a sacred cow over something like Mohamed, victimhood status, etc. I believe the idea is that sacred cows are still bad but this is a less than perfect way to mitigate that, by choosing what is viewed as the least bad cow.
Contrary to expectations, I don’t think there is anything inherently “bad” about totemic thinking (or as I called it in another reply in this sub-thread, “magical thinking”).
Totemic or magical thinking is the foundation for social group identities that allows social organization to cohere and persist.
In large societies (what Mark Moffett calls “anonymous societies” in *The Human Swarm*), social identity markers are the bond that allows those societies to operate by providing a shared reference point for members of a society to know that they all belong to the same society even when the society is too large for each member to know everybody else by face and name.
The cognitive act of distinction (“this” is distinct from “what is not this”) is the root of identities and categories, and acts by proscribing a boundary layer within which a social system achieves its self-sustenance (its autopoiesis) as a separate society existing apart from others with its own shared group identity. This is derived from Spencer-Brown’s *Laws of Form* and Luhmann’s second-order cybernetic *Social Systems Theory*.
Totemic or magical thinking is the cognitive act operating within the individual psyche which aligns the self-identity of the individual with the group identity of the particular social system allowing for a smooth operation between these different systems (the society, and the individual psyche). This is derived from the theory of Western Esotericism-as-psychology and the attendant methods of propaganda and public relations.
The issue arises when individuals confuse magical thinking with other modes of thinking as if they are the same thing, or as if you can switch back and forth between these different modes within the same argument.
I do think there's a measurable Venn overlap between Motters and the "Intellectual Dark Web" -- which is clearly a satirical title, since that crowd is neither intellectual, nor associated with the dark web, nor confined to the internet.
More to the point, a lot of the ~~toxicity~~ ~~gullibility~~ infiltration of the Rationalsphere by alt-right types is probably a consequence of their fundamentalist commitment to this version of free speech, even though it's never explained how that follows from first principles (more like it is a first principle).
This is an excellent article, one I was waiting for! Perfect title. I
would add that the pro-letter squad fails to acknowledge right-wing
cancel culture, of which my favorite example is the meltdown just 15
years ago that the right had when PBS dared to suggest (and not even
explicitly!) that lesbians are ok people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcards_from_Buster#Criticism_and_controversy
But there are of course many more powerful and more sinister
examples.
On the other hand, if I were forced for some reason to choose between
the pro-letter folks and the anti-letter folks (a false choice), I am
pro-letter. I don’t think David Shor should’ve been fired, I don’t think
Joshua Katz made Princeton’s campus more
dangerous for black students by (very wrongly) calling the Black
Justice League a terrorist group, and I think the insufferable
self-righteousness of rich white intelligentsia who proclaim every
institution is white supremacist is counterproductive. Here’s Terry
Eagleton’s typically devastating take, one that folks could use to read,
according to me!
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/against-the-wokescenti/
Because the US is a deeply parochial society, not much given to
seeing itself from the outside, what seems obvious to an external
observer – the fact that the more baroque forms of political correctness
represent the latest outbreak of good old-fashioned American Puritanism
– seems not to be much recognized at Yale or Columbia. Sectarianism,
holier-than-thou-ism, the gulf between the reprobate and the elect, the
scanning of words and actions for the least flicker of ideological
impurity: all this has a history as old as the nation itself. There’s
nothing new either about the claim that if my experience is radically
different from yours, you are incapable of understanding me. It used to
be known as middle-class individualism, and involves confusing sympathy
with empathy, as well as making a fetish of immediate experience. Once
upon a time, the self was hermetically sealed off from the selves around
it; now it is cultures that are mutually incommensurable. In this sense,
a number of those who see themselves as political radicals are
unwittingly in cahoots with the society they condemn.
Colin Kaepernick is another good example of right-wing cancel culture. But, like... a real example. He got cancelled right out of a career (albeit in an inherently authoritarian, militaristic, right-wing organization). When the right uses examples of "cancelled" people, those people invariably have faced some online criticism and/or mild consequences for their actions, but still have careers and massive platforms.
And the extra funny thing is context. Kaepernick was protesting something real, which is theoretically not antagonistic to the NFL and its supposed values. Right-wingers tend to get "cancelled" for saying things that are A) not accurate and B) directly antagonistic to the stated values of the organizations and people they claim to serve.
But, this shouldn't be surprising. Reactionaries are unable to understand the difference between real gay pride parades and fictional straight pride parades. They won't compare two things until they've stripped away all context first, making everything into abstractions. I guess that makes it easier to stomach such an ugly worldview.
I'd suggest one more quickie for your list: Ken "Popehat" White, an Actual Libertarian who doesn't have much patience for complaints about cancel culture, calls it the ["preferred first speaker"](https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1280521195318697984):
> “The problem of the preferred first speaker” is the tendency to impose norms of civility, openness, productiveness, and dialogue-encouraging on a RESPONSE to expression that we do not impose on the expression itself.
[Slightly more here.](https://www.popehat.com/2013/12/21/ten-points-about-speech-ducks-and-flights-to-africa/) Even the late SlateStarCodex [thought it was a good idea (in 2013) but disagreed](https://web.archive.org/web/20140101045633/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/29/the-spirit-of-the-first-amendment/).
The recent furor over the NYT article really brought out the censorship goblins to a degree I didn't feel comfortable with, but I hadn't realized how far back and how deeply the anti free speech stuff went. Nice, albeit depressing, find.
(NSFW)
I get the feeling that no one is talking about the real issues at all, instead conflating wildly different things together and trying to vaguely gesture at some underlying principle. So many of the examples that people gesture in the direction of when talking about these issues are way more complicated and nuanced than anyone is giving them credit for.
And that should be part of the point! Twitter and other shitty social media platforms blow small, nuanced things into huge, simplified ones. Singular examples of hostile work environments get pointed to as though they’re the only evidence, like one documented example is the sum total of a person’s experience working at a company where the management is, at best, insensitive.
There’s a good debate to be had about social consequences for free speech, but what we need more than that is a talk about the structure of platforms like Twitter to take things and twist them until they snap, which itself is a result of a largely unexamined ethos of unbridled free speech. If you have free speech, free association, and a free market, then you’re going to have counter-speech, counter-association, and people voluntarily moving their business elsewhere (whether through an intentional mechanism of boycott or simply because a company or business gives them a bad feeling).
It’s probably not a particularly hot take that Twitter sucks, but I wish people were talking more about the system that gives rise to these behaviors, rather than the behaviors themselves, which you frankly shouldn’t be too surprised about given the premise of short messages, people with millions of followers, signal amplification, velocity of communication, etc. Anyone who’s been on an online forum of any kind should understand that there need to be some limits to speech (and halfway decent moderation) in order to keep a civil community. That goes against the spirit of Silicon Valley though, and beyond that, costs time and money.
It’s insane that these guys have successfully framed the issue as being about “free speech”, when all they really mean is freedom from consequences or even criticism of their speech. I’ve seen them argue with a straight face that people shouldn’t be allowed to call them out or boycott them—the biggest fucking hypocrites in existence. Fuck them.
(Nsfw) This article helped me put words to something I’ve been trying to articulate to myself for a while:
There is a certain style of rhetoric, a style of thinking, a style of engaging with ideas, which holds that you can treat concepts (such as “Free Speech”) as being entirely totemic (and thus devoid of reference beyond being a social identity marker, like a national flag) and as actually meaning something at the same time.
Other people hold that concepts always mean something, and to them practitioners of the former style of thinking look like hypocrites. To group B, any speech act referring to a concept can always be engaged with at the level of constructed meaning as the referred concept actually means something which can be engaged with as such.
Whereas group A switches back and forth between using speech acts as totemic rallying cries, and using them to actually mean something, without clear distinction over when a concept is being stated in one mode or the other; and sometimes willfully switching at their convenience.
This is strongly related to the motte and bailey schtick, and to the “high-decoupling” schtick. It’s like… a style of thinking where your mind lives inside the text of a propaganda poster.
This cognitive-linguistic style is often utilized by intellectual dark web rhetoricians, Rationalists, Fox News viewers, and NRx goons, and I’m sure it has creeped out to the larger milieux as a copyable style due to its effectiveness at stymieing effective debate in the culture wars.
I want to put a name to this so it can be addressed as a phenomenon.
I want all the karma for being the first to link to this Twitter reply.
It hardly seems sneerclub related, but it is a pretty good article.
This is an excellent article, one I was waiting for! Perfect title. I would add that the pro-letter squad fails to acknowledge right-wing cancel culture, of which my favorite example is the meltdown just 15 years ago that the right had when PBS dared to suggest (and not even explicitly!) that lesbians are ok people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcards_from_Buster#Criticism_and_controversy
But there are of course many more powerful and more sinister examples.
On the other hand, if I were forced for some reason to choose between the pro-letter folks and the anti-letter folks (a false choice), I am pro-letter. I don’t think David Shor should’ve been fired, I don’t think Joshua Katz made Princeton’s campus more dangerous for black students by (very wrongly) calling the Black Justice League a terrorist group, and I think the insufferable self-righteousness of rich white intelligentsia who proclaim every institution is white supremacist is counterproductive. Here’s Terry Eagleton’s typically devastating take, one that folks could use to read, according to me! https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/against-the-wokescenti/