Surprising how much press "cancel culture" gets these days <i>as if it's a new thing</i> or <i>as if it's a new thing being pushed on society by the left</i>. We've always had cancel culture. Some might remember the Dixie Chicks. How about the Rachael Ray ad that Dunkin Donuts pulled merely because it looked like an Arab scarf? Jerry Falwell came to prominence entirely based on his pushing of cancel culture. When I lived in North Carolina, one of the things that was repeated all the time was that a newspaper editor would lose his job for publishing a story with a positive spin on free trade. You can go back further to McCarthyism, Turing being prosecuted for being gay, and on and on.<p>Cancel culture remains a thing. Apparently now that folks aren't just being cancelled for supporting gay marriage, the free exchange of ideas is suddenly important. The outright hypocrisy of so many on this issue is the biggest story.<p>Edit: Forgot to mention this extreme example of cancel culture:<p><a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/professor-who-wore-hijab-us-christian-college-resigns" rel="nofollow">https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/professor-who-wore-hijab-...</a><p>A professor was cancelled because she wore a hijab. There was no outrage at all from the usual suspects.
I genuinely wonder what cancel culture is going to look like in the next 5-10 years and beyond. Just about everyone I speak to about the subject agrees that cancel culture is bad but very few people seem willing to confront it. I sense that people hope the rest of society will come to its senses and we all stop being so judgemental.<p>But as much as I loathe cancel culture and it's chilling effects on the free exchange of ideas, I can't help but admit that it <i>seems to work</i>. From a detached and objective standpoint, an ideology that utilizes cancel culture is really good at stamping out opposition. You are free to think and believe whatever you want in private and then you self-censor in public out of fear. It takes a certain critical mass of people to affect change and cancel culture excels at keeping individuals from speaking out because the consequences have the potential to ruin your life.<p>So all that being said, I genuinely wonder if cancel culture is here to stay, because the next ideology to come along will also realize how powerful of a tool it is.
I find it almost funny how the media/culture/etc. seems determined to build a group of people that will react negatively to so-called "cancel culture." They seem to think that people will gladly follow the ever-growing list of arbitrary rules indefinitely.<p>If I were a betting man, I'd predict a resurgence in punk attitudes in about 2025 or 2030. At some point, the dam will break and people will stop caring. I already get a sense that the 13-19 generation is a bit tired of it.
If you talk to someone who works/worked in publishing or the creative arts scenes (MFA programs, etc.), you'll see that KI is likely <i>specifically</i> addressing that crowd - his industry.<p>I think a lot of the general populace is aware of the dynamics that he's talking about, but in publishing it's another world/level.<p>Interesting example that's the norm in the space: the story "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" by Isabel Fall. Bear with me as I likely butcher the pronouns/terms etc, but my intent is earnest and well meaning here...<p>Isabel is a trans woman author. She/they weren't out when that story was published in a scifi mag. The story makes some pretty obvious references to sexual/gender identity, and the writing has very specific commentary and sometimes mockery.<p>Isabel, not known to be trans at the time, faced a torrent of online abuse for ~appropriating/joking about/exploring concepts about gender identity. The motivation was pretty clear: Isabel wasn't trans (as far as the public knew).<p>The story had passed some "sensitivity readings" too (yes, sensitivity readers are another interesting area to explore), but the online reception was still awful. There's also a difference between criticism vs. outright internet abuse. Isabel's experiences were pretty firmly in the latter.<p>The author took down the story, I believe came out or the news outed her/they, and the details go on (finger pointing, revisions of criticism about the story given light of the author's gender, etc.).<p>The point of all this is that's an insane dynamic to create in, and that's the tip of the iceberg really with what Publishing is going through. Young Adult fiction is apparently one of the ground zeros for this dynamic.
Not sure a 66 year old can truly understand what consequences young people can face. You can be completely blacklisted not only from your works being stocked, but even all means of promoting yourself too and in the most extreme cases get blacklisted from payment processors which I'm sure will trickle down and become more common over the next few years.<p>End of the day you have to pay the bills and if you want them paid you have to at least make your writing a certain way of thinking and ideology.<p>Until this changes this is terrible advice for young artists. Just don't rock the boat, follow right think, don't write anything controversial and pray you eventually get enough money to write what you actually want to write.<p>Sure yeah art will suffer as a whole but the decision was already made what's more important, art or a few annoyed people on twitter and the annoyed people won.
This is happening in all professions I'd imagine. Everyone is so scared that they are violating some social framework - which is constantly shifting in what is acceptable or not acceptable.<p>To me I think it really slows down progress we could be making in multiple areas. It's kind of like a mental brake being applied to any freedom of thought. Almost like working in an old fashioned company where there's weeks worth of meetings and bureaucracy in order to get a change deployed to production to make sure everyone is okay with it, even those of whom it doesn't even impact.
It's an interesting phenomenom the one described in the story.<p>I myself a great number of times have experienced situations where I held back on writing down certain thoughts even in places like my journal where the whole point is to write down every single thought crossing through my mind anyway.
Can you really blame authors? Anything that is even mildly controversial can easily result in effectively being banned from participating on various platforms. More recent example of this weird feedback loop is:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Attack_Helicopter" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Atta...</a>
We live in an era in the western world which feels like pilgrim censorship with a new set of taboos, as opposed to an extremely tolerant love filled utopia we were promised.<p>I want my love filled utopia dammit!
One of the biggest issues is the lack of consistent canceling for the same offense along with the changing rules.<p>If you said something 10 years ago that was completely acceptable it will be used to attack you in the present. When others said the same thing they get a pass but you don't. If the rules were clear and generally agreed upon I think tnere would be less fear.
Putting aside the fact the worst examples of "Cancel Culture" are an amplified, tiny number of edge cases, given fuel by those who wish to attack fairly reasonable requests to marginalise hate speech.
Ishiguro makes a good point a skilled writer can write from the perspective of someone very different from them. Not that many people are actually arguing against that. What was of concern is the perspectives of marginalised people being written in a cliched and harmful way by people who have no understanding of their lives. Or because they have an agenda of portraying those people in a negative way. Understanding built on accurate and intelligent writing is great but I'm not going to read stuff that has an agenda to caricature and attack.
I've been wondering how much cancel culture is affecting journalism right now. The way it affects won't be clear since it seems stating that you're self censoring due to cancel culture makes you a target of said culture. Also, I imagine for journalists it's not easy to admit to self censoring. Confronting cancel culture is a big risk to take.<p>But how would you measure the effects of it? As a (mainly) reader, I have no clue if the writer omitted something due to their fear. Hell, the writer might not realize it.
I'm OK with people saying "you wrote a terrible book that nobody should buy or read."<p>I'm less OK with people saying "because you wrote a terrible book, we need to ensure that you are severely punished, that you present a public confession and apology for writing it, and that none of your writing is ever published or read again by anyone."
It's really sad that in the age of unrestricted access to information public discourse is self-restricting to avoid wrong-think and dissenting opinions.
If you look at the history of intellectual progress, much of it was exactly due to unpopular opinions.<p>Now by having one you're risking your entire career and sometimes more. This is truly the dark age of the information era.
Isn't that what pen-names are for? They can use a new pen-name if they want to write on a topic that might not be received well and only reveal themselves after it's well received. Has something changed so that this isn't as viable of a strategy anymore?
There's a whole nuance here that often gets lost.<p>A lot of people are straight up _raging jackasses_ - or worse and/or their work is repulsive - and at a certain point, wind up getting to be the target of an Internet Hate Mob. Note that in a perfectly just world, these people might be in prison or have otherwise major life consequences applied by the designated authorities - yet they have not had consequences.<p>And there are, of course, people who simply say something that flips the bit of the online mob and becomes the target of an Internet Hate Mob. Someone ran their mouth and said something dumb. Oops.<p>It is critical to consider that both of these cases are true, and the outcome, in the moment, doesn't per se look different without a careful attention to the ground facts. Much of the social media system has been unintentionally engineered to be an outrage machine. Shockingly, outrage results. I suggest not having outrage before reading facts.<p>It is, of course, the case that immature activists are immature, that is tautological. I share the national eyerolling when it makes the news. Thank you for reading my TED talk transcript.<p>I have very little fear of young literary authors self censoring. Self censoring is a conventional part of basic society and something we teach children from a very early age. Understanding the difference between a thought useful to express and something vomited out of the id takes time and some level of maturity.<p>Having to have a basic understanding of what you're talking about and taking on as a topic shouldn't be controversial, yet it seems to be.<p>edit: minor clarification.
Very interesting. He credits his perspective to the fact that he grew up in a Japanese’s family without the western influence limiting his creative output.
I feel like this discussion is sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. Ishiguro has a new book out and the article doesn't mention it til half way through, as if his mildly presented, fairly specific remarks about "Cancel Culture" are even notable. He mentions young writers with precarious careers, and the author of the article brings JK Rowling into it, which is about as far from what Ishiguro was talking about as can be.<p>Either way, I've only read The Remains of the Day, and I'm interested in reading more, but I can't say this article drew me in to Klara at all. Any suggestions for next books of his to read?
Be right back, a bit busy at the moment, am booked up all morning to do interviews on major news networks about how I'm cancelled and no longer have free speech.
An interesting point is made way at the end:<p>> And in fact AI could come up with the next big idea, an idea like communism or Nazism or capitalism… and what troubles me about that is that it is very difficult for humans to keep control of that situation.<p>This to me is the best "are AI at human-level intellect yet" benchmark I've heard to date. Once AI can create a novel socio-political framework and convince humans to adapt it en-masse [0], I think we can safely say AI has far surpassed human intellect. (99.9999...% of humans can't accomplish such a task)<p>0: leaving myself some wiggle room with the definition of "masse"
Isn't censorship a badge of honor among artists?<p>Lots of writers throughout history had their works censored or banned. This is not a new phenomenon nor did it every really stop. In fact, most great works were, or still are, considered controversial and the controversy is often more discussed than the actual work.
If you're not willing to stand by your opinion and face the consequences of sharing it, how important is your opinion really?<p>Intellectual progress demands that ideas distasteful to the status quo must be openly discussable, but some stakes are necessary to keep those who have carefully thought out their positions and thus hold them with conviction from being drowned out by those who merely parrot ridiculous talking points they never took the time to digest themselves.<p>If you are ashamed to be associated with an idea, that is not an idea you should be advocating - if it has any merit, others will advocate it better than you, if not then what purpose does your advocacy serve?<p>There is nothing wrong with picking which hills are worth dying on, and it's okay to acknowledge that some of your opinions are kinda dumb. The fact is most of us are experts on only a narrow range of human knowledge, and our opinions on the rest are coming from a place of ignorance. If you don't have something valuable to add to a conversation, it is not only reasonable but preferable to remain silent and listen to what others have to say.
> The 66-year-old said he was worried that less established authors were self-censoring by avoiding writing from certain viewpoints or including characters outside their immediate experiences.<p>Speaking as an occasional author, this is a true statement...
I understand the source of people's fears here, though I'm not sure whether they are justified. In attempting to clearly articulate ideas, writers too often fall into cliches--the sort of pitfall that might be widely understood at the expense of predictability. Those, coupled with topics related to current events and sensitive topics, can be a dangerous brew.<p>Yet in a world where media are not centrally controlled (cf. N Korea), ideas can propagate without being direct. Philosophers and heretics have written indirectly for millennia to avoid being read by the authorities or by the public; even the Soviets were accompanied by a thriving culture of satirical literature (and more importantly, jokes/anecdotes) that were allegorical yet far-reaching. If there are meaningful truths that must be said, there is a way to say them without being blunt about it.
I agree that people have gone too far. Art is a protected field, right?<p>There’s going to be a huge backlash against cancel culture, I don’t think it’s going to last very long. That kinda trend always breeds rebellion.
> "I think there are very valid parts of this argument about appropriation of voice," he added, saying he believes "we do have the obligation to teach ourselves and to do research and to treat people with respect if we're going to have them feature in our work".<p>> He said there must be "decency towards people outside of one's own immediate experience".<p>This is the key point. If you are not doing your research, misrepresenting people or not showing the respect people deserve you should to be called out. From my point of view it looks like the people complaining about self-censorship are just being told to show common decency and they don't like that
Speak in contradiction of the popular covid narrative and see what happens.<p>Listen to your friends parrot the popular talking points in unison.<p>Something dark lurked beneath the surface and has now revealed itself.
I am quite interested that people worry cancel culture is preventing intellectual progress more than copyright.<p>Copyright, patents, and other forms of intellectual property have an absolute legal stranglehold on whatever you're trying to do. "Cancel culture", which honestly I've never felt like has limited me, just puts peer pressure on people.<p>Why is the outrage towards IP not as strong as it is towards cancel culture?
Self-censoring is part of the frontal cortex's normal function.<p>I only hear this word 'self-censorship' brought up as a boogeyman.
If people have an axe to grind against some part of mainstream culture, why not just say it out loud instead of priming their readers with FUD? (fear, uncertainty, doubt).
This is a wildly uninformed opinion. People have always written to social norms, and this person is unwilling to acknowledge changing attitudes towards types of writing. I would love a concrete example of the kinds of things this guy thinks are being 'self-censored'.
All of these risks existed in the past, but it was more difficult for opposition to organize into a sustained movement, because asynchronous communication was limited by the physics of time and space and the processes of gatekeepers.<p>The Web brought ease of publishing to anyone, and search engines and social networks brought fast keyword-based and topic-based discovery (sometimes automatically), so like-minded individuals can find themselves quicker than they could before. Your fans can organize fast, but so can your critics.<p>Having loud critics (or even detractors) isn't a problem in itself. But organized opposition can boycott businesses and make demands involving you that endanger your current livelihood and make it risky for others to work with you in the future. There is an unequal relationship between unproven authors and their publishers, promoters, and others who work with them. An author has a few publishers, but a publisher works with many authors. Given sustained publicity and economic pressure, most publishers will drop an author if keeping them results in harm to the publisher.<p>This lays bare the fact that authors were never truly free to say what they want to say, because they were frequently dependent on the goodwill, social support, and business support of others. It may appear that in the past, publishers were more principled and didn't cave to sustained loud demands, but it was more difficult to organized sustained loud demands, and various factors made such movements more vulnerable to be dismissed as fringe protests of an upset few instead of the legitimate will of the people.<p>What changed is the globalization of culture, aided by TV and the web, which made faraway events relevant and remote social movements compatible; the globalization of news enabled by the globalization of culture and aided by the 24/7 news cycle perpetuated by commercial TV news and commercial internet news organizations; and the willingness to people to take direct (in-)action against corporations (i.e. boycotts) that are easy to avoid, in pursuit of a cause framed by like-minded thought leaders as moral.<p>There is a lot to unpack in all of this. This is why boycotting your electricity company is much harder and significantly more rare than boycotting a publisher or an entertainment studio or some random company that worked with someone you don't like. This is why it seems like things were different in the past.<p>The fact is, in order to succeed in this changed world, authors must adapt too. Partition writing on different topics and different works by pen names. Self-publish. Market directly. Network with other authors in loose confederations; publish your future works under a new pen name in the same circles. Insulate your personal life from your professional life, and your professional authorships from each other. Reduce your risk that one upset about one thing in one work will wipe your entire life's work.
the percentage of folks commenting under throwaway accounts should suffice for the seriousness of this issue, even on a board where folks are supposedly even keeled...
The Internet is a Dark Forest.<p>Keep your True Name hidden.<p>> "And in fact AI could come up with the next big idea, an idea like communism or Nazism or capitalism… and what troubles me about that is that it is very difficult for humans to keep control of that situation."
I can see why. Some people think it’s wrong not to include diverse characters, and others think it’s wrong to speak for other races (ex. colour matching voice actors to their characters). If you’re a white person who wants to write a book then I think you just need to accept that a handful of crazy people are going to get angry no matter what you do.
Anyone who thinks 'cancel culture's is only one side of the political spectrum has conveniently forgotten what it is like to kneel during a football game during the playing of the national anthem.<p>Or what it's like to sit in the front of a bus when you are in the minority. Etc etc.
What a clickbait article. There's no mention at all of any specifics of "young authors" censoring their work. Instead it's a vague opinion piece about Ishiguro disliking "cancel culture" in general, because JK Rowling took some heat. It just looks like the same story of "I think cancel culture is the cause of all problems" without any specifics.
People always self-censored. Far worse, people were censored. Really censored, not "oh, I cannot write on my platform of choice, so I have to use another one which can reach the whole world" censored. You wrote something the people in charge didn't like? No distribution for you, cause all printing was censored. You wrote against your king? Prison for you. You were politically inconvenient for your patron? Hope you have fun on the streets. Your book wasn't like by the book publishers? Sucks to be you. Probably ended up as an unread manuscript in an attic. Oh, and to mirror the words of the article: There were (and are, though less common) real lynch mobs when someone wrote something people didn't like. I have a feeling they are a bit more scary than getting screamed at on Twitter.<p>Fact: It was never as easy as it is today to reach an audience. All the people who have been "cancelled" or whatever the word of the week is, they still have reach people in ages ago would have killed for. Some even got bigger audiences because they were "cancelled". If you self-censor that is a decision. Maybe it is a wise decision. But is it not something people never had to deal with before.