To what extent are ‘cancellation’ campaigns against people expressing unpopular opinions (unpopular, at least, in the view of some substantial number of people)–now a regular and unpleasant feature of social media sites–really a new phenomenon, rather than being just a modern incarnation of a kind of behavior which has long existed?
Hans Fallada’s novel Every Man Dies Alone, is centered on a couple who become anti-Nazi activists after their son Ottochen is killed in the war; it was inspired by, and is loosely based on, the true story of a real-life couple who distributed anti-Nazi postcards and were executed for it. I thought the book was excellent. The present present post, though, is not a book review, but rather a development of some thoughts inspired by a particular passage in the story.
Trudel, who was Ottochen’s fiancee, is a sweet and intelligent girl who is strongly anti-Nazi..and unlike Ottochen’s parents, she became an activist prior to being struck by personal tragedy: she is a member of a resistance cell at the factory where she works. But she finds that she cannot stand the unending psychological strain of underground work, made even worse by the rigid and doctrinaire man (apparently a Communist) who is leader of the cell and she drops out. Another member of the cell, who has long been in love with her, also finds that he is not built for such work, and drops out also.
After they marry and Trudel becomes pregnant, they decide to leave the politically hysterical environment of Berlin for a small town where, they believe, life will be freer and calmer.
Like many city dwellers, they’d had the mistaken belief that spying was only really bad in Berlin and that decency still prevailed in small towns. And like many city dwellers, they had made the painful discovery that recrimination, eavesdropping, and informing were ten times worse in small towns than in the big city. In a small town, everyone was fully exposed, you couldn’t ever disappear in the crowd. Personal circumstances were quickly ascertained, conversations with neighbors were practically unavoidable, and the way such conversations could be twisted was something they had already experienced in their own lives, to their chagrin.
Reading the above passage, I was struck by the thought that if we are now living in an ‘electronic village,’ even a ‘global village’, as Marshall McLuhan put it several decades, ¦then perhaps that also means we are facing some of the unpleasant characteristics that, as Fallada notes, can be a part of village life. And these characteristics aren’t something that appears only in eras of insane totalitarianism such as existed in Germany during the Nazi era. Peter Drucker, in Managing in the Next Society, wrote about the tension between liberty and community:
Rural society has been romanticized for millennia, especially in the West, where rural communities have usually been portrayed as idylic. However, the community in rural society is actually both compulsory and coercive. And that explains why, for millennia, the dream of rural people was to escape into the city. ‘Stadluft macht frei ‘ (city air frees) says an old German proverb dating back to the eleventh or twelfth century.
Consider: Going way back to 2013, an assistant manager at a Wal-Mart store lost his job because of a post he put up on his Facebook page, in which he made some negative and slightly obscene comments about Muslim women wearing niquabs. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) complained, and the man was fired. (Having demonstrated their power, CAIR then kindly asked that he be rehired (I don’t know whether he ever was.)
If, in the pre-social-media era, a Wal-Mart manager living in a large city had made negative comments about some group to friends in person, the odds that it would have resulted in his firing would have been pretty low. On the other hand, if a store manager living in a village were to repeatedly express opinions hostile to the deeply-held beliefs of the majority of the villageers–say, if a rural store manager in 1955 became well-known as hostile to religion, it might well have had an adverse effect on his employment. The electronic village has to some extent re-created the social pressures of the traditional village.
Of course, the village culture doesn’t always reinforce and serve the values of the politically dominant . During WWII, for example, the people of Chambon-sur-Lignon, a town in the France’s Massif Central Range, saved more than 5000 Jews from the Holocaust. The village community can act as a bulwark for civil society against the over-reaching power of distant tyrants, and in some cases, as with Chambon-sur-Lignon, “the community culture will be of a nature that can accept, respect, and help people whose beliefs from their own.
Certainly, the ability of the Internet to facilitate the distribution of information and opinion, beyond the control of the media gatekeepers, has been and is of tremendous value in preserving liberty. Without it, we as a society would be in even more trouble than we currently are. But the erosion of privacy, and the resultant fear of expressing oneself or acting in ‘unapproved’ ways that might harm your Permanent Record (to use the phrases with which teachers and school administrators used to threaten students) are factors whose influence in undeniable.
The widespread distribution and sharing of information enabled by technology becomes particularly dangerous when the national government is in the hands of people who lack respect for individual liberties and when the administrative discretion granted to individual bureaucrats is high. Can anyone doubt the high likelihood that information from Electronic Medical Records which were pushed as part of Obamacare will at some point be used to destroy political opponents of whatever Administration is in power at the time? (If, indeed, these records have not already been so used.) Can anyone doubt that, with the ideology of ‘progressivism’ becoming increasingly intolerant, ever-larger numbers of people have been and will continue to be denied jobs, promotions, college admissions, and tenure based on opinions that they have expressed in a Facebook or Twitter post or a blog post at some point in their lives? (and, quite likely, the other way around as the political winds shift and the ‘progressives’ themselves are under attack) and that expressions of opinion will unless the climate changes markedly, tend to become much more guarded, just as a village merchant might be reluctant to say anything to offend the small group of people on whose goodwill he is permanently dependent for his livelihood?
I (still) haven’t read it, but Roger McNamee’s book Zucked is subtitled Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. The author is a well-known VC and was himself an early investor in FB. (Although some have asserted that on-line cancellation campaigns have been largely a Twitter phenomenon, the early phases of this phenomenon predated Twitter popularity and used Facebook and other early social media as vehicles. This all accelerated considerably with Twitter under its previous ownership; I’m hopeful that it may be damped down somewhat under Musk leadership, especially with the introduction of the Community Notes feature.
As an overall conclusion, I think that electronic cancellation in the global village is indeed the modern manifestation of behavior patterns that have long existed–but enabled by technology to operate both more rapidly and with much wider geographical scope.
Your thoughts?