The Hardest Part Is Starting
Cancel culture's chilling effect provides opportunity for ambitious people.
It is difficult to get around to getting started on pursuing your personal goals. Perfectionism and self-doubt prevent people from pursuing their goals seriously or even starting. People are usually naturally too myopic and have difficulty pursuing goals which have little pay off initially.
Sometimes I tell people that I want to write a book about social science or philosophy. It expresses that I have goals and interests and it's the honest truth. How many people also want to write a book but never get around to it? I imagine this experience is very common.
It is best to start with something small and build your way up. What if I start a blog? Or what if I start a YouTube channel? Could I imagine slowly getting bigger and bigger until it's other people telling me to write the book? Every video and every blog post has a probability distribution over how much attention I will get. The more posts that I make, the more likely it is that I get attention. If I continue working hard it becomes more and more certain that I will achieve my goals. Technology has facilitated this.
The market for selling your intellectual content is volatile in the age of the viral video. You could wake up one day and have 10x the following you did the day prior. This is not typical of well thought out intellectual content. It is not as easy to go viral with a 5 page blog post. But what is the benefit? The more articulate, careful and generous you are, the less likely it is that you make people angry. It also means you are not so exciting.
In the age of cancel culture, someone can cause you trouble by getting you fired. They can figure out your name and find your Facebook. From your Facebook, they can find your LinkedIn and from your LinkedIn they can find your employer. This was made a lot easier by technology, not only because searching for things is so easy but because your exposure to the type of people that would do something like this is increased.
Technology makes pursuing your controversial intellectual goals easier but allows for the treat of cancellation. Cancellation makes things harder for you but creates a supply problem.
If you only punish drug dealers, but don't punish drug users, you end up with a situation in which supply is reduced when a dealer is arrested and prices increase. These increases are appealing and allow for opportunity. The people who would not enter into this market normally but are not so scared of the risk have an opportunity to make some money.
A lot of people are scared currently of being canceled which is having an intellectual chilling effect. However, there is still a demand for controversial intellectual content. If you are able to prepare yourself mentally and financially for being canceled and you do not have people dependent on you, you are in a position to benefit. The land is fertile. The hardest part is starting.
Hey!! I haven't read this post before, but I've talked with you about this.
> "However, there is still a demand for controversial intellectual content. If you are able to prepare yourself mentally and financially for being canceled and you do not have people dependent on you, you are in a position to benefit. The land is fertile."
You know what else would be great? Being the "face" for other people with excellent-but-controversial intellectual content! I think it would be AMAZING if I could, like, get into excellently-thought-out conversations on some of the controversial topics... and carefully archive who said various things, (so if they got their courage up later, they could get full credit for originating the thought/paragraph/concept-handle. Or even if they NEVER became public... ensuring some of the benefits came back to them.) and then post some of the best things we came up with in our dialogues. (or someone else being the "front man"! either way!)
Let's talk more about this after Scott's book review contest!!