I was just revisiting some of the 90s/00s era "anarchy is when everyone is involved in consensus over the things that impact them" frame, and it suddenly gave me a bit more understanding of the "anarchists" of that generation screaming bloody murder about cancel culture...
The classic response that proves the limits of that conception of anarchism is: "If you ask me out, my turning you down could affect you dramatically, but you still don't get any say in it"
But the "never cancel" anarchists of the 90s generation... are actually being consistent!
It's actually blowing my mind. They may not entirely understand the full extent of the bullet they're biting, but they are, in some very real sense, staying consistent to what was once almost the hegemonic or mainstream conception of anarchism in much of north america.
It's in fact, *the rest of us*, who broke from that conception of anarchism in various ways (like my turn to agency-consequentialism, but also all of us that embraced anthropological insights into how central gossip/ostracism/etc are to stateless peoples) that swerved!
I don't quite know what to do with this. Obviously the rest of us are correct. You *must* be able to cancel relationships freely regardless of how invested the other person is in it. Anything that says otherwise is catastrophically wrong. But... these people bit the other bullet.
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