## Cancel Culture Programming
How I was cancelled and how you can easily program it too.
by
Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net>
## Historical Categorisation
See https://stallmansupport.org/
False accusations were made against Richard Stallman in September
2019. Although others pointed out the mistakes, the stage had
been set for a cascade of defamatory reactions that
followed and spread like wildfire.
A new wave of attacks was launched when the reinstatement of
Richard Stallman in the FSF Board of Directors was announced on
March 21, 2021.
This talk is not about RMS and what he has done, it is about the reaction
and the tools used by people, which are not proper, in my opinion.
## I got cancelled on Gopher Mailinglist.
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2021 18:46:24 +0100
From: Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net>
Subject: Open Source Needs Your Help!
To: gopher-project@other.debian.org
Greetings Comrades!
Recent events in open source sparked discussions at bitreich too. To get
a public opinion, we started a poll:
gopher://khzae.net/1/poll/1616607816
Please vote! It is for the future of Open Source!
Sincerely,
Christoph Lohmann
## Yellow People
| -- Do you boycott yellow people? --
| We should avoid yellow people in open source, because they are
| against open source values.
| __________________________________________________________________
| 29 49% Yes
| 30 50% No
59 people voted as of 2021-06-13. First there was a majority for yes,
then came the no.
## XML as Gopher Menu
Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2021 20:00:38 +0200
From: Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net>
Subject: G3C announces: GML, Gopher and XHTML
To: gopher-project@other.debian.org
Greetings comrades.
The G3C, headquartered at Bitreich, has an announcement to make:
Gopher and XHTML merge.
In an effort by looking at the gemini protocol, we at the G3C are
working on improving user experience. We hope to solve this gap of
markup and extensibility by using XHTML in gopher menus, the Gopher
Markup Language – GML:
## XML as Gopher Menu
Bitreich.org
## XML as Gopher Menu
The icons are using the new smiley standard we are working on at G3C.
We hope to have all gopher clients supporting this standard by the end of
2021 and so going into a brighter future!
(gopher://bitreich.org/0/usr/20h/phlog/2021-04-01T16-24-45-236361.md)
Happy Easter to Everyone!
Sincerely,
Christoph Lohmann
## The Reaction
Greetings.
On Fri, 02 Apr 2021 09:38:53 +0200 XXXX wrote:
> Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net> writes:
>
> > - > href="gopher://bitreich.org/1/bithub"
> > icon="::long-dick:skin-tone=3,circumcised=no::">
>
> There's an overwhelmingly high probability that somebody who mentions
> dick size and skin tone in the same breath like this is making a thinly
> veiled allusion to a racial stereotype. A racial stereotype cloaked in
> a pseudo XML tag is still a racial stereotype. It is not funny. I
> would call it puerile, but that would be insulting to children.
## The Reaction
Those probabilities do not seem right. We at the G3C work on a standard
to mark racism easily for those inclined to be born in the USA and fond
of finding racism in every small detail. For this new standard the
committee has waded through all studies and not found any evidence for
your reasoning.
Please quote the appropriate studies, so the new G3C standard can be
adapted accordingly. But consider that G3C standards adapt to the most
progressive cultures, not just progressive-considering cultures.
Sincerely,
Christoph Lohmann
## Other Reactions
* Someone came on IRC and complained about *everything* Bitreich being
wrong and calling the IRC police.
* The same person whined on twitter and wanted cheap capital
on simple cancel hysteria.
* I (20h) got banned for six weeks from Gopher Mailinglist. I never asked
back and I am still banned.
* Josuah got cancelled on some art IRC channel for just telling them,
their current art of the day is shown on #bitreich-books.
## The Bitreich News Reaction
# 2021-03-25 05:18:03.374603 UTC (+0000)
Where Was The Racism?
As a reaction to open source becoming a cancel culture of choice and
hysterical people seeing a word as a problem to really go for threatening
with legal acts, calling the police, telling people, they go down the
drain, are bad people for the rest of the life, we posted a poll asking
about »yellow people«.
In this study of the gopher mailinglist, 50% of the replies saw no
racism and 50% saw racism, with overreactions.
## The Bitreich News Reaction
As we see, open source has an inherent problem of cancel culture,
diverting us from technical merits to social-cultural blockers, keeping
out people who could contribute neutrally to the greater work of free
software, but are thrown out because of small triggers.
This trigger cancel culture gets a big part of society to not speak about
some topics and is the way towards 1984. We slowly forbid ourselves words
and are not able to communicate properly.
So the big questions remains: Where was the racism?
Sincerely yours,
20h
Family Doctor, who has sworn to treat every patient equally, no matter
where he/she/it is from, looks like, political viewpoints are.
## No Names
I redacted all names of people answering and kept uncertain about where
people reacted childish because of half-known facts.
People can change and I give them a chance.
## Summary
* An intellectual experiment on text understanding showed that childish
overreaction and forceful non-understanding are a power in our free
hobbyist culture.
* Information with feelings is spreading fast and gets inaccurate too
easily.
* People too easily get blind for the obvious.
* Do not copy opinions without thinking.
## Summary for the Gopher Mailinglist
Since and during the whole discussion no technical merits were discussed.
The mailinglist is obviously dead.
An overreaction of the a debian mailinglist admin has set the seal for
a split of bitreich news from the gopher mailinglist.
Let us see in the future how much gopher culture stays on the mailinglist.
## Tutorial for Cancel Testing
In case you want to show or test some environment, if it is infiltrated
by cancel culture hystericals, use following steps.
1. Find some funny topic.
2. Write a message on maybe some day like April 1st.
3. Add a simple joke everyone on the street understands.
4. Send the message.
Be prepared to not use up lifetime in this group or environment anymore.
## Conclusional Questions
Is the cancel movement over?
* No attacks have been seen so far again.
* RMS has won.
* The hystericals have shown to be childish and overreacting.
Will the next movement be more childish or less?
* You can see what is coming in the Code of Conducts.
Who benefits from cancel culture?
* It has weakened Gopher subculture.
* Even after cancelling out the offender, the cancel culturists
have no productive counter proposal.
## Comments / Questions
Do you have comments or questions?
## Thanks
Thank you very much for listening.
## End
Send comments and questions to:
Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net>