 Here's what I think canceling is and why it's different from criticism. Criticism is expressing an argument or opinion with the idea of rationally influencing public opinion through public persuasion, interpersonal persuasions. Cancelling comes from the universe of propaganda, not critical discourse. And it's about organizing or manipulating a social environment or a media environment with a goal or predictable effect of isolating or de-platforming or intimidating an ideological opponent. It's about making an idea or a person socially radioactive. Today, you'll hear the activists say, well, I didn't read the thing. I don't need to read the thing to know that it's colonialist or racist. So an open society is a place that has a lot of intellectual pluralism, a lot of diversity of viewpoints. It tries to pit bias and prejudice against other biases and prejudice. And it does that by forcing contention and critical argument and forcing people to persuade each other over time. That's really what science is. That's really what journalism is. The open society is not only incomparably better at producing knowledge than any other society because it allows us to make errors and not be punished for making errors. It allows us to make errors, in fact, much more quickly. That's the secret of science. I call it liberal science. The magic of liberal science is in the institutions that force us to channel these conversations in socially productive ways. If you're an academic, you're writing for journals, you're undergoing peer review, you're being credentialed by some kind of scientific organization. If you're a journalist, you submit to ethics codes, you probably were for an organization where you're supposed to tell the truth. All of these things are mediated in ways which allow us to be individuals but also to understand some rules of engagement to follow each other. Society where you don't have that or a community, like say Twitter or like say an academic culture where it's student to student and peer to peer. Where you don't have that kind of mediation going on, this social fabric turns into kind of Lord of the Flies, who can gang up on who, who can make the most noise, who can attract the most followers and you begin to display to each other instead of talking to each other. Weirdly, the way to help us be more liberated as individuals is to strengthen the institutions that we use to connect each other. This is not a fight between one set of people and another set of people. It is also a fight within ourselves. There are ideas that each of us hate that it's very hard to restrain ourselves from not ganging up on in an illiberal way. The idea that wrong-headed and dangerous and heretical and blasphemous ideas should be not only allowed but protected is preposterous. It's ridiculous. No society has ever had that idea until about 250 years ago. It shouldn't work. But here we are and the reason is because despite its ridiculousness, it has the one great advantage of being the single most successful social principle ever invented.