>I don’t think I can fully describe the heart-wrenching pain of seeing your life & career crumbling around you and feeling utterly powerless to stop it. I thought I was fast approaching my inevitable and permanent end. I don’t cry often, but I cried a lot that night.

The author has harsh words for his previous behavior, but the question I have is about the sentiment at the center of his reflection on the experience: if he had agency in the attacks on him. I certainly believe that he does not think he does.

A lot of this comes down to deeply personal questions about how to address misbehavior and what we expect from other people. I do not know the details of what Noah did or what the people he mistreated want, but in his incomplete account I can certainly think of things that jump out to me.

- He says that no one has accused him of raping them. I personally know people who were raped and never accused their rapists. It was not worth the trouble or they did not have the social capital or they did not want to pursue law enforcement. How much introspection Noah should have depends a lot on the specifics but is it certainly not clearly enough to say that you didn't do something because no one accused you. That's not reflection.

- At the end of the day no one has an obligation to like you. It is not up to the perpetrator to decide what the appropriate restorative process is. We do not need a legal system to give us permission to dislike someone.

- He says, towards the end "If you’ve been cancelled and want someone to talk with who won’t shame or judge you, shoot me a message." I mean...I suppose I get what he means, but it seems hard to simultaneously put forth that your previous behavior was wrong and should be judged harshly and also that you will not judge others for their previous behavior. I am all for a path to restoration, but if I am to believe in reform I would like to see a more complex understanding than I get from this essay. I believe any real path to restoration must include judgement about past misdeeds.

I think about the Dan Harmon apology for the sexual harassment her perpetrated against a coworker[1]. It has its own flaws and, to a degree, I think it overly-centers Harmon, but one thing I think it gets very right is that Harmon made sure to apologize in a way that was accepted by his victims and was detailed about his misbehavior. He is clear-eyed about the way that he took advantage of his power, how selfish and small his motivations were, and how much damage he did to his victims. His apology feels merciless to his past self in a way that I do not see in Noah's account.

Now maybe Noah has fully satisfied his victims and they simply do not want to go public and ofc that changes my understanding of this situation. But I do not get the same unceasingly unsympathetic treatment of Noah's past behavior. He seems like he wants it to go away rather than make it part of his story and, I think, that approach feels less fully-engaged than others that I've seen.

Ultimately accounts like this, where we are all judging behavior of strangers we haven't meet in past events we did not experience, are always questionable. I don't feel certain at all about Noah. I also think it is easy to read this account of his experience and be uncertain about how he has changed. He mentions, at the start, that cancelling "those who are attempting to grow is such a counterproductive and potentially dangerous trend" - but I do not understand from this article how he is attempting to grow. Instead, I see a disagreement about how to deal with his past behavior.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/674/transcript

I think he did in the sense that he could have chosen to respond in different ways. He could have said, for example, something like: "I admit I behaved badly in the past. I have changed who I am so I don't do those things any more, and I have apologized in private to the people I hurt. That's all I'm going to say about it." And then just ignored whatever happened on social media after that.

The question is whether that would have affected, for example, his getting fired and disowned by companies he had worked for. I don't think it would have, because I don't think the companies that fired him were doing it based on any evaluation they did themselves of his behavior; they were doing it based on fear of social media.

> it seems hard to simultaneously put forth that your previous behavior was wrong and should be judged harshly and also that you will not judge others for their previous behavior

I don't think that's what he's saying. The things he was accused of on social media and which caused companies to fire him were not things he had actually done in the past, but accusations about things he had not done in the past. So I don't think he's complaining about being judged on what he actually did. I think he's complaining about being cancelled on the basis of things he had not done, simply because social media never stops at what you actually did, but always goes on to accuse you of things you didn't do, and you have no way of defending yourself. And he's saying he won't judge other people based on things social media says about them because most of the things social media says about anybody aren't true.

(Note that if you disagree about whether, for example, he actually raped someone, naturally you'll disagree about the extent to which the social media cancellation was justified. But the fact is that he says he didn't rape anyone, so what he is saying is not what you are describing. He's not saying that rape isn't bad or that he wouldn't judge someone harshly who had raped someone. He's saying he won't judge someone harshly just because social media accuses them of raping someone.)

If you feel it's only appropriate to judge people on the behavior they admit to, then I think your read is correct. That also, to me, feels like it becomes tautological - it places the locus of power on the accused and the onus of coming forward on the victim.

We want some level of responsibility on the victim. False accusations exist (though research suggests they are extremely rare). I don't have good answers - but someone asked what more someone could want and I answered. There are parts of how he talks about the experience that make me uneasy. I can understand that unease making others uncomfortable.

The line I would draw is one of looking for reflection on personal behavior. As I said in my post, I'm not comfortable accepting his description of the events as the end of it and I do not see any understanding of why that might be in his answer. I don't think he needs to have intended to commit sexual assault to have done it and I don't think someone needs to accuse him (privately or publicly) for him to reflect on the possibility.

I said elsewhere that I would work with him, but I would certainly understand if people didn't feel comfortable about it. I guess I've seen many people leave companies or not get hired for far more mundane interpersonal mismatches. It is really hard for me to take seriously that cultural fit matters at work, but that people must accept a former abusers' representations they have changed.

I also just want to say:

>[the companies fired him] based on fear of social media.

I have no idea if this is true and neither do you. I have seen external embarrassments handled in different ways and I am skeptical it was this simple. Of course, I could be wrong, but there are plenty of prominent figures who had accusations made against them and they either kept their jobs or found new positions.

I'm fine with forming and acting on your own opinions, if they are based on reliable information.

What I'm not fine with is cancelling someone without even bothering to find out reliable information, which is what appears to have happened in this case.

What research are you referring to?

[1]https://www.thecut.com/article/false-rape-accusations.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape

I have no idea if this is true and neither do you.

Fair enough. We don't have access to internal company deliberations.

I agree with this, but here we're not talking about just disliking someone. We're talking about cancellation--someone's livelihood is taken away (he was fired, from multiple jobs). Just disliking someone does not justify doing that. We don't have a right to have other people like us, but we do have a right to make a living, and we should have legal recourse if false accusations impact our livelihood.

I think each employer would need to make their own decision. There is nothing in his account that would make me uncomfortable working with him. But, I think your critique really points away from 'cancel culture' and towards a more robust set of employment protections. I favor those, but they aren't really related to 'cancelling' people.

He does if he can prove damages. In practice that is extremely hard to do, even if we leave out all the additional difficulties associated with accusations made by anonymous people on the Internet.

Also, the only legal remedy is compensatory damages and punitive damages from a successful lawsuit. But who is he going to sue? Twitter? They'll just say they aren't responsible for false accusations made using their platform, and AFAIK that position has already been upheld in court. And beyond that, we come up against those difficulties I just referred to: how do you find people in the real world corresponding to various Twitter identities and get them into court? And what do you do if they turn out to be judgment proof?

I agree. But the decision should be based on reliable information. What's more, I would say it should be based on reliable information that is related to the person's job performance.

> I think your critique really points away from 'cancel culture' and towards a more robust set of employment protections.

To the extent that "cancel culture" has an impact on people's employment, the two are related. Of course a company isn't going to come right out and say "we fired this person because we were afraid of being shamed on social media". That doesn't mean there isn't causation involved. Would Bradley have been fired if there hadn't been a social media firestorm? If someone had just privately informed Wizards of the Coast (or any other company he was doing artwork for) about what Bradley had done in the past? That's the key question, and I'm not sure it's addressable by more robust employment protections, since there's no way to prove causation even if it's there.