Clubhouse controversy: Push to ‘democratize everything’ creates creepy speech police

“It’s Not Callout Culture,” ran the headline at the Atlantic. “It’s Accountability.” The piece pushed back on the idea that one best battles bigotry and fights for justice by building relationships rather than social media mobs. Speaking of people losing their jobs after old microaggressions came to light, the writer suggested, “The online reckonings of late would be best described as demonstrating not ‘cancel culture’ but ‘accountability culture.’”

Firing someone for bad tweets or right-leaning politics? “The Cancel Culture is Just Adult Accountability,” explained liberal commentator John Pavlovitz.

The problem is that this “accountability” stretches way beyond any sensible notion of accountability. Sullivan, in the Washington Post, trains her fire on public officials, who do, in fact, owe their constituents, and by proxy the press, an account of their actions and words. That’s part of democracy.

But in our current age of mass media and a left-wing effort to “democratize everything,” it becomes assumed that everyone owes an account for everything to everyone else.

Journalists and commentators are increasingly worried that we’re not holding people accountable for their private conversations.

For one thing, there’s a new discussion app, called Clubhouse, where people can talk to and listen to other people. Yet this app “doesn’t keep old posts or audio files and doesn’t allow users to record conversations,” as one article by Poynter, a prestigious journal on media, put it.

This is problematic. Where’s the “accountability” for strangers saying something to other people in a not-totally-public forum?

The piece at Poynter, quoting an article at Grit Daily, which fashions itself a “brand watchdog,” worried that “on Clubhouse, “there’s no path to accountability. … There is no way to prove that someone said anything controversial at all.”

Imagine that. Out of your earshot, someone, anyone, could be saying something “controversial,” and you, dear reader, might be totally unaware.

The Grit Daily author, Olivia Smith, praised the search function on Twitter, which allows one to search out bad opinions and verboten words and phrases. This has “contributed to what some might call cancel culture and others might simply call accountability—especially when it comes to inexcusable actions such as acts of racism or sexism.”

The Associated Press expressed similar worries, with a story headlined “Extremists exploit a loophole in social moderation: Podcasts.” People talking in a forum without ready word searches is a “loophole” in what world? Is there some law that says every scold has a right to know exactly how many times we have used verboten phrases such as “sexual preference” or “Burisma.”

It all built up to a perfect joke tweet:

But, of course, accountability is a real thing. And sometimes critics of cancel culture get called hypocrites when they advocate accountability. Here’s an example from the fall.

Liberal cancel culture critic Yascha Mounk publicized that Sarah Iannarone, a leading candidate for Portland mayor, liked murderous dictator Mao Zedong enough to wear a Mao skirt on the campaign trail.

Liberal cancel culture defender Julia Ioffe asked Mounk if this wasn’t cancel culture and snitching.

It’s a fine question, and the distinction is clear to anyone who thinks about it.

If a candidate for public office admires a murderous dictator, that’s very relevant information to all voters. That is, Iannarone, as a political candidate, owed Portlanders an account of her seeming adoration, or at least toleration, of Mao.

There are all sorts of people I owe an account to. I owe God and my wife an account for just about everything I do. I owe my employers an account of what I write on Twitter, say on television, publish in my book, because I’m a journalist, and they’re paying me to say and write good things.

I teach Sunday school, and I owe my students and my parents an account of what I do in the classroom, and I owe my parish an account of how I live my public life.

I don’t owe some tech reporter at CNN an account of my private conversations. Nonpublic figures don’t owe the public an account of their beliefs, even if they’re expressed somewhere where a Salon reporter can easily find and amplify them.

And frankly, a Hollywood actress or NFL quarterback doesn’t owe Ioffe or any of us an account of their politics.

The idea that they do is rooted in a pathological desire to democratize everything. Democratizing things sounds good until you realize that so much of our life is not at all democratic, and that’s probably good.

“Democratize what Sarah is having for dinner” is tyrannical. So is “democratize who can quarterback the Saints,” or “Democratize what you can say in private to your friends.”

Here was an apt tweet from the weekend.

Little platoons, clubs, families, religious congregations, circles of friends — all the places where most of us find our real identity, meaning, and purpose in life — are sometimes internally democratic but deliberately insulated from what the masses outside them say. That is, the majority of Americans might object to Catholics ordaining only men, but the majority of Americans don’t get a say. Also, the majority doesn’t get a say in whether Mel Gibson still gets to make movies.

That’s problematic to today’s cancel puritans who stay awake at night worried that someone, somewhere, is expressing an unpopular opinion.

Poynter’s piece on Clubhouse concludes with this bizarre rhetorical question: “On Monday, after a rare moment of cross-border dialogue between users from mainland China and others outside the country, Chinese censors moved in. If Xi Jinping’s administration isn’t ignoring Clubhouse, why should fact-checkers? Why should you?”

Yes. If China’s oppressive communist regime thinks private forums are problematic, shouldn’t you?