Closed Loops: is cancel culture one?

Hello,

Just like the NBA, the Brussels Philosophy Meetup has a summer league. This time we will try to explore the limit of complex systems that have become self-referential and try to connect this theme to cancel culture.

In recent years cancel culture has become a polarizing topic. For some it means calling out harmful behaviour when traditional systems of society fail. For others it represents a new form of exclusion: an unforgiving, relentless and fast form of public justice.

There’s a deeper issue beneath the surface: what happens when systems designed to serve justice or equality become so complex they are not serving their function? These systems are self-referentially complex and so internally focused on procedures. Unintentionally they may have excluded those without equal acces to resources, intelligence, education or opportunities.

When people feel these systems fail, cancel culture can be a response. Ironically, cancel culture itself may have become a self-referential system, both consequence and cause of self-referential systems, which in turn is both consequence and cause of cancel culture which have become... You see where I am going. In this sessions we well try to reflect on self-referring systems and gain insights in cancel culture. Some questions may be:

When does a system begin to serve itself rather than serve its intended function?
How can we distinguish between complexity that improves the system and complexity that obscures or undermines its intended goals?
What are the ethical consequences of systems that prioritize their own survival over the reasons they were created for?
How do we reform a system that is incentivized to maintain itself at all costs?

Is cancel culture a necessary evil in a world where complex systems may fail?
How are systems adapting to cancel culture in ways that reinforce complexity (diversity policy in companies?)?
How can the new complexity of cancel culture, be inclusive instead of exclusive?
How does the fear of being cancelled impact inclusion in society?
A last question building on the two previous sessions: if we could make a cancel culture how would it look like?

I hope in the end, we can talk to each other and not talk only to ourself.

FYI: the picture is a mandelbrot set. It is a simple mathemathical expression causing very complex paterns. When visualised, it is a perpertual self-imaging loop of the same patern.