In the Future Everyone Will Be Fired After Fifteen Minutes

Earlier this week Pax Dickinson, the Chief Technology Officer at Business Insider, was fired after a number of his tweets regarding women and minorities drew public outrage. Pax (if that is his real name) is only the latest of a growing series of individuals who lost their jobs after expressing unpopular or offensive views. In July Jack Hunter resigned from a position on Senator Rand Paul's staff after past statements in defense of the Confederacy came to light. In May, Jason Richwine resigned his position with Heritage after the details of his Ph.d dissertation (which speculated on issues involving race and IQ) were reported in the Washington Post. Psychology professor Geoffrey Miller managed to keep his job after one of his "fat shaming" tweets went viral, but was censured by his employer, was forced to undergo sensitivity training, and is subject to a number of other administrative penalties.

And that's just in the last few months. Going back further one can find the same story playing out over and over where an unpopular comment draws popular outrage, leading the offender's employer to (quite rationally) seek to disassociate itself as quickly as possible.

What's odd about these sorts of incidents is that, while a single offhand comment can ruin a person's career, professional pundits are in general subject to very little accountability for what they say. After the 2012 election, Dick Morris was dropped from Fox News "because I was wrong." But the truth is that Morris had been wrong on television and in writing for more than a decade beforehand without any apparent ill effect on his career, and there are plenty of folks in the media who consistently make poorly grounded predictions or spout false talking points and yet continue to maintain employment.

I used to think that these sorts of cases were part of a passing phase. Between social media, 24-hour news, and an archived Internet, the number of possible occasions for people to take offense at other views seems to be growing exponentially. Eventually, I thought, people would grow tired of constantly being outraged, and would become desensitized to such things. I also figured that as people would become less willing to exploit public outrage to pressure employers to dump folks for their views once they realized that they were at risk to the same tactics.

Increasingly, though, I wonder if this trend might be permanent. Michael Brendan Dougherty recently noted how the Internet can serve to intensify the tyranny of common opinion. The anonymity of modern industrial life created space for more non-conformity of opinion and behavior as opposed to, say, life in a small town or village where everyone is "in everyone else's business." If technological advances mean an end to anonymity, is this going to result in some degree of rollback of this openness as social media recreates the social pressures of conformity on a much larger scale?

And, if so, then so what? Many of the opinions that have gotten the folks listed above in trouble are, in fact, quite noxious. But there is nothing about the sort of outrage strategy being employed requiring that the views that get you fired be noxious or even wrong; all that is necessary is that they be unpopular. Is it really so hard for people to imagine how this sort of strategy could be used against perfectly legitimate views. Public opinion can be quite fickle; the Internet is forever.

Ironically, it is hard to mount a cogent objection to these sorts of tactics from a purely libertarian point of view. Most of the cases I've mentioned did not involve the government, just private citizens expressing their rights of free speech ("X should be fired") and association ("Sorry, X, but we're going to have to let you go"). I've even seen libertarians cite similar sorts of campaigns as a positive feature of a civil society.

On the other hand, J.S. Mill's On Liberty (one of the classic defenses of freedom of opinion) was written against both legal *and* social sanctions for unpopular opinions. Given Mill's consequentialist attitudes, this is not really a surprise. If conformity of thought has negative consequences, then those negatives will probably exist regardless of whether the conformity is due to government dictate or to social pressure. Frankly, I've never been sure if the idea of there being no social sanctions for holding any opinion is even possible. It's certainly never been tried. But it is the case where people constantly self-censor their opinions (more than they do now) would probably be a much blander and boring world than the one we have today.  

UPDATE: Even Paul Krugman is worried.