About
Our Mission
Our mission at Pluribus is to facilitate support for victims of Cancel Culture, and anyone else who has suffered public persecution due to an opinion or belief stated without explicitly malicious intent.
There are two types of Cancellation. Social Cancellation, which is enforced by regular people possessed by a mob mentality, and Institutional Cancellation, which is enforced by organizations and their participants protecting their interests. This latter scenario is also known as the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex, or “DISC” for short.
In either case, there have been far too many people punished simply for straying from the dominant opinion. Our goal is to provide a platform enabling decentralized grassroots support for those same people.
Problem
People are afraid of having their lives destroyed for voicing an opinion. Or making a mistake. Or making a mistake 10 years ago. The problem is the culture of fear that pervades every aspect of our society, forcing decent people to choose between voicing obedience to ideas they don’t actually support, or maintaining a degrading silence- terrified of the consequences that come with breaking it.
Cancel Culture is a new term, but not a new phenomenon- it’s always the same plot, just with different characters. While the intensity ebbs and flows, members of dominant belief systems targeting those outside of that belief system is the story of civilization. From the Spanish Inquisition, to the French Revolution, to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century, those with unpopular beliefs have been preyed upon by their fellow citizens. While modern democracies have kept this tension under control for some time, the degree of intolerance we are currently witnessing is simply not compatible with a free society as we know it.
In short, Cancel Culture is a psychological hostage situation on a mass scale, and a society that is too frightened to discuss its problems has no hope of actually solving them. As it currently stands, everyone keeps their heads down because the potential costs of speaking out are far too great. Every time someone is punished for speaking out, it disincentivizes everyone else from doing so in the future.
This punishment usually takes the form of someone getting fired- like former Google engineer James Damore after sharing data on sex differences to aid the company’s diversity efforts; or being deplatformed from social media- like feminist Meghan Murphy for referring to a trans woman as “him” on Twitter.
The ability to freely exchange ideas is the oxygen of a healthy society, and the restrictive cultural atmosphere we’re all choking under prevents us from doing so. By enabling people to support those who have run afoul of prevailing opinion, we hope to provide some breathing room we don’t currently have.
Solutions
Part of why Cancel Culture is so effective is because it attacks its targets on several different levels. Like a corrosive agent, it severs an individual’s ties to society; be it professional, social, or otherwise. Accordingly, we are approaching this issue from three different angles: Resources, Stories, and Community.
- Resources are meant to replenish what Cancel Culture has taken away. This means addressing various social, psychological, financial, and legal challenges to help victims continue recovering what they lost.
- Stories will catalog the numerous victims of Cancel Culture. It is important to remember the victims experience, therefore we will keep a record of what has occurred after the public has moved on.
- Community is provided via our Discord server (with more forums for communication in the works). The psychological damage from being publicly shamed is not to be underestimated. We are here to facilitate conversations that support victims of Cancellation as a reminder that most people do not hate them, and they have more allies than they realize.
Story
Pluribus originated from Tyler (the Founder) being in the same boat as everyone else- quietly watching society go off the rails, and diving down internet rabbit holes to try and make sense of what the hell is going on.
On his search, he discovered Jordan Peterson, the Intellectual Dark Web, Eric and Bret Weinstein, Jonathan Haidt, the Grievance Studies Affair, and more sources explaining the nature of this aggressive, vindictive, attitude sweeping across the country.
At the same time, Tyler continued to see good people have their lives ruined at the drop of a hat day in and day out. He continued to see groveling apologies for mistakes made decades ago. He continued to see people across his social media feeds endlessly repeat how, “Something needs to be done!”, and he continued to see nothing change. The mob claimed its scalps and moved on, and the counterforce so many of us have been waiting for never arrived.
Tyler just couldn’t take it anymore. If networking technology enables hordes of people to take someone down, it could enable just as many to prop people up. All the necessary tools were already there; he just needed to use them for good.
History
March 2020:
Launched initial experiment on Twitter to have people cooperate to help resolve the Cancel Culture problem.
Posted video to confirm the authenticity of the project
April 2020:
Created initial Google Doc completed for an outline of what could be done for an Anti-Cancel Culture platform.
May 2020:
Website building started
MONTH 2020:
Website publicly launched