To me, this hints that the concept is a convenient tool to own people over social media or use in political attacks for rallying a voter base. There isn’t anything new here except people being shitty to each other. Anything else from it is what you normally get with reputation damage (justified or not).

Once we get rid of the annoying exercise of trying to define cancel culture, there’s some real action items we can talk about regarding reputation/livelihood damage for dumb things being said. Any reason to revisit that is because of technology’s reach now and how seemingly easily it can happen, not that cancel culture is a new thing.

The problem with that line of thinking is how "those in power" is defined more and more broadly and has now evolved to a point where who you are is more important than what you did.

So now most people who gets cancelled do not tend to be the Harvey Weinstein but one of those "racist Karens" videos where the context have been cut off and the people are obviously in the early onset of dementia or college kids making offensive jokes on Twitter.

> So you get a mob together where no one person is an easy target for having their life destroyed and ignore the justice system which can be easily bent with money/connections.

This is double edged knife since mobs and thugs can be bought too. There is a reason why all modern nations give the state the legal monopoly on violence.

> It's a logical response to the power structure in place.

Correction, it is an emotional response. Mobs are never "logical".

Here's the problem: If you define "cancel culture" so extremely broadly that it covers any form of social ostracism whatsoever, then it's not in any respect a new or novel phenomemon. It's been with us for as long as society has existed. In this sense, it's almost a tautology that cancel culture exists. But so what? Why is everyone going on and on about cancel culture in recent years when it's thousands of years old?

What is relatively new is global social media, which has existed for less than 20 years. Personal information or misinformation can now go "viral" in a way that it never could before, as a result of computers and the internet. But it's not clear that there's been a "culture" change. It's just the same old human culture, now technologically enhanced.

Do people sometimes lose their jobs or other professional opportunities because of information spread on social media? Yes. Although I think this happens less than the fearmongers would have us believe. So "cancel culture" in the stricter sense may exist too, but I think it's been exaggerated quite a bit.

Of course I wouldn't deny that social media has the ability to rapidly spread information. What I deny is that social media has the power to cancel people. It does have the power to initiate the discussion about whether to cancel people, but that's only a discussion, mere words (tweets). The actual decision to cancel someone is always made by the people in power, and not by the "mob". Twitter can be denied or ignored. However, the people in power often have no loyalty or regard for those who are under them, so they're perfectly willing to throw underlings under the bus to cover their own asses, without a second thought, just to make an unpleasant PR situation go away. So leadership cowardice and selfishness is empowering and incentivizing "cancel culture" in this sense.

I should note that I'm expressing no particular opinion about whether a particular person should or shouldn't lose a particular job or financial benefit. That really depends on the specifics of the situation. In general, I don't think that anyone should be denied the ability to make a living, but I'm less sympathetic about someone losing special privileges and high status, which are nobody's right.

> We know it’s sometimes serious, just ask Harvey Weinstein.

I can't, because he's in prison.

I think it's the opposite: if you got cancelled previously—Walmart, Barnes & Noble, etc. stopped selling your book perhaps—you'd simply disappear into a memory hole. Nobody would have a way to find out about it, so nobody would know to care. Now at least other people may find out about it, and you can make a stand to fight back.

> since the internet won’t forget and the mob won’t forgive

The internet forgets plenty, and whether the mob's forgiveness even matters depends on whether your audience is in the mob.

They're being heard loud and clear. That's the problem. Their incessant whining and searching for the "problematic" behind every issue is crowding out reasonable discourse and discussion.

It's a form of mob rule and it's progressing from tiresome to downright hideous as more and more careers are destroyed by its vindictiveness.

> "cancelling" is often invoked in response to acts (sexual assault, racism) that have been regarded as wrong and/or illegal for millennia

You have it upside down. Cancelling is often the result of applying today's morals on yesterday's actions. People/books/movies/statues weren't "cancelled" before because nobody had a problem before. But now everything's retrospectively a target of the new moral crusaders.

I appreciate this point. I think sometimes these waves of calls for cancellation play into larger movements that have more clearly defined goals, such as #metoo, which I think focused on shedding light on sexual violence/abuse/harassment and to get individuals and organizations to create more policies to prevent it from happening. Maybe when I think of "cancel culture" I think less of the underlying structural goals of it, but you've helped me step back to think of that.

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I think a lot with the call to "cancel" someone (I don't know why I feel compelled to put it in quotes but I keep doing it) is often to specifically tell the organization(s) to remove the individual from participating. E.g., wanting Netflix to fire Kevin Spacey in House of Cards (and other Hollywood production firms to no longer hire him), wanting radio stations to ban R Kelly's music, etc.

So I think it's the idea that for a person to be cancelled, someone has to do the cancelling.

_____

I guess for me, I wouldn't see that so much as how the phrase "cancel" is being used in the "cancel culture" idea. Yours seems to be you, the individual consumer, doing the cancellation, and also you being open to giving her a second chance through forgiveness.

I see a "cancel" of DojaKat in this instance being people demanding that her record company, her agent, TV stations, radio stations, and others agree to break relations with her and when she apologizes, to not forgive her and to not give her a second chance.

So in summary, I see "cancel culture" as more about trying to rally others, especially groups and institutions, to break off relations with that person (or sometimes a group) and to do so permanently.

I personally don't like it because I believe much more in restorative justice than I do retributive justice, and I also believe that by distancing ourselves from these people, through the power of the internet, they may find other people who feel alienated and cancelled and they could form into more and more radicalized groups.

No, it isn't. The defining characteristic of cancel culture has always been using collective online action to have someone ostracized from social or political circles, removed from their job or professional relationships, etc.

>This is generally a precursor to a bandwagon/snowball to de-platform the individual. This happens when a portion of individuals begin picking a side by taking action, sometimes out of caution.

Correct. that is cancel culture, and that part never happened in any of these cases. Simply calling someone names isn't cancel culture. If it were, every opponent of cancel culture referring to "witch hunts", "pearl-clutching mobs" or "Marxist SJWs" would be engaging in the very activity they denounce by denouncing it.

This massively understates the problem. One could easily put together a list of non-celebrities who have had their lives ruined after making some completely anodyne comment.

Ostracization/cancellation of the non-conforming doesn't seem to be new. My point is that this kind of behavior is the modern corollary to witch hunts.

The Left Wing manifestation of it seen in modern times is called Cancel Culture, but all of its forms, past and present, have beeh types of mob persection in my opinion.

Your comment made me curious, and I found out Politico took a poll: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000173-7326-d36e-abff-7ffe7.... 46% think cancel culture goes too far, 10% thinks it goes not far enough, 18% say 'neither', and 26% don't know. The kicker, however, is that Politico defines cancel culture as "withdrawing support for a public figure or a company". That is the softest, most benign definition I can think of and it notably excludes all of the ordinary people who were terminated because of a coordinated harassment campaign. It strikes me as almost pleasant--"we're angry with you, so we're going to go away and leave you be!".

I think for a more reasonable definition, and especially when primed with specific incidences of cancellation (especially ordinary people who lost jobs), far more would disapprove. I don't want to quibble about definitions, but I'm expressly not concerned about celebrities "losing support" and much more interested in low and middle class families losing income and healthcare.

I think "cancel culture" mostly just works because it takes society some time to collectively identify a problem and organize to find a solution. At present, there are at least a handful of bills in the pipeline of various state legislatures to combat cancel culture, all of which would be horrible from perspectives of free speech and academic freedom (the best approach I can think of is to strengthen employment protections and take away the bullies' stick). The point is that just because political opposition hasn't organized yet doesn't mean that the majority of people are ambivalent or supportive.

A good, frustrating point. A large proportion of complaints of cancel culture are coupled with implications of frustration that they feel they can't say unpleasant things that they would have gotten away with previously. Or people complaining about direct efforts to change social norms that they don't agree with, claiming that due to a status quo bias, change is cancellation and therefore baseless.

As with most ideologies, discussing the definition is a fairly pointless task because its subjective and ill-defined, especially by those who feel passionately about it. The term is pointless. What happened in this case sounds bad, at a glance. Let's not generalize it to other things. It'll get nowhere. Whether or not one believes something is a part of cancel culture has no bearing on whether a particular idea to squash something is good or not.

That's because the whole thing is a moral panic imagined by liberals in the media who were mad that people could reply to them without the filter of the NYT letter pages editor (it was then embraced by conservatives as well for similar reasons and because "you can't even say X anymore" is convenient way to push the buttons of older conservatives). Most of the supposedly dire results of being 'cancelled' are utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of people because most of them are various forms of 'not getting as many media gigs'. Ordinary people can't get 'cancelled' because we don't make a living going on CNN or giving talks at universities.

Sure you can cherry pick examples of people saying something stupid on social media and their workplace massively overreacting (similarly you could find real examples behind the moral panics of the 80s and 90s - well ok, maybe not actual demonic possession but most of the rest of it was based on at least a few semi-real cases). That's not what any of the people crying about cancel culture care about. If it was they'd be advocating for stronger protection for employees.

The desired solution is of course always to regulate social media so that the nasty mob can no longer reply to opinion columnists and they can go back to splitting their time between writing poorly researched rants and trying to get academics who disagree with them fired.

No, it's not, and saying it is is trivializing lynching. Which, given the political alignment of the people usually arguing the loudest against cancel culture, is unsurprising.

To be clear "canceling" in the sense of "cancel culture" was coined by the cancelers. It's not a conspiracy "to drive a political wedge", but a description using the movement's own jargon.

As far as "it has always existed", I don't think that's true. Certainly campaigns of targeted harassment have always existed (which is to say "canceling" has always existed), but the culture where this kind of behavior is normalized and valued is relatively novel. Like any kind of social ill, if you rewind far enough you can find a time when it was common, but at least in my lifetime it was never normal or valued.

The canonical exception which proves the rule was the Dixie Chicks' cancellation as a result of their criticism of the war, and even then to get that kind of a response, the Dixie Chicks had to say something which offended a supermajority of Americans, while "cancel culture" today is typically about offending a small minority (roughly 10%).

> When your revenue is on the line you don't have a choice in this matter. So, to the parent's point, pretending to take this stance isn't not be apolitical.

Like everything, opposition to cancel culture is political for a sufficiently broad definition of "political". Maybe the more interesting question is whether it's partisan, and I think your anecdote proves that it's not. There are elements of the left and the right for whom "cancel culture" is an apt description. Similarly, there are folks on all sides who oppose cancel culture.

It's a real problem, but mostly just for the sort of people who might sign on to a letter such as this: elite think tankers, academics, and columnists, who would love nothing more than to be able to continue spouting unsubstantiated nonsense with impunity.

If your livelihood is throwing opinions into the Internet wind, then of course cancel culture is an existential threat. As these sorts of people now tend to be extremely online, every little barb and retort pains them disproportionally, too.

For most of us, it's just a distraction. If you're not famous on the Internet, you can't be canceled to begin with.

> "cancel culture" is simply culture

There are 2 types of cancel culture: society "cancelling" people when we discover they are extremely toxic and/or sexual predators, and private citizens getting doxxed, slandered, and sometimes fired from their jobs because of a racist tweet or off-putting remark. The latter is a by-product of social networks, especially Twitter, and it's a real problem with real consequences.

Saying or doing something racist or rude is bad, it should and would probably get you kicked out of a bar or event. But prior to social media, it would not get your entire reputation ruined, and you wouldn't get 50,000 random people to start harassing you. I hope most would agree that this is a disproportionate punishment.

But IMO the larger issue of cancel culture, is it makes people less likely to say edgy jokes or borderline politically-incorrect statements for fear they will also get "cancelled". Then the definition of "borderline" politically-incorrect shifts further left, more and more becomes taboo, and people start to deny facts because they don't agree to societal norms. When reality is taboo, you get real consequences.

We need a grey area, where you can say something which isn't "accepted by society", but it doesn't get you effectively blacklisted everywhere, and it doesn't affect things like job offers. I'm too young to confirm but I assume we had something like this before social media took off. But with everyone connected and very scrutinizing/critical it's starting to go away.

That is not cancel culture. That is something else. Cancel culture, by definition, requires something that can be cancelled. Equivocating the two issues is an attempt to make public figures, organisations, etc less accountable.