Yes and no. One of the concerns about cancel culture is that it results in people's lives being ruined/ended. This (usually) is not the case, even among the most egregious examples that people can come up with.
And how about the psychological effects on these people of being bullied by a large group of people online?
I don’t know what I’d do if it happened to me, but I know it would leave me in an even worse state mentally than I am in, because I know how it feels like to feel that other people don’t want you around.
Because social protections haven't eroded enough to get to the point where lives are actually ruined. Why wait to speak out against cancel culture until it's actually ruining lives?
If your entire concern is based in a slippery slope, it's more difficult to take it seriously, especially when the concern conceals a disregard for actual harm happening now.
"Cancellation" is a democratization of power. It allows the little guy to push back effectively against the bigger guy. Saying "look there's the possibility that it might eventually have bad consequences" rings hollow when it's also actively having good consequences right now.
> If your entire concern is based in a slippery slope, it's more difficult to take it seriously
Of course the same argument could be applied to anything, such as covid back in March. "What's all the fuss about? Things are trending in a bad direction, but they're not that bad yet so naturally they will not get worse in the future." I hope the fallacy here is obvious.
> the concern conceals a disregard for actual harm happening now
I could hazard a guess as to what you're alluding to here, but it hardly matters--if you have some concern about some actual harm that's happening right now that you'd like to express, free-speech has your back with respect to your right to express it.
> "Cancellation" is a democratization of power. It allows the little guy to push back effectively against the bigger guy.
You have it completely backwards. You can't cancel someone without power over them, and many of the targets of cancellation have had little power and were cancelled by people with literal, explicit power over them (e.g., Lindsay Shepherd).
> Saying "look there's the possibility that it might eventually have bad consequences" rings hollow when it's also actively having good consequences right now.
"Good" is in the eye of the beholder, and you're observing the fleeting convenience of authoritarianism.
> Of course the same argument could be applied to anything, such as covid back in March. "What's all the fuss about? Things are trending in a bad direction, but they're not that bad yet so naturally they will not get worse in the future." I hope the fallacy here is obvious.
It is not. We know how viruses work. We also know how they don't do good things. Are you willing to provide specific falsifiable predictions on the harms that Cancel Culture will cause in 6 months or a year and how it will be so great?
Trying to explain away a slippery slope fallacy by comparing it to the well documented and well understood exponential growth of a communicable disease isn't good reasoning.
> if you have some concern about some actual harm that's happening right now that you'd like to express, free-speech has your back with respect to your right to express it.
Exactly! To allude to anther example: someone tweeting "@FSF, you should fire Richard Stallman because he is a bad man" is simply exercising their right to free expression. Why are you criticizing that?
> You can't cancel someone without power over them, and many of the targets of cancellation have had little power and were cancelled by people with literal, explicit power over them (e.g., Lindsay Shepherd).
Lindsay Shephard doesn't fit the definition of cancellation. There was no social media, there was an anonymous complaint to her university, who did something, and when the public was involved the university reversed course. "Cancel Culture" is characterized by a boycott or threat of boycott, or at least distributed criticism. Imagine that instead the members of her class had taken to twitter to urge the university to remove her from her position, and encouraged others to stop donating to the school if they didn't do so. That's cancellation.
What you described is a bad thing, but it's also a non sequitur.
And note the difference: her pupils (the non-authority) pulling in popular support to provide consequences to the authority figure when normal channels of feedback failed.
> "Good" is in the eye of the beholder, and you're observing the fleeting convenience of authoritarianism.
You're going to have to elaborate on how decentralized movements are authoritarian in nature, that's a relatively unique claim.
Compared to the generic "woman at Google", I'd argue yes. But even if you disagree in that one case, that doesn't invalidate what I said. It allows upward facing action.
But it has a pretty bad record of targeting "upward" and those few 'upward' targets suffer much less than the many 'downward' targets. "Ineffective in the best case" is not a very compelling argument.