[jarpadat]

While I agree with all this, I think a lot of the frustration around "cancel culture" is a general frustration about the politicization of everything. Without denying the reality that much of this is just privileged people living in blissful ignorance of an underlying unjust world, we live in a time of unprecedented change, where the rules of society are different on a weekly basis, and there is an emotional / mental health toll to people undergoing rapid change at speed and accidentally making political stands before breakfast.

And there seems to be nobody around to help society navigate these transitions. Quite the contrary, many leaders claim a mandate to sew division, basically. Worse, they may be right: outrage seems like a winning strategy to gather and keep power in a human society. And even those seeking justice have no choice but to seize the customary tools of modern politics in order to accomplish their goals, because their opponents will not bring knives to a gun fight.

I think "cancel culture" cannot be separated from the broader context of the rise of outrage as an efficient source of political capital, both as it relates to the outrage at some person for doing X, and then the outrage against the first outrage for X having some consequences. The details of "what it means" to have consequences (or as you say, "should we be forced to buy things") are I fear a kind of nuance that may be out of date in our political discourse.