[binxbolling]

Cancel culture is not primarily anywhere. For as long as humans have existed we have wanted to persuade our peers to avoid some things and embrace others; we have wanted some voices amplified and some quieted; we have wanted people to face the consequences of their actions and to reap what they've sown.

That's all cancel culture is at its root. It's been rebranded in America's asinine culture wars so we can pretend there's some insidious new threat to free speech while the real threats go perpetually unchallenged.

[chrisco255]

Clearly a difference in magnitude can be a difference in kind altogether. The ability for disparately frustrated individuals to all echo chamber their way into a fever pitch that affects the news cycle and the political cycle is quite new.

Twenty years ago, an insensitive (and probably intoxicated) comment at a bar would be forgotten about the next day. Today, someone says the wrong thing on the internet and a pitchfork mob is ready to cancel their humanity forever.

Has this sort of witch hunting occurred in human history? Yes, but we typically taught these lessons as cautionary tales of the hysterical past, not blueprints for the 21st century.

[luckylion]

Sure, but at least my impression is that the current iteration of it is different. I can't recall a time in my lifetime (made it past 40 a few years ago) that deplatforming on ideological grounds by non-state groups was that pervasive in the West.

There's been the red scare in the decades between ww2 and my birth, but that seemed more like a "threat to the system" kind of thing, this feels more religious, with individual small-time sinners being exposed and hunted down, not the deep state pulling levers to blacklist hollywood actors they suspect of having sympathies for communism.