[jtsnow]

This seems highly revisionist. Cancel culture isn't just about boycotting or being selective about what one consumes. It's not even about holding people accountable.

It's about destroying people and tearing them down in order to make examples of them. It results in antagonists showing up at people's homes, writing letters to employers, creating petitions, attacking people in the nastiest ways possible with out engaging with ideas or arguments.

It's the disproportionate and graceless reactions that distinguish cancel culture from past methods of accountability.

[intended]

What do you think happens when people get boycotted in villages or “back in the day”? Collections of people get MANY things wrong. Just see relationship advice vs AITAH vs CMV.

Are people used to some benign, harmless, ineffective version of social boycotts? Grace? The Scarlet letter describes what society did to adulterers.

see what happened in 2008 when large groups got together, or the police protests or any number of movements. They start when there is something easy and clear to work with, and soon smash into (and past) nuances.

I agree with the parent poster, these are modern day boycotts, influenced by the malaise of being seen primarily as consumers, and super charged by the emotional polarization of the internet.