LB: On the other hand, it's important to maintain that opportunists have repeatedly used these waves of valid criticism to incessantly harass and forever stain a person regardless of their response to an issue, and that our society has to accept that people who make mistakes [everyone] are sometimes willing and capable to make it right
It's important to remember that, following Black development of "cancellation" as a concept (which today's outcomes often only cursorily resemble -- words change!) and rapid adoption of that power strategy, we queers were the ones who began using "cancel culture" to describe the toxic phenomena that almost immediately extrapolated from it (naturally, given its consumerist frame). The last thing we need is to deny weaknesses our adversaries can so prolifically, effectively, even validly exploit.
@ariadne Yes! Boycotting, applied to brands, even if those brands were most often manifested by individual people. I wonder how many people are familiar with "getting cancelled" but never even saw or made the connection to its original character, that of a television show not getting renewed for another season. Celebrities' existence is thus confounded. Effects like these led the phenomenon into something you do specifically toward individual people in a sociopolitical fashion.
@ariadne There is hardly a better example of a relatively straightforward power-subversive phenomenon going so wildly out of control with its ramifications that it produces several "vanishing mediators" in a row, and layers of history, meaning, and analysis vanish while still sitting right before our eyes. We end up in a place that denies societal resistance to distributing that power in the first place, insisting we've already achieved a broadly multipolar world
@bobbyd0g i mean, "cancellation" was originally just boycotting.