What X is, is material though. So as much as we want to be able to simplify and not get lost in the weeds of interpersonal drama, we can't just say any behavior in that vague direction is toxic. If X is "he is a bad person and is going to make false claims and lie and cheat and steal from you, has repeatedly done this, and there is legally admissible evidence of this", that's a totally different thing from X is "he looked at me funny and, I dunno, I just feel a bad energy coming from him" amplified by the social media megaphone.
Cancel culture applies to discussions of policy in the public square. The idea is that certain views should be silenced. You can be a believer in free speech, and disagree that those views should be silenced. And then you can work to punish malicious actors in Silicon Valley who violate important investing norms. I just don't think there's a contradiction!
Defaulting to public debate on the matter isn't as stark a difference from this behavior as we want to believe, especially when the community in which you engage these points is so heavily biased in one direction. Discussions around "cancel culture" rarely take into account that the conversations being had are happening within a particular cultural context, one that depends on the venue in which it takes place. Too often I see public shaming framed as reasoned debate on this forum when the intention is otherwise abundantly clear.
An amusing corrollary to this is that cancel culture as normally defined is implied to be the majority opinion. I don't think that's true, though, the nature of news media definitely amplifies certain voices over others, getting back to the point about venues above.
That's a pretty generous way of framing it. It's not like this was a concerted effort to protect all small start ups or change employment law to protect founders from legal action from former employers. The article pretty clearly posits that it was a retaliatory exercise of power that was executed to serve the interests of YC. I would argue that the kinds of anticompetitive tactics described in this article are not economically healthy and are thus ethically, if not legally wrong.
>It's not like this was a concerted effort to protect all small start ups or change employment law to protect founders from legal action from former employers.
Imagine you volunteer at a local soup kitchen feeding homeless people. My response: "It's not like this was a concerted effort to feed all homeless people or end the problem of homelessness."
From the article:
> PG shared his anti-Adchemy game plan. In a nutshell: YC would anathematize Adchemy’s VCs, and declare that they’d never do business with YC again unless they straightened this out. Knowing PG, not only would they be disinvited from Demo Day, but PG would probably also steer companies to take money from other funds instead. Given that many if not most YC funding rounds were oversubscribed with investors, an excommunicated investor could be excluded without damaging the fund-raising company at all.
In other words, yes, YC was engaging in what the US Government would call "secondary sanctions": actions taken to cut the sanctioned individual or group off from support.
This and the other things you mentioned have both happened and not happened in various instances of cancellation. I think you might have some motivated reasoning going on here. It sounds like you are trying to make a distinction between sanctions imposed by people you agree with and people you don't. This is a distinction without a difference. Secondary sanctions are the most effective form of sanctions[0]. Everyone imposes secondary sanctions if they feel they can get away with it, because sanctions without secondary sanctions have no teeth.
[0] Why? Simple: they force everyone in the room to not only make a choice between the intolerant and the sanctioned, but if they choose the intolerant, to also enforce that same decision upon others. In other words, they're "GPL viral".
Suppose, hypothetically, that any lawyer who's found guilty of "defending a criminal" receives the same sentence as that criminal. So if you're a public defender, and you defend someone accused of murder, and that person is found guilty and serves a life sentence -- then you yourself are also required to serve a life sentence.
In this hypothetical, the justice system breaks down very rapidly. No one wants to defend the accused anymore -- even if you're fairly sure they're innocent. The risk of being forced to serve the same sentence is just way too high. This has second-order effects. Accusations are now much more likely to be successful, since the accused lack representation. If you're having a beef with someone, you'll want to be sure to accuse them before they accuse you. Etc. Society collapses into chaos.
This isn't just a hypothetical, note. A dean at Harvard was dismissed for representing Harvey Weinstein. Even the ACLU can explain why that was wrong: https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/harvard-was-wrong-dism...
Reputational punishments are serious punishments. There's an urban legend that public speaking is a more common fear than death. Obviously, public shaming is even scarier than public speaking -- public shaming is basically the worst-case scenario for public speaking.
If I choose to defend someone whose reputation is under attack, and my reputation gets attacked in response, that's isomorphic to the situation where a public defender gets sentenced for defending a criminal. This helps explain the chaotic, dysfunctional nature of modern cancel culture.
>you are trying to make a distinction between sanctions imposed by people you agree with and people you don't. This is a distinction without a difference.
Consider: "You are trying to make a distinction between punishment administered by the state, and punishment administered by private individuals." There's a huge difference between a judge sentencing a prisoner to 10 lashes with a whip, and a private individual randomly lashing another private individual because they're having a bad day.
There's nothing inconsistent about me trusting PG as an authority in enforcing SV good behavior norms, and me not trusting random vigilantes on social media to correctly diagnose racism/sexism/etc.
If you want to argue that I shouldn't trust PG, the best way to do that would be to mention an example of miscarriage of justice that he's responsible for. If your complaint is just: "but he's acting as an authority!" -- well, it would appear that he's doing a good job, since the Valley seems to be thriving.