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Comment by buu700 | Hacker News Reader

You're attacking a straw man. I didn't say I supported Harvey Weinstein, and I don't have any strong opinions on J.K. Rowling.

Why are you so focused on wealthy celebrities? They're a tiny minority of the population and inherently the ones least harmed by cancel culture. You can't really doxx a celebrity, and trying to have them censored or financially ruined is a much larger hurdle than for ordinary people.

I don't intend to silence anyone, critics or otherwise. I welcome all constructive criticism. You're just inventing a motive and arbitrarily assigning it to a phrase you don't like.

On a meta level, this whole subthread proves my original point. Whether or not you actually support cancel culture, what you're attacking right now is vocabulary. It sounds a lot like how certain people online react to the term "cisgender". Having a commonly understood term for a thing that exists isn't offensive; it's just how language works.

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> Having a commonly understood term for a thing that exists isn't offensive; it's just how language works.

I repeat my claim that you're trying to wish this thing into existence by using words.

Words and language matter because they help shape how we think and what actions we take.

It's easy to notice that you refuse to actually engage with any attempt to meaningfully define the term "cancel culture" instead you just use it as a phase with no inherent meaning except the negative ones you need it to have at any given moment.

I'll repeat myself here: the idea that cancel culture actually exists is deliberately fomented by a small group of people and those people are doing this in order to attempt to protect certain ideas from criticism.

> I don't intend to silence anyone, critics or otherwise.

You say this but this is literally what the proponents of the idea of cancel culture are attempting to do. This is why they invented the term cancel culture, in order to silence people.

Yes, I get it, they're coopting terms that appear to mean the opposite of how they're using them. Shockingly, people lie a lot.

> Why are you so focused on wealthy celebrities? They're a tiny minority of the population and inherently the ones least harmed by cancel culture

Because they're literally the only example anyone can ever come up with of "cancel culture". If we're not talking about wealthy celebrities, what exactly are we talking about?

You're imagining an exchange that didn't happen. At no point have I declined to provide a definition upon request. In fact, I went out of my way to provide both a Wikipedia link and my own off-the-cuff paraphrasing.

That being said, here is my answer to your question: I would broadly define cancel culture as a culture of engaging in grassroots campaigns to materially punish, ostracize, and/or silence sources of speech which one finds disagreeable.

I'm not sure what you think celebrities being the most prominent (debatable) examples proves. That's practically a tautology. It's not difficult to find specific known impacted individuals who weren't celebrities, whom I'm hesitant to name out of respect. Having said that, here are two general examples off the top of my head:

1. Ostensibly non-political major subreddits setting automod to indiscriminately ban anyone with a past comment in /r/conservative. This quietly hits large numbers of nameless people on a daily basis, and manual moderation activity isn't much better (particularly on subreddits that are actually related to politics).

2. A recent campaign of targeted doxxing and harassment against authors of distasteful remarks regarding Charlie Kirk's assassination, including reports to employers with intent to cause financial harm. This is one current prominent example, but there are many others in relation to pretty much any controversial political issue.

I've given no indication of bad faith, so I'm not sure why you insist on accusing me of lying about my preference that cancel culture not exist. It's an anathema to free speech and privacy, and ultimately bad for everyone.

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