In the case of what people call cancel culture, I think taking every example of it on a case-by-case basis is very important. I find some of the attempts to paint cancel culture as a topic with an easy to define opinion on every case, or being the cause of poorly-defined, loosely affilated groups such as "Social Justice Warriors" (I actually think the term SJW in general is damn near useless, if not harmful to online discourse, but I digress, that may be a topic for a different thread) to be especially strange due to the wide variety of topics in this subject.
So I want to focus on the whole mob based mentality here. Obviouslly, the concept of rallying people together for a cause is a pretty old topic in human history. Cancel culutre is a pretty similar thing, just amplified to previously unseen degrees because of how connected we are as a species today.
One of the results of this amplification of opinions that I'm quite fond of is that it's given a voice to many groups of people who have historically, been ignored. An obvious example of this is the #MeToo movement, which as I'm sure most of you are aware of, has had pretty profound effects on both online discussions, views on the conduct of men, and even how people present themselves publically. #MeToo was a recokoning of sorts, bringing down some pretty popular public figures, and not just ones with a ton of power such as Weinstien. In fact, #MeToo was sorta like a bunch of cancel culture movements happening at once really!
The effects of these large cancel culture movements can have effects beyond blasting celebreties. To use an example I personallty witnessed: I used to frequent a popular video game forum called NeoGAF. As some of you know, that entire site pratically collapsed due to the #MeToo movement. To make a long story short, the owner of the website was not only found to have damn near sexually assaulted someone, but had also been engaged in the cover-up of a former moderater engaged in pedophillia. To a lot of us on that site, this was all pretty shocking news, made even worse that there were signs of this all over that we basically missed! It was one of those situations that forced me to revaluate when I should look at certain posts as just "harmless shitposting" and "weird, bad opinions", or the sign that something troubling is brewing under the surface!
This thought about revaluation brings me up to another point: In our increasingly connected culture, it's truer than ever that words, thoughts, and opinions have more consequences then they ever had before! Again, I don't think this is a bad thing at all. I do find it good that it's harder to brush disturbing qualities such as racism under the rug so to speak. I like that it discourages hero-worship, and can even encourage some people to think critically about the people and things they love.
This is a double-edged sword however, illustrated pretty well by the whole James Gun incident with Guardians of the Galaxy. As I'm sure many of you Marvel nerds know (probably better than me, I haven't watched a film since the first Avengers rofl), Disney fired James Gun due to backlash about a pretty edgy pedophilla joke he made a long time ago. As some of you have brought up, people make mistakes, some more severe than others, and theres times where people realize they made a serious mistake in the past, and own up to it! There's plenty of times where internet mobs will form regardless of wether or not a person has acknowledged and owned up to their mistake, and that's never a good thing! It often takes a while for these storms to settle so clearer heads can prevail. In the case of James Gun, he ended up getting rehired by Disney, so he had a happy ending, but not everyone is lucky enough to have that luxary.
To once again move away from the celebrity angle, I understand that many people on the internet lament that the rise of cancel culture could directly impact their ability to engage in internet discourse, for fear of getting struck by an internet mob. Certainly a reasonable worry, and a good reason to be much more careful when expressing things than in the past! While this isn't always a good thing (even if it can curbstomp many troubling qualiites), I do think the change in internet discourse makes for a pretty good excuse to do plenty of regular self-reflecting. At least personally, I've found that listening to what others have to say about their issues in life, and looking into what they say, have made me realize that my opinions are more malleble than I previously thought!
To be clear, while a majority of this post is me arguing that cancel culture is not an inherently bad thing, that doens't excuse its consequences either. Sometimes, you'll get people ralleying around accusations that are frankly, total bullshit hot air. It could be people getting pissed off at an ancient statement that the "defendent" has long since disowned, it could be a simple misunderstanding, or it could be based around something that has less crediability than the Flat Earth Society! This goes back to talking about how the internet and social media amplifies movements: the downside is that indiviuals are much more likely to get targted, not just large groups, and the basis could just be a bad case of telephone tag. And yes, while I mentioned that there are some positives for critical thinking, the opposite is true too: plenty of people are more than willing to bandwagon over the latest hot, trendy "outrage", putting no thought into the reasons for the outrage (hell, I've been guilty of this in the past too!). Some people are really always looking for a shallow reason to get angry.
Unfortunately, I'm not quite sure there are any good, currently feasible solutions for the times counter culture makes catestrophic misfires, especially when I'm under the impression that the internet being fairly young, but radical change in our lives is leading to some serious growing pains in our species socilization behavior.
Regardless, I don't think generalizing every ocourance of counter culture in a specfic category is a wise idea. Generally, when exposed to the latest "yo fuck this guy" moment, I think the best thing you can do is look into whats happening, and why people are calling for someone or something's head on a platter. Not only will you be more informed about the situation, but you may just learn something about yourself that you may not expect!
