I was with you up until here. This is blatantly wrong. Regular people are being cancelled all the time. Besides, people in prestigious positions deserve due process just like anyone else. Cancel culture intentionally circumvents any semblance of due process or fairness.
I like an artist named DojaKat.
A while ago a video surfaced of her singing a song with a racial slur in it.
I saw the video and said to myself "Oh man, I don't want to support a racist artist, this sucks, but I don't think I should stream her on Spotify anymore (In my mind, that was the cancel).
Some weeks later, DojaKat released a video in which she apologized, talked about how much she's grown as a person, and promised to do better. It seemed sincere to me, so I added her work back to my Spotify playlists.
Am I correctly interpreting that as a cancel?
I mean, I'm no authority on any of this. But my impression is that most of the high profile cancelations I've seen have no attached list of demands at which point the person is considered to have made amends and can return to their previous stature.
> Am I correctly interpreting that as a cancel?
Unless you were publicly telling other people that they shouldn't stream her then I wouldn't interpret it as any kind of "cancel". We're all free to stop consuming from anyone for whatever reason we like. That's not canceling people, it's just having a preference.
At the same time, I'm sure the individuals who are opting to not support could conceivably be swayed back into supporting the creator in most cases.
I guess my point is that theres a de facto list of demands in most cancels, you just don't see them because theres no central authority to reiterate it.
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I didn't tell other people to stop streaming her, but I learned about the video and chose to boycott because other people were telling me to do so.
If I had posted on Facebook: "I saw an old video where DojaKat used an offensive racial slur, and have thusly chosen to stop consuming her music. Here is the video for your reference"
Would that have constituted cancelling? I'm just expressing my preference to my friends, no?
With a boycott, the intent is to change the organization's behavior. Once the organization stops doing the thing you don't like, you can stop the boycott. Problem solved.
But with canceling, there is an assumption that people have a deeper, immutable character. They are canceled because of an act or acts they have already done, and the cancelation is intended to be permanent based on the assumption that those acts reveal who the person really is and that we can never trust that they won't do those acts again in the future.
Part of the justification for this is that canceling a person sends a signal to other people "don't be like that". The canceled person is considered irredeemable but an accepted casualty to root out a societal ill.
It's also important to consider what people are being canceled from. This is a sanction mostly applied to celebrities and politicians. These people are not being ostracized from all society—they can still go to the grocery store. They are being kicked out of the high prestige realm they were a member of.
In that sense, it's maybe more acceptable that the sanction is permanent because they're only being kicked out of a club, and not left to die alone in the wilderness.