Cancel culture doesn’t mean people deciding to stop listening to you. It means people actively attacking your reputation so that others are less likely to hear you. It often involves intimidation tactics that mess with your real life, e.g. finding out where you work and creating bad PR that will go away if your employer fires you, or PM’ing your associates to suggest they distance themselves from you publicly if they don’t want to get tangled up in this themselves. Hopefully the people doing this will always make the right decision and only do it to people who really deserve it, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

> "cancel culture" is a dumb euphemism for "consequences for your actions."

If by "actions" you mean "saying things you disagree with" and by "consequences" you mean "trying your hardest to permanently deprive them of their livelihood", then sure.

Being banned from a service is not an attempt to permanently deprive anyone of their livelihood. No one has ever starved to death in the street because their Twitter account was closed.

Cancel culture is more than just getting people banned from Twitter. Consider this example of when the cancel mob got somebody fired, and then when he found another company that was willing to hire him, the mob immediately turned on it: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-20/vmware-st...

And now he's destitute and living under a park bench, a pariah shunned by society?

He seems to be doing just fine. The article you posted doesn't even say his new employers refused to hire him because of "the mob." You're not exactly proving cancel culture to be the life-destroying force you made it out to be earlier.

> The article you posted doesn't even say his new employers refused to hire him because of "the mob."

Sure, maybe his new employer stood up to the cancel mob. But if the cancel mob got what they wanted, then he would be "destitute and living under a park bench, a pariah shunned by society". Their goals don't stop being evil just because they failed to complete them.

> You're not exactly proving cancel culture to be the life-destroying force you made it out to be earlier.

It's not life-destroying because they "just" succeeded at getting him fired from one job, and weren't successful at getting him immediately fired from his new one?

>It's not life-destroying because they "just" succeeded at getting him fired from one job, and weren't successful at getting him immediately fired from his new one?

It's not life-destroying because, as far as I'm aware, no one's life - including his - has ever been destroyed by it.

Your claims and the hyperbole of your rhetoric just aren't borne out by reality.

It was an attempt to be life-destroying, and this attempt just (thankfully) failed.

So it's fine as long as the mob is ultimately unsuccessful?

Cancel culture is rather more specific than that. It's not descriptive of getting arrested for a crime, stubbing your toe for being careless, or getting dumped for mistreating your SO. It's a quite specific response (Twitter mobs, contacting the person's employer, making it a sin to enjoy the offender's art/works) that has a lot more to do with what the responders choose to do than what the offender chose to do.

"cancel culture" talks about people being"cancelled" that is losing their job, scholarship, or other means of livelihood. For saying something, usually innoculous, that had nothing to do with their job or school or livelihood. It is even worse when the thing was said years ago. Consequences should be proportionate to the actions. Not "you should starve to death because I don't like what you said." Which is essentially what cancel culture boils down to.

"Cancel culture" is not a simple boycott as you put it, and it's kind of disingenuous to portray it as such.

Does not really apply to woke-mobs bringing down statues or burning books.