2. About the Phenomenon

• Cancel Culture is a widely used contemporary term but without a clear-cut definition.
• Broadly, when any perceived wrong, whether from two minutes ago or half a century ago, suddenly come under scrutiny from a group of people online and results in public shaming, censorship, loss of friends and connections or even a job, it means that the person who has aired such a view has been cancelled.
• Demanding accountability from people holding such problematic views is central to cancel culture.
• Those who are cancelled for not ascribing to a particular view or value or norm are often public figures such as Rowling.
• However, we are also increasingly seeing online mob attacks on those without power.
• For instance, in May 2020, a woman, Amy Cooper, was walking her dog in Central Park in New York when she ran into a Black man and birdwatcher, Christian Cooper.
• Christian asked Amy to put her dog on a leash, as was the rule in Central Park. 
• When she refused, he tried to give the dog a treat. Amy panicked, called the police and complained that an African American man was threatening her.
• Christian recorded this on video, a part of which went viral. The public backlash for calling the police on a Black man for no reason resulted in Amy getting fired from her job at an investment company.
• The interpersonal interaction in the park had, through the virality of the video, become a matter of scrutiny for society as a whole.
• Therefore, what a group of people believed was the right consequence of her actions took precedence over.
• It is also significant that this incident happened at the same time as the death of George Floyd when emotions were high on social media.

3. Proponents 

• For many people, such swift collective action has come to signify a form of social justice.
• The idea of cancel culture began as a tool for marginalised communities to assert their values and norms against public figures who continued to cling to power despite wrongdoing.
• Since changing the inherent structural inequality of society itself is not possible for such communities, cancel culture emerged as a way to change public sentiment.
• Proponents of cancel culture believe that people with enormous power and clout cannot be made to get away with statements or acts that affect individuals and communities who do not enjoy such power (such as trans people).
• However, many also believe that cancel culture is no longer about speaking truth to power and has become an online form of vicious mob intimidation.
• They believe that it first and foremost affects free speech.
• Second, as the goalposts of cancel culture keep changing, individuals and organisations are selectively targeted and face different degrees of outrage.
• While some are made to feel embarrassed for a while, others are at risk of losing their careers.
• Also, instead of focusing on those who discriminate against others or propagate injustice of some kind, cancel culture has become a way of shaming anyone who does not agree perfectly with a view that a person or group holds.
• Third, cancel culture often signifies the lack of ability to forgive and move on.
• The views that people held 20 years ago may not necessarily be the views that they hold today.
• Fourth, cancel culture tends to club all kinds of people together a common man who did something wrong has, thanks to social media activism, sometimes been cancelled in the same way that a politician making a hate speech has been cancelled.
• Finally, cancel culture has led to people being constantly aggravated and frustrated with each other.
• They can't seem to move beyond that, to initiate a change of the kind they want to see, for public sentiment is constantly changing.
• The democratic inclusion that we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.
• The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.
• While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture.

• Am intolerant of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.
• Predictably, this letter garnered criticism, with many defenders of cancel culture saying it is simply a way of demanding accountability for statements and actions and that the very same people who wrote this letter are perhaps afraid of their powers being increasingly questioned and their statements coming under scrutiny.
• Conservatives in the U.S. have now latched onto the term "cancel culture as a cudgel to use against liberals whenever they face political adversity.
• Former President Donald Trump even called it a form of "totalitarianism".
• While cancel culture began as a way to correct power imbalances, it is also now being used by those holding positions of power against those it intended to help.

5. Conclusion

• Today, the meaning of cancel culture may change depending on who you ask. 
• For some, it is a form of harassment, for some a form of justice; for some a consequence of public misdemeanour; for some a form of mob vigilantism; for some a way to demand accountability and for some an act of censorship.
• The truth is that it could be any of these. It often depends on your political prism, background, and importantly, the case at hand.