canceling is a label applied to play the victim when people are being held accountable for things they don't want to be or by people they don't consider equal.
Man you're just coming out swinging.
Remember when a scientist was cancelled over a shirt? On a day of greatest achievement of his professional life? We remember.
What word should we use instead then?
What word is suitable to describe low-context, online-mob-driven pile-ons / denunciations?
(Perhaps you’ve never seen that happen?—that would be remarkable.)
The problem, as usual, being that you are trying to describe something with a term where the common usage is just plain bad faith.
Unfairly attacked?
Harassed?
There’s lots of words…the common usage of cancelling is none of them nor what you described. The common usage is what no one in this thread seems to want to admit. And it’s why the same people who cry about cancel culture want to use it’s supposed existence as a reason to actually restrict others free speech.
But I think I see your point. It's a phrase that can be used lazily and in bad faith and itself contribute to degraded discourse.
It’s important to note that there is a significant portion of the people employing this term in bad faith who are doing now intentionally and to cause confusion. The problem with a new term is that it will, almost inherently, be co-opted by these same groups.
The attempts to mislabel are intentional and coordinated. I think you are coming from a good hearted place, and it’s nice to be able to have this convo, but a new label won’t fix it because the label isn’t the problem the use is.
Justine Sacco was definitely canceled, in exactly the way you are denying happens. There is a legitimate discussion to be had on the phenomenon, and it can't be hand-waved away by claiming it's completely legitimate. Clearly it's not.
The fact that real things happen doesn’t make using the same term to describe not real things happening acceptable.
I can’t call out of work because there was a blizzard if there wasn’t a blizzard recently where I actually live
Cancel culture is a real thing. It's a new thing enabled by the structure of the systems we've only just created. I think a label is justified (even if this one kind of sucks). And of course concept creep will find this label weaponized almost as soon as it's been created.
That's kind of the era we live in: bad faith abuse of language by the extremists on all sides.