Wait. What?
Are you trying to imply this was some kind of a real thing that happened?
Sarcasm on the internet doesn't always travel well, I can't tell if you're just using this fiction as a metaphor or trying to convince people it actually happened.
I won't speak for GP, but it was very clearly a real thing (no "some kind of" qualifier necessary) that actually did happen.
I observed it to happen.
I observed it to negatively affect people I personally met and cared about.
I observed the creation of entire subreddits dedicated to the application of the technique, such as r/byebyejob which today has 650 thousand subscribers.
Wikipedia recognizes that it has happened (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture). (And this is despite that I would generally consider Wikipedia's coverage of political and cultural topics to be biased against me.)
I have been observing it for over a decade, longer than it had a name (if Wikipedia is to be believed, anyway — although of course one should naturally expect "cancelling" to have existed for longer than the "culture" around it). For just one example completely off the top of my head, consider the case of Dr. Matt Taylor, who was browbeaten into apologizing for wearing a shirt (which was a gift from a female friend) deemed "sexist" (for depicting women in outfits that wouldn't be out of place in a general-audience comic book) and further harassed after apologizing. I followed this story closely as it happened.
Aside from that, if you disagree with someone else about facts, please speak plainly. Phrasing like yours implies a level of disdain and disrespect that is well outside my understanding of how discourse is expected to work on HN.
The main point I want to make here is the difference between what people said happened and what actually happened.
> I have been observing it for over a decade, longer than it had a name
Let's define what "it" actually is:
Someone receiving social shame/criticism with the stated intent to change behaviour.
If you look slightly more than a decade ago, it happened then also. And the decade before that. And the century before that. Pretty much as long as we have records with the appropriate level of detail, we can find examples of this.
So yes, people were publicly shamed in the last decade. They were publicly shamed the decade before that as well. There was absolutely nothing special about anything that happened "recently" other than some pundits deciding to invent a catch term and push a meme around the culture.
My issue is that the people who started this meme and pushed it the hardest, were doing so in an attempt to deflect or prevent themselves and their ideas from being criticized, and mostly they really deserved criticism.
It's certainly possible to be an "unwitting dupe" and continue to spread this meme, not knowing any better, but I'm not sure it's the most likely scenario.
As for your example, the evidence you've presented certainly makes him seem like an innocent victim of bullying him. I sympathize and wish it hadn't happened to him.
But you can't use this as some kind of statement to justify being against shame and criticism just because people use it immorally.
It was not simply "social shame/criticism". People lost their jobs for doing things that simply didn't reasonably merit such a consequence. In fact, they lost jobs for things that I don't think can reasonably be considered wrongdoing at all. Not only were they targeted on social media, but in high-profile cases the media ended up grossly misrepresenting their actions.
See also e.g. James Damore. I have read what he actually wrote. The large majority of accusations that were made (and are still referred to) about what he wrote, are simply not supported by a plain textual analysis. He was accused of expressing unacceptable ideas that he objectively did not express, and he lost his job because of it.
And then, well, perhaps you remember https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681 . Attempts at cancellation occurred in both directions there. Though it's worth highlighting that the joke was not directed at anyone (including the presenter) and not even intended to be heard by Ms. Richards, or really anyone besides the guy's (male) colleague. And the guy who made the joke is, in my mind, weirdly contrite about having done nothing worse than making a puerile joke in a nominally professional space, for a social purpose. (Also, everything would have worked out just fine if Ms. Richards had kept the story off social media and followed the procedure that had been outlined in the newly added Code of Conduct that was specifically provided to pacify people like Ms. Richards who had been unsatisfied with the atmosphere of the convention in previous years.)
> My issue is that the people who started this meme and pushed it the hardest, were doing so in an attempt to deflect or prevent themselves and their ideas from being criticized, and mostly they really deserved criticism.
Disagree, in the strongest possible terms, based on what I've actually seen play out in practice. When I saw these things happening on social media, and looked into the evidence, in the large majority of cases I found that the actions were blameless and the criticism ridiculous.
> It's certainly possible to be an "unwitting dupe" and continue to spread this meme, not knowing any better
To "not know better", I would have to be wrong.
I know that I am not wrong because there was an extended period of my life when I would spend hours a day examining the evidence. Cases like the one you find sympathetic were the norm, not the exception.
I don't remember more than a few cases because in large part I have tried to move on from that phase of my life. But I find it frankly insulting to be told that my personal experiences were not as I actually experienced them, and condescending to be described as "possibly an unwitting dupe" in a way that implies that this is supposed to be the charitable take.
The short, short phone typing reason is that people who use the term cancel culture are almost always using it to attack criticism, and the majority of those times, it's things that deserve criticism.
I'm not sure I can change the world or even the culture of a small internet message board, but I can at least push back on it when I see it.
It is not a meme or a myth. It has happened, has been happening for a long time, and is still happening. I have personally observed it to happen on many occasions, including ones that caused harm to people I care about.
It is disrespectful to dismiss that.
