Will, you are right that boycotting is not the right term for the phenomenon at hand. In addition to the reason you gave, a cancellation campaign mostly involves pressuring other organizations or people to boycott somebody. Plain old boycotting is one personal’s decision to not attend a talk, cancelling is demanding to stop the talk from even happening.
However, I think there is some truth to the point that cancel culture is not the most productive term when used in discussions over whether it is actually a bad thing, precisely because as you say it suggests that people engaging in it are doing something wrong and thus begs the question. For a somewhat symmetrical situation, consider proponents of cancel culture starting a discussion over “Should Organization A be a platform for Person B’s harmful views?”.
Will, you are right that boycotting is not the right term for the phenomenon at hand. In addition to the reason you gave, a cancellation campaign mostly involves pressuring other organizations or people to boycott somebody. Plain old boycotting is one personal’s decision to not attend a talk, cancelling is demanding to stop the talk from even happening.
However, I think there is some truth to the point that cancel culture is not the most productive term when used in discussions over whether it is actually a bad thing, precisely because as you say it suggests that people engaging in it are doing something wrong and thus begs the question. For a somewhat symmetrical situation, consider proponents of cancel culture starting a discussion over “Should Organization A be a platform for Person B’s harmful views?”.
Yeah, I’m sympathetic to this, and I accept the symmetry you suggest. I’m not sure to what extent it applies to this post, though.