> What I notice about the "cancel-culture" debate is that it predominantly seems to define culture as being the sphere of the people who can be cancelled to beg

> What I notice about the "cancel-culture" debate is that it predominantly seems to define culture as being the sphere of the people who can be cancelled to begin with. Yeah, and to a certain extent those people have also been "canceling" people for their views a long time, but the people they canceled didn't have a platform to complain and be heard. > I think the root of the problem isn't cancel culture but the limitation of the political to a bunch of celebrities.... > If however political discourse is the job of the professional commentariat and the rest of society is some sort of passive mob waiting to be activated, sure then you get cancel culture. I think you're probably right about the root cause, but that's going to be a really tough problem to solve. A corollary of your observation is the ability of "rest of society" to participate in productively in "political discourse" seems to have atrophied. It's going to be a difficult problem to fix, and a lot of things we take for granted (like national media that gets all the attention) will probably have to change to fix it.