Boycott involves someone not consuming goods and services. The cancel thing involves yelling at private individuals in a public place to the extent they loose t

Boycott involves someone not consuming goods and services. The cancel thing involves yelling at private individuals in a public place to the extent they loose their livelihood. There is a clear difference between a business decision based on financial calculations to either sell or not sell porn and someone thinking a book is great or not. The second difference is the virality. Once an idea, a meme, of someone being X is out there, nobody cares where it came from and it’s virtually impossible to reverse. One can stop the action that sparked the boycott and it will end. The person being canceled can do absolutely nothing to make it stop. Also, malicious targeting is easy: getting a meme go viral is a fairly well-understood and commercialized endeavor while convincing a significant number of people to join a boycott inevitably involves a lot of legwork and the people actually agreeing with the original premise. The latter is not true with cancelling, you just take “X is Y” for granted after a very short while