What is cancel culture exactly?

Four Guardian writers respond to the letter. Malik is asking some of the same questions I did in the last post. E.g.:

"The idea of 'cancel culture', the obvious, albeit unnamed, target of this letter, collapses several different phenomena under one pejorative label. It’s puzzling to me that a statement signed by a group of writers, thinkers and journalists, most whom have Ivy League or other prestigious credentials, would fail to at least establish a coherent definition of what it believes cancel culture is before seeming to condemn it.

"The fact is that decisions made by corporate HR departments, failings in editing processes at media organisations such as the New York Times, and the demands of movements for social justice to be accorded recognition and respect do not constitute one clear trend. The new climate of 'censoriousness,' if there is one, cannot be diagnosed and dispatched this easily. In my view, the failure to make these distinctions clear is probably less an oversight and more of a convenient fudge. Because outrage about cancel culture can’t be credibly sustained when you start breaking down what it actually consists of. [...]

"In not parsing these different patterns clearly, the Harper’s letter commits the same offense it accuses others of doing: indulging in 'the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.'"