If you're really serious about talking about the problem of 'cancel culture', rather than either spewing talking points or denying that the term refers to anything, then the first step is to acknowledge that the relevant social dynamics are hardly a new thing.
The piece that I always return to is Jo Freeman's essay 'Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood' (jofreeman.com/joreen/trashin…), and the example that always saddens me the most is Shulamith Firestone (newyorker.com/magazine/2013/…).
The most extreme historical example that is often brought up by the opponents of 'cancel culture', which should always be born in mind precisely because of its extremity, is the Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution in Mao's China (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_…).
I'm not saying people hounded off Twitter by more or less organised mob behaviour are being subject to the ritual abjection of hyper-Maoist self-criticism, but if you want to understand these confluences of desire, it's worth looking at where they've lead when left unchecked.
Be honest about what your own drives can do, because we all have these drives inside us, waiting to come out and assemble terrifying desiring machines beyond any individual's control. Self-control does mean self-criticism, but this is something to invite rather than enforce.
If you want a more recent concrete example of how these social dynamics can spin out of control, I highly recommend reading the transcripts from the 'interracial bondage porn' dispute that tanked the ISN (thecharnelhouse.org/2014/01/27/fir…), if you can find them.
This is really a matter of online anthropology. Seeing the ways in which the mediums that have agglomerated over the last few decades have encouraged certain sorts of communicative dynamics, and what does/doesn't work if you want to steer these dynamics in the right direction.
We might not want the medium to be the message, but it has an alarming tendency to assert itself whenever it is used without a tentative, experimental self-awareness. Such is the problem of artifice itself, not to say the problem of selves, which are thoroughly artificial. 🖖
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