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Scott posted Lukianoff And Defining Cancel Culture. He takes one of the given definitions of cancel culture and tries to see how it applies to edge cases, and whether it makes sense as a definition. I thought the comments on the slatestarcodex reddit thread were pretty good. I tried to post a synthesis of the ideas I got while reading the comments:
Cancel culture is speaking about and coordinating your disassociation with a person.
You have the right to not associate with people. You should feel free to exercise that right when you personally notice them doing something you don't like.
To avoid being a part of cancel culture:
Supplemental section.
Applying these to Scott's examples:
A1-A6 are not cancel culture. The actor is taking personal steps to change their association with someone they don't like.
A7-A12 are cancel culture. The actor is trying to coordinate and spread their disassociation with someone.
The other ones are a bit more complex.
B1-B2 The university admin isn't really the prime source of "cancel culture" in this example. It is the newspaper that is trying to publish a juicy story. I think the university admin is fine to resist as much as they feel comfortable resisting, but is not obligated to resist at all. The newspaper is bad, and you should cancel your subscription from that newspaper (and only tell the newspaper why you are cancelling).
B3-B5 It is cancel culture to write the article and focus it on the grad student or any particular person as the problem. If you are able to anonymize the grad student and others involved then it is not very cancel culture. If others then dig deeper and de-anonymize the grad student, they are cancel culture. If you wish to be part of the anti-cancel-culture alliance, probably don't write it at all. If you just wish to follow politeness norms anonymize the people involved to the best of your ability. If you want to be a part of cancel culture make the article entirely about the grad student.
C1 The New York Times was doing cancel culture against Scott. His friends did cancel culture against the New York Times. Scott in his articles about the situation did not encourage cancel culture. Tit-for-tat strategy can be good for getting people to not do things. But it needs to be handled carefully. Retaliate for specific instances against exact people. Do not retaliate for general attacks by generally attacking the other direction.
C2 Scott can personally cancel his subscription and never associate with the Atlantic again. That is not cancel culture. Telling us about it is cancel culture.
Tbh, I think the attempt to find a subject matter-neutral definition is pointless, and it's fine for 'cancel culture' to just mean when a group 'cancels' someone for poor reasons in ways that have negative consequences. If someone you know IRL regularly promotes pedophilia and isn't super clear about whether or not they'd actually engage in it themselves, it's fine to suggest that others stay away from that person. Whereas if someone IRL regularly promotes traditional conservatism, then it's absurd to suggest others stay away from that person. There's no difference in 'coordination of disassociation' between the two, but just by my gut the second is 'cancel culture' and the first isn't, and that's fine. I think this is closer to the way people actually use 'cancel culture'.
If someone in your gaming clan groomed a minor, so you dm your friends to have your friends ban them from any other groups they're admin in, that is "cancel culture" by your definition (grooming a minor over the internet is speech!), but I don't think the definition should include it. Or in another example, say you're running a regular rationalist meetup, and you hear from other rationalist community members that an infrequent attendee has been stalking/harassing other community members and has generally become unstable. You look at some of the evidence they sent, and in part because of your experience the last time you let such a person come anyway, you ban the person from your meetups indefinitely. This is, by your definition, cancel culture. But I think it's good, because such pruning is necessary to have fun events. This does not feel, to me, like cancel culture. But attempts to kick people out for being conservative or racist look exactly like that! Someone will claim racism necessarily harasses and harms minorities, sexism makes women not want to attend, and so banning the person is just pragmatic. (although because blah blah witches, the overlap between the two groups is much higher than you'd expect by chance) And when they do it, it's cancel culture, and a very central example! The reason we care about cancel culture is because it is/was common and is bad. There's no reason to adopt a formal definition that includes reasonable behavior as well.
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