Let me start with what cancelling actually is in practice, so someone does something terrible and we are talking genuinely terrible here, not just said something people disagree with and the internet collectively decides that this person should lose everything, their platform, their income, their reputation, their relationships, their career, all of it.....gone, driven by public opinion, by outrage, by thousands and sometimes millions of people who have decided that this person no longer deserves to exist in public life.
And the question is whether that is okay, my honest answer is complicated, I think there is something valid in the idea that the public gets to decide who they support. If a celebrity or a public figure does something horrific and people decide they no longer want to stream their music or watch their movies or follow their page that is not a crime, that is a choice, nobody is entitled to public support, nobody is entitled to a platform, and if your actions are terrible enough to make people withdraw that support then that is a natural consequence of what you did, I do not have a problem with that part of it.
What I have a problem with is when cancelling stops being about withdrawing support and starts becoming something that looks more like sport, when people are not just saying I no longer support this person but are actively hunting, harassing, digging through years of history looking for more ammunition, sending threats, going after family members, making it their personal mission to destroy every single thing about someone's existence, that crosses a line for me, that is not justice, that is cruelty wearing justice as a costume.
And then there is the authority question, should these things not be handled by the appropriate systems? In an ideal world yes, but we do not live in an ideal world and I think a lot of cancel culture exists precisely because people have watched powerful people do terrible things and face absolutely no legal consequences, when the system fails repeatedly, when money and influence make people untouchable, the public starts to feel like they need to take something into their own hands, I understand that frustration even when I do not fully agree with every expression of it.
But here is my issue with the cancel and punish at the same time approach. If someone is genuinely guilty of a crime and the legal system is handling it they are going to court, they are facing charges, they are paying a real legal price then what exactly is the cancelling adding at that point? Is it about justice or is it about the satisfaction of watching someone fall completely?Because those are two different things and we should be honest about which one is actually driving it.
I also think we need to talk about the permanence of cancel culture, people do change, people also grow, people do terrible things and genuinely reckon with them and become different....., but the internet does not forget and it does not forgive and once you are cancelled that label follows you in a way that makes redemption almost impossible even when it is real.
Justice should have room for accountability, It should also have room for redemption, cancel culture right now is very good at the first one and almost completely uninterested in the second...and that is where it loses me
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