No one that I know seems to be very worried about being canceled anymore. There’s concern about “optics,” or managing one’s online “brand identity.” And there is self-censorship, either because your co-workers or family can browse your social-media profiles, or because of a conviction that other people are not entitled to our personal information. But the overarching fear of cancellation appears to be a thing of the recent past.
Last month, the comedian Shane Gillis was invited to host Saturday Night Live, the very same show he was fired from in 2019, after audio clips emerged of him making racially charged jokes on a podcast. Kanye West’s new album debuted at No. 1, notwithstanding his professed admiration for Hitler. The social commentator Richard Hanania was outed for pseudonymous “race realist” writings he composed as a young man, but HarperCollins still published his book Origins of Woke. Vaush, a popular left-wing political YouTuber, was allegedly caught on a stream with pornography so bizarre and disturbing I won’t describe it here. The incident earned him an entry on the Web site Know Your Meme, an encyclopedia of online events, but he’s still streaming.
The political scientist Yascha Mounk was accused of rape and what happened? The Atlantic suspended their relationship with Mounk, there was about a week’s worth of social-media chatter, and then … nothing. As of this weekend, he’s still on the faculty at Johns Hopkins (though the school has opened an investigation) and is a visiting professor at Dartmouth. People continue to share his Substack. (No criminal charges have been filed against Mounk, and he told The Washington Post that the allegation is “categorically untrue.”) And this is how it should be; accusations this serious should never be adjudicated by the court of public opinion.
In fact, I know more people who hope that their latest post will be the Really Big One—the earthquake piece of content that gets them branded as “problematic”—than those who are worried about the backlash. But no matter how hard they try, nobody comes after them. We’re de-sensitized to it. Even if cancellation is warranted, the mob has simply cried wolf too many times. It’s possible we wasted our last cancellation, back in 2022, on “West Elm Caleb,” a furniture designer for West Elm who went viral for having ghosted one too many girls on dating apps.
Doxing, or the act of revealing someone’s personal information, was something that once left people quaking in their boots. But now, pseudonymous gadflies who once guarded their true identities are dropping the masks, like Costin Alamariu, also known as “Bronze Age Pervert,” a far-right provocateur who has never seen a sacred cow he wouldn’t happily turn into a cheeseburger. As one influential tech commentator noted, “The age of anon accounts is over.”
Kanye West’s new album debuted at No. 1, notwithstanding his professed admiration for Hitler.
And the pool of cancelers appears to be shrinking. In a recent article, New York Times critic Jon Caramanica observed, “Audiences that don’t care about an artist’s indiscretions can be more sizable than the ones that do.” But it’s not just a change in the Zeitgeist, or a “vibe shift,” as a widely circulated New York magazine story termed it. The eco-system has also changed.
Our digital public squares have all but disappeared. Social media has never been more fragmented. A decade ago, there were a handful of major social platforms, but today, everyone’s safely tucked away in their own silo. This is partially thanks to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, but other major platforms, such as Facebook, have deprioritized news sharing. In 2024, a controversy in one silo is less likely to jump to another.
And it’s not just social media that’s changed. The press has changed, too. Gone are the Web sites that helped instigate cancellations, such as Jezebel, Gawker, and, in its later years, Vice. Meanwhile, the smaller number of publications that remain have mostly given up on the idea that information wants to be free and have gone back to charging for their product. Nothing stops a mob in its tracks like a paywall.
Now, for someone to truly become national news, he has to literally light himself on fire, as was the case with Aaron Bushnell, the air-force cyber-security technician who self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., last month, in protest of America’s support for the Israeli military.
Nothing stops a mob in its tracks like a paywall.
We have entered what former Kickstarter C.E.O. Yancey Strickler called the “Dark Forest of the Internet.” The idea was that in response to the increasing surveillance, commercialization, and toxicity found on mainstream social-media platforms, people would move toward smaller, more private online spaces to share and communicate. Such spaces are harder to find, not indexed by search engines, and often require invitations or specific knowledge to access. As a recent New York Times Magazine article declared, “Group Chats Rule the World.” We are in the age of the invite-only space—the subculture, not the monoculture.
Cancellations still happen, but they have taken different forms and have radically different implications. The first kind is typified by Libs of TikTok, a popular and controversial account that reposts expressions of extreme wokeness. But when you’re singled out for shame or mockery by someone who’s not on your political or cultural team, you can wear it as a badge of honor. Even if superficially it appears to be a bullying campaign, it’s more likely than not to backfire on the would-be canceler. Instead of a pariah, the target becomes a cause célèbre.
The recent attempt to shame the blogging platform Substack into enacting stricter content moderation may be an example of this phenomenon. Those who already had a bone to pick with Substack aired their grievances, while others rallied to support and show their love for the platform. Both sides got the publicity—and catharsis—they wanted. And nothing changed.
The second style of cancellation is more similar to when people would be cast out of local music scenes. Just today, a young woman I’m in a group chat with was kicked out because she made what someone felt were “problematic comments.” Drama ensued. But it was just that: drama. You might have to make new friends, but your life isn’t over.
People who have gone on record as having dissident, edgy, or even plainly offensive political opinions still get de-banked and de-platformed. It’s an all-too-familiar lack of justice, but not the mass celebration of reputational ruin. The spectacle—the sold-out performance—just isn’t happening anymore.
Katherine Dee is an Internet-culture reporter. You can read her work at UnHerd, The Spectator, Tablet, and on her blog, default.blog