I don't really know your intended audience but I think this is greatly misguided.
Why should there be mob justice in the first place? If you don't want to invite anyone to a party you can do that with no public explanation and even no explanation to them.
If the behavior is criminal, there is normal justice with proper safeguards.
If the behavior is simply distateful in a social bubble, no need to smear them; again you can simply exclude who you want from your friendship no justifications needed.
"Cancel others as you yourself would want to be cancelled" -> exactly, so no cancellations at all.
Maybe because I expect I could be cancelled only by angry righteous misguided people because I don't expect to act malignantly.
Anyway, let's have free speech (no defamations) not cancellations for what one thinks. Which is what usually happens, not about what one DID but what one believes.
TL;DR cancellations are a virtual form of lynching, which often has also very material consequences. Lynching is always bad and having a guide to politely do something bad sounds very weird (even for you :P).
I hoped it was clear in my post that I think cancellations should be a pretty last resort, and meet very stringent requirements.
In the cases I threw my weight behind cancelling, going to the police was not a very good option (no law technically broken or victim didn't want to go through legal process), but I think it was overall healthy for the community to see the warnings before engaging with the people.
It seems unlikely to me that all cases are optimally handled by law. I agree that mob justice is often terrible, much more terrible than the law. But if you place a strong set of rules for justice into a mob... Idk it seems to be sort of following the spirit of law in a way I think is justifiable.
I think these concerns are valid and I am in general heavily anti-cancellation. At the same time, I have seen cases where I consider it valid.
In a hobby community I was in, there was a prominent person and community leader who as a consistent pattern over a 10+ year period had been grooming young girls. He was public about recruiting and mentoring them on a team he was leading, but it was only when many of them put their secret stories together that they realized they weren't the only one in the group he'd been having sex with. 4 of them united to report him to the police - 3 of them had been 15-16 (so able to give sexual consent in this country) and one was below that age. Turns out he'd been giving all of them different lies about his age and was somewhere above 35 years when he had sex with them.
They eventually made contact with others and found all his years of engagement in the community had been under a false identity. They also found he'd had a girlfriend for several of those years who had experienced long term physical abuse from him.
Police was unhelpful because it was an old case with no physical evidence and the groomed girls had consented. The community still needed to know that this prominent community leader with a pattern of recruiting young girls was an active threat and had to be excluded from not just one event but the community as a whole.
This event had 5+ women able to report on events, along with the 2 other males in the community who had not seen direct proof but enough alarming signs that as soon as the girls spoke out, they had grounds to back them up. It wasn't smeared on all social media, but it sure wasn't a quiet broken stair situation either - they made sure all relevant parts of the hobby community knew that he was a danger to be excluded. As cancellations go, this was one of the more constructive, and clearly fact-based I've seen, where the danger was real and where the legal avenues did not work.
Like you, I've of course also seen many go completely off the rails or operate with no standard of evidence in the first place.
We've actually had those failures in both directions in my country. I saw that group of testifying women get brushed off with a sense that they were wasting time and "We've got a real rape to deal with in the room next door".
A few years after, there was a political effort in the country which caused a swing to the opposite pole and caused a bunch of documented incidents where men were being sentenced for rape even in cases with minimal evidence or with significant evidence against it being rape.
For example cases where there were text messages about her looking forward to sex with him (e.g. "You don't have to use a condom") and even other people in the house who at no point heard protests or anything but enthusiastic consent, or in some cases witness testimony that she only changed her opinion on the sex experience on hearing reactions from friends in conversation hours later. Sadly quite a few such cases, where she changed her feelings about the experience and particularly less articulate men could not fully argue why for why they interpreted consent at every stage of the sex act, and they ended up with life-destroying sentences.
Rape is always a shitshow in the justice system and barring some privacy-destroying dystopia, I don't think we'll ever stop seeing errors in both directions, and even some sense that the case handling can be an absolute gamble in terms of the people who end up handling the case. But I do think that a government comfortable with sentences a significant proportion of innocents in order to get at more of the guilty ones, is a much scarier prospect than a higher proportion of guilty not meeting the standard of evidence.
A pretty normal thing to want that is somewhere between "throw this guy in jail" and "don't invite this guy to my personal parties" is "disinvite this guy by default from stuff in my community" or even just "make sure my community knows what they did". A community can be like, a couple hundred people who don't all directly know each other but tend to share spaces and events. If someone is dangerous, it makes a huge difference whether or not they're welcome in the community's spaces and events. (People can be dangerous in a way that isn't clearly prosecutable.) If someone *might* be or *used to* be dangerous, maybe you don't ban them but you make sure people are aware so they can make their own choices using their own risk tolerance & so that if they slide into bad behavior again people are equipped to notice.
Cancel culture is just a bureaucracy of righteousness.
It always starts the same way: “I’m not power-hungry, I’m just enforcing the rules.” Every inquisitor in history said that. So did every censor. So did every regime that sincerely believed it was saving society from harm.
Your essay tries to civilise cancellation by giving it a checklist, as if social execution becomes ethical once it’s properly documented. It doesn’t. You’ve simply replaced pitchforks with Google Docs.
You claim cancellation is a last resort, yet you normalise it as a routine tool for enforcing today’s moral fashion, fully aware that yesterday’s heresy often becomes tomorrow’s orthodoxy. That alone should disqualify anyone from acting as judge, jury, and amplifier.
The core flaw is simple: you confuse moral certainty with moral authority. Feeling righteous does not make you right. Being convinced you’re preventing harm does not mean you are. History is crowded with people who were absolutely sure—and catastrophically wrong.
Your rules don’t restrain power; they launder it. They let ordinary people cosplay as executioners while insisting they’re being careful, fair, and sad about it. That’s not humility. That’s self-deception with footnotes.
If your system requires people to publicly destroy others “carefully,” the system is the problem—not the technique.
Real justice uses restraint, due process, and proportionality.
Cancellation uses vibes, momentum, and applause.
One of those survives contact with time. The other never does.
Rapists are already massively not punished for their crimes. All your rhetoric will not change that.
When justice doesn't work (and not by accident, by design), people take it into their own hands, and they're right to do so.
If you want due process, vote for people who fight for rapists to be behind bars, not for the one who protect them (or are straight up rapists themselves).
But you're not fooling anyone : you're not interested in that.
Saying “the system fails” doesn’t justify replacing it with something worse. It explains frustration, not legitimacy.
When people “take it into their own hands,” they don’t fix injustice; they create a new one with no standards, no restraint, and no way back. That doesn’t help victims. It just redistributes power to whoever shouts loudest.
And no.... wanting due process is not indifference to crime. It’s the only thing that separates justice from accusation.
If the bar for destroying someone = belief + outrage, then everyone is at risk, including the innocent—and eventually, the people cheering it on.
You can argue the legal system needs reform. I agree.
What you can’t do is claim that abandoning it makes you righteous.
Im a journalist who has written about harm in the psychedelic underground. I dont know if thats 'cancel culture' - which sounds like an attempt to permanently invalidate and erase someone. It sounds brutal and permanent. While reporting on harm in a culture or marketplace is more like 'this is information that you, the consumer, should know about this person or this place, to try and reduce harm'.
People usually come to a journalist like me because other avenues have failed, they tried to communicate about the harms to the person or the place, and nothing happened, nothing changed. Thats the same reason people go public and post on social media.
Usually, the person who has done the harms barely engages in any reflection, has little sense of the harm they have done, and they deflect it and make it all about the accusers. they act like narcissists. But sometimes they DO reflect, they feel shame and guilt mixed with a sense of anger and helplessness at the process, because its not a legal process where one can defend oneself or 'do the time'. they then feel in extended purgatory without any sense of closure.
In other words, there's no mechanism for atonement or repentance in cancel culture. So thats my question - have people seen anyone ever come back from cancellation? Anyone who has said 'im really sorry, can i continue to work?'
I prob should have expanded more on this in the post, but would consider part of the "have they already been confronted about for their behavior". The cancellation should prob happen after there's good evidence they are not interested in atonement.
I am much more wary than others about atonement that happens after a punishment! The incentives seem really bad there - it's entirely to get into social graces, not because of any genuine recognition that something went wrong. This is especially true if you gave them a lot of opportunity to stop and fix things beforehand.
But still, sometimes people go to prison and decide they did wrong eventually. But in cancel culture there is no process for atonement at some later date - it’s permanent…
Louis CK. Aziz Ansari. Johnny Depp. All of these men still have careers. Even Weinstein is getting a rebrand through Candace Owens and everyone else who thinks that actresses are getting uglier.
"Cancel others as you yourself would want to be cancelled" is great for people who work on principle, but might not work out so well among people who don't.
(This is not a complaint! Like, I don't expect every edge case to be covered. I just noticed that there's something that parallels "do unto others as you would have done unto you" and how that can go awry, or how like people who seem "hypocritical" often actually are very consistently just "my chief over anyone else's chief" or similar.)
This is such a good article. Ironically - expect critics who will accuse you of advocating for silencing, protecting, or excusing the actions of "bad people" despite that not being at all what you're saying. In fact, that will prove your point.
The thing is "cancelling" isn't something unique to women towards men. Groups with their own definitions of morality and what is and isn't acceptable behaviour (or even manners of simply existing) or what is considered "threatening" have been publicly and aggressively "canceling" individuals for ages for their perceived improprieties.
I'm not suggesting the "all cancelling from any parties for any reason are equivalent" game - not at all. What I'm backing up is your suggestion that bad actors exist that are not acting in good faith, and it's our responsibility to trust but verify. Consider the framing, consider the motivation, consider whether there is a pattern of behaviour, consider the actual threat, consider the consequences - what is ultimately the desired outcome or punishment?
These sorts of actions have power and you want to make sure that the power you're wielding doesn't lead to the sort of outcome that you can't take back. I'm intentionally not giving any specific examples because I don't want the discussion to devolve into debating whether the person "deserved" what they got or not - that's not the point. The point is being aware of what it is you're ultimately trying to achieve and once it's put out there, understand that you immediately lose control of what others do with that information.
If a system relies on irreversible punishment without accountability, it’s not justice, it’s abdication.
Once you accept cancellation as a tool, you’ve abandoned justice and are just negotiating who deserves it. Everything else is just arguing over who gets to hold the knife.
First, I was not advocating for or against the act. It exists regardless of how any of us feel about it.
Second, your stance is based on the flawed idea that we live in a just society subject to just systems. Speaking to how things should be is not a relevant argument when that's not how things are.
Mob justice is never good. Even if the beheading is executed politely, it's still a death sentence. It often causes significant harm, ranging from mental health issues to suicide, which frequently exceeds the original offense it aims to punish by many magnitudes. Those involved often seem to lack basic civility and grace. Canceling always strips the right to a fair hearing, and once started, it can never be fully undone. The strain won't just disappear, even if proven innocent. When society advances, we'll look back in fifty years and feel shame about the public cancellations we've tolerated and enabled through public and social media.
I think in almost all cases of mob justice you are correct. I think you'll find almost all cases of mob justice fail to meet the criteria I think of being necessary for a cancellation.
Again, this is The Great Feminization at work: an abomination enabled by upscaling female morality via social media.
Way better to keep things old school: stick to whisper networks for women, for men either allow other men beat them up or follow the institutional path (police -> jail).
This is one of my favorite articles that you've written so far. Thank you! It might be interesting to ask how people feel about Cancelling in a future survey if that's not already in there and seeing what other stuff it correlates with.
I think the comments worried about the potential long-term negative impacts on cancellees' mental health are true and important and also raise this interesting question for me that's a bit about theory of mind that's like, can these people 'get better'.
Ideally, what underpins cancel culture/peoples' desire to cancel is a desire to stop bad behaviour. So, how might we most compassionately help Bad Actor stop the behaviour?
For cases I've seen personally in my community/ies, often the 'bad guys' have pretty volatile mental heath,, low self-esteem, etc, which I think is often what causes them to grab for power and do nasty hurtful dangerous things. In theory, they could do a shit load of 'emotional work' to help heal the underlying stuff and hopefully the surface level manifestations like manipulation would fall away. But this presupposes stuff like: a) they're willing b) they're not a psychopath/sociopath who is just biologically encoded differently and thus less capable of this change we want to see.
In general these considerations feel like an important part of discussing how to deal with bad actors because it should change the possible actions we might take. For example, I think there's a strong argument for, instead of cancelling someone (even and only if they meet Aella's proposed criteria), we might propose some sort of community call for them sorting their shit out, like a big mob 'honey, your dad and I have been worried about you recently' intervention. Maybe I'm naive, maybe this wouldn't work, but I think it's possible if enough people, who shared big enough concerns to consider cancelling them, got together in a room with Bad Actor and told them, hey we really don't like this stuff you keep doing, and we want it to change because it's dangerous/terrible/x/y/z for our community, here's what we think might be going on and here's some things you could do to change... I imagine this could have a huge impact on Bad Actor. (Probably wise and more powerful if the people who sit them down are not the victims, a) because Bad Actor might not take victims seriously and b) because Bad Actor needs to see that other people don't like this shit either, and that they're catching on) They realise the severity of the impact, the scale (i.e. how many people feel this way), the potential negative consequences if they don't change, but are also met with this compassion of like, you can fix this.
I KNOW, I KNOW, this won't work for all Bad Actors/potential cancellees, I know. I know some people truly don't give a shit about their impact. I would argue these people fall into the psychopathic/sociopathic category where they truly are incapable of changing due to some misfortunate glitch in their genes (this is probably deeply miscategorising what those conditions are, apologies lol).
I just present this as one option for those people who can be fucking nasty and horrible and abusive, but for me at least it is so abundantly clear it is coming from a deep part in them that's grasping for power and control because they basically had a terrible childhood and got fucked up and now the world is scary and they need to control it. (Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal: "The world is a horrible place").
I think this is well-intentioned, but it quietly assumes something that simply isn’t true: that communities are qualified to diagnose, treat, or “intervene” in other people’s psychology.
Once a group decides someone is a Bad Actor and then convenes to “help them get better,” you haven’t replaced cancellation—you’ve just softened the language around the same power imbalance. It’s still accusation without due process, pressure without consent, and judgment without accountability.
Communities are not therapists. Crowds are not clinicians. And moral certainty is not a treatment plan.
If someone has committed a crime, there are legal systems. If someone needs psychological help, there are professionals. If someone is merely disliked or deemed dangerous in theory, then the honest answer is restraint—not inventing ad-hoc tribunals disguised as compassion.
The core problem with cancel culture isn’t that it’s insufficiently kind. It’s that it appoints people to roles they have no right or competence to occupy... and then acts surprised when harm follows.
Great article! Unfortunately the types of people that should read this the most probably lack the self-awareness to think it necessary lol.
Also, it’s interesting how many commenters are acting like you’ve advocated for death by stoning even when you explicitly say cancellation is a last resort.
I liked the article. Since one can decide who & how someone should be cancelled, it seems to me to be a personal choice. If you are more of a loner or recluse, as I am, it is seldom an issue. I find that I get much more enjoyment from animals than from people.
Every willy-nilly cancellation helps the real baddies develop counterstrategies. A crude instrument such as cancellation cannot remain effective for long against people with more than trivial power. It’s naive to believe the opposite.
I don't really know your intended audience but I think this is greatly misguided.
Why should there be mob justice in the first place? If you don't want to invite anyone to a party you can do that with no public explanation and even no explanation to them.
If the behavior is criminal, there is normal justice with proper safeguards.
If the behavior is simply distateful in a social bubble, no need to smear them; again you can simply exclude who you want from your friendship no justifications needed.
"Cancel others as you yourself would want to be cancelled" -> exactly, so no cancellations at all.
Maybe because I expect I could be cancelled only by angry righteous misguided people because I don't expect to act malignantly.
Anyway, let's have free speech (no defamations) not cancellations for what one thinks. Which is what usually happens, not about what one DID but what one believes.
TL;DR cancellations are a virtual form of lynching, which often has also very material consequences. Lynching is always bad and having a guide to politely do something bad sounds very weird (even for you :P).
I hoped it was clear in my post that I think cancellations should be a pretty last resort, and meet very stringent requirements.
In the cases I threw my weight behind cancelling, going to the police was not a very good option (no law technically broken or victim didn't want to go through legal process), but I think it was overall healthy for the community to see the warnings before engaging with the people.
It seems unlikely to me that all cases are optimally handled by law. I agree that mob justice is often terrible, much more terrible than the law. But if you place a strong set of rules for justice into a mob... Idk it seems to be sort of following the spirit of law in a way I think is justifiable.
I think these concerns are valid and I am in general heavily anti-cancellation. At the same time, I have seen cases where I consider it valid.
In a hobby community I was in, there was a prominent person and community leader who as a consistent pattern over a 10+ year period had been grooming young girls. He was public about recruiting and mentoring them on a team he was leading, but it was only when many of them put their secret stories together that they realized they weren't the only one in the group he'd been having sex with. 4 of them united to report him to the police - 3 of them had been 15-16 (so able to give sexual consent in this country) and one was below that age. Turns out he'd been giving all of them different lies about his age and was somewhere above 35 years when he had sex with them.
They eventually made contact with others and found all his years of engagement in the community had been under a false identity. They also found he'd had a girlfriend for several of those years who had experienced long term physical abuse from him.
Police was unhelpful because it was an old case with no physical evidence and the groomed girls had consented. The community still needed to know that this prominent community leader with a pattern of recruiting young girls was an active threat and had to be excluded from not just one event but the community as a whole.
This event had 5+ women able to report on events, along with the 2 other males in the community who had not seen direct proof but enough alarming signs that as soon as the girls spoke out, they had grounds to back them up. It wasn't smeared on all social media, but it sure wasn't a quiet broken stair situation either - they made sure all relevant parts of the hobby community knew that he was a danger to be excluded. As cancellations go, this was one of the more constructive, and clearly fact-based I've seen, where the danger was real and where the legal avenues did not work.
Like you, I've of course also seen many go completely off the rails or operate with no standard of evidence in the first place.
You actually believe the criminal justice system does anything and helps victims? Especially around rape? How misguided...
Misguided would be to think cancel culture is a better solution to the justice system.
I agree the justice system is not doing enough and should be improved.
If you want to feel like you're doing something, seek to improve the justice system. Don't support a failed and flawed alternative.
We've actually had those failures in both directions in my country. I saw that group of testifying women get brushed off with a sense that they were wasting time and "We've got a real rape to deal with in the room next door".
A few years after, there was a political effort in the country which caused a swing to the opposite pole and caused a bunch of documented incidents where men were being sentenced for rape even in cases with minimal evidence or with significant evidence against it being rape.
For example cases where there were text messages about her looking forward to sex with him (e.g. "You don't have to use a condom") and even other people in the house who at no point heard protests or anything but enthusiastic consent, or in some cases witness testimony that she only changed her opinion on the sex experience on hearing reactions from friends in conversation hours later. Sadly quite a few such cases, where she changed her feelings about the experience and particularly less articulate men could not fully argue why for why they interpreted consent at every stage of the sex act, and they ended up with life-destroying sentences.
Rape is always a shitshow in the justice system and barring some privacy-destroying dystopia, I don't think we'll ever stop seeing errors in both directions, and even some sense that the case handling can be an absolute gamble in terms of the people who end up handling the case. But I do think that a government comfortable with sentences a significant proportion of innocents in order to get at more of the guilty ones, is a much scarier prospect than a higher proportion of guilty not meeting the standard of evidence.
A pretty normal thing to want that is somewhere between "throw this guy in jail" and "don't invite this guy to my personal parties" is "disinvite this guy by default from stuff in my community" or even just "make sure my community knows what they did". A community can be like, a couple hundred people who don't all directly know each other but tend to share spaces and events. If someone is dangerous, it makes a huge difference whether or not they're welcome in the community's spaces and events. (People can be dangerous in a way that isn't clearly prosecutable.) If someone *might* be or *used to* be dangerous, maybe you don't ban them but you make sure people are aware so they can make their own choices using their own risk tolerance & so that if they slide into bad behavior again people are equipped to notice.
Cancel culture is just a bureaucracy of righteousness.
It always starts the same way: “I’m not power-hungry, I’m just enforcing the rules.” Every inquisitor in history said that. So did every censor. So did every regime that sincerely believed it was saving society from harm.
Your essay tries to civilise cancellation by giving it a checklist, as if social execution becomes ethical once it’s properly documented. It doesn’t. You’ve simply replaced pitchforks with Google Docs.
You claim cancellation is a last resort, yet you normalise it as a routine tool for enforcing today’s moral fashion, fully aware that yesterday’s heresy often becomes tomorrow’s orthodoxy. That alone should disqualify anyone from acting as judge, jury, and amplifier.
The core flaw is simple: you confuse moral certainty with moral authority. Feeling righteous does not make you right. Being convinced you’re preventing harm does not mean you are. History is crowded with people who were absolutely sure—and catastrophically wrong.
Your rules don’t restrain power; they launder it. They let ordinary people cosplay as executioners while insisting they’re being careful, fair, and sad about it. That’s not humility. That’s self-deception with footnotes.
If your system requires people to publicly destroy others “carefully,” the system is the problem—not the technique.
Real justice uses restraint, due process, and proportionality.
Cancellation uses vibes, momentum, and applause.
One of those survives contact with time. The other never does.
Written by ChatGPT but based.
"Spell checked by Microsoft... but based"
I'm never sure how that's relevant or why anyone would care.
My writing is either right or it's wrong.
Most people, including writers, will use AI and spell check to save time.
Input what you want to say and let the computer sort it out.
These are not AI's conclusions. They are mine.
And to be honest, who wants to spend more time than the minimum on this article?
But I agree with your conclusion that it is indeed based.
Lots of words to say you don't care if rapists are not being held accountable.
"So you're saying..." - Cathy Newman
https://youtu.be/JkcXRC4HZqc
Rape is a crime and should be dealt with as such, i.e. by the courts and associated apparatus.
It should. And it's not.
And the people whining about cancel culture are NEVER the ones to actually call and work for more justice.
Best way to eliminate cancelling is to have actual justice. And it's not the right who's fighting for it. (I wonder WHY ? 🤔)
Who is whining? This is a constructive and IMHO pretty reasonable post.
Describing reasonable critique as "whining" is a rhetorical cheap-shot, but doesn't actually address the issues raised in the slightest.
I'm not sure which Country you're in but it's only the parties on the right who are fighting for investigations into grooming gangs and SA cases.
Especially in the US and UK.
In any case, Rape isn’t right-wing or left-wing.
Reducing it to a partisan insult trivialises the crime and helps no victims.
That’s a remarkably efficient way to avoid engaging with the argument:
Step 1: Ignore everything said.
Step 2: Invoke rapists.
Step 3: Declare moral victory.
Accountability isn’t weakened by due process.
It’s weakened when you replace it with ill considered vibes in a comment section.
When you bypass due process, you’re not stopping rapists.
You’re simply choosing who gets called one. How pathetic.
Rapists are already massively not punished for their crimes. All your rhetoric will not change that.
When justice doesn't work (and not by accident, by design), people take it into their own hands, and they're right to do so.
If you want due process, vote for people who fight for rapists to be behind bars, not for the one who protect them (or are straight up rapists themselves).
But you're not fooling anyone : you're not interested in that.
You’re making my point for me.
Saying “the system fails” doesn’t justify replacing it with something worse. It explains frustration, not legitimacy.
When people “take it into their own hands,” they don’t fix injustice; they create a new one with no standards, no restraint, and no way back. That doesn’t help victims. It just redistributes power to whoever shouts loudest.
And no.... wanting due process is not indifference to crime. It’s the only thing that separates justice from accusation.
If the bar for destroying someone = belief + outrage, then everyone is at risk, including the innocent—and eventually, the people cheering it on.
You can argue the legal system needs reform. I agree.
What you can’t do is claim that abandoning it makes you righteous.
That’s how abuse gets laundered as virtue.
My rapist being cancelled absolutely helped me. And it helped other women to avoid him.
Rapists must love befriending you.
Im a journalist who has written about harm in the psychedelic underground. I dont know if thats 'cancel culture' - which sounds like an attempt to permanently invalidate and erase someone. It sounds brutal and permanent. While reporting on harm in a culture or marketplace is more like 'this is information that you, the consumer, should know about this person or this place, to try and reduce harm'.
People usually come to a journalist like me because other avenues have failed, they tried to communicate about the harms to the person or the place, and nothing happened, nothing changed. Thats the same reason people go public and post on social media.
Usually, the person who has done the harms barely engages in any reflection, has little sense of the harm they have done, and they deflect it and make it all about the accusers. they act like narcissists. But sometimes they DO reflect, they feel shame and guilt mixed with a sense of anger and helplessness at the process, because its not a legal process where one can defend oneself or 'do the time'. they then feel in extended purgatory without any sense of closure.
In other words, there's no mechanism for atonement or repentance in cancel culture. So thats my question - have people seen anyone ever come back from cancellation? Anyone who has said 'im really sorry, can i continue to work?'
I prob should have expanded more on this in the post, but would consider part of the "have they already been confronted about for their behavior". The cancellation should prob happen after there's good evidence they are not interested in atonement.
I am much more wary than others about atonement that happens after a punishment! The incentives seem really bad there - it's entirely to get into social graces, not because of any genuine recognition that something went wrong. This is especially true if you gave them a lot of opportunity to stop and fix things beforehand.
But still, sometimes people go to prison and decide they did wrong eventually. But in cancel culture there is no process for atonement at some later date - it’s permanent…
Louis CK. Aziz Ansari. Johnny Depp. All of these men still have careers. Even Weinstein is getting a rebrand through Candace Owens and everyone else who thinks that actresses are getting uglier.
"Cancel others as you yourself would want to be cancelled" is great for people who work on principle, but might not work out so well among people who don't.
(This is not a complaint! Like, I don't expect every edge case to be covered. I just noticed that there's something that parallels "do unto others as you would have done unto you" and how that can go awry, or how like people who seem "hypocritical" often actually are very consistently just "my chief over anyone else's chief" or similar.)
This is such a good article. Ironically - expect critics who will accuse you of advocating for silencing, protecting, or excusing the actions of "bad people" despite that not being at all what you're saying. In fact, that will prove your point.
The thing is "cancelling" isn't something unique to women towards men. Groups with their own definitions of morality and what is and isn't acceptable behaviour (or even manners of simply existing) or what is considered "threatening" have been publicly and aggressively "canceling" individuals for ages for their perceived improprieties.
I'm not suggesting the "all cancelling from any parties for any reason are equivalent" game - not at all. What I'm backing up is your suggestion that bad actors exist that are not acting in good faith, and it's our responsibility to trust but verify. Consider the framing, consider the motivation, consider whether there is a pattern of behaviour, consider the actual threat, consider the consequences - what is ultimately the desired outcome or punishment?
These sorts of actions have power and you want to make sure that the power you're wielding doesn't lead to the sort of outcome that you can't take back. I'm intentionally not giving any specific examples because I don't want the discussion to devolve into debating whether the person "deserved" what they got or not - that's not the point. The point is being aware of what it is you're ultimately trying to achieve and once it's put out there, understand that you immediately lose control of what others do with that information.
If a system relies on irreversible punishment without accountability, it’s not justice, it’s abdication.
Once you accept cancellation as a tool, you’ve abandoned justice and are just negotiating who deserves it. Everything else is just arguing over who gets to hold the knife.
First, I was not advocating for or against the act. It exists regardless of how any of us feel about it.
Second, your stance is based on the flawed idea that we live in a just society subject to just systems. Speaking to how things should be is not a relevant argument when that's not how things are.
Saying “it exists regardless” doesn’t make it neutral though.
Plenty of things exist; we still judge whether they’re legitimate.
And pointing out that our systems are imperfect isn’t an argument for abandoning them. It’s an argument for improving them.
I never said they were perfect.
Replacing flawed justice with unaccountable crowds isn’t realism; it’s regression.
If “things aren’t just” becomes a license to act without standards, then nothing restrains power at all. That’s precisely the danger.
Mob justice is never good. Even if the beheading is executed politely, it's still a death sentence. It often causes significant harm, ranging from mental health issues to suicide, which frequently exceeds the original offense it aims to punish by many magnitudes. Those involved often seem to lack basic civility and grace. Canceling always strips the right to a fair hearing, and once started, it can never be fully undone. The strain won't just disappear, even if proven innocent. When society advances, we'll look back in fifty years and feel shame about the public cancellations we've tolerated and enabled through public and social media.
I think in almost all cases of mob justice you are correct. I think you'll find almost all cases of mob justice fail to meet the criteria I think of being necessary for a cancellation.
Wow, this cancel culture thing is crazy.
Again, this is The Great Feminization at work: an abomination enabled by upscaling female morality via social media.
Way better to keep things old school: stick to whisper networks for women, for men either allow other men beat them up or follow the institutional path (police -> jail).
Aella. The premise that any one person gets to decide that they possess the moral superiority to punish others should be rejected.
Also, you need to define “harm” in the criteria, or else its just random people deciding what harm is based on how they feel at the time.
This is all bad
This is one of my favorite articles that you've written so far. Thank you! It might be interesting to ask how people feel about Cancelling in a future survey if that's not already in there and seeing what other stuff it correlates with.
I think the comments worried about the potential long-term negative impacts on cancellees' mental health are true and important and also raise this interesting question for me that's a bit about theory of mind that's like, can these people 'get better'.
Ideally, what underpins cancel culture/peoples' desire to cancel is a desire to stop bad behaviour. So, how might we most compassionately help Bad Actor stop the behaviour?
For cases I've seen personally in my community/ies, often the 'bad guys' have pretty volatile mental heath,, low self-esteem, etc, which I think is often what causes them to grab for power and do nasty hurtful dangerous things. In theory, they could do a shit load of 'emotional work' to help heal the underlying stuff and hopefully the surface level manifestations like manipulation would fall away. But this presupposes stuff like: a) they're willing b) they're not a psychopath/sociopath who is just biologically encoded differently and thus less capable of this change we want to see.
In general these considerations feel like an important part of discussing how to deal with bad actors because it should change the possible actions we might take. For example, I think there's a strong argument for, instead of cancelling someone (even and only if they meet Aella's proposed criteria), we might propose some sort of community call for them sorting their shit out, like a big mob 'honey, your dad and I have been worried about you recently' intervention. Maybe I'm naive, maybe this wouldn't work, but I think it's possible if enough people, who shared big enough concerns to consider cancelling them, got together in a room with Bad Actor and told them, hey we really don't like this stuff you keep doing, and we want it to change because it's dangerous/terrible/x/y/z for our community, here's what we think might be going on and here's some things you could do to change... I imagine this could have a huge impact on Bad Actor. (Probably wise and more powerful if the people who sit them down are not the victims, a) because Bad Actor might not take victims seriously and b) because Bad Actor needs to see that other people don't like this shit either, and that they're catching on) They realise the severity of the impact, the scale (i.e. how many people feel this way), the potential negative consequences if they don't change, but are also met with this compassion of like, you can fix this.
I KNOW, I KNOW, this won't work for all Bad Actors/potential cancellees, I know. I know some people truly don't give a shit about their impact. I would argue these people fall into the psychopathic/sociopathic category where they truly are incapable of changing due to some misfortunate glitch in their genes (this is probably deeply miscategorising what those conditions are, apologies lol).
I just present this as one option for those people who can be fucking nasty and horrible and abusive, but for me at least it is so abundantly clear it is coming from a deep part in them that's grasping for power and control because they basically had a terrible childhood and got fucked up and now the world is scary and they need to control it. (Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal: "The world is a horrible place").
I think this is well-intentioned, but it quietly assumes something that simply isn’t true: that communities are qualified to diagnose, treat, or “intervene” in other people’s psychology.
Once a group decides someone is a Bad Actor and then convenes to “help them get better,” you haven’t replaced cancellation—you’ve just softened the language around the same power imbalance. It’s still accusation without due process, pressure without consent, and judgment without accountability.
Communities are not therapists. Crowds are not clinicians. And moral certainty is not a treatment plan.
If someone has committed a crime, there are legal systems. If someone needs psychological help, there are professionals. If someone is merely disliked or deemed dangerous in theory, then the honest answer is restraint—not inventing ad-hoc tribunals disguised as compassion.
The core problem with cancel culture isn’t that it’s insufficiently kind. It’s that it appoints people to roles they have no right or competence to occupy... and then acts surprised when harm follows.
Your first mistake was assuming that bad actors don’t know what they’re doing is bad.
Woke mobster - Sanctimonious little cunts
Great article! Unfortunately the types of people that should read this the most probably lack the self-awareness to think it necessary lol.
Also, it’s interesting how many commenters are acting like you’ve advocated for death by stoning even when you explicitly say cancellation is a last resort.
I liked the article. Since one can decide who & how someone should be cancelled, it seems to me to be a personal choice. If you are more of a loner or recluse, as I am, it is seldom an issue. I find that I get much more enjoyment from animals than from people.
Every willy-nilly cancellation helps the real baddies develop counterstrategies. A crude instrument such as cancellation cannot remain effective for long against people with more than trivial power. It’s naive to believe the opposite.
the first rule of war is dont fucking bother... but if you actually have no other good choice, then do it hygienically and well.
Familiar echoes of church discipline, my final interaction with Christianity. Very interesting parallels.