Atlas, canceled

"Where are they now?" is another way of asking "What have we done?"

Early in my exploration into cancellations, I had this idea of assembling a Board of the Damned to turbocharge some of my ventures in sport startups. Just within the first few months I had talked to or identified several Olympic coaches, the former CEO of a major sports event company, a network media executive, a digital media executive... an impossible level of experience and talent. All had been canceled. They were just there for the taking by anyone who valued what they could do over whatever woke transgression they supposedly committed.

It would be like an expansion team signing a full squad of Hall of Famers, in their prime, as free agents.

My naivete / ignorance about cancellation led me to underestimate two things.

First, the enduring stigma of a moral panic (or three). One of my hoped-for BoD members told me that if I put this team together, it would ensure no one else would ever take my calls. He said that about two years ago. He recently had his first job interview since his cancellation over five years ago.

Second, the even-greater endurance of the trauma of cancellation. Looking back, none of them (of the ones I had direct contact with) were ready to get back in the game. Some were just getting out of the “leave their house and be seen in public” stage. As another prospective BoD member put it, “It’s been over seven years since my career ended publicly. Prior to that, I’d have thought you’d absorb the hit, reload and move on. If someone couldn’t do that, they probably had other issues or lacked inner strength. It couldn’t take that long. I understand things very differently now.”

Even though I knew right from my first two phone calls with canceled people—the calls that started it all for me—the devastating effects of being canceled, I thought that, with time, they’d all get back to where they belong.

Probably in the back of my head somewhere was the idea that my Board of the Damned would be the Galt’s Gulch of sport. A refuge for those who had been rejected by and exiled from an irrational society. But instead of an autarky in a valley, where only the members would benefit from each other’s work, we’d be at the forefront of the sports industry, on both the business and performance sides of the house.

The idea of Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged entrances many idealistic young readers. It’s a beautiful and noble alternative to the standard binary of a struggling, starving, unappreciated-in-her-own-lifetime artisan and the popular, widely acclaimed, crassly commercialized sell-out. Only a few dozen people will ever see your work in the Gulch, but they truly value it, and you can truly value theirs.

I always thought of it as an inspiring plot device in an idealistic novel that offers a way to live in the real world—until a cancelled author of dystopian fiction told me: “It’s sweet, but it’s fantasy.”

She’s right, and I’d missed it in the decades I’ve been (re)reading that book.

Not a valley, but close enough, and works on so many levels.

Galt’s Gulch makes Atlas Shrugged a fantasy novel. Without this idea that all the prime movers and men of integrity are alive and whole somewhere the world cannot touch them, Atlas Shrugged would be dystopic. The lights would go out in New York City, trains would strand passengers in the desert when they weren’t colliding in tunnels, and society would collapse: everything that happens to the outside world in the book, but with no one spared the consequences.

But even that permits some hope: maybe a few of the heroes, or people like them, survived and they would be the forebears of civilization’s rebirth.

Perhaps inspired by my conversation with this author, a fully dystopic fan fic quickly came together in my head.

Instead of the men and women of the mind inexplicably abandoning their jobs and disappearing, they were all canceled—publicly, brutally, totally. In this version, there’s no mystery about why they disappeared. Dagny doesn’t need to find the mysterious “destroyer” who was snatching them away from their desks. We know who the destroyer is: a cancel mob. But she still needs to find them. Less “Who is John Galt?”, more “Whatever happened to...?” and “Where are they now?”

Her pursuit ends not in an idyllic Valhalla-in-a-valley, but at a mass grave: all the canceled people she had lost and sought had committed suicide or died deaths of despair. Instead of John Galt being the first person she sees when she opens her eyes in the valley, his is the bottom-most corpse, the first to go (or would it be more brutal if he was on top of the pile, and she missed her chance to save him by near minutes?).

Considering how regularly cancelled people talk to me about their thoughts of suicide, in addition to the suicides that I know of and the deaths of despair that I suspect, my dystopic version is closer to reality than Rand’s fantasy.

On the plus side, my version will end without a 100-page philosophical discourse thinly cloaked as a monologue.

Costs of cancelation still coming due for the rest of us

Galt’s Gulch is an effective plot device because it lets Rand show the world as it could be (life in the valley) contrasted to the world without the “good guys”; and how the gap between the two widens with each successive Atlas who shrugs, that is, each person of integrity who walks away. Rand patiently shows how the bridges don’t all collapse at once: the consequences of losing them build from daily inconveniences to national catastrophes. Instead of wrestling with the “seen and unseen,” she shows us both.

The Gulch is the common answer for two questions that create the mystery of the first two parts of the book: Why are all these people disappearing, and why is everything going to s—t?

Many people today are asking the second question. To be fair, every generation, upon reaching a certain age, feels compelled and qualified to ask that question. But rarely has there been such a cull of talent and ability as we’ve seen over the last 10–15 years of cancellations. When you start thinking of how many people we’ve lost to cancellations, that second question is much more justified and answerable.

By definition, you don’t get canceled based on performance. Quite the opposite: you get canceled for everything but.

Talk about a widening gap between what could have been and what is. Someone gets to where they are based on ability. They get canceled because of a moral panic (or three, I can’t say that enough given the importance of the year 2020 to my work). Their successor is necessarily no better, and likely not as good.

This applies to everything from a middle manager to the CEO, a solopreneur or a head coach, which novelist gets a publishing deal and which artist gets a show.

It’s the broken window fallacy applied to jobs and lives. We’re not better off because now the replacement has those opportunities. We’re significantly worse off because we’ve destroyed one career and life, and they’re not coming back, and we’ve replaced them with less. A less capable coach, less enriching books on the shelves, more bland and blase shows to attend or stream.

We are all worse off because of cancelations.

I recognized this several years before I started researching and writing about cancellations. For some reason, one in particular—also from 2020—stood out to me as, my God, what a waste. What an absolute tragic waste. I thought the word “tragic” at the time not in reference to her, because I had no idea what cancellation actually did to the targets. I used it in reference to all of us as consumers and as society. Her company, her industry, and, at some level, all of us are poorer for having lost her.

She was also on my Board of the Damned, even though to this day I’ve not had any contact with her.

Lowering expectations in a canceled world

“Where are they now?” is another way of asking “What have we done?”

The resident heroes of Rand’s valley all have “day jobs” in the outside world, jobs outside of their real profession and well below their level of ability. Low skill, easily replaceable, often menial jobs. “[T]he kind of job that the world wishes me to hold,” Galt says.

Many canceled people are closer to the station in life that their cancellers wish them to hold than to where they were before—or where they should, and would otherwise, be. That’s true years after they were taken out.

Even today, I still sometimes find myself cheerleading a canceled person to get back in the game, whatever that might mean for them.

Part of that is a sense of justice and rightness: they belong, at the very least, back where they were, if not a few steps ahead. I can’t stand the fact that each of their cancel mobs won. But just as much is pure self-interest: I want whatever it is they used to put out into the world. I want to watch top athletes and learn from their coaches, attend great events, read stimulating and creative books, watch shows that I actually remember a month later (and maybe even use as a starting point for an article).

Those creations and their creators were stolen and destroyed by the cancel mobs.

“They have no idea of the harm. They think I had a job for 20 years, and then I just didn’t have a job,” said the second prospective BoD member from earlier.

Most of what you’ll read at this site and in anything else I write will center on the question “What have we done to the canceled?” But a complete understanding of the consequences of cancellation and what cancellation can teach us about the human experience requires asking “What have we done to ourselves?” Cancellation is so deeply human because it entangles so many interactions between the individual and the social.

Answering that question is also essential for getting normies to care about this phenomenon enough to approach these stories with an open mind, and perhaps even read, subscribe, upgrade their subscription to paid, and buy anything that I produce in the coming years.

I no longer think about assembling my sports industry Board of the Damned. There are the two recognitions I wrote at the beginning. But it’s also because my work and ambitions in the realm of cancellation have supplanted many of my goals and plans in sports business (kinda taken over my life, tbqh).

Funnily enough, though, I’m still cold-contacting and talking to many of the same people; and, many times, connecting them with each other.

Only instead of coming together as a board, they’re my sources and subjects. And, for each other, support.