The cancelation playbook for the years on either side of 2020 (the peak year for cancelations, given the overlaps of Black Lives Matter, COVID, and MeToo) distilled to: attach a moral panicky -ism or -phobia to the target, get the accusations into the media, and algorithms will take over from there. Mobs could attract the media’s attention through social media virality (which in itself is highly destructive), or organized statements or leaks to reporters.
Of course, many times the media itself would lead the way, and the mob would follow right along.
Once that happened, the target’s entire identity was annihilated. The top results for any Google or social media search for their name would be the articles lashing them for racism, sexism, toxic bullying, or whatever captured the day’s leading moral panic(s).
This reliance on third parties (major media, Google search, social media) left open a way back. The first step was owning the means of establishing their counter-narrative. In the early 2020s, a canceled person could invest the time and money into reclaiming the search results for their name by buying their-name-dot-com and building their online persona around that site. They would direct their social feeds to it, post content to it, build back links related to whatever new ventures they were tiptoeing into. It’s painstaking and expensive to overtake a newspaper of record or a buzzy site with high SEO ranking, but it was necessary and one of the few ways out.
Cancelers have caught on. The playbook now starts with a deliberate, strategic strike against someone’s online identity. Increasingly, this includes buying the domain of target’s-name-dot-com and posting “dossiers” and “evidence” against them. This immediately destroys their reputation by replacing the target’s actual life with the canceler’s narrative, while precluding them from having their “name domain” as a way back.
I wrote about this at The American Spectator:
As a matter of investigation, these dossiers may be airtight. But as the basis for punishment—or even just for making up your own mind—they are fatally incomplete.
A big part of the reason why prosecutors can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich is because the proceeding is entirely one-sided. These dossier-wielding vigilantes despise the fact that our judicial system is adversarial. The accused have a right to see in advance the evidence that will be used against them. They then have the opportunity to refute or impeach the other side’s case, as well as presenting their own case.
Half the story is only sufficient if you’ve already made up your mind and are reveling in your self-appointed role as judge-jury-executioner.
Last week, I described this domain-and-dossier approach to cancelation to someone who is equally familiar with the devastating harms of cancelation and with the systems and institutions of justice abjectly failing.. To my surprise, this person said (paraphrasing), “Interesting. I’m not fully against it,” and then gave me some situations where it could be justified and beneficial.
Long before I tripped into cancelation, I beat the drum for justice being a process, not an outcome. Our judicial systems are not perfect (see, e.g.: Simpson, Orenthal James), but they are remarkably solid. If nothing else, they are the best we’ve got. The alternatives, at least in our current state, are vigilantes and mobs.
When the system fails, there are a lot of options between “shrug and move on” and “vigilantes and mobs.” In that space are ways to reform the institutions and processes, explore new options, and—as always—try to reach individuals as individuals, and engage them as a way of changing the culture. Glenn Greenwald had a great monologue on this recently.
Many of the digital vigilantes that have my attention these days, though, are preempting the system. They are not even giving it a chance to work, let alone fail. They simply declare that it has failed, or will failed, and thereby assume the right to destroy the lives of people they don’t like. From The American Spectator:
Like any other vigilantes, they have declared the systems of justice defunct and beyond repair. They are not interested in reform or improvement. Instead, they are embracing their atavistic id outside, above, and against the law.
There is too much malice aforethought to chalk these efforts up to misguided virtue signalling. The identity annihilation, the lifelong harm to the accused individuals, are the point.
Researching and writing about the consequences of cancelation over the last three years, I often wonder if the average person knows what cancelation does to the target. That motivates a lot of my work, although I remain wary given the little wake-up call I got earlier this year:
Describing the trauma is a trap, because a good number of people will read it and say what my acquaintances [said]. Or, worse, they’ll say “Good!” and I’ll have inadvertently delivered cancel culture snuff. Moral panic porno.
I have no such questions about these vigilantes. They know the consequences of cancelation, and they practically get off on talking about what they do.
“When you look for a job, when you look for a spouse, when you look for a nanny, when you look for anything, our work will always be documented.”
“When I think about that and I hear that, I don’t give a shit how old that kid is. You’re going to learn that lesson the hard way… In some instances like with a 16-year-old, I am judge, jury, and executioner for this person, because I know they’re guilty because I have reviewed that evidence.”
I hope to write more in the coming weeks on this dossier-and-domain phenomenon, where it fits in with social punishments and public punishments (not always the same thing), our cratering understanding of and appreciation for individual rights and dignity, how it follows from trends in the content and attention economy, and how it seems that no matter what the offense, there is only one punishment: cancelation.
If you have any thoughts, leave them in the comments as I continue to try to make sense of all this. If you’d like some more thoughts along the way, read Domains and Dossiers Are the New Weapons of Cancelation at The American Spectator and listen to Greenwald’s monologue.