We Are In A Post-Cancellation Era

(And It's Your Fault)

In the five years I've been creating content on TikTok, scrolling through thousands of comments and fielding questions from followers across the political spectrum, no single question has been posed to me more frequently, more urgently, or with more loaded expectation than this: "What do you think of cancel culture?"

Gen Z followers ask it with genuine confusion, trusting me to help them navigate a social landscape that seems to shift beneath their feet daily. Millennials ask it with battle-worn exhaustion, seeking validation for their own complicated relationship with the internet’s version of accountability. Older users ask it like a gotcha question, as if my answer will definitively place me in one ideological camp or another.

While I have my own convictions about cancel culture—that it began as a genuinely important mechanism for removing bad actors from positions of influence and addressing inexcusable behavior, before eventually spiraling into something far more destructive and indiscriminate—I've come to believe that debating its merits misses the larger point entirely. What's more telling is how the question itself has evolved over the years I've been on social media.

Where I once fielded endless variations of "What do you think about cancel culture?" I now find myself answering a fundamentally different question: "Why doesn't cancel culture work anymore?" The shift is subtle but significant—we've moved from debating whether cancellation is morally justified to collectively acknowledging that it's simply lost its power. People aren't asking me to defend or condemn the practice; they're asking me to explain why their outrage no longer translates into consequences, why the social mechanisms they once relied upon have seemingly broken down.

This evolution in questioning reveals that we've already moved beyond cancel culture into something else entirely: a post-cancellation world. And, if I spoke frankly, I’d say it’s your fault.

While there are structural reasons why cancel culture lost its potency—we no longer live in a monoculture where companies can dictate public taste, and moral consensus has fractured to the point where mobilizing collective outrage requires near-impossible coordination—I believe the more decisive factor has been the general public's repeated failure to handle high-profile cases competently. Each botched cancellation, each instance where the punishment wildly exceeded the crime, each moment where mob justice devolved into mindless cruelty, chipped away at the entire system's credibility and moral authority.

The public proved, again and again, that it couldn't be trusted with the power to destroy lives and careers. Cancel culture didn't die because it was objectively philosophically wrong or structurally impossible (though, again, contained many aspects I disagreed with)—it died because the public was bad at it, and everyone could tell. When your enforcement mechanism becomes indistinguishable from a lynch mob or witch-hunt, people stop taking your calls for justice seriously.

The most damning indictment of cancel culture's devolution is how many people traded actual justice for attention online. This shift from accountability to performance fundamentally corrupted the entire enterprise, turning what should have been a mechanism for addressing harm — as the police and court system are truly who have the power to deplatform someone — into a content creation opportunity.