The idea of being “cancelled” scares the bejesus out of many who are famous. Why them? Because, truth be told, they are the ones who are invariably on the receiving end. No one, it seems, can be much bothered to cancel someone who’s never written a bestseller, never made the top of the music charts and who’s Twitter account only has 236 followers. Online mobs just aren’t interested in those guys.
Without going into the psychology of all that, I want to mention an intriguing aspect of cancel culture that I’ve not seen discussed before.
Say you’re famous and you get cancelled. Whether people continue to seek out your content, wherever they can, depends on how original your content is. If your pre-cancellation audience can’t get what you offer anywhere else, then they will do what it takes to stay in tune with you. If they can get it somewhere else, chances are they’ll drop you.
So, cancellation affects primarily those people whose content, or whose take, is not sufficiently unique. If all you are really doing is forwarding memes, or living off the back of something original you did years ago, then, yes, cancellation will likely be final.
As our culture becomes increasingly “meme-ified,” so cancel culture offers a way to decouple those who actually are only living off memes - for money or fame - and to preserve those who are truly original.
And… it will hopefully drive individuals to be more unique, to create new forms, to seek out new life, to boldly go where no….
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