From the New York Times: My Year of Grief and Cancellation
If you were on Tumblr in the early 2010s, you may remember a blog called Your Fave Is Problematic. If not, its content should still sound familiar to you. The posts contained long lists of celebrities’ regrettable (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ethnophobic, ableist and so on) statements and actions — the stuff that gets people canceled these days.
That blog was my blog. I spent hours researching each post; as you can probably imagine, my search history was pretty ugly.
Your Fave Is Problematic had around 50,000 followers at its peak, in 2014, when I was a high school senior, but its influence was outsized. I got in a feud with a prominent young adult fiction author over his inclusion. One actor submitted himself, perhaps as a dare (or a plea) to dig up his worst. “Problematic fave” became a well-worn meme; even after I stopped posting, my blog was cited in books, articles, podcasts and think pieces. Through it all, my identity stayed private.
The blog started, as so many anonymous online projects do, as vengeful public shaming masquerading as social criticism. I was fine-tuning my moral compass and coming into my own as a feminist. So when I noticed classmates making sexist jokes on Facebook, including some about me, I started taking screenshots to post on a Tumblr called Calling Out Sexists. My policy was that I would take down a post only if its author publicly apologized.
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My brain wasn’t ready for nuance. I was angered by hypocrisy and cruelty; what I did about it was apply a level of scrutiny that left no room for error. I’m not saying that I should be canceled for my teenage blog. (Please don’t!) I just know what we all should know by now: that no one who has lived publicly, online or off, has a spotless record.
For these reasons, I’ve thought about deleting my Tumblr. But doing that would mean erasing my own errors of judgment. I almost feel like I need to leave it up to punish myself for having made it in the first place. That, and I know someone could (and probably would) just pull it up on Wayback Machine. The internet, after all, never forgets.
What surprised me about this is that I felt sorry about her at the end of it.
I didn’t expect that.Report
I feel like the internet would have been a lot better off if we’d established an 18+ rule and stuck to it.Report
“Erasing” isn’t the same as “Not presenting to the world”.
Blog started in March 2013 and it’s posts in March/April/May of 2013 are larger than the rest of the blog combined x10. So it was the work of a high school Junior, maybe 16.
She’s about 25 now and has found out the world is less black and white than she thought and realizes that her 16 year old self was an idiot.
That’s pretty common, she should move on.Report
Cancel culture in a nutshell:
Young people for whom nuance is still a foreign country getting righteously offended by something their elders did being put on blast by their elders for the click, the lolz, or signalling purposes.Report
This article is why I think Cancel Culture fears are overblown. The reason that teenagers currently triggering ten minute hates on sundry stuff aren’t being eyerolled and ignored is that the medium they’re doing it in is outside the olds’ experience. As soon as the current generation ages a bit the next generation that tries to do this on twitter will just get eyerolled at. Of course by then we’ll probably be sitting in our wheelchairs and discussing the looming threat of cancel culture that is wildly proliferating in holo-myspace-2050 or whatever.Report
Religious zealots are trying to cancel the Covid vaccine: https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/03/health/bishops-catholics-johnson-and-johnson-vaccine/index.htmlReport