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What's the worst thing about being cancelled?

Ditum, Sarah
http://unherd.com/2021/07/whats-the-worst-thing-about-being-cancelled/

Publisher:  Unherd
Date Written:  28/07/2021
Year Published:  2021  
Resource Type:  Article

It's impossible to talk about cancel culture without acknowledging how fiercely social humans are. As frightening as it is to experience threats of violence, as disturbing as it is to suffer abuse, what's truly dreadful is the feeling of being ostracised. There’s no "I" without a "we" to reflect it back to you. When the "I" in other people’s eyes is a gross, despicable caricature of who you think you are, that's an attack on your fundamental sense of yourself as human, broadcast on the inhuman scale of social media.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

It's impossible to talk about cancel culture without acknowledging how fiercely social humans are. As frightening as it is to experience threats of violence, as disturbing as it is to suffer abuse, what's truly dreadful is the feeling of being ostracised. There's no "I" without a "we" to reflect it back to you. When the "I" in other people's eyes is a gross, despicable caricature of who you think you are, that's an attack on your fundamental sense of yourself as human, broadcast on the inhuman scale of social media.
...
Of course, one of the things about cancellation is that the very fact of it happening to you means you've been marked as a person whose feelings are of no account. If you talk about it being painful, you're either being insincere (as one article argued, J. K. Rowling can't be cancelled while "still raking in millions a year") or you're experiencing a deserved punishment (as the same article argued, all the rape and death threats and the repudiation of her fandom were simply "the consequences of her actions"). There's no way to argue yourself back into other people's sympathy, because the reasoning is that unless you deserved it, you would never be in this situation.

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