Sort of. For most of human history we lived entirely in small communities where everyone knew us from when we were little and knew about every important event of our lives and judged us constantly. These communities created pecking orders and you could very well spend your entire life being socially punished for something you did as a kid. On top of that, because there were no cameras, social status was a substitute for truth, so the person who was being bullied was as likely (or more likely) to be the one who got punished for the bullying.
Those dynamics were different, but I don’t really believe this is the first time ordinary people have been subject to being “cancelled”. In fact, it’s happened over and over in many forms. Not the least of which is that we used to kill each other a lot more over social sleights.
That said, the idea that social media will allow everyone in the world to surveil and judge each other in a way previously only possible in small towns is, indeed, horrifying. I’m not a fan of small town dynamics.
