That’s the new and historically unprecedented part. That plus unlimited, instantly searchable memory of all past actions at all times.
“The ubiquity of smart phones means that everybody’s statements are permanently recorded—sometimes on video,” says Robby Soave, an editor at Reason and the author of Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump. “Every living person has done or said things they regret, that they would not like to revisit, and wish would just go aaway. But now, the evidence doesn’t just go away. It exists forever. Primarily, this is a problem for kids and teenagers, or people who used to be kids—i.e., everyone!—and are now being held accountable for unwise statements that should have remained in the past.”
I was going to make a joke that everyone should be canceled, because I kinda … do actually believe that … but the article did it for me!
As for how long this particular moment will last, who knows, but as Meghan Daum told me, “I hope cancel culture keeps expanding and more and more people get canceled, because then eventually everyone will get canceled and it will mean nothing and we’ll just have a reset. Cancel culture is inevitably a self-canceling proposition.”
And they’re right, too. Reset is coming, hence social turmoil of the likes we haven’t seen since the 1960s.
Videogame communities predicted the future here, for better or worse. We just weren’t paying attention.
