FOR THE MAJORITY of human history, people could do horrible things to harm others or express racist/homophobic/transphobic/sexist opinions and face no consequences whatsoever.
Seriously. They’d just get up and go to work like nothing ever happened, and in some cases, when they knew they had gotten away with it, they’d just go out and do something bad again without giving it a second thought.
In the last few years, things have changed quite a bit. Everybody has access to the internet now. Most people use social media, too. We share information with each other more now than ever before.
Perhaps if you heard about allegations against a pop-star or film director ten years ago, you might have brought it up in conversation with whoever was in the room with you at the time. Nowadays, we share the news with however many hundred or thousand people follow us on Twitter, and many of those people will pass the news on in the same way.
When a celebrity does something shitty now, not only are more people going to hear about it, but more people are going to be able to publicly discuss the ins and outs of their shitty act. There’s really no limit to how many people can join in the conversation.
You might think that this is bad news for celebrities, sportspeople, politicians or basically anybody in the public eye. “Somebody’s career could be destroyed in moments by people on the internet who were offended!”, we hear you scream. In 2019, we have still yet to see any celebrity who has not remained filthy rich and wildly successful after the internet declared they were cancelled.
That’s not to say that making the decision to stop listening to music, watching films, or reading books written by people who have done awful things is pointless. It does make a difference, however big or small that difference might be. In a lot of cases, people aren’t doing it in the hopes of making a difference. Sometimes you just can’t live with yourself while knowing that you’re supporting somebody who did something you really don’t agree with.
There’s no doubt that there are plenty of people out there who genuinely cut ties with filmmakers, directors, musicians and other types of artists when they do something inexcusable, but we’re wondering how strict everyone is about sticking to this.
