So You're Being Cancelled

How to Survive a Dogpile

“Cancel culture” is a virtually meaningless phrase at this point. Mostly it is bullshit, but sometimes it is not. Cancellation is absolutely a real thing. It happens often. It's ugly, and awful, and shredding.

By cancellation, I don't mean suffering negative repercussions for being an asshole. I’m talking about a thing that happens with stunning regularity in leftist circles where the majority of people in your community decide you are a bad person who should not exist in public. Once they have reaches this decision, they attack you, relentlessly, no matter what you say, with the goal of driving you out of public life entirely. No internet presence. No showing up in person. They want you to disappear.

This kind of attack has happened to me, and, in a life that has included plenty of bad things it is still one of the most horrific things I’ve ever been through. There is simply no way to explain it to someone who hasn’t gone through it. Everyone who isn’t attacking you is telling you that you’re being a giant baby. It’s an impossibly lonely situation.

You are not being a giant baby. You are an animal that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to survive by forming social groups. Now you are being driven out of your social group, which your brainstem know means death. You are also discovering that people cannot be trusted—people you thought were going to be your friends forever, people you’ve personally helped, people you admire. You are what no human being can bear to be for long: alone and helpless.

But you aren’t actually alone, and you aren’t helpless either. There are things that you can do to minimize the damage and the pain. I learned these things the hard way. I now bequeath them unto you.

I’ve wanted to write a How To Survive Cancellation guide for a while. There’s no particular reason for me to do it now—with social media crumbling before our eyes it makes less sense than ever. I’m just doing it because I want to, and because I should be working on other things that I don’t want to do at all.

This guide assumes that you are being cancelled for something where the punishment emphatically does not fit the crime: a dumb mistake, or something you phrased poorly, or someone twisting your words, or maybe an accusation with no basis in reality whatsoever. If you’re Colleen Bollinger, this guide is not for you. It’s for people who are getting run out of town for something that makes no sense.

1. Do Not Apologize

As the cancellation gets underway, the first thing people are going to do is demand an apology. Your enemies will say that the reason they’re so upset is that you haven’t apologized, haven’t made amends, haven’t shown that you want to do better.

This is, unambiguously, a lie.

If you are being dogpiled, I mean really dogpiled by hundreds of people, there is no apology that will assuage them. Whatever you say, it won’t be enough. Whatever you do, it won’t be enough. Your apology will not be accepted. What you have actually done by apologizing is admit that you deserve to be punished, and people who might otherwise be sympathetic will see your apology and figure that if even you think you’re a piece of shit, you probably are one. Your enemies are sharks who frenzy at the faintest smell of blood, and apologizing in that situation chums the water.

It is possible that your friends will ask you—even beg you—to apologize. It’s very hard to risk a friendship when you’re already losing so many people you trust, but do not listen to them. If they’re suggesting apologies that means they’ve never been cancelled and have no idea what you’re going through. I do. Say no.

2. DO NOT APOLOGIZE

Really can’t emphasize this enough. Don’t care if you wish you’d done something a little different. Don’t care if you agree with part of what they’re saying. Doesn’t matter. Don’t.

You're welcome.

3. Lock Down Your Circle

You’re going to have a ton of feelings and almost every step of this guide involves not expressing those feelings to the public. You are going to need to express those feelings somewhere, though, and you are going to need people around you to remind you that not every single person on earth hates you and thinks your soul is bad. So you are going to assemble your team. Your circle. Friends that you can trust.

This may be hard. You are probably hemmorhaging friends right now. Look to offline friends. Family. Online friends that you’ve known for a very long time, ideally years, whose lives are not inextricably intertwined with the community that's coming for you and are sticking with you through this storm. Sit down and really think about who you can trust. Make a list.

This would also be a great time to get a therapist if you can afford one and don’t have one already.

As I said earlier, unless your friends have been through actual full-scale cancellation (and CLING TO THOSE PEOPLE IF YOU HAVE THEM), they will not fully understand what you are going through. That’s OK. What matters is that they love you and they think all of this is very silly. Hang out with them. Do activities with them. Have long phone conversations about whatever, anything at all. This is how you remind yourself, every day, that the ostracism is an illusion. This is how you tell yourself you’re good.

(On the subject of support: a commenter reminded me of something important. Your haters are loud. Your supporters will tend to be quiet. Not everyone is falling for the bullshit, and many don’t want to get involved at all)

4. Never Surrender

One of the things that separates a cancellation from a normal Internet fight is that your community has decided that you, as a person, are bad. Not that you did a bad thing, or that you’re wrong about something, but that your very soul is rotten and cannot be redeemed. Whatever you said or did to kick off this cancellation—or whatever someone accused you of—is more than a mistake to them; it’s a sign of your secret sin.

Most of us carry around a lot of self-hatred. Perhaps, like me, you fight every day against dark and poisonous whispers that agree with your attackers about the state of your soul. If you’re lucky enough not to feel this way, odds are you’ve still done something you’re ashamed of. You have personality traits you wish you didn’t. Habits you wish you could break.

As these people attack you, you are going to start to feel like you deserve it (and we’ll talk about that more later). This is especially true if your cancellation involves some aspect of yourself that you are ashamed of, which they often do. The urge to give in becomes stronger and stronger: to accept your punishment, to simply melt away.

Do not melt away. Your disappearance is their vindication. It reads as an admission of guilt. Any support you might have had will evaporate and a return to social media will become nearly impossible. Why should anyone fight for you if you won’t fight for yourself?

You’re not going to go out like that. You’re going to fight this, and you’re going to do it smart.

By all means take breaks from online when you need them. When you do, though, announce that you are taking one and announce when you’ll be back. Make it clear that you are the person who decides where you go and where you stay. You, and no one else.

5. Post One (1) Explanation

As you are quickly finding out, truth doesn’t really matter anymore. You can explain the real story until you’re blue in the face to your new army of committed haters and it will do you no good.

But you do want an explanation out there, for people who are genuinely curious, and because writing an explanation will help you regain a modicum of control of the narrative. So write one, and put it on the Internet.

The length of your explanation will depend on what you’ve been accused of. Because I was accused of secret fascism stemming all the way back into a secret fascist childhood, I ended up writing an entire biographical article (which I’ve since expanded into the present day). Your explanation might be much shorter. Make it as long as it needs to be.

I'm a writer, so I had a ready-made platform: my website and, later, this substack. If you don't have a platform, no worries: it is free to make a Medium account and free to post. Takes like 5 minutes to set up. This can be the only thing you ever publish on there.

A good explanation will not directly reference the cancellation itself—you don’t want to bring more attention to the accusations against you.

You’ll notice in the biography I linked to above that I never talk about being accused of being a fascist. I simply explain the nature of my research, why I think it’s good actually, and clearly express the things that I believe in. If you didn’t know the backstory, you’d have no idea the bio started out as a defense against baseless accusations of far-right tendencies.

Once you have completed this one (1) very thorough explanation, you will never explain yourself again. When someone asks about what happened, you will link to that explanation and refuse to talk about it further. Congratulations. You’re done writing about this nonsense and can refuse to give the jackals the reaction they want. Drop the link to your explanation when the issue comes up, and then…

6. Block Block Block Block Block

You are going to make the Great Wall look like a picket fence.

Anyone in your replies even obliquely referencing whatever it is you supposedly did gets blocked. Not only do people who post lies about you get blocked, everyone who liked posts with lies gets blocked. Nothing about this situation is funny, so riffs where you’re the punchline get blocked too. If the question “should I block them?” pops into your head at all, the answer is yes.

(Yes, Musk has threatened to do away with blocks. If he goes through with it the site will become unusable and you can throw it in the trash and walk away. Meanwhile, it's still here, and the block button still works)

You are not going to hear anyone out. You are not going to try to convince them. You are not going to let the jackals attempt to gain converts in your own replies, which is why you're not gonna settle for a mute. Smash that block button and imagine them dissolving like Spiderman in that one Marvel movie where Thanos cancels half the universe or something.

You’re not going to associate with these people in real life either. You are not going to go to parties where those people are. You’re going to be that asshole that makes your friends choose. Do not put yourself into a situation where you’ll get sad or reactive, because it’s very important to…

7. Never Let Them See You Sweat

As people you used to trust turn on you, you will have this delusion that if they knew how much they were hurting you, they wouldn't hurt you anymore. If you could somehow explain how much their thoughtless pig-ignorant condemnations are making you suffer, surely they would stop. This is your community. Would your community hurt you like this if they knew?

Yes, they would. In fact, they would hurt you more.

You are never going to let them see you sweat for the same reason you are never going to apologize: because it shows these jackals that they’re getting to you. A lot of the reason people participate in cancellations is because they can’t attack any of the people who are actually hurting them. They are helpless against their landlords, climate change, rising inequality, the gig economy, etc. Your haters are desperately trying to feel like they have control over something—anything at all—just to feel like it matters that they’re alive.

If you tell them they are hurting you, you are telling them that they control the way you feel. Their stupid little posts had some kind of effect on the world, they have power after all! Having the power to hurt someone is a great feeling, especially if you’ve convinced yourself that the person you’re hurting is Bad, and telling the people dogpiling you that they are hurting you is like pouring gasoline onto a fire.

Tell your friends about it. Write about it if you keep a journal. Go for a long run or whatever you do to blow off steam. Scream and cry in your room. Do anything—literally anything—other than post about it.

Here’s what I did after 6 months of being vocally miserable online and finding my enemies becoming more vicious and not less whenever I begged for mercy: every time I found myself in despair and wanting to write about the pain of it, I did the opposite. I took a picture of myself smiling and posted about how wonderful my life was. How grateful I was for everything in it. How I couldn’t believe how many friends I had.

This is the part where I’m supposed to say “and writing that I was happy made me believe it,” but lol lmao not even a little. I had, however, discovered that my happiness drives the jackals crazy, and that’s what I wanted more than anything back then: the power to hurt them back. I imagined my smile like a knife in every single hateful eye. I imagined my happiness—and their powerlessness—keeping them up at night. Survival is what matters. Do what works for you.

8. It’s Not Your Fault

Years ago I read this terrific thing in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (I think) which I am far too lazy to look up but which changed my life forever. Sometimes, bad things happen for reasons totally beyond your control. When that happens, you have two choices. You can accept that this world is a chaotic and unjust place that sometimes knocks you flat for absolutely no reason, or you can convince yourself that you somehow deserve it. You’d think that second thing would be worse, right? Wrong! If you can make yourself believe that you brought this cancellation upon yourself, that means the community you trusted isn’t rotten and shitty, that the people who betrayed you aren’t sadists or vaccilating cowards, that this whole thing makes sense somehow.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news: your cancellation makes no sense. The universe sucks and there’s nothing you can do about it but live as best you can. Sorry.

There is a third option, which Nietzsche would not approve of, which—hear me out, we’re talking survival here—is to believe that God made this happen because you weren’t supposed to be part of that community, because it was holding you back, because you learned all you could from being part of it. Then, you keep an eye out for whatever better thing God wanted for you.

This strategy works pretty well whether you believe in God or not. If you’re going to delude yourself, why not tell yourself the lie that helps you heal instead of the one that’s the equivalent of cutting yourself in the bathroom to feel better?

9. Your Life Isn’t Over

There’s no sense sugarcoating things: your life is going to be harder now. There are places on the Internet, and possibly in the real world, where you are no longer welcome and can no longer go. Wherever you go, the lies will follow. Every time someone praises me on the Internet, some random account I’ve never heard of shows up to inform that person that I am in fact a secret fascist who helped organize Patriot Prayer or whatever (I’m not and I didn’t).

But there are many other communities out there. Eventually, you’ll find one.

It might take awhile to find your new social home. But the world, both online and off, is really big. If you have the ability to physically relocate, I recommend it. Either way, the odds are good that you’ll find some other place to be. And maybe, someday, you’ll find yourself sitting in an antifascist bookstore because a friend invited you to his book reading and you were really nervous to go but you went anyway and no one recognized you so it was fine and one of the people who contributed an essay to the book will say “Antifascists should have been on the ground on January 6th, if antifascists had been on the ground J6 never would have happened” as though J6 wasn’t the best thing that could possibly have happened for opponents of Trump, and you will look around in disbelief but no one else will seem to find this statement the least bit batshit insane, and in that moment you will feel an intense wave of gratitude wash over you that this community is no longer your community, that you have moved on to bigger, better things. And on that day, you will finally know peace.

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