Cancel Culture and the Rights of the Accused

The logic of cancel culture – the kind where an ordinary individual is marked and subjected to targeted harassment that extends to anyone who stands by them and anyone who stands by them, in a bid to isolate, dominate and control that individual – shares a number of points with the logic of the carceral system. Both assume that punishment produces justice; that isolation is a good tool of punishment and thus justice; and that punishment does a number of useful things such as produce future compliance, prevent recidivism, discourage offences in the first place, and generally keep people safe. Both assume, also, that the world can be fairly neatly divided into good people and bad people, or at least innocent people and guilty people – neatly enough, in any case, to justify the systems of punishment that we construct for the bad people.