Cancellation Station
Artwork is a portrait of C0n71nuum
Not every social punishment begins with a crime.
Some begin with an abstract performance, a falsity, an accumulation of impressions that gather force before anyone stops to ask the “offender” what is being proven. That is part of what makes digital condemnation so unnerving — the verdict often results from the complexity (and simplicity) of human nature.
What I staged on Instagram was not a publicity stunt in the conventional sense because publicity implies scale, and I do not have the kind of following that makes PR the operative category. It was something stranger and more revealing — a durational stress test, a digital prank, a black-box audit performed through collage, excess, and unreliable self-presentation. I have always had a flair for drama, for plot twists, for the theatrical charge of a reveal, but I also care deeply about exposing the truth, and that was the paradox of the whole exercise. By appearing unstable, I aimed to tell the truth about stigma but also about a platform that rewards premature judgment, zero of the necessary context, and the conversion of Debordian spectacle into outcome.
Social media researchers have a name for this mechanism. Alice Marwick has discussed that what looks like outrage often functions as morally motivated network harassment, in which an accusation of norm violation triggers the outrage, a hive mind reaction, and punishment, with the harassment serving to reinforce the group’s values rather than to establish the truth of the case. What I discovered is that Instagram is a stage upon which audiences assemble false narratives into prosecutions. A single mistake, a weird mood, a jarring image, a handful of suggestive details, and suddenly a person is no longer a person but a case. Marwick and Dana Boyd's work on “context collapse” helps explain why. On social platforms, multiple audiences become one unstable interpretive field, making it harder to manage said context the way people do IRL. In that condition, the nuance drops out, irony dissolves into evidence, and spectators begin treating the vibes as a reason for guilt.
What research in PNAS called “moral contagion” helps explain why cancellation online so often feels like social pre-conviction. Content charged with moral emotion spreads quickly through networks, which means a story does not need to be complete in order to travel. It only needs enough emotional force to become believable, repeatable, and socially useful to the crowd. Once that story hardens into what appears to be fact, people love to join in on the fun because participation itself becomes a way of belonging to the right moral public. The Atlantic described this soooo well — social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process, enabling collective punishment for small or imagined offenses while stripping away context, mercy, and truth. Anne Applebaum made a point in describing digital judgment as quick and without any consideration of how it may ruin someone’s life, especially when users fail to adapt to the volatile code of acceptability.
What made my experiment dangerous is that it worked. By depicting myself as unreliable and excessive, I made it easy for followers to project madness onto me, and that projection did not stay online. It bled into real life, into social shunning, into the actual emotional cost of being treated as suspect by people who mistook a constructed image for reality. That consequence matters, because the harms here are not theoretical. A 2023 review in Social Media + Society notes that online harassment is widespread and that roughly 40 to 50 percent of American users report having experienced harassment. The point is not that every instance of criticism is unjust, nor that public judgment is never warranted. It is that platformed judgment almost always exceeds evidence and invites people to confuse a reaction with a fact.
As someone with severe ADHD, I believe we need a little more madness in this mad world.
And so — cancellation on Instagram is a form of networked theater in which shallow evidence, algorithmic amplification, and crowd psychology combine to produce a collective decision before anything like genuine understanding has taken place, and it is dehumanizing to say the least. The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics warns that online shaming poses serious moral and political risks and can even undermine the very goals it claims to serve. My experiment entered that machinery from the inside. I constructed the conditions for my own mild cancellation, and the platform (along with the users on it) did what it had been trained to do.
I have come away with a clear point of view on how easily the digital public can make a mistake of their own, as well as a book.
