Just Internet Things: Ur Canceled
Or, how do we navigate a world where the court of public opinion is basically higher than SCOTUS?
Welcome to the first installment of Just Internet Things where I, a card-carrying member of the “chronically online” community, talk exclusively about things happening online.
Calling myself chronically online is a bit of a lol, but there’s also quite a bit of truth to it. More than one person has called me the “Very Online Girl.” My old boss used to tap me for things because, and I quote, “You always just know what’s going on out there.” I eat up influencer discourse with the same level of interest as that of “are Jennifer and Ben actually divorcing or is it just a distraction from her disastrous tour.”
All of that to say, maybe I am chronically online.
But aside from those who are proudly Luddite-esque like my Libertarian father, who amongst us is not? The internet, for better or worse, pulses through us all to at least some extent. Even from behind the walls a private account, any post on social media is for at least an iota of attention. No one is totally immune to the now 24/7-always-on-never-off news cycle—even if you have an Android.
So entering into the chat is: Just Internet Things. A sporadic edition to this Substack specifically talking about things online, things in the digital sphere, and things pertaining to my never-ending fixation on the ways in which we consume media today.
Without further ado, let’s jump into Our First Internet Thing. Please don’t cancel me over it. (Get it? You get it. Ok.)
What does it mean to be canceled?
Is it the influencer with undeleted and unsavory tweets from their high school days? Is it the YouTuber who fails to delete the footage of them lashing out at their dog? Is it the activist and personality who might not be as nice as you once assumed? Is it Monica Lewinsky? JK Rowling? Is it Chrissy Teigen? Alison Roman by way of Chrissy Teigen? Emma Stone in Easy A? Hester Prynne? The girls in The Crucible? The actual women from the Salem Witch Trials? The UK when the US declared war? King George III? Is it Julius Caesar? Socrates? Jesus himself? Going back to the (some would say) definitional beginning, was patient zero for cancelation Eve?
The point I’m trying to make here is the concept of cancelation and cancel culture has been around as long as the masses have been able to mobilize together with the goal to publicly shame. We’ve just come up with a more alliterative title for it these days.
With well over a decade of experience personally and professionally putting myself out there on the world wide web, the concept of internet hate and an impending cancelation is a concept that is almost always somewhere in my mind. Whether being on the receiving end of a wave courtesy of an internet mob myself or watching jilted lovers go head to head with a “they said/he said/she said” on TikTok, it’s hard to not think about. Cancelations are about as common these days as calling an Uber. And frankly even Uber’s been canceled.
The latest chapter in the ongoing concept of cancel culture that caused me to have a case of car accident syndrome was watching everything that unfolded on TikTok with influencer Lily Chapman and her snark subreddit.
Because I am who I am (aka: a self-prescribed internet encyclopedia) let me give you a brief run down on both who Lily is and what snarking is before we get into the canceled round table.
Author’s Note: Bear with me—these internet breakdowns are going to be anything but concise but I promise they will be good.
Lily Chapman, formerly known as the handle ebcjpg, is a Colorado-based TikToker who grew to popularity sharing thrift-flips, travel diaries, dating stories, and just general lifestyle content on the app. She’s known for being particularly candid and blunt, for having a unique sense of style, for her “authenticity” (which I put in quotes not to dog on her, but because what does that even mean these days?), and most recently for now sharing her pregnancy with her finacé Scott Sinclair. Cross-platform, Lily has over 1 million followers.
To put it at its most simplistic definition, snarking is the act of talking (probably anonymously) shit about people online. I’m not going to placate the idea of snark by calling it criticism. I think there can be genuine criticism woven within snark (more on that later)—but the notion of snark is really a simple formula:
You dislike someone + You seek out other people who dislike them = You get together online to talk about your dislike for them
As I put in my own TikTok a few weeks ago, the concept of snarking is nothing new whatsoever. Since the inception of the internet if you’re going to post on it, someone will be out there to try and make you hate yourself for whatever that post happened to be. Before r/blogsnark there was GOMI which was predominantly dedicated to ragging on mommy bloggers like Kelle Hampton and the late Dooce. YouTubers and OG influencers were dissected to pieces on forums like Lipstick Alley and Guru Gossip. More mainstream places like Go Fug Yourself and the og Internet Satan Perez Hilton made it their mission to say truly whatever they wanted about celebrities in the 2000s and 2010s. And my own personal hell were third-party commenting platforms like Disqus which websites like the one I worked at installed to make anonymous trolling possible on things posted literally for your job.
Truly these influencers would not last an hour in the Disqus comment threads that raised me.
All of this to say, the concept of anonymously hating on people online is far from new. Really! Hating on people is nothing new! See: Voltaire vs. Shakespeare. Honestly, I bet hieroglyphics had hate comments. I would love to see them.
But I digress.
Snark subreddits just happen to be the latest and greatest place in which to unleash that vitriol.
Most snark communities position themselves as existing in the interest of having found out a creator is problematic and wanting to hold them accountable. Their stance is usually that said influencer, notable persona, family, or whatever has done something or things that are awful and therefore that makes them an awful person who deserves to have a traceable account of said awful actions. Sometimes people will simply admit that they find someone annoying, cringe, or just dumb, but more often than not it comes from some sort of position of hypothetical justice based on the subject’s own supposed actions.
In the case of self-proclaimed original influencer Caroline Calloway, her snark subreddit r/smolbeansnark really took off when Calloway hosted a series of “creativity workshops” back in late 2018/early 2019. The workshops were deemed to be a scam, a grift, and the internet went absolutely wild. Calloway didn’t particularly help the issue when she made t-shirts calling out the original journalist who wrote about the scandal by name and kept the proceeds. Her subreddit was further fueled by her former best-friend Natalie Beach who penned the now absolutely infamous essay “I Was Caroline Calloway” for The Cut calling out Calloway’s drug use, her buying of followers, and the claims that the captions that catapulted her to original influencer fame she hadn’t actually written at all: Natalie Beach had. When Calloway was sued by her former landlord for owing over $40,000 in rent in early 2022, her subreddit was vindicated yet again in their obsessional level of disdain over her.
This digression into A Brief History of Caroline Calloway™ (a personal favorite train wreck of mine) is not an unintentional tangent. It’s to show that these snarking communities genuinely feel like they have hard evidence to support their inclinations that someone is terrible, and that that someone should be “held accountable.” Maybe to simply admit that it’s kind of fucked up to use someone’s name to sell a t-shirt, or maybe to admit you should have to pay the rent you should have been paying during COVID the entire time.
I do not point this out to take the position of Team Snark. I think if you find a good chunk of your socialization in going onto a community dedicated to talking shit about someone you’ve swung much too hard in the opposite direction of fandom on the parasocial relationship pendulum. But I point it out to demonstrate that when people feel like someone is wrong and there are a lot of other individuals siding with them on the side that is “right,” it can be absolutely so easy to get sucked down the drain of aligning yourself (even anonymously) to this proverbial “right-ness.” And sometimes, they have a fucking point.
So let’s get back to Lily Chapman.
Back at beginning of June, Chapman began a multi-part series in which she talked in depth about her snark subreddit in part to show the dark underbelly of snarking but also to debunk the many claims those subreddit members and mods had made about her. Some of the claims Chapman made were that her subreddit mods allowed her IRL stalker to be active in their threads (which should have been a violation of the rules), they deliberately misrepresented her in order to call her racist, and that they allowed an ex-fling of her fiancé’s to spread blatant lies about him in the subreddit as well. The over 20+ video series garnered over 9.8 million views, well over a five figure follower increase to Chapman’s account, and started a larger conversation about influencers and the notion of snarking on TikTok overall.
If the three things that Chapman pointed out are worth noting, I think it’s also worth presenting to the table a handful of the other things that her snarkers wanted her held accountable for, being the following:
Posting an entire series berating an unhoused man for finding her purse in a bar and using her credit card (discussed in her series)
Allowing her following to use racist attacks against a BIPOC creator with a much smaller following than her own (sort of discussed in her series)
Not researching countries which she was traveling to and behaving arguably racist in said countries (very briefly discussed in her series)
Liking comments that encourage(d) dogpiling and/or violence against people who disagree with her (very briefly discussed in her series)
Aligning with people (ie: people she’s called her best friends) who have racist histories themselves (not touched on at all in her series)
Encouraging dogpiling and bullying within her “Cancel Me” series despite the point of the series being discussing the harms of dogpiling and bullying (not touched on at all in her series)
Just to name a few.
Now! I don’t point any of this out to position myself as Team Lily/Team Influencer. While I do believe to my core that literally all of us are fallible and we all have mistakes we’ve made in the past and will continue to make as human beings, I do think if you have done things that warrant multiple strangers wanting to hold you accountable or even wanting to actively dislike you, that’s somewhat worth diving into. Even if the mob of racists coming to speak on your behalf wasn’t in the thousands (like Lily claims) and it’s just 5, or 4, or 2, or 1, I think that’s pretty fucking abhorrent. I think heavily featuring someone with intensely problematic views multiple times on your social media should be examined. I think liking comments that say you want someone curb-stomped is shady at best and deeply antithetical to your anti-bullying point at worst.
But it all bears to question, was Lily Chapman actually canceled?
I think we have an unequivocal answer: No.
And really…has anyone ever been?
Whenever I ask my friends to name someone who has been canceled successfully they almost almost list people who fall in to two categories:
Men
andPeople who have committed a crime and/or actively harmed someone
Maybe it’s just me but I don’t consider committing a crime and being convicted or hurting someone deliberately and people rightfully disavowing you for that choice being “canceled.” Harvey Weinstein wasn’t canceled. Chris Brown wasn’t canceled. Louis CK wasn’t canceled. Marilyn Manson wasn’t canceled. Shia LaBeouf, Kevin Spacey, Armie Hammer, James Franco, Shane Dawson, James Charles, and so on and so forth. They weren’t canceled. They did horrible, disgusting, and often illegal things and were rightfully held responsible for them. To call that “canceling” is, in my opinion, to even subconsciously downplay the behaviors that landed them there in the first place. And frankly it’s a game I simply will not play.
So then that bears the question, does cancel culture even exist?
I don’t think that the answer is as simple as a yes or a no. I think it ultimately lands in a…kind of sort of space.
If we examine the case of Lily Chapman vs. The Snarkers, it’s easy to see how both sides both have points and miss them in the same breath. Lily feels like they canceled her simply for having a generationally wealthy fiancé (his father is the CEO of Sprouts) and the claim that she “cosplayed as poor” while going on a $10k+ engagement trip. Her Snarkers would argue that deliberately hiding one’s affluence is lying by omission to come across as disingenuously more relatable. Lily says that her snark subreddit regularly violated its own rules by allowing her stalkers to be a part of it and also encouraging talking shit on her unborn child. Her Snarkers would say something akin to, “Hazard of the internet.” Lily says she can’t be held accountable for the actions of 800k+ people in the case of people berating others on her behalf, her Snarkers say the same regarding their subreddit of 4k+. Lily says this, they say that. Lily does this, they interpret that. Lily feels this, they counter that. Lily, them. Lily, them. Lily, them. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Another case of the “they said/he said/she said” that will likely never be fully resolved.
If there was one image to represent the idea of the internet as a whole, I think it would have to be Ouroboros: the snake with its own tail in its mouth that continues to devour itself and be reborn over and over and over again. The internet giveth and the internet taketh away. Trends only last for 72 hours only to resurface again 6 months later. One influencer gets canceled only for the internet to move on to the next person they want to line up to the metaphorical guillotine a mere week later.
And so on, and so forth.
If I think critically about canceling, and the art of it, what I think it really boils down to is deciphering our perception and our own criticism of the court of public opinion. The frequency to which it moves, the speed that it drives at, the level of detail it is willing to decipher. I think it’s being critical of the way we’re so eager to tar and feather people for being, to use my own parlance, fallible while also not allotting them the space to grow without a death glare level of scrutiny on whether or not they’re growing the right way.
As Jon Ronson put in his book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (which sidebar, I think should be required reading in order to have an internet connection):
“We have to think about what level of mercilessness we feel comfortable with.”
I think if we’re driving an 8-month pregnant 25-year-old to make a 20+ video series to defend herself and her family against a snark subreddit, we have more than a few things to evaluate within our allegorical court system.
Do I think Lily Chapman was 100% right? I do not. Do I think that means she deserved being driven into a spiral by a subreddit? I do not. Do I think both of those things should be able to coexist critically and thoughtfully and, dare I say, harmoniously? I do.
I think at the end of the day, anyone who is actively rooting for the idea of cancel culture to take off has absolutely lost the goddamn plot. I may not fully believe in its existence, but that doesn’t mean I hope someday it emerges from the forest like Bigfoot to prove me wrong. I do think that by participating in risk-assuming behaviors (like being online) there is some level of responsibility in assuming said risk, but I don’t think you should resign yourself to being completely demoralized or beaten down by it.
Something I think I’ll be continually fascinated by is how the internet will shift our morals and beliefs and behaviors. (See: The entire purpose of this Substack edition.) There’s absolutely no version of reality in which we currently understand the ramifications of putting ourselves out there for this level of immediate consumption and criticism and simaltaneously no version where we know how consuming everything at this extreme speed has impacted us.
I think, at the end of the day, all we can hope for is to retain our humanity through it all.
Lest we just eat ourselves repeatedly within the very short window of entertainment for others before they forget they ever saw us in the first place at all.