Constructing cancel culture: Strategic scaling in stories of “cancellation”

Abstract

Narratives about cancel culture are stories about problematic scaling—yet in telling these stories, cancel culture critics themselves engage in crucial forms of scaling. In this article, I analyze a selection of cancel culture narratives published in mainstream media outlets, focusing on how narrators define the here-and-now and project it into the future. I argue that in order to represent cancel culture as an “epidemic” of “ruining people’s lives over a single mistake,” these narratives must engage in strategic scaling processes that: (1) frame the event(s) prompting the cancellation as “a single mistake”; (2) frame the consequences as “ruining” someone’s “life”; and (3) frame the incident not an individual injustice but as a burgeoning cultural problem—an occurrence that is already too frequent and only becoming more so. This analysis demonstrates the central role that narrators’ scalar framings play in shaping the narrative’s moral and political implications.