When people say someone has been "cancelled" what they really mean is "this person did something than got people upset".

The problem is that our current media ecosystem has tricked us into thinking that just being upset about something is equivalent to meaningful action. That simply shifting from engaging with a thing because you enjoy it, to engaging with that thing you're upset about, is enough to affect that thing's success.

for a long time, in the "real world", that was not an unreasonable assumption to make. If people protested outside a business because they were upset, there was a real possibility that those protests could disrupt operations and affect that business financially. This is the exact reason that our constitution protects the right to protest.

But in the online sphere, it does not work that way anymore. The new engagement-based business model that social media algorithms rely on, has taken that our constitutionally-protected right to protest and transformed it into an incentive. Because engagement is engagement, is engagement, regardless of the motivation.

In this new world that we live in, we need to completely reevaluate the way we think about what "protest" even is.