So-called “Cancel culture” could be thought of as a modern-day form of bloodyless scapegoating—a scapegoating mechanism which, having lost its power because it has been exposed by Christian revelation, is a victim-making machine. No sooner than one person get cancelled and hashtags start trending on social media then another scapegoat is sought. Cancelled victims only have the power to unite people for a day, and in some cases only a few hours.
Cancel culture is the equivalent of a modern day social stoning.
Cancel culture is addressed in a hilarious set of cartoons here, in the blog Mimicking Machines: Mirror Neurons & Mimetic Theory
And from Alex Danco’s blog post on mimetic theory:
Coming back to the online world, we seem to be iterating through progressive cycles of a modern sort of anger: “outrage culture”, “cancel culture”, or whatever you want to call it, which has some recognizable characteristics of scapegoating that we talked about earlier. Our instinct to blame is strong, and we target that blame into specific people or groups of people as a way to protect our own community. It’s especially strong when that blame is justifiable to everybody in your peer set, and singling out a particular person as being worthy of outrage can provoke a definitive wave of pile-on mimicry among your group. They, after all, have just seen you successfully earn praise for casting blame on someone, so the instinct is strong to join in. The internet lets this mimetic behaviour scale far faster and far broader than ever could before. People get “cancelled”; modern-day sacrifice, basically.