In Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, nineteen people were hanged and one was pressed to death under the weight of stones. The evidence against them was spectral — visions, dreams, the testimony of accusers who claimed to have seen their tormentors in spiritual form. The village believed the accusers. The accused had no meaningful recourse. The community’s moral panic became lethal.
Three hundred and thirty years later, the mechanism is identical. Only the platform has changed.
The Structure of a Witch Trial
What made Salem a witch trial — and what makes any moral panic a witch trial — is not the existence of accusation. It is the structure of the proceeding.
In a witch trial:
- Accusation is treated as evidence
- The accused cannot effectively defend themselves without amplifying the charge
- Community belonging is contingent on affirming the panic
- The stakes of non-participation (being accused yourself) exceed the stakes of participation
- The process ends only when the community exhausts itself, not when justice is served
Every element of this structure is present in contemporary cancel culture. The form has been preserved perfectly. Only the names have changed.
The Acceleration Problem
What social media has done is not invent the witch trial. Moral panics are as old as human community. What it has done is eliminate the time delay between accusation and consequence.
In Salem, the machinery of community judgment moved at the pace of a village: weeks of rumour, testimony, and deliberation before action. Today, the distance between a tweet and the destruction of a career, a relationship, a life, is measured in hours. The mob forms at a speed that makes rational assessment impossible. By the time evidence can be gathered, context assembled, nuance articulated, the verdict has already been rendered and the sentence is being executed.
The speed is not incidental. It is the mechanism. The mob derives its power from the fact that it moves faster than any individual can defend themselves.
What Cancel Culture Shares With Censorship
For anyone who has made work that platforms have censored, removed, or defunded, the structure of cancel culture is recognisable. The same logic that allows a payment processor to remove an artist’s income without warning, appeal, or explanation — because a policy category has been triggered — is the logic of the online mob.
Both operate on the assumption that the existence of the content is itself evidence of harm. Both remove the possibility of context. Both produce outcomes that are irreversible by design.
The 215 OBSCENE EXPOSURE, 172 I FUCK DA POLICE, and 126 BURN IT ALL FUCKING DOWN — each of these films, in different ways, is about exactly this: what happens when the moral architecture of your community turns against you, and the tools of defence are taken away before you can use them.
The Way Out
The way out of a witch trial is not to argue within its terms. You cannot prove you are not a witch to people who believe in witches and have already decided you are one. The only exit is refusal: refusal to accept the terms, refusal to confess, refusal to perform contrition for the benefit of people who will not be satisfied by contrition anyway.
It is expensive. Salem made that clear. But the alternative — full capitulation to an accusation structure that has no legitimate endpoint — is worse.
The Future Sex Love Art Projekt is, among other things, a fifteen-year document of what it looks like to refuse. To keep making the work. To not apologise for existing.
That’s still the only strategy that makes sense.
Missy Jubilee is developing Cancelled: The Human Stories Behind the Headlines — a documentary series examining cancel culture through the stories of people who lived it. Learn more at missyjubilee.com.