Cancel Culture 2.0: Welcome to the Age of the Un-Person! By James Reed

Once upon a time, if a tyrant wanted you erased from history, he sent men with torches and swords. Your books went up in flames, your statues got toppled, and your name was chiselled out of the records. The Romans had a phrase for it: damnatio memoriae — the condemnation of memory. Orwell warned us in 1984 what that looks like in the modern age.

But Orwell didn't predict Silicon Valley.

Here we are, in 2025, and the Soviets' dusty propaganda tricks look downright primitive compared to what Big Tech can do with a line of code. They don't just burn your book; they pretend the book was never written. They don't just censor you; they "un-person" you!

Take political cartoonist Ted Rall. Not exactly a household name, but a guy with real credentials, syndicated nationally in the US, Pulitzer finalist, decades of work skewering the powerful. Try typing his name into certain AI systems, and suddenly you hit a digital wall. Nothing. No acknowledgment he exists. Not a ban, but a blank space, as if he never picked up a pen.

That's not cancel culture. That's algorithmic annihilation.

And here's the kicker: this isn't just about edgy cartoonists or troublemakers on Twitter. OpenAI and its cousins have contracts with the federal government. That means the same AI models that quietly erase inconvenient dissidents could be woven into the infrastructure of law enforcement, defence, even the bureaucracy that decides whether you get a mortgage or a passport.

Think about that: if the model decides you don't exist, do you exist? Not in the eyes of the state. Not in the digital ledger. Not in the algorithmic hive mind that increasingly substitutes for reality.

It's one thing to get kicked off X or Facebook. Annoying, sure, but survivable. It's another thing when the next-generation information filters, the ones the government itself starts depending on, simply omit you. Try proving you were at a rally. Try finding your own published work. Try convincing the system you're real when the system has already decided you're not.

We worry about Central Bank Digital Currencies flipping a switch and cutting off your money. Now we have to ask: what if they don't just cut off your funds? What if they cut off you?

De-personed. Digitally un-humaned. A ghost in the machine.

And yes, this isn't just political, it's spiritual. A society that grants itself the right to erase people is declaring itself god. We're made in the image of God, with intrinsic worth that can't be nullified by bureaucrats or programmers. Yet the technocrats of the new Tower of Babel are arrogating to themselves the power to decide who counts and who doesn't. That's not just censorship. That's blasphemy.

So, what do we do? The answer is not to plead for re-admittance into their gated platforms. The answer is to build elsewhere. Parallel economies, parallel media, parallel tools. Decentralised, local, untouchable by the priesthood of the algorithm.

Because here's the truth: they can only erase you if you play on their turf. Stop handing them the eraser.

Cancel culture was the warm-up. The main act is digital un-personing. And unless we start building alternatives right now, the ghosts in the machine are going to be us.

https://jeffdornik.substack.com/p/cancel-culture-is-evolving-into-digital