so what
i am the villain in a netflix documentary. a minor one. one clip. i have been told by people who watch a lot of television that this is the hardest kind to live down, because nobody remembers the plot but everybody remembers the guy.
here is the plot.
the island
april 27, 2017. great exuma, bahamas.in the spring of 2017 a friend sent me an advertisement for a music festival on a private island in the bahamas, and the advertisement was so beautiful, so full of white sand and people who looked like they had never been tired, that i did the thing the advertisement was for. i bought a ticket. six of my friends bought tickets. i was twenty-three, an age at which a man will still believe a video.
i packed a dslr, a gopro, a drone, and a solar charger the size of a paperback, because i had decided, somewhere between the advertisement and the airport, that i was going to make something out of this. i was, it turned out, the only person on the island who had.
the island had no festival on it. it had a gravel lot, a row of disaster-relief tents, a plate of cheese that would later become famous, and several thousand people who had been told the same thing i had. we were told housing was a free-for-all. i had ten thousand dollars of glass in a backpack and nowhere to lock it.
so we took the tents on the edge. and then, because the edge is only safe if nobody wants to be next to you, we made the tents beside ours look like something had already happened to them. we flipped the mattresses. we put holes in things. a friend of mine, in a spirit i will not defend, pissed on a bed. i slid the camera bodies under a mattress and lay down on top of them and thought: this is the most expensive pillow i will ever own.
there was one injury on the island that i know of. a friend stepped on a sea urchin. i cleaned it and got the spines out and wrapped it, and then a local man with a pickup truck let us put him in the bed of it, and i rode back there with him, holding the foot up, over gravel, to the island's emergency room, which was a room.
that part is not in the film.
the film
january 18, 2019. netflix.twenty-one months later a message arrived from the instagram account that had promoted the festival in the first place, which is a sentence i have read back several times. they were making a documentary. they had heard about the drone. they wanted the footage.
they offered a number that was an insult. i said no. i said: give me a producer credit and let me stand in the room while you cut it, because i want to learn how this is done. they said yes. the credit, when it finally appeared, was on a different program entirely. bait, then switch. i have kept the page anyway. there was a release. it was read to me the way the terms are read to you at a car rental. i signed it feeling safe, which is what the tone was for.
i talked for two hours. i was encouraged, gently, to make it bigger than it was. i did, a little. the greeks had a word for the small error that the whole tragedy turns on: hamartia, an archer's word, a missed mark. mine was a few inches of embellishment for a producer who was nodding. i am not going to pretend the man on the tape wasn't me. he was me, aiming slightly off, for an audience of one.
they used one clip. the clip is a young man laughing about ransacking tents.
what it is
thaddeus. colorado college, 2015. six words.my friend thaddeus, who was suspended from college for a six-word joke and has thought about this longer than i have, wrote the only guide i've read that tells the truth about what happens next. (how to survive cancellation.) i am going to borrow his bones and put my own meat on them.
a cancellation is a trial where the verdict was typed before the charges.
everyone involved knows this. that is what makes it a ritual instead of a mistake.
thaddeus compares it to the show trials, the ones where the prisoner stood up and confessed to things the prosecutor had written for him the night before, and everyone in the room knew, and the confession was read anyway, because the confession was the point. there is no evidence phase. there is no defense. there is a kangaroo court, which is a court that has already left the room, and a mob that has already decided, and the only question the mob has for you is whether you will kneel on your own or be helped down.
that is what an apology is, in that room. it is a humiliation ritual. admission of guilt does not lessen the sentence. it confirms the seating chart.
the word is older than the internet. cancel comes from cancelli, the latin for lattice, the crossed lines a scribe drew through a text to strike it. you are not being argued with. you are being drawn through. the strikethrough page on this site is me doing that to my own beliefs, in public, on purpose. this was the other kind.
and the ritual is older than the word. the greeks kept a man in every city for this. the pharmakos. in a bad year, a plague, a famine, a lost war, they walked him to the edge of town and put him out, and the city felt better, and nothing about the plague had changed. rené girard spent a career showing that every crowd still does this and that the crowd never knows it is doing it. i was a pharmakos for a mid-sized internet plague of the second week of january 2019. the crowd needed one. i had a drone.
i apologized. the next morning, on instagram, i wrote that people were upset with me and that i understood why, and that i hadn't come across well given how it was cut, and then i explained.
i did not mean it. not even a little.
i was asked to do it again, by several people, in several registers, and i did that too, and it changed nothing, because the mob had made up its mind before i opened my mouth, and my mouth was only there to make the minutes look complete. i learned more about people in that week of apologizing than in the year before it. a man who asks you to apologize for something he has already convicted you of does not want an apology. he wants to watch.
what it cost
people called my parents' house. the landline. my mother answered some of them.
someone made a youtube video. the title called me the worst millennial ever. i watched it. it was hilarious and it was sad, in that order, and then both at once: twenty minutes of commentary from a man who did not know me and who, i knew with total certainty, would not have said one sentence of it to my face. that is not the point. the point is that i finished it, closed the laptop, and let it go, which i had not known i could do until i did it.
people emailed my employer demanding that i be fired. my employer was me. i had started the company. i sat at my desk and read strangers asking me to fire myself.
what i felt, and i have checked this several times since, was not shame.
the greeks had two words where we have one. aidōs is the shame that keeps you from doing the thing; aristotle thought it was fitting in the young, a kind of blush that stands in for judgment until judgment arrives. aischynē is the shame after, the disgrace, the feeling of being seen. the second one needs an audience whose seeing you have agreed to rank above your own. i read the emails and i looked for that audience and it wasn't there. the people whose seeing i had actually granted rank to, the ones who could shame me, had all been on the island, or on the phone that week, and none of them were writing.
what i felt instead was something closer to clarity. a small cold feeling, and a useful one. it said: so this is what the crowd is. now you know its weight. it was lighter than advertised.
it was three days.
on the third day i noticed that my life was the same. the people i loved still loved me. i still had the phone, the desk, the friends, the sea urchin story. the only thing that had been taken was a thing i had never been able to hold in the first place.
the subtraction
here is the argument, and it is the only thing in this room worth stealing.
reputation is what other people hold. worth is what you hold. a cancellation confiscates the first and, if you let it, proves you never needed it for the second.
epictetus divided the world into what is up to us and what is not, and spent a whole book on the second column so that his students would stop fighting over it, and what i learned on the third day is that a man's name in the mouths of strangers sits in that column, has always sat in that column, was never anything but weather, and that the reason it feels like the ground giving way is that you have been standing on it, which is your error and not the weather's, and once you step off it there is, to your surprise, a floor.
the floor is you.
the stoics had a name for standing on it. ataraxia. it gets translated as tranquility, which makes it sound like a spa. it is closer to the quiet of a man who has checked the locks and knows which of his possessions can be carried off, and has moved his whole life into the other room.
everything after that is subtraction. you stop managing what people think, because you can't, and because you have watched it not matter. and when you stop managing it, a strange thing happens to your mouth. it starts saying the true thing. the greeks had a word for speaking the truth in public at your own cost: parrhesia. diogenes did it to alexander. socrates did it to athens, and athens did to him roughly what the internet did to me, at a somewhat higher cost. they thought it was a duty. i got it as a side effect.
the chasm
thaddeus says the cancelled man has one real decision, and he has to make it fast, before it is made for him. you can put distance between yourself and the thing, or you can embrace it. what you cannot do is both. the middle is where people drown.
he calls it crossing the chasm. he also warns about what waits on the other side: sides. take a side's help and you wear its jersey for the rest of your life, whether you meant to join or not.
i embraced it. i took the thing into myself and gave it a chair. and i was lucky in one way that i did not earn: nobody offered me a jersey. my sin was not political. it was tacky. there is no faction for the tacky. so i crossed alone, with the whole thing on my back, and said the two words that became the title of this page, and meant them.
caesar had a phrase for the moment the decision closes behind you. alea iacta est. the die is cast. thaddeus puts it at the end of his piece and i understand why. it is the most restful sentence in latin. there is nothing left to manage.
nietzsche's version is warmer and i prefer it. amor fati. love of what happened. he meant it as the whole ethic, the test of a man: could you will your life again exactly, with the tents in it, with the clip in it, with the man in the youtube video in it, and not flinch. i have run that test on this. i pass it. that is not the same as being glad.
the vice
there is a cheaper way to arrive at the same floor, and i recommend it.
signal the vice. say the worst true thing about yourself first, on purpose, before anyone can find it. it does three jobs.
it filters. the people who leave were there for the performance. the people who stay were never watching it.
it frees. nobody can take what you've already handed over. the film took one clip from me. everything else in this room i gave.
and it is the only proof of the rest. a man who admits nothing is asking you to take his word for the good parts. montaigne wrote that he spoke of himself in his faults, and it is why anyone still reads him. augustine opened the first autobiography with the pears he stole and ended up a saint. in the bar room of the fire department where i spent five years, the jokes were the welcome, and the jokes were mostly confessions, and the day the jokes stopped was the day someone actually had a problem with you.
thaddeus's first instruction is to write it down, immediately, before the story is told for you. i had a drone. i had two hours of tape. it was told for me anyway. so this page is the writing-down, seven years late, which is the wrong time and the only one i have.
i notice that confessing to vice-signalling is itself a small performance. fine. one is allowed.
who is left
thaddeus has a test for who to keep after: would they come to your wedding, and would they come to your funeral. i did not have to run it. it ran itself in three days and returned the same names i already had. some people from my hometown enjoyed the week. that was the whole cost, and i would pay it again for what it bought.
i think about it more than i admit, though mostly as a philosophical object and not as a wound, which is either growth or the best available imitation of it. aristotle would say the imitation, practiced long enough, is the thing. i am counting on him.
the object
i have an imdb page.
it says producer at the top. under that it lists a documentary in which i appear, for one clip, as the villain.
so what.