From Cancel Culture to Incarceration Culture : Prosecutorial Democracy and the Future of Cancellation

Cancel culture is morphing from personal backlash into a state-backed tactic to silence dissent. A series of essays unpacks the psychological, social, and class dynamics fueling this shift while warning of modern censorship's threat to public debate. They expose the hidden perils of stifled dialogue.

For more than a decade, cancel culture has contributed to the stifling of public debate and the ruin of private lives. Academics, artists, and professionals have found themselves deplatformed, disinvited, and unemployed for little more than expressing an opinion or publishing research that departs from current dogma. In From Cancel Culture to Incarceration Culture, his first book, Canadian lawyer and writer Collin May brings together a collection of essays on the cancel culture phenomenon. Drawing on his own experience as the target of a recent cancellation attack, May dissects the psychology, class motivations, and contemporary ideologies fueling cancel culture. As for its future prospects, May argues that cancel culture is undergoing a transformation from a socially driven occurrence to an institutional prosecutorial strategy deployed by the state to manage dissenting opinions outside the elite class. In response to this new “incarceration culture,” the author outlines proposals to combat this latest phase of cancellation.