Unhinged: Meditations on Cancel Culture

Proof Of. Life, yes, especially for those who have been at the receiving end of hate and vitriol online. It IS horrific. It IS enough to question all you’ve done, and to think that none of it matters. It IS enough to bring you to a dark place. In 2023, the left-liberal spectrum on Twitter pounced on a post that named no one but which apparently hit everyone. My writer-self had the sense to ask former students to please go on my account and screencap everything, and then to see how it expanded to Facebook. The verdict: that in the first 48 hours of a two-week kuyog, there was “at least one attack-tweet tagging my handle every 4 seconds.” And while those tweets petered out, many shifted to Facebook (all screen-capped too), and then rappler published a hit piece by a male journalist calling me hysterical.

As it unfolded, I thought of Nacho Domingo and totally understood him. I got back on anti-anxiety meds. I stopped using Twitter. I went to court for Nacho, to talk about what had transpired on Twitter against him before he died (as I had also documented through screencaps). The kind judge let me speak about my own experience of this kind of hate. And no, it’s not the platforms making people like this—it’s people BEING LIKE THIS. It might all be online, but trust that this is a measure of who these people are in real life, too.

This book took two years to write. It feels longer. It is a book I cannot re-read. I hope it helps all those who have been at the receiving end of massive, baseless, undeserved, online hate.