The Rise and Fall of Internet Celebrities

A decade ago, becoming famous took years, gatekeepers and a great deal of luck. Today it can take an afternoon. A single video, posted by a complete unknown, can reach millions before the sun goes down, and the person behind it can wake up a celebrity. It is one of the genuine wonders of the modern internet — and also one of its cruelest traps. Because the same machine that lifts someone to fame overnight can turn on them just as fast.

To understand the fall, you have to understand the rise. Online fame runs on algorithms that reward one thing above all others: engagement. Content that makes us react — delight, outrage, envy — gets pushed to more people, who react in turn, and the cycle feeds itself. This is how something goes viral. But engagement is blind to whether the reaction is love or fury, which means the very forces that build a creator up are perfectly capable of tearing them down.

The intimacy that isn't

There is a deeper reason online falls feel so brutal. Fans of a creator often feel they truly know them — their voice, their humor, their daily routines. Psychologists call this a parasocial relationship: a powerful, one-sided bond with someone who has no idea you exist. It is mostly harmless and even comforting. But when a beloved figure stumbles, that imagined closeness can curdle into a sense of personal betrayal, and the backlash is fierce precisely because it feels personal.

Enter "cancel culture"

This is the world in which cancel culture operates — perhaps the most argued-about phrase of the decade. To one camp, it is a long-overdue form of justice: ordinary people finally able to hold the powerful to account when older institutions failed. To another, it is digital mob rule, in which a careless word can end a career and a stranger's life can be dismantled by people who will never face them. The striking thing is that both descriptions are sometimes accurate — which is exactly why the argument never seems to end.

The word "cancel" is quietly doing the work of two very different ideas.

And that points to the real problem. "Cancel culture" lumps together two things that ought to be kept apart. The first is accountability: asking a public figure to take responsibility for genuine harm, to apologize, to change. That is healthy, and most societies have always done some version of it. The second is the disproportionate pile-on: months of harassment, threats against a person's family, the demand that someone lose everything forever over a single mistake. That is not justice; it is cruelty wearing justice's clothes. It's one thing to criticize what someone did; it's quite another to try to erase who they are.

The forgotten word: proportion

If there is a way through the noise, it is the unglamorous idea of proportion. A response that fits a serious, repeated harm should not be the same as the response to a clumsy joke from a decade ago. We already understand this everywhere else in life; we somehow forget it online, where the scale and speed of a reaction can turn even a fair criticism into something monstrous. Accountability without proportion isn't accountability at all — it's just a faster, larger form of punishment.

So, has cancel culture gone too far? Sometimes, clearly, yes; at other times it has simply given a voice to people who never had one. The honest answer is that the question is badly framed. Once we separate accountability from the pile-on, and insist that any response be proportionate to the harm, the debate stops going in circles and starts being useful. The goal was never to punish harder. It was, and still should be, to do better.