This is a Carousel guest post by a Twitter anon, the entrepreneur behind Pluribus.
Cancellation is a plague, and like all plagues there’s profit in the cure. We’ve grown accustomed to it hanging over our heads like the Sword of Damocles for the better part of the past decade. Considering the Creator Economy is a $100B industry comprised of 50M+ creators and their 4B+ followers, it’s rather surprising that the market hasn’t managed to produce some form of cancellation insurance. Until now.
How do you calculate risk when a core feature of the phenomenon is how arbitrary it is? Even if the rules were consistent, how would an actuary gauge someone’s likelihood of saying the N-word? And if you somehow manage that, how does the claims adjuster determine if they didn’t do it on purpose to get a payout?
Cancellation insurance is impossible through traditional models. The necessary vehicle lies within networks. If cancellation mobs utilize networks as an offensive weapon to damage a given target, we reverse engineer that process on the same terrain and utilize networks as a defensive weapon to protect a given target. Because you don’t know when the hammer is going to fall, you mobilize your network to preemptively crowdfund potential cancellations.
However, giving people money just in case something happens in the future isn’t an attractive prospect for most supporters. Therefore, the trick to making cancellation insurance a reality is “conditional pledges.”
Conditional pledges mean supporters make a commitment to donate (and provide payment info) if certain conditions are met. These conditions are set by the pledge recipient, which determines the criteria for the funds to be “activated” into live donations and transferred to them.
“Cancellation” means different things for different people, so pledge recipients tailor their conditions accordingly; whether it's YouTube demonetization, Patreon deplatforming, or Twitter banning. They define the scenario they want to hedge against, and supporters lock-in funds that only leave their accounts should that scenario come to pass.
If/when that day comes, creators alert their supporters they intend to activate their pledges, which will be transferred after a holding period of seven days. This hold is to give supporters the opportunity to oppose a claim they feel either didn’t occur, fell outside the parameters they agreed to, or was deliberately triggered just to get the payout. If more than 50% choose to do so, the claim doesn’t go through.
Pledges benefit both parties by supplementing the current subscription model, which appears, as Hollywood has learned, to be reaching its limits. Subscribers can afford only so many subscriptions, and they have to draw the line somewhere. Creators that fall above that line are vastly outnumbered by those below it. Pledging to support creator insurance means no immediate expense to subscribers, and gives consumers the ability to contribute to more creators below the line.
Proactively offsetting the costs of future attacks changes everything. The power of Sword of Damocles derives from the expected damage when it falls. When getting stabbed through the chest becomes a paper cut, it will be like there was never a sword there at all.
I thinc a conscious contra-cancellation concord would be casus cancelli in and of itcelf.