I think I was expecting more from this one. I agree with a lot of what it has to say about online shaming being an ultimately unproductive tool for safeguarding marginalised people as it doesn't address the systemic causes of hurt, and I definitely agree that these weaponised takedowns disproportionately affect already marginalised people, and that too often they become a tactic for oppressors to silence those who've already had to fight for their platform. Those are the primary issues I have with so-called 'cancel culture'; to me, it seems like the only people who are ever really cancelled are the people who don't have the resources to rebuild, often owing to pre-existing institutional oppression. I think brown does a good job untangling these problems and writing about them from a place of real concern, rather than moral panic. You can tell she's thought a lot about these ideas and theories, and they're usually well articulated and considered. It's genuinely illuminating to read a critique of online shaming which doesn't boil down to 'people on the Left are just becoming the moral police', because that's a disingenuous critique of cancel culture and it's infuriating that this is the primary critique presented in the media, rather than the genuine issues that brown identifies here. For that reason alone, this book is invaluable, and I'd be interested in reading a lot more on the topic from both brown and other writers.

However, my main problem with it was that I didn't feel that this book delivered a viable alternative. In that respect, it reads a lot more like a manifesto rather than a considered analysis. brown speaks a lot about 'healing' and 'mediation', but there's no tangible idea of what this looks like. Whilst I do think this is a genuinely helpful book in terms of explaining some of the problems with online shaming to someone who might otherwise only have heard of and dismissed the more hyperbolic right-wing objections, I didn't feel like ultimately this book offered an image of how to facilitate the other methods that are nebulously named in lieu of it. I also found it difficult to stomach some of brown's metaphors; she wrote in the introduction that she had to rewrite her initial essay and undertook a lot of work to find metaphors which weren't rooted in racist terminology, but I feel like she ultimately fell into using ableist language instead (e.g. metaphors of online shaming culture as a cancer / disease) and it left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, to be honest. There's also an awful lot of language in here which reads like those aspirational corporate slogans you see in people's LinkedIn bios, and again, it rang slightly hollow; it felt like filler.

Finally, and perhaps most egregiously for me, although brown states at the beginning that she is only applying her analysis to cases of 'cancellation' following conflict or mistakes, and not in cases of abuse, this doesn't actually seem to be the case in the rest of the book, where abusers are often lumped in with generic wrongdoers as people who can be rehabilitated within their communities. That raised a red flag with me; I think this book needed to do much more work in untangling the difference between people who are 'shamed' for mistakes and conflict, and people who are publicly exposed as abusers and predators. You can't just say 'I'm not applying this analysis to abusers' and then do exactly that for the rest of the book. As it stands, it really read like brown was suggesting that abuse survivors sit down to mediation with their abusers, and I think that's a dangerous path to head down; abusers are far too good at manipulation tactics for this to be a viable process of healing. Some people frankly do need to be removed from their platforms and their communities, and I feel like this needed to be addressed as part of the analysis here.

I don't know. It's not a bad book by any means, and it gave me a lot to think about. I just think it needed to engage much more fully with the topic and stop being so wishy-washy. For a book which did, at one point, dedicate several (necessary and genuinely enlightening) pages to defining the terms and language used, it still managed to be evasive a lot of the time. It's a good primer to the reasons that the veracity and usefulness of online shaming as a tool needs to be considered from a Leftist perspective, but it's very much a book which asks the right questions rather than answers them.