The Death of Call-Out Culture: A Postmortem
by Alex S. Johnson
Recently I have given a bit of thought to the call-out culture trend that prevailed in social media spaces for more than a decade, and the reasons for its utter collapse. This being said, straggling remnants of call-out culture still persist, but they are isolated and disorganized.
At its height, call-out culture operated as a form of quasi-judicial vigilantism with real-world consequences; it allowed digital space to be overrun with illegal behaviors such as slander, usually without any consequences. Numerous authors, directors, actors, comedians, musicians were serially subject to “cancelation” only to have their status secretly restored later by a thoroughly unsystematic process.
The reasons call-out culture failed are several, but the main ones are:
1. No vetting process for accusers, evidence (aka “receipts”) and litigation of cancellation.
A typical call-out occurred this way: a culturally prominent/significant person is accused of misdeeds ranging from actual crimes such as assault, molestation, plagiarism, etc to legal but questionable social behavior. The evidence was delivered via screenshots by interested parties, often those with a vested interest in harming that person (with significant exceptions). It was thought that the greater community interest was served by exposure of bad actors, with literal consideration as to who was pointing the finger, and why. It was thought that the greater community interest was served by exposure of bad actors, with literal consideration as to who was pointing the finger, and why. should be without consideration as to the motives or identities of those doing the finger-pointing; in rhetorical terms, this form of vetting is known as ‘ethos.’
No vetting process means in practice that those accusing could literally be anybody, and most often were, those with personal grudges, animosity, jealousy and other low motivations. Unlike the legal process, there consisted of no means by which the accusers’ claims could be stacked against the truth; most often, these campaigns were waged using ad hominem attacks and pile-ons. Various insults were bandied about; the sociological phenomenon of the bandwagon effect meant that even those who had no personal grudge against those targeted could be swept up into the fray and conscripted in a war against their peers. When the smoke cleared and the bodies were counted, it often became clear that nothing whatsoever had been accomplished and the wrong person had been hurt.
Receipts replacing actual evidence meant that unlike the legal process, a screenshot could be altered, manipulated and taken out of context by bad actors solely to damage their target’s reputation. Receipts are not subject to the rules of provenance; screenshots can be easily faked using a variety of tools, including AI. In law the principle of “fruit of the poisoned tree” applies; in online call-out culture, it never did. Meaning that anybody could at any time invent, concoct, construct “receipts” that did actual social harm to authors, for example (this has occurred numerous times to me), resulting in their work being either deleted from anthologies and magazines after publication or their names removed from projects they created and re-credited to people who had nothing to do with their creation.
One example from my own career occurred about a year ago, when a very troubled author/editor stated online that they wished me to “suffer” from my extreme neurodegenerative condition which also involves around-the-clock chronic pain often hovering towards “10” on the needle. Their reasoning? Because an anthology I had included their work in changed thematic focus; I apologized to them, but they stated that they would publish my email online and in a book of such “receipts.” This person was the co-creator of a press whose founder literally mailed me an amazon gift pack of 100 razor blades with suicide instructions. The book my work was removed from went on to achieve fame for the editor who removed it and a coveted Splatterpunk award (ironically enough, an award co-created by Bram Stoker Award-winner Brian Keene, who also runs Scares that Care, where the razor blade sender had assaulted a former imprint editor for their press; Keene banned the razor sender for life from Scares that Care and publicly apologized to me, yet failed to make the connection with the recipient of the Splatterpunk award.
This kind of blatant disconnect is, unfortunately, far more common than one would suppose). I was forced to report the sender of the razors four times to the FBI, which did nothing.
2. Exhaustion
Professionals do not engage in call-out culture, by definition, unless there is independent, highly vetted evidence that the person accused has, in fact, done the thing they are accused of (legal evidence helps!). Professionals, by definition, are concerned with the writing of books, the creation of songs, experiments, films, art, and so forth. Professionals in order to function require order to their work space and time spent attempting to determine if a sock puppet account that just called out an author they work with can be trusted (this also occurred to me; I wish I could say only once).
3. It’s Completely Batshit
The worst-case example of a call-out campaign would be a fringe author with a long history of severe mental illness well known to the community deliberately targeting a colleague with obvious slander that contains no actual evidence except for screenshots (“receipts”) which, again, have no vetting process; unlike in law, where evidence is introduced only after its actual origins have been confirmed; then, the significance of the evidence qua evidence is further vetted by cross-examination of expert witnesses. Which is not to say that literal legal processes cannot be corrupt or tainted, just that the standards are much, much higher.
3. Call Out Campaigns Harm Everyone.
If a bad actor is supported by their community, which instead targets someone who has committed no bad act whatsoever, and it’s discovered that the community has been all that time covering up for that bad actor(s), it can and has led to the demise of an entire genre or movement, such as, for example, what occurred with Bizarro…a genre rife with internecine wars that finally detonated the genre and its infrastructure itself in 2019, where it was discovered that a Bizarro author arrested for assault by the FBI and known to have stalked and harassed numerous women was a guest of Eraserhead Press founder Rose O’Keefe, and had stayed on her coach during a period where the outraged father of the woman he had allegedly assaulted on an airplane (leading to his arrest on the ground) attempted to bring justice for his daughter. Ultimately that author was booted out of Bizarro, but in the context of other shenanigans being exposed. The end result of this was that the aforementioned Brian Keene, who had named several Bizarro authors, including myself, in a Cemetery Dance Publications History of Horror column in 2017, deleted Bizarro altogether from that column and publicly pulled his support from the genre. After 2019, numerous core members of the genre withdrew from the field; Eraserhead Press itself collapsed, and at present Bizarro is a footnote of genre history.
The Eraserhead Press example demonstrates that a culture of call-outs without any kind of formal adjudication, based on personal animus, the desire to cover up actual harm, or emotional dysregulation prevailing, led to a movement which had great potential dissolving in a puddle of goo. Reputations were permanently harmed; self-appointed “gatekeepers of Bizarro” found themselves without a genre to gatekeep.
4. Conclusions
The lesson of the demise of call-out culture is fairly simple: Anybody who spends more time attempting to harm others, in whatever form that harm takes, than doing their job, will suffer the consequences. A very few instances of call-out culture that proved successful in permanently damaging the reputations of their targets only succeeded because those targets were also credibly called to account in highly vetted processes such as trials, with actual evidence.
During his 30 plus year career, “dark polymath” Alex S. Johnson, aka Kandy Fontaine, has been accused of sending a magical bee egregore to another horror author, causing their fictional murder; raping and murdering a former professional party clown by a similar process (long distance telekinesis which, oddly enough, failed to result in the actual rape and murder of the victim); and running a foreclosed on wine press in Las Vegas (his accusers mixed up Darkest Wine Media with Dark Wine Press). He has also published alongside such outlaw icons as Allen Ginsberg, Patrick Califia, Kate Bornstein and Carol Queen, hosted multiple award-winning authors and literal rock stars on their Youtube program, had their work archived at Harvard’s Widener Library, and celebrated more than a decade of Nocturnicorn Books featuring David J. Haskins (Bauhaus/Love and Rockets; Jarboe (Swans), Caitlin R. Kiernan (“an original”-Clive Barker) and Poppy Z. Brite (Queer horror icon, author of Exquisite Corpse). Forthcoming from Johnson is Twilight of the Doom Hippies, with a Foreword by Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award-winner Mort Castle and an Afterword by Cyberpunk genre co-creator Paul DiFilippo, who has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards and praised by the likes of Samuel R. Delaney and Kathe Koja. On Halloween Day 2026 he turned 59. He lives with his family in Central California.
