The Untold Impact of Cancellation

I have never before been open about the impact that being cancelled had upon me. Cancellations try to silence their targets, so their stories are less often heard.

This is my account.

As you read about my experience over the last four years, you may come to understand why I have found it so hard to share. This is my own unique story, but other targets of online “mob justice” may find similarities.

Before my cancellation, I was an active and prominent software developer, conference organizer and frequent speaker in a vibrant community of software developers working with the Scala programming language. Scala is a powerful and deeply technical programming language that’s used by a lot of companies, including X (Twitter) and many large banks. The Scala Community is based all over the world and has anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 members, depending on how you count.

I lost my reputation in that community overnight. I lost many of my friends. Soon after, I lost my job and my income. I then lost my home, and later I even lost my pension.

The overwhelming majority of those involved in the cancellation, I believe, acted in good faith. They believed that the allegations they read were true, and that their actions were moral and just. They had conviction that they were on the side of good; that it was right. And with the one-sided evidence they had, probably nothing was more obvious.

Obvious as it may have been, their “evidence” was false, and the action that led to my cancellation was executed in the complete and total absence of due process.

This account is not about the lies told about me, or the shoddy investigation that led to their publication. This is not about whether I deserved to be condemned or not. This is about what I suffered as a consequence.

The Evening of the Cancellation

On the evening of 27 April 2021, I was accused by two women, in coordinated blog posts, of a pattern of sexually-predatory behavior. Both had been in relationships with me, one lasting nearly two years; the other, much shorter.

Minutes later, an “open letter” appeared online and was shared widely on social media throughout the community I had been part of since 2004. The letter was co-signed by 23 authoritative figures from that community, more than half of whom I had considered my friends until that moment.

That instant cut my life into the time before, and the time after.

I only found out about the publication of the two statements from a friend. Nobody had told me it was going to happen then; nobody had told me it was going to happen at all. Nobody had ever put any of the claims to me.

It was an ambush, and I was blindsided.

This was also the moment that I discovered the identity of the second of my two accusers. This shocked me because I had no reason to expect it. It might seem incredible that I wouldn’t have known who she was, but her portrayal of our relationship was untrue; she was never part of the Scala community; and most importantly, she just didn’t have a reason to condemn me. While our two-year relationship had an unhappy end for both of us, and we stopped speaking afterwards, it was over three years earlier, and I believed we had both moved on.

The substance of the blog posts was the greatest shock. I remember standing in a doorway, reading them on my phone, over and over again, in stunned disbelief. It was like reading a fiction about me concocted from benign fragments of reality, transplanted into new context to make them sound abominable.

I knew it wasn’t true, but I also knew in that moment that thousands of people would read it and believe it. And they did.

Signing My Condemnation

With publication, the Open Letter collected signatures. I watched in horror throughout the evening as it grew, unable to do anything about it. I wrote and published my own rushed response, which was roundly ignored. Many of the names I didn’t know, but others were familiar; people I had interacted with online or in person over the years.

Many had been friends. Some had visited my home or hosted me at theirs. I had been a guest at the wedding of another. None of them contacted me about it before signing—with the exception of one who simply told me he would be signing.

Each name added to that letter smote me with psychological torture that was particular and personal to that name and the person I knew behind it; bound up with years of pleasant memories about them.

Each name I read took the breath out of me. It felt similar to learning of their untimely death because reading their name meant they were gone from my life—but it was more brutal because it was their choice and they were all doing it at the same time.

Every happy memory of times spent with them—at conferences, in conversations, video calls, dinners and even on vacations—were transformed into stains on my psyche. Thousands of friendly interactions I had with hundreds of people over more than a decade were tainted in less than a day.

The torrent of signatures continued throughout the evening, but had reduced to a slow trickle after a couple of days.

A few others contacted me that evening to offer support, but they were outnumbered by the public messages of condemnation from former friends and strangers alike. But I remain grateful for those supportive messages which helped me through the next few days.

In the face of this onslaught, three women who knew me independently wrote unprompted blogposts strongly supporting me, and disputing my characterization in the allegations. I saw them, and each one was touching. But unfortunately, they were largely ignored, unseen or dismissed.

Maybe even sadder were the dozens of people who neither contacted me nor signed the letter. Even without condemning me, many people who had been my friends never made contact again. Either their perception of me changed, or our friendship became too burdensome to maintain. I may never know.

I became afraid to reach out to people I once counted on as friends, unless they contacted me first.

As time passed, exclusion became so familiar to me that I began to find it hard even to talk to people I knew were categorically my friends, particularly when I knew they shared friends with signatories of the letter. I felt uncomfortable having them straddle the community divide on my behalf.

My Life in Scala

The Scala Community was central to my life. Nobody else attached so much of their life to that community. Nobody attended and spoke at so many conferences. Nobody gave as many presentations to meetup groups. Nobody traveled to so many different countries in support of Scala.

And I did it for the love of that community; for the satisfaction I got from interacting with other people who shared my interest in Scala; for the stimulating conversations I so often had in a community that was dense with intelligence and rich with kindness.

I had spent the previous few years traveling. I had been partly nomadic, living in AirBnbs in several different countries, before I had settled down the previous year.

In that time, the one constant in my life was the Scala Community. It was the people I interacted with daily, talked to and dined with at conferences, and met up with on any other occasion I had the chance. It went beyond my professional life; it was my social life too. Its members were not just work associates; they were friends. As I traveled between countries and continents, the Scala Community felt like my home.

The End of My Life as I Knew It

And in that one moment, I lost most of the life I knew. I offered my resignation from my developer advocacy job because it became untenable and it was damaging my employer, even though we both knew there was no cause to terminate my employment.

I gave away my most successful open-source project to new maintainers so that it could continue. I abandoned training courses I had planned. The free educational website I devoted six months to was shut down, to my detriment and to Scala’s.

I abandoned a charitable foundation to promote Functional Programming in Africa, which I was just starting. Online videos of my presentations were deleted, and my name was even removed from historical conference programs, as if I had never been there.

Most of my online interactions just stopped dead. My ability to earn a living was obliterated. A huge swathe of my friends would no longer talk to me. I was no longer welcome at the events I once considered the center of my life.

My then-girlfriend, for all the love and support she gave me, found herself in a very different relationship from the one we started a year earlier, and it survived only a few months more, though we remain friends. And although I did not realize it until much later, the experience had a long-term impact on my health.

I also did not realize then that 18 months later, I would be unable to afford to continue paying rent, and would be forced to move out of my home.

I’m well aware of the many ills of this world, but it’s hard to imagine anything so sweeping as to devastate one’s professional life, social life, private life and health; even less so, an action perpetrated by a group of professional software developers in the name of “justice”.

Recontextualization

I have come to understand psychology and human nature better since then.

When you learn something which permanently changes how you see the world, you undergo a process of recontextualization, where you re-evaluate past beliefs in the context of the new knowledge.

For example, if you become a parent, it changes your life, and changes your outlook on life. You recontextualize your entire future to accommodate a new person being there with you, and dependent on you.

Once revealed, the new context never goes away. You can’t forget it or escape it. But old thoughts that made sense in the old context can return days, weeks or years later, and each must be processed so it fits into the new. In the beginning, this happens frequently and the mental burden is enormous. But it reduces over time, with a long tail.

Maybe surprisingly, I did not lose sleep during the first few weeks. Instead, although I had no work and no deadlines, I felt overwhelmingly exhausted, day after day. I had several calls with friends, but struggled to speak to more than one person per day. When I went to bed, I slept easily, slept long and slept well.

This can be explained. In those first weeks, my waking hours were consumed by the heavy toll of recontextualization, as years of my professional and social life was forced into a new context. This was the same community of people whose enthusiasm I had shared, and whose qualities and characters were the reason I devoted so much time and energy to it.

But not only did I have to come to terms with losing most of my friends, I started questioning why I had devoted so much to a community that so willingly condemned me upon unproven accusations. The burden was all-encompasing and tiring, and it took its toll on me. It was weeks before I began to feel closer to normal, and I still don’t feel the same.

It might seem like the obvious thing to do would have been to publish a response to the allegations. But for weeks, I was simply not mentally fit to do so. Furthermore, I was scared: my last interactions with the Scala Community had been the most traumatic experience of my life, and the condemnation had been so comprehensive I became convinced that anything I said would just be ignored.

The Financial Toll

I was cancelled in the middle of the Coronavirus pandemic. Besides the isolation, which affected everyone, the pandemic was not kind to me, as a professional trainer and conference organizer.

Over the previous years, I had created and run four editions of a conference, Scala World, which attracted about 200 attendees each time. It had established a good reputation, but it never made any profit, and would have made a loss if I had paid myself.

But I had also offered an advanced programming course since 2018, which could be very profitable for a couple of days at a time. And with just four or five training sessions per year, I covered my basic living costs and budget travel, and it allowed me to work on the open source projects I cared about. So for about three years, I did no more paid work than necessary. I traveled to and spoke at almost every conference I could, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I knew these were the best years of my life, and I was grateful; this was my lifestyle choice, and it was a luxury.

I never had any trouble rationalizing those years as a kind of startup that failed. It was a gamble I took, a gamble I devoted all my time to, which I hoped might make me a decent salary doing something I loved. And it was a gamble which didn’t pay off—not even slightly. But I accepted the failure was on me and I owned it.

In the second half of 2019, with hapless timing, I decided to focus on my training and conference, and I invested my modest savings in that. I sponsored Scala Days, the biggest conference of the year. And I placed an early booking on accommodation for my conference in 2020, and devoted time to developing further training material and planning several training events.

And then the pandemic started. Conferences and training became impossible. My investment was wasted. So I entered the first lockdown without savings and without an income. My most valuable asset at that time was a deposit on the conference accommodation for later in the year.

Due to these unlucky choices I made, I was in debt and needed to find work. I approached the company I had recently been working with, and we began employment discussions.

Like many small businesses at that time, I kept going thanks to a government business loan. And in the summer of 2020, as lockdowns were relaxed, I planned a small hybrid conference with my prospective employer at the pre-booked venue.

But within a couple of weeks, this event had to be cancelled, in part due to the pandemic.

But there was a second reason: around that time, my co-organizers were informed by a third party of vague “concerns about my behavior,” but which lacked sufficient clarity to act on. They were nevertheless enough to seal the event’s cancellation, pause my hiring process, and trigger an investigation.

That investigation lasted around four months, and found no evidence of wrongdoing. But at a time when I most needed to earn, I was forced to wait a further four months without pay.

This was not the first I learned of the actions that led to my cancellation, nine months later, but it was the first time it caused me material losses.

Employment and Unemployment

With the exception of the creator of the language, and one other, there was not a single person in the Scala Community with a longer continuous history of working with Scala. I had been one of the first users in 2004, when I started using it in the first months after my graduation. Almost my entire professional career had been Scala.

In the seventeen years covered by my résumé, every success was a success with Scala. Every contract or job I worked used Scala. My entire public output was related to Scala. And I wanted to continue working with Scala.

But if they didn’t already associate my name with the allegations in 2021, any potential employer reading my résumé could search for me and immediately find content that would raise justifiable concerns about hiring me. (My name is unique enough that there’s little doubt that the publications refer to me.)

I have felt like I’ve had a choice when applying for work: to be open and upfront about my situation, and give the employer the option to back out right away; or to remove all Scala references from my résumé, hide my experience, and hope that nobody ever searches for me.

Could I apply for a job in another language? Perhaps: my programming skills may be transferrable to other languages and other communities. But unfortunately, my undeserved reputation is a red flag that’s more universally transferrable. Even if I got a job writing another language like Haskell or Rust, I would forever be one tip-off and a Google search away from having to explain the publications, and risk losing my job. I cannot take the risk of learning a new language, and then losing my job over the same false accusations. I’m an expert at Scala, and that’s where my future lies.

I also considered—and quickly rejected—changing my name.

None of these are good options. I’m not comfortable hiding who I am, and what I’ve been through has become part of my identity. I choose to be open about it, because anything less feels like living a lie.

Consequently, I have found very little work, even with friendly companies in the Scala Community. To be specific, in the three years between my last job after cancellation, and the contract I started last year, I earned an average of $14,600 per year, before tax.

I spent about a third of this income on compulsory health insurance, and more than the total amount I earned went on legal costs. I also needed to pay for rent, bills and sustenance.

These numbers clearly don’t add up. I survived only thanks to financial help from friends, and selling some assets. This included withdrawing everything from my small private pension account for less than I paid into it. I was reluctant to add to my problems by getting into more debt, but with few options available to me, I accepted help when it came.

Escapism

In January 2022 I found the courage and finance to begin legal action against the few people involved in my cancellation who shared my jurisdiction. I hoped that this would trigger real scrutiny into my case.

However, by September 2022, it became clear that I would not be able to keep paying my rent. I was already in debt, and as a recent immigrant to Germany, I was not eligible for any kind of state support. My legal action was proceeding very slowly, accruing costs, and the risk of abandoning it would not only have thrown away my one hope of definitively clearing my name, but would have made me liable for my opponents’ costs as well, which I certainly could not afford.

So I lived the most frugal life I could for as long as I could. When that was no longer possible, I moved out of my flat, taking a backpack, tent and sleeping bag, as well as my laptop. I took a train and spent €20 on a shared ride to France, where I started walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.

This decision was not rushed. I knew for months that I was spending more than I was earning, and not because I was spending a lot. For months I had been looking for work, or some other way to fix my situation. I had hoped for serendipity to relieve me of my financial problems: serendipity had already intervened to delay that moment a couple of times.

And so my decision was made only in desperation. I left my home with no certainty of what would come next; not knowing where I would be in a month or through the winter; or in a year. I had no idea how difficult it would be. I had no idea what I would do when the cash in my pocket ran out.

But I was also deceiving the people who cared about me. The choice to walk a long-distance path across Europe appealed to me because it was a way to mask my desperation from the people I didn’t want to worry; a way to maintain my pride that I wasn’t relying on charity; a way to make it look like a choice. But it was no choice. That was a lie, first of all to them, and second to myself. The situation was diabolical, and it was the most vulnerable I’ve ever been.

But it was also relief, in a way. It gave me exercise and time to think. I spent nearly six weeks living each day as it came, walking by daylight, and spending most nights sleeping outdoors.

There were nights where I suffered in the conditions and had to endure bitterly cold temperatures. It would have been easy to dismiss these as “just camping”, except that most people go camping with a comfortable home to come back to afterwards. I did not.

In all, I walked 800km in six weeks. I had time alone, and time walking with others. I made new friends. I kept my circumstances private. And despite the physical challenges, not only did the simpler life allow me to escape my financial problems for a few more weeks, but it was a mental escape, too.

It was escapism, but it too was unsustainable. It ended when I finally ran out of money and had to call on my last lifeline. It ended with losing my independence and becoming financially dependent on someone else. This was the end of my walk, but not the end of my hardship. However, beyond this point I prefer to keep private.

My legal action continued for more than a year after this, as I looked for opportunities to conclude it without incurring unaffordable costs, or revealing to my opponents that I was in financial trouble. The risk of default lingered over me. We reached a settlement in my favor in early 2024, avoiding an expensive court hearing by a few days. However, this compromise meant that I missed the chance for my case to be scrutinized in court.

Perseverance

I have found the last four years tough, even though I have tried to pretend they weren’t. I got through them by indulging in my work: unpaid open-source software. The intellectual stimulation it has given me, day after day, has kept me going and provided motivation to continue—and hope that people may one day give me a fair hearing. Without a project to work on, I believe I would not have had the resilience to continue, and I credit Scala’s endless learning curve with giving me the grit to carry on.

To those people who have suggested I would be better leaving Scala to do something else, I respectfully disagree. I shouldn’t have to, and I’m not going to.

Last year I learned more about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and recognized that I was suffering from some of its symptoms. Most of these only began three years after my cancellation. They are real, but thankfully mild, and should not be overstated: they affect my quality of life, but are not debilitating. I take some non-prescription medication to help.

A Lesson

In my own particular way, I am getting through this. But I know that a different person thrust into a similar situation could decide on a very different way out. My experience has taught me how it feels to be the target of cancel culture, and unless you go through a similar experience, you’re unlikely ever to feel the same visceral sense of isolation that can trigger an extreme resolution.

This is not idle scaremongering. The same concerns about “self-policing” were raised after the tragic death of a student at Oxford University in 2024, who fell victim to cancel culture. In the Prevention of Future Deaths Report published following his death, the coroner poses legitimate concerns about social ostracism as “self-policing”, and the normalization of exclusionary behavior. I fully support the findings in the report, and they should be taken seriously by the Scala Community and other communities.

Group action coordinated by powerful authority figures against an individual has to be recognized for what it is, and understood for the dangers it poses to its target.

So I have this advice: if you are invited to sign a letter condemning someone, please stop, remember what happened to me, and think about the potential consequences. If you are in a position of authority and find yourself considering coordinated social ostracism against an individual, please stop, and seek an alternative resolution. If you witness someone targeted by cancel culture—regardless of what they’re accused of—show them your support, either publicly or privately; your contact could make the small difference that saves their life.

A Request

Unfortunately in today’s world, too many claims today are valued for their popularity, over their substance. Each name that remains on the Open Letter adds the perception of popularity and the appearance of credibility to the words of the letter that has caused me so much misery for four years. Each name dilutes the scrutiny on the actual claims. And each name continues to cause real harm.

I make this clear request now to each of the signatories: please remove your name.

If you did not sign the letter, but know one of the signatories as a friend or colleague, please contact them and respectfully encourage and support them in making the right decision. Make them aware of what they contributed to.

I consider the signatories to be misguided; not malicious. I believe that they wanted to do the right thing. I judge them by their intent, not their lack of foresight into the consequences. You should too.

And they should be judged for their ability to recognize their mistake, and correct it.

I have always had a hopeful and positive outlook on life. My faith in the innate goodness of people has been shaken, but remains intact.

❧