Just when you think your favorite TV show is good or that you can eat some sexy new grain bowl-slash smoothie-slash energy bar, BAM! The rug gets pulled out from under you and your favorite thing is canceled. Just kidding, cancel culture isn’t real! But if it was, this is what we’re probably canceling in 2020.
TikTok
Since the mainstream media has gotten hip to TikTok, I wonder how long teens will stay on the platform if they’re going to be increasingly subjected to Washington Post reporters clumsily joining in on their dance challenges and New York Times writers in their private messages asking them to talk about a video they’ve made (Mooom, get out of my room!) In 2020, I see TikTok being canceled for simply becoming insanely uncool, oh and there’s that whole, um, federal investigation into the app’s security risks.
CBD
It doesn’t do anything. Next!
Peppa Pig
As someone who bought an airbrushed Peppa Pig shirt on a musty Jersey Shore boardwalk this summer, this addition makes my heart heavy. But facts are facts: much like “Baby Shark,” children cancel things, songs, TV shows, weird cousins, just as much as adults do and I suspect they’ll grow weary of her sometime. And despite the fact that surprising pop icon Peppa had a moment this year with teenagers, she’s also a noted sexist* who uses the term “fireman” instead of “firewoman,” a gangster, and a capitalist. The horror!
*I don’t actually care about this, please.
Tweeting Succession Screencaps To Express Yourself
I can’t watch another person screenshot another still from this show of some character in a fleece vest screaming “FUCK!” with the caption “me” again. You sound like those wackos who compare everything happening in politics to Harry Potter, except this is your Harry Potter.
Prairie Dresses
They’re cute, but the high-fashion iterations from brands like Batsheva and Ganni are expensive, and I think “colonialist white woman settler chic” is out for 2020. Burn ’em.
Any Other Fast Food Chicken Sandwich
Popeyes (and chaos) reigns.
YouTube
Like many social media platforms, this is one we should finally cancel in 2020 but likely won’t. Between nearly pushing out beloved ASMR Youtuber Life with Mak for flagging her videos as inappropriate and the platform’s algorithm that leads pedophiles to innocuous home videos of children, I’m holding out that we can blow up Youtube in 2020. Maybe the TikTok’s fleeting, seductive power will help destroy it?
Tie-Dye
It’s a cool kid staple right now with brands like Online Ceramics and Collina Strada, but worn wrong it makes everyone look like they’re going to a fictional summer camp set in 1990s Olsen twin movie.
Real, Delicious Hamburgers
I know, I know, overthrowing climate change shouldn’t be on the individual but on the corporations and corrupted systems that are doing nothing to stop it. At least, this is what I told myself when I didn’t buy a metal straw. But the rise of great meat alternatives means that beef shaming for a better world might become the new normal.
The term “emotional labor”
You’re using it wrong.
Social media likes
This year it was reported Instagram was flirting with the idea that they might remove “likes” from the platforms completely, to keep the focus to the content and not how many likes posts get. Ha, right. But given the handwringing around social media and mental health, with Instagram linked to anxiety, depression, and a negative body image, likes and favs and hearts or whatever you want to call it might be canceled for good.
The Plague
Oh my god guys, it’s going to suuuuuuck.
Wait, actually, maybe us? Because we’ll be dead from the Plague?
Probably.