The art of the public apology

If your genetic code survived the Pleistocene epoch, and prospered sufficiently that you find yourself reading this, I feel I ought to warn you that you are in great danger. For though the woolly marmoset and sabre-toothed sloth may be extinct, a new apex predator has emerged: human beings, or more specifically, other human beings.

In this latest evolutionary cycle, they have turned cannibalistic, traversing great swathes of the webosphere at high speed to feast on their favoured delicacy: you and your opinions. Far from becoming a more civilised species, we are in the midst of an epidemic of cancellations. We have no dinner dates to bail on, so we cancel each other instead. It can be for almost anything — a racist sneeze here, a transphobic pair of shoes there. Inevitably, these digital witch hunts lead to unclean individuals being forced into grovelling apologies in order to make their ordeals stop.