Sometimes people get cancelled. Their names get burned to the ground and salted so that nothing may grow there. This is one of our age’s Social Crises, but nobody really knows what to do about it. I have two mediocre-to-terrible ideas.

Cancel insurance is where you contribute money to a pool, managed by a cancel insurance company, so that on the off-chance that you do get cancelled, they pay out and you get emergency compensation.

This is kind of fun to think about but in the end probably a bad idea. Cancel insurance suffers many of the same problems as regular insurance—it can easily become a racket where insurance salespeople try to exaggerate your likelihood of getting cancelled so that they can upsell you on insurance packages. But it gets worse: when you’re filing your cancel insurance claim, you’ll have to contend with the fact that nobody agrees on what counts as cancellation, so before you get your payout you’re first going to have to litigate with the insurance companies (and they can probably afford pricey lawyers). No one likes insurance companies.

But what makes cancel insurance a self-defeating proposition is this: who would want to buy it? Buying cancel insurance signals that you predict you have a higher-than-average likelihood of getting cancelled. This could be seen as a tacit admission that you are cancel-worthy. Then people could cancel you preëmptively. Why would she buy cancel insurance unless she’s hiding something? This leads nicely to the second idea.

Cancel prediction markets are prediction markets where people place bets on who will get cancelled. There could conceivably be a market on every single person’s odds, but in practice a cancel prediction market platform may limit itself to the most lucrative markets: celebrity cancellation. You could open a market on Will Robyn Vargas get cancelled by the end of 2023? This would resolve to yes if she does get cancelled by then, and no if she doesn’t. You can make popcorn and watch as the price fluctuates.

This has some of the same problems as cancel insurance, namely that we don’t have an agreed-upon definition of cancellation, so the direction in which a market resolves will probably end up getting litigated to high heaven again. But the scarier part of this is that it essentially incentivises bettors to get the subject cancelled. If you have a lot of Yes shares in Will Robyn Vargas get cancelled in the first week of May 2023?, then you can earn a lot of money by actually getting her cancelled then. And it’s very easy to get someone cancelled if you can come up with a grievance and know the right internet people. It’s like an assassination market, except with reputations instead of lives.

Gosh that got scary fast. Please don’t make this a reality.