In a World of Cancel Culture, Reputation Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Back in the day, old school “thinkers” — careerists and academics, mostly — believed that reputation was everything. But now, reputation doesn’t have the same weight it once did.

On the surface, it appears as though reputation is more important than ever. As I’m sure your high school teacher has told you, everything you do is now recorded online — that means if you do something scandalous when you’re young, it can have ramifications well into the future.

While this is correct to some extent, the truth is that this comment by your teacher is shrouded in moral idealism and a poor understanding of how the world works: a company will always hire a 10x software engineer, even if they happened to have posted pictures of themselves drinking in sophomore year of college.

No — instead, something else has happened in this post-truth world. In reality, most of these cases are used by bad actors as deliberate attacks — in other words, a company might not care what you were doing junior year, but if someone else brings it to their attention and states that they’ll bring it to the press unless action is done, it now becomes a PR issue and the company is forced to capitulate. This is the bad side of the cancel culture war — when sociopaths realize they can convert legitimate investigations of terrible behavior into campaigns over minor controversies to defeat their enemies.

The good news is that most people have gotten wise to this whole thing, and the tolerance window for behavior has changed. So now, it’s no longer about having a stellar reputation… but if its not about reputation, what is it about?

I often say I hate the idea of reputation — but in reality, this is a bit of a clickbaity misnomer. It’s that I hate the idea of a generalized reputation: that you must always say the right things at the right time, do the right things, to every person. And while I do believe cultivating kindness is important, it’s just not something that most people are able to keep up. Dealing with a shitty boss or client or friend might have been the only way to keep a pitch-perfect reputation back in the old days, but now — in this new, more tolerant society — it’s time to change how we do things.

Now, it isn’t about generalized reputation. It’s about specialized reputation.

A great example of this is the controversial comedian Sam Hyde. Despite being known widely across the internet as an extremist troll, he still has a stellar reputation among people who have worked with him. Why?

It’s because Hyde was selective in choosing his persona, and therefore who respects him — and those who respect him he respects back.

When he interviewed with Buzzfeed, he didn’t take the classic Munger approach of respecting them so that he could get an in and stay within the confines of the traditional media industry. Instead, he outright blasted them — and got fired from his company Adult Swim as a result.

Here’s the thing: everyone who worked closely with Hyde knew he would react that way to a Buzzfeed interview. He never hid his opinion on media journalism! So while he did get fired, he ended up taking his entire studio with him — he cultivated a level of respect with his employees, even though he didn’t care about his bosses.

The result? He now owns his own media studio and makes roughly 5x the amount of cash he was making before. That’s the power of specialized reputation.

The ultimate lesson from this is that cancel culture has shifted how reputation works. The reputation world has gotten too fickle, and if you try to please everyone you’ll just end up walking on eggshells until eventually one of the eggshells cracks. Instead, you want to be very particular with who you are, then focus on never betraying your identity or giving in to outside forces — still a hard task, but one that’s much more manageable, and one you’ll find leads you to the same level of respect and success you would’ve gotten in the old days.

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