Forget your 15 minutes of fame. “In the future,” writes Liam Pieper, “everyone will be cancelled for fifteen minutes.” In a country of tall poppy cutters, that’s not a seismic cultural shift. We’re a censorious bunch; hubris has long been weaponised here. But the locus of power is shifting. New cohorts have the means and hunger to scold. Our cultural hierarchies – and cruelties – are no longer predictable. That is the true terror of “cancel culture”: unfamiliar rules.
Pieper’s new novel, Appreciation – a quip-witted comedy – begins with a grand reputational detonation. Our doomed chap is Oliver Darling (Oli), a heavily marketed and highly collectible “queer artist from the bush”, who peddles a kind of “affable, self-effacing good-blokery” (think David Bromley meets Trent Dalton with a coke habit). “Oli’s entire schtick,” Pieper explains, “involves switching between stories of Aussie resilience and hardship, as celebrated in his art, and ribald, not-quite-obscene anecdotes that titillate suburban audiences without quite offending them”.
