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Illustration: Paula Dacal

In southern Chile, the word funa was born . It didn't emerge from Twitter or TikTok, but from the streets. In the 1990s, human rights groups began holding public escraches against the repressors of Pinochet's dictatorship. When the official justice system refused to act, the community organized to point the finger, make them visible, and denounce. "Funar" meant pointing out the torturer, the human rights violator , the powerful person who had escaped the courts thanks to impunity. The funa was a political weapon of the people against silence. In Argentina, the escrache played a similar role: groups like the Children of the Disappeared pointed the finger at the military and officials of the dictatorship who were walking peacefully through the streets. In the absence of institutional justice, community justice emerged: to point the finger was to resist.

Today, however, we're faced with another term: cancellation. This word became popular in the United States and Europe through pop culture and social media , where people talk about "canceling" a celebrity, influencer, or politician for racist, sexist, transphobic behavior , or simply for being unpopular. To cancel someone is to withdraw support, stop consuming their products, boycott their spaces, and turn them into a digital pariah.

While funa and cancellation are related phenomena, they are not exactly the same. Funa emerged as a tool for political denunciation from below, a response to institutional silence. Cancellation, on the other hand, emerged as a cultural practice in the media ecosystem of the Global North, amplified by algorithms that turn punishment into spectacle.

The digital mutation: from political cry to spectacle

On social media, disavowing or canceling no longer necessarily means denouncing an untouchable abuser; it also means exposing and punishing anyone who makes a mistake, expresses an unpopular opinion, or disagrees with the majority.

The funa, or cancellation, has become a spectacle. A kind of digital consumer ritual in which the important thing isn't transforming the conditions of structural violence, but rather achieving retweets, validation, and a brief sense of having done justice. As Rita Segato in The War Against Women, "punishment doesn't transform, it only reaffirms the punitive logic." In this new ecosystem, the funa and cancellation are as swift as oblivion: one day someone is trending topic , tomorrow no one remembers what happened.

I, too, have been denounced and denounced. I have participated in that symbolic lynching that produces a strange sense of power: the power of being the judge without a trial, of pointing fingers without sufficient evidence, of believing that a screenshot equals the truth. And I have also been on the other side, receiving insults, blocks, and cancellations. I know what it means to be reduced to a mistake, a phrase taken out of context, a rumor amplified by hundreds of strangers. That experience forced me to ask myself: what are we building with this dynamic? The denouncement/cancellation offers no space for repair or transformation. It only opens a new wound.

The funas were born to denounce power, not to destroy those of us who survived it.

We've come to demand more rigor from an Instagram post than from an official media outlet . We scrutinize racialized activists on social media, but we let xenophobic headlines slide in the press. That's the paradox: perfection is demanded of those of us who fight from the front lines, but institutionalized hate speech is normalized.

It's also worth remembering something that seems to be forgotten: funas were born to denounce power, not to destroy those of us who barely survived it. When the practice is trivialized, it loses its political force and becomes another form of horizontal violence.

What can we do now?

I don't want to romanticize the "original funa." I know there were also mistakes, excesses, and damage. But they had a clear political intention: to break impunity. Today, however, many funas and cancellations are more like a reality show : consume, get outraged, and move on to the next topic.

Perhaps the question we should be asking ourselves isn't "who to denounce or cancel?" but rather "what do we transform with each denounce or cancellation?" Because if the answer is "nothing," then what we're doing isn't justice, it's spectacle.

Today I write this with the certainty that I'm not outside that dynamic. I've been on both sides, and that experience forces me not to fall into the cynicism of those who believe that everything doesn't matter. It doesn't. Reporting abuse isn't the same as canceling someone for an unpopular opinion. Making impunity visible isn't the same as reinforcing the culture of dismissal. Let's differentiate between power that must be challenged and human error that requires dialogue.

Commit to processes of transformative justice, listening, and reparation. Understand that it's not about protecting reputations, but about not becoming what we claim to fight.

Because if I learned anything from being a founder and a founder, it's that punishment gives us adrenaline, but it rarely gives us justice.

*This article was originally published in Pikara Magazine—quality journalism with a feminist perspective, critical, transgressive, and enjoyable—and is published in Presentes as part of our agreement with this partner media outlet.

*Rudy Bruña is a Colombian social communicator and journalist. He is an activist for the rights of diverse Black and gender-nonconforming people. He has worked in community-based research with a decolonial and participatory approach, as well as in training on anti-racism, sexual diversity, and violence prevention.