At the end of last month, 450 past Jeopardy! contestants issued an open letter condemning recent winner Kelly Donohue and demanding that both Donohue and the producers of the show apologize for what the letter writers referred to as a “racist dog whistle.” On his fourth appearance on the show, Donahue made a gesture with three fingers to indicate that he’d won three times. The previous two times, he’d made the one- and two-fingered equivalent without stirring up any controversy. But in this case, the former contestants thought what he was doing resembled a gesture sometimes made by white supremacists (and far more often made by ordinary people unaware of any such association — resulting in the kind of confusion approaching absurdity that those white supremacists were probably aiming for).

It was a striking example of a phenomenon sometimes called “cancel culture” (or, before that, “callout culture”). The term itself has become mired in endless debates about what it means to be “canceled,” whether anyone is “really” canceled, and so on. The culture war cycle often features reactionaries stretching the concept of “canceling” to incorporate a variety of unrelated cultural grievances — see, for example, Mr. Potato Head — and progressives insisting that “there’s no such thing as cancel culture.”

But the underlying phenomenon is real. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the toxic cocktail of neoliberal social atomization, for-profit social media platforms that incentivize our worst impulses, and a sense of powerlessness that can be temporarily sated through online pile-ons and attempts to get people fired or de-platformed for doing or saying bad things has produced a culture of mutual surveillance and hair-trigger denunciation that infects the entire political spectrum.