One by one, the people of the world are being cancelled.

Last month it was comedian Sarah Silverman, who was fired from a movie she was working on after the re-emergence of a decade old picture of her in satirical blackface.

More recently it was video game developer Alec Holowka, who was ostracized by his colleagues after being publicly accused by a feminist activist of “emotional abuse and sexual assault” a decade or so ago. He subsequently committed suicide.

Increasingly, public figures live in fear that they’ll say or do the wrong thing, or have something they said or did long ago presented before the online mobs, resulting in the cancellation of their careers, reputations, and even lives.

The poet Camonghne Felix assures us that “cancellation isn’t personal but a way for marginalized communities to publicly assert their value systems through pop culture.”

His views are shared by many on the left, who praise “cancel culture” as a powerful tool of social justice, diminishing the influence of those who fall short of ethical standards, and thereby preserving the purity of our role models, thought leaders, and of society itself.

But a careful analysis of the means and ends of cancel culture will reveal that it is both a contravention of the left’s founding tenets and counterproductive to the pursuit of social justice.

Cancel culture began as call-out culture, a tendency by social justice activists to publicly shame people online for problematic behavior. Campaigner Hari Ziyad claims call-out culture can come from a place of love because it can “indicate the belief in the recipient’s capacity to be a better person.” On the other hand, fellow activist Karla Thomas claims call-out culture is not really about helping the recipient of the calling out, but about helping the recipient’s victim by reassuring them that “those transgressions were seen and will not go unaddressed.”