Over the last couple of weeks, we've taken on some of the battles in the ongoing culture war.

We looked at how a group with a right-leaning agenda weaponized the AP's adherence to neutrality

to get a young reporter fired for her Twitter activism.

We examine the issue of critical race theory, a term misapplied to classroom lessons about

America's racist past. And of course, we talked about the granddaddy of them all,

cancel culture. Michael Hobbs, co-host of the podcast you're wrong about, told us that there

isn't a situation that's been labeled a cancellation that

couldn't benefit from a more accurate word to describe what happened. So-and-so was fired. Such-and-such

was met with disagreement on Twitter. Cancel need not apply. He also explained on his own podcast with Sarah Marshall that there were a few

pivotal events along the way that led to the term cancel culture, becoming the moral panic it is

today. One of them was the 2015 release of John Ronson's book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed.

It was a series of case studies of people who were, in a word, canceled before we even started using the word.

When I spoke with Ronson in 2015, he told me that his investigation was triggered by his own discovery that someone had

started using a Twitter account in his name and with his face, an unknown entity that tweeted

in a way that was utterly unlike Ronson. Yeah, talking about how he was very much looking forward

to having a dinner party, and he's going to make some nice lemon grass stew, and, you know, anybody who knows me knows that I abhor dinner party. So this was annoying, embarrassing even, but it wasn't exactly shameful. No. How did that episode lead you into ultimately what became a deep exploration of shame?

Well, I asked these guys to take down their spam butt and they refused. And this went on for a couple of months.

Finally, I said, look, well, if you won't take down your spam butt, they kept calling it an infomorph.

Can we at least meet and you can explain,

you know, the rationale behind your spam bot? And they said, yeah, we'd very much like to meet to

explain to you the rationale behind the infomorph. And I said, good, because I'm really looking

forward to finding out the inspiration behind the spam bot. So I met them, and to cut a long story

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