You don’t hear much about “call-out culture” anymore. The term has been supplanted by “cancel culture.” This is unfortunate, because the former is a more fundamental problem to be addressed than the latter.
Cancel culture is a subset and outgrowth of call-out culture.
“Calling out” is public shaming to inflict social punishment for non-conforming behavior (especially wrongthink) in order to enforce behavioral conformity. And cancelation is simply one of the harsher forms of such punishment.
The implicit threat of all shaming is disassociation: fewer friends, fans, followers, customers, job opportunities, business partners, etc. And cancelation is near-total disassociation: that is, social ostracism.
Cancelations are just particularly brutal battles within a broader, constantly raging war of mutual shaming that is pervading our public discourse.
To avoid the battles, we must resolve the war.