This isn’t a new development, but rather the leveraging of an impulse that’s been prevalent throughout the pandemic. People have been surveilling and snitching on each other, almost recreationally, since the first lockdown went into effect. The idea of reporting your neighbors for noncompliance is not just becoming normalized; it’s a way that people who have been left feeling hopeless and helpless by the events of the last two years can feel, at least briefly, as if they’re in control of something. The enthusiasm for such measures isn’t limited to blue states, or for that matter to pandemic policies. Consider the new Texas abortion law, which was explicitly designed not to be enforced by DAs or police but by private individuals with the time and inclination to interfere in other people’s lives.

This is the catch-22 of having power during the pandemic. The authorities who impose these mandates are being screamed at every day to do something to combat the spread of a wildly contagious virus that, realistically, they can’t do a lot to contain. So they do something, but they don’t want the blowback if the something doesn’t work. If case rates in my town keep rising despite the mask mandate, nobody will ever admit that the policy was flawed; it’ll just be blamed on the individuals who didn’t comply, and on the service workers and small business owners who didn’t make them comply.