It’s from an essay on the founders of the Frankfurt School. It can be found online if you google any part of that quote. I think this explains the origins of thought on cancel culture which seems to have been studied decades ago, if not it seems to come pretty close.

The entire section reads:

Then there is the question of social collectivity, without which revolutionary movements and parties stood no chance of overthrowing existing state structures. When collectivism fails in this endeavour, it is reconstituted into a tool of ideological domination. What underpins the mass of philosophical and applied sociological investigations that the Institute undertook during its period of wartime exile in the US is a concern for the fate of the individual in mass society. As the industrial economies of the West became subject to automation and an increasingly brutal division of labour between mental and manual tasks, individuals came to be ever more subordinated to the collective that they theoretically constituted, but which was now fast becoming an independent structure of prohibitive authority to which all must submit. Rather than being the medium in which human hope for liberation might be invested, the social collective was now a repressive structure that swept everybody under its homogenising sway. Society had become a functional law unto itself, in accord with the principle of instrumental reason, and what that resulted in, at the level of individual human beings and their psychology, was a more desperate struggle for self-preservation than they had known since they lived in rock-shelters. That struggle, more than anything else, is what had put paid to the idea of a historically decisive transformation of society by those of its elements who had the least to lose.