The appeal and futility of mask meltdown videos

Shaming people who don’t wear face masks is popular, but it won’t really change anyone’s mind.

They all start in the middle.

The videos, blurry and shaky, look like the beginning of a found-footage movie, one of those horror flicks where you don’t know what you’re looking at it until it becomes impossible to miss. In this case, it’s a first-person point of view. Our cameraperson, a woman in Scottsdale, Arizona, is slapping masks out of a display.

“This shit’s fucking over,” she says, again and again, her free hand...