Theater of Shame – The rise of online humiliation
yalereview.org
yalereview.org
People seeing it that way should spend some time with me in 3rd world countries to reset their value counter. I'll show you punishment.
Shame is powerful and necessary, but it's very much a first step punishment, a warning, not an ultimate one.
This mismatch between perceived intensity and the real thing is seen everywhere these days: insecurity, activism, political projections.
It seems we solved so many important problems that humans have reset their baseline of comfort to confuse unease with danger.
Loosing your job, your social status or your tweeter audience is not the greatest suffering you can endure.
In fact, that's why exposed crooked politicians and companies keep getting away with things: shaming them just slow them down, not stop them.
Yeah, the article is a bit over the top here. I do think shame is at it's worst when coupled with real violence or intense threat of violence.
> In fact, that's why exposed crooked politicians and companies keep getting away with things: shaming them just slow them down, not stop them.
This is critical to the whole article: if a person is shameless and/or their community is ok with the "shameful" behaviour, then really there isn't any effect at all.
I question whether it's genuinely over the top or if it's just a worrying symptom of society's increasing trend, on both sides of the aisle and every political corner, to equate speech with violence.
I would too, in most cases; that said, I'd rather get a literal slap on the wrist or even the face than be humiliated in an online sphere, especially as related to my real identity. It's not the case that shame and humiliation always trumps physical violence in my order of preferences, and I'd be surprised if it's not the same for you too. "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" is a cute rhyme, but utterly disintegrates when one starts to consider degree and the importance of social standing in public daily life (from getting a job to the looks you get at Walmart).
It's the dog growling to get you to back off so it doesn't have to bite you.
>This mismatch between perceived intensity and the real thing is seen everywhere these days: insecurity, activism, political projections.
This derives from the zero-tolerance policies in school. No bullying allowed and so people, millenials, never quite earnt or understand this.
>It seems we solved so many important problems that humans have reset their baseline of comfort to confuse unease with danger.
A common thing for humans. Right now it's like 18c outside and im freezing. But in the spring when it's 15c its soooo warm.
the same goes for pleasure and pain. If you're always comfortable, you end up needing more and more pleasure heading to an extreme just to be happy. Societies even have this problem, when pleasure becomes imbalanced you end up throwing people to the lions.
On /r/watchpeopledie I saw a 16-year-old girl doused with gasoline and burned to death because she was accused of being with a gang that killed a local taxi driver in a mugging, a group of four young men bashed with rocks and set on fire because they were accused of stealing a laptop, and elementary-school children going around an abandoned building murdering tied up men in some kind of ISIS propaganda video. I've seen a woman in Iran hanged by being pulled up from a crane, starting to kick her feet slowly and then wildly and then stopping. A guy in Mexico having his heart cut out while he was alive in front of his son, and then the same happening to the son. A group of women stripped naked and shot in the head in some kind of cartel video. A guy told that he was being released and to turn away, and then used for target practice with some kind of heavy artillery - he essentially exploded when they hit him.
All that shit is out there, and most Americans who have never seen anything worse than a mean Tweet have no idea about it.
Framing this around shame is of course misplaced, it is about threat: threat to one's comfortable use of the internet, one's social network, one's livelihood, and you'd love to believe these maniacs would stop there, wouldn't you. Did they ever before?
Shame is used as a weapon and a warning. It isn't that those lucky souls this doesn't work on are shameless: rather, they are protected from mob violence against their character wreaking havoc on their livelihood.
Young Adult authors have no such protection.
But that means an author simply has to be more protective of their private lives than other professions. There's a reason so many in history have written under pseudonyms; the effect of losing your audience if the public discovers you don't fit the mould is not new.
... But authors who have tried that have also found the public isn't receptive.
Nor Orson Scott Card (net worth $10 million).
In fact I'm kinda racking my brain thinking of any examples of someone doing this recently...
I'm starting to think the problem isn't the author's personal positions, it's that they're writing books few people want to read in the first place and the public finding out they're also not the sort of folks the public wants to support financially does their sales no favors on top of that.
... But, she was planning to sell to an American audience so that matters. If anything, it sounds like the feedback gave her a chance to tighten her fiction to be aligned better to the target market. That's a win for her and her publisher.
Anybody who just wants to write can drop their thoughts on a blog and call it a day. People who want to make money writing have to account for shaping the message to part people from their dollars.
Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fanfiction. In that form it couldn't be marketed. A few name changes and some reframing and it has sold over 150 million copies.
I thought shame was more associated to one's future "self". Guilt on the other hand is more associated to one's present "self".
So when you don't live up to the expectations of your future self, you are ashamed. When you don't live up to your current expectations, you are found guilty.
There's various examples in this article that seems to use shame as the catch-all. It feels like many of these online examples are rather guilt than shame?
Humiliation is typically an underserved feeling. Shame on the other hand is internalized and thus deserved.
Shame = I am bad
Guilt = I did something bad
Humiliation = I didn't deserve that
Embarrassment = I deserved that
A similar Super PAC for online comment trolling was known as CTR (Correct the Record) - backed by Hillary Clinton. So if you posted a negative comment about her online back before the election, you would often see these blank troll accounts leave you a friendly little reply.
It's hard to talk about this in tech because we, as a blob, enable it. It helps our companies growth and bottom line.
Dark truth.
Until such behaviors are made too expensive, illegal, or difficult, both parties and well enough funded organizations and individuals (see reputation management agencies) will all engage in this astro turfing. If you don’t like it when the other political party does but you don’t care when it’s your own political party, there are words for that.
For those interested in how Share Blue spun up some of it's troll farming, here is a great write-up:
For some people it's an easy choice to make: the benefits clearly out weight the risk, or vice-versa. For whatever reason, some people decide that they wish to be online, but don't agree with the risk of being shamed - a fool's errand. It's easier to move the world than to reshape the social order. Simply wishing for something to be true is the product of an immature mind.
Oh look, I don't have to worry about this crap any more. Yay :)
...except that when the person being shamed is from your camp.
The person being shamed is almost always from your own camp. That's the only time shaming has any effect.