gayfeline

curlicuecal:

As I mentioned, I recently read Jon Ronson’s book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” and thought it made some very compelling points on the renaissance of public shaming in the age of social media. I was going to post my highlights, but then I realized I’d highlighted about 30% of the book, so instead:

I wrote down what I thought were some of the key, take-home points the book made, and pulled quotes from the book in no particular order for each of them. It’s still a wall of text, but feel free to wade in if you’re interested.

Again, I strongly recommend giving this book a read.

Public shaming is often motivated by a belief that one is Doing Good

Public shaming is about social conformity

Public shaming can make us LESS aware of viewpoints different that our own

Shame works because we are all afraid

Shaming others can bring out our own brutality

Shame leads to dehumanization and “death of the soul”

Shame leads to violence

Technology has strange warping effects on how public shaming
affects us (and social media shaming can have longer impacts than we
expect)

There is evidence that “De-shaming” may have more positive outcomes than shaming

quotes from the book supporting each point under the cut. (bolding mine, quotes by paragraph and in no particular order)

Public shaming is often motivated by a belief that one is Doing Good

“Social media gives a voice to voiceless
people—its egalitarianism is its greatest quality. But I was struck by a
report Anna Funder discovered that had been written by a Stasi
psychologist tasked with trying to understand why they were attracting
so many willing informants. His conclusion: “It was an impulse to make
sure your neighbor was doing the right thing.”

“It seemed to me that all the people involved in
the Hank and Adria story thought they were doing something good. But
they only revealed that our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of
potential responses so narrow, that the only thing anyone can think to
do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a
shaming.

All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame,
and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap
shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks.”

“She was also someone whose shaming frenzy was
motivated by the desire to do good. She told me about the time 4chan
tracked down a boy who had been posting videos of himself on YouTube
physically abusing his cat “and daring people to stop him.” 4chan users
found him “and let the entire town know he was a sociopath. Ha ha! And
the cat was taken away from him and adopted.” (Of course, the boy might
have been a sociopath. But Mercedes and the other 4chan people had no
evidence of that—no idea what may or may not have been happening in his
home life to turn him that way.) I asked Mercedes what sorts of people
gathered on 4chan. “A lot of them are bored, understimulated,
overpersecuted, powerless kids,” she replied. “They know they can’t be
anything they want. So they went to the Internet. On the Internet we
have power in situations where we would otherwise be powerless.”

[On the fallacy of the Stanford Prison Experiment:] There was a smoking gun, but it was something I
hadn’t noticed. “The really interesting line,” Haslam wrote, “is I
thought I was doing something good at the time. The phrase doing
something good is quite critical.” — Doing something good. This was the
opposite of LeBon’s and Zimbardo’s conclusions. An evil environment
hadn’t turned Dave evil. Those hundred thousand people who piled on
Justine Sacco hadn’t been infected with evil. “The irony of those people
who use contagion as an explanation,” Steve Reicher e-mailed, “is that
they saw the TV pictures of the London riots but they didn’t go out and
riot themselves. It is never true that everyone helplessly joins in with
others in a crowd. The riot police don’t join in with a rioting crowd.
Contagion, it appears, is a problem for others.”

Public shaming is about social conformity

“We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it.”

“
The sad thing was that Lindsey had incurred the
Internet’s wrath because she was impudent and playful and foolhardy and
outspoken. And now here she was, working with Farukh to reduce herself
to safe banalities—to cats and ice cream and Top 40 chart music. We were
creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland.”

““But there is a chilling of behavior that goes
along with a virtual lynching. There is a life modification.” “I know,” I
said. “For a year Lindsey Stone had felt too plagued to even go to
karaoke.” And karaoke is something you do alone in a room with your
friends. “And that’s not an unusual reaction,” Michael said. “People
change their phone numbers. They don’t leave the house. They go into
therapy. They have signs of PTSD. It’s like the Stasi. We’re creating a
culture where people feel constantly surveilled, where people are afraid
to be themselves.” […] “This is more frightening
than the NSA,” said Michael. “The NSA is looking for terrorists. They’re
not getting psychosexual pleasure out of their schadenfreude about
you.”

“But the Stasi didn’t only inflict physical
horror. Their main endeavor was to create the most elaborate
surveillance network in world history. It didn’t seem unreasonable to
scrutinize this aspect of them in the hope it might teach us something
about our own social media surveillance network.”

Public shaming can make us LESS aware of viewpoints different that our own

“The tech-utopians like the people in Wired
present this as a new kind of democracy,” Adam’s e-mail continued. “It
isn’t. It’s the opposite. It locks people off in the world they started
with and prevents them from finding out anything different. They got
trapped in the system of feedback reinforcement. The idea that there is
another world of other people who have other ideas is marginalized in
our lives.”

“
We express our opinion that Justine Sacco is a
monster. We are instantly congratulated for this—for basically being
Rosa Parks. We make the on-the-spot decision to carry on believing it.”

Shame works because we are all afraid

“I’ve worked on dark stories before—stories about
innocent people losing their lives to the FBI, about banks hounding
debtors until they commit suicide—but although I felt sorry for those
people, I hadn’t felt the dread snake its way into me in the way these
shaming stories had. I’d leave Jonah and Michael and Justine feeling
nervous and depressed.”

“
Psychologists try to remind anxiety sufferers
that “what if” worries are irrational ones. If you find yourself
thinking, What if I just came across as racist? the “what if” is
evidence that nothing bad actually happened. It’s just thoughts swirling
frantically around. But Lindsey’s “what if” worry—“What if my new
company googles me?”—was extremely plausible.

“
“Growing up I was ashamed of everything… and at a certain point I realized that if I was open with the
world about the things that embarrassed me they no longer held any
weight! I felt set free!” She added that she always derives her porn
scenarios from this formula. She imagines circumstances that would
mortify her, “like being bound naked on a street with everybody looking
at you,” and enacts them with like-minded porn actors, robbing them of
their horror.

“

“Years ago I might have thought it crazy that
Donna had become so upset over such an innocuous article. But now I
understood. I think we all care deeply about things that seem totally
inconsequential to other people. We all carry around with us the flotsam
and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. We are
a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them? And so
I sympathized with Donna. It seemed sad—given how Max and Andrew owed
her so much—that as soon as she saw herself from the outside she felt
ashamed, like the shame had snaked its way into her and there was no
escaping.”

“A lot of people move around in life chronically
ashamed of how they look, or how they feel, or what they said, or what
they did. It’s like a permanent adolescent concern. Adolescence is when
you’re permanently concerned about what other people think of you.” It
was a few months earlier, and Brad Blanton and I were talking on Skype.
He was telling me about how, as a psychotherapist, he had come to
understand how so many of us “live our lives constantly in fear of being
exposed or being judged as immoral or not good enough.”

“All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame,
and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap
shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks.

“

Shaming others can bring out our own brutality

“
The common assumption is that public punishments
died out in the new great metropolises because they’d been judged
useless. Everyone was too busy being industrious to bother to trail some
transgressor through the city crowds like some volunteer scarlet
letter. But according to the documents I found, that wasn’t it at all.
They didn’t fizzle out because they were ineffective. They were stopped
because they were far too brutal.

“

“I wondered: When shaming takes on a
disproportionate significance within an august institution, when it
entrenches itself over generations, what are the consequences? What does
it do to the participants?”

“
I assumed that by lunchtime John would move away
from shaming familiarization to other types of courtroom
familiarization. But, really, that never happened. It turned out that
shaming was such an integral part of the judicial process that the day
was pretty much all about it.

“

“Matthew’s role-play lasted fifteen minutes. His
face turned as crimson as a rusted cargo container as he mumbled about
corroded coils. His mouth was dry, his voice trembling. He was a wreck.
He’s weak, I felt myself think. He’s just so weak. Then I caught myself.
Judging someone on how flustered he behaves in the face of a shaming is
a truly strange and arbitrary way of forming an opinion on him.”

“
it’s odd that so many of us see shaming how
free-market libertarians see capitalism, as a beautiful beast that must
be allowed to run free.

“

“
But The Crowd was more than a polemic. Like
Jonah Lehrer, LeBon knew that a popular-science book needed a
self-improvement message to become successful. And LeBon had two. His
first was that we really didn’t need to worry ourselves about whether
mass revolutionary movements like communism and feminism had a moral
reason for existing. They didn’t. They were just madness. So it was fine
for us to stop worrying about that.”

“
” Was he right? It felt like a question that
really needed answering because it didn’t seem to be crossing any of our
minds to wonder whether the person we had just shamed was okay or in
ruins. I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely
administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our
collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel
responsible for the avalanche.

“

“Judge Ted Poe’s critics—like the civil rights
group the ACLU—argued to him the dangers of these ostentatious
punishments, especially those that were carried out in public. They said
it was no coincidence that public shaming had enjoyed such a
renaissance in Mao’s China and Hitler’s Germany and the Ku Klux Klan’s
America—it destroys souls, brutalizing everyone, the onlookers included,
dehumanizing them as much as the person being shamed.“

“It feels like they want an apology, but it’s a
lie. […] It’s a lie because they
don’t want an apology,” he said. “An apology is supposed to be a
communion—a coming together. For someone to make an apology, someone has
to be listening. They listen and you speak and there’s an exchange.
That’s why we have a thing about accepting apologies. There’s a power
exchange that happens. But they don’t want an apology. […] What they want is my destruction. What they want is for me to die.
They will never say this because it’s too histrionic. But they never
want to

hear from me again for the rest of my life, and
while they’re never hearing from me, they have the right to use me as a
cultural reference point whenever it services their ends. That’s how it
would work out best for them. They would like me to never speak again. […] I’d never had the opportunity to be the object of hate
before. The hard part isn’t the hate. It’s the object.”

“
But I didn’t think any of those things were
true. If punching Justine Sacco was ever punching up—and it didn’t seem
so to me given that she was an unknown PR woman with 170 Twitter
followers—the punching only intensified as she plummeted to the ground.
Punching Jonah Lehrer wasn’t punching up either—not when he was begging
for forgiveness in front of that giant-screen Twitter feed.

“

This was especially true, he told
me, because the onlookers had been so nice. He’d feared abuse and
ridicule. But no. “Ninety percent of the responses on the street were
‘God bless you’ and ‘Things will be okay,’” he said. Their kindness
meant everything, he said. It made it all right. It set him on his path
to salvation. “Social media shamings are worse than your shamings,” I
suddenly said to Ted Poe. He looked taken aback. “They are worse,” he
replied. “They’re anonymous.” “Or even if they’re not anonymous, it’s
such a pile-on they may as well be,” I said. “They’re brutal,” he said. I
suddenly became aware that throughout our conversation I’d been using
the word they. And each time I did, it felt like I was being spineless.
The fact was, they weren’t brutal. We were brutal.

“The justice system in the West has a lot of
problems,” Poe said, “but at least there are rules. You have basic
rights as the accused. You have your day in court. You don’t have any
rights when you’re accused on the Internet. And the consequences are
worse. It’s worldwide forever.”

“You turn around and you suddenly realize you’re
the head of a pitchfork mob,” Michael said. “And it’s ‘What are these
people fucking doing here? Why are they acting like heathens? I don’t
want to be associated with this at all. I want to get out of here.’” “It
was horrible,” I said. “All this time I’d been thinking we were in the
middle of some kind of idealistic reimagining of the justice system. But
those people were so cold.” The response to Jonah’s apology had been
brutal and confusing to me. It felt as if the people on Twitter had been
invited to be characters in a courtroom

drama, and had been allowed to choose their
roles, and had all gone for the part of the hanging judge. Or it was
even worse than that. They all had gone for the part of the people in
the lithographs being ribald at whippings. “I’m watching people stabbing
and stabbing and stabbing Jonah,” Michael said, “and I’m, ‘HE’S DEAD.’”

Shame leads to dehumanization and “death of the soul”

“People really were very keen to imagine Jonah as
shameless, as lacking in that quality, like he was something not quite
human that had adopted human form. I suppose it’s no surprise that we
feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt—before, during,

or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes
as a surprise. In psychology it’s known as cognitive dissonance. It’s
the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two
contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that we’re kind
people and the idea that we’ve just destroyed someone). And so to ease
the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behavior.”

“Stop and Frisk: The Human Impact.” Several
interviewees said that being stopped and frisked makes you “feel
degraded and humiliated.” One went on to say: “When they stop you in the
street, and then everybody’s looking … it does degrade you. And
then people get the wrong perception of you. That kind of colors
people’s thoughts toward you, [people] might start thinking that you’re
into some illegal activity, when you’re not. Just because the police
[are] just stopping you for—just randomly.
That’s humiliating [on] its own.” … [Another said,] “It made me feel
violated, humiliated, harassed, shameful, and of course very scared.”

“A shaming can be like a distorting mirror at a funfair, taking human nature and making it look monstrous.

“

“
I suddenly remembered how weirdly tarnished I
felt when the spambot men created their fake Jon Ronson, getting my
character traits all wrong, turning me into some horrific, garrulous
foodie, and strangers believed it was me, and there was nothing I could
do.

“

“I’d been taught that psychopaths had just been
born that way,” he said, “and that they’d only want to manipulate you so
you’d get them a reduced sentence.” He pictured them like they were
another species.

[…]
“The men would all say that they had died,”
Gilligan said. “These were the most incorrigibly violent characters.
They would all say that they themselves had died before they started
killing other people. What they meant was that their personalities had
died. They felt dead inside. They had no capacity for feelings. No
emotional feelings. Or even physical feelings. So some would cut
themselves. Or they would mutilate themselves in the most horrible ways.
Not because they felt guilty—this wasn’t a penance for their sins—but
because they wanted to see if they had feelings. They found their inner
numbness more tormenting than even the physical pain would be.”

“These men’s souls did not just die. They have
dead souls because their souls were murdered. How did it happen? How
were they murdered?”

“The way we construct consciousness is to tell the
story of ourselves to ourselves, the story of who we believe we are. I
feel that a really public shaming or humiliation is a conflict between
the person trying to write his own narrative and society trying to write
a different narrative for the person. One story tries to overwrite the
other. And so to survive you have to own your story. Or”—Mike looked at
me—“you write a third story. You react to the narrative that’s been
forced upon you.” He paused. “You have to find a way to disrespect the
other narrative,” he said. “If you believe it, it will crush you.”

“I’d been
thinking about a message that had appeared on the giant Twitter feed
behind Jonah’s head: “He is tainted as a writer forever.” And a tweet
directed at Justine Sacco: “Your tweet lives on forever.” The word
forever had been coming up a lot during my two years among the publicly
shamed. Jonah and Justine and people like them were being told, “No.
There is no door. There is no way back in. We don’t offer any
forgiveness.” But we know that people are complicated and have a mixture
of flaws and talents and sins. So why do we pretend that we don’t? Amid
all the agony, Jim McGreevey was trying an extraordinary thing.

“We kept walking—past inmates just sitting there,
looking at walls. “Normal prison is punishment in the worst sense,” Jim
told me. “It’s like a soul-bleeding. Day in, day out, people find
themselves doing virtually nothing in a very negative environment.” I
thought of Lindsey Stone, just sitting at her kitchen table for almost a
year, staring at the online shamings of people just like her. “People
move away from themselves,” Jim said. “Inmates tell me time and again
that they feel themselves shutting down, building a wall.”

“I remembered a moment from Jonah Lehrer’s
annihilation. It was when he was standing in front of that giant-screen
Twitter feed trying to apologize. Jonah is the sort of person who finds
displays of emotion extremely embarrassing, and he then looked deeply
uncomfortable. “I hope that when I tell my young daughter the same story
I’ve just told you,” he was saying, “I will be a better person …”
“He is tainted as a writer forever,” replied the tweets. “He has not
proven that he is capable of feeling shame.” “Jonah Lehrer is a friggin’
sociopath.” — Later, when Jonah and I talked about that moment, he told
me he had to “turn off some emotional switch in me. I think I had to
shut down.”

“It’s shameful to have to admit you feel ashamed.
By the way, we’re saying the word feeling. The feeling of shame. I
think feeling is the wrong word.” It may be somewhat paradoxical to
refer to shame as a “feeling,” for while shame is initially painful,
constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is,
in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming
intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and
deadness. [In Dante’s Inferno] the lowest circle of hell was a region
not of flames, but of ice—absolute coldness.”

“Given all of this, you’d think LeBon’s work
might have at some point stopped being influential. But it never did. I
suppose one reason for his enduring success is that we tend to love
nothing more than to declare other people insane.”

Shame leads to violence

[on an interview of random americans, finding that the majority of people have at some point entertained vengeance fantasies.] “Almost none of the murderous fantasies were
dreamed up in response to actual danger—stalker ex-boyfriends, etc. They
were all about the horror of humiliation. Brad Blanton was right. Shame
internalized can lead to agony. It can lead to Jonah Lehrer. Whereas
shame let out can lead to freedom, or at least to a funny story, which
is a sort of freedom too.”

“Universal among the violent criminals was the
fact that they were keeping a secret,” Gilligan wrote. “A central
secret. And that secret was that they felt ashamed—deeply ashamed,
chronically ashamed, acutely ashamed.” It was shame, every time. “I have
yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the
experience of feeling shamed or humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed.” […]
For each of them the shaming “occurred on a
scale so extreme, so bizarre, and so frequent that one cannot fail to
see that the men who occupy the extreme end of the continuum of violent
behavior in adulthood occupied an equally extreme end of the continuum
of violent child abuse earlier in life.” So they grew up and—“all
violence being a person’s attempt to replace shame with
self-esteem”—they murdered people.

“And after they were jailed, things only got
worse. At Walpole—Massachusetts’s most riot-prone prison during the
1970s—officers intentionally flooded the cells and put insects in the
prisoners’ food. They forced inmates to lie facedown before they were
allowed meals. Sometimes officers would tell prisoners they had a
visitor. Prisoners almost never had visitors, so this was exciting to
hear. Then the officer would say that the prisoner didn’t really have a
visitor and that he was just kidding. And so on. “They thought these
things would be how to get them to obey,” Gilligan told me. “But it did
the exact opposite. It stimulated violence.”

Technology has strange warping effects on how public shaming
affects us (and social media shaming can have larger and longer impacts than we
expect)

“According to Google’s own research into our “eye
movements,” 53 percent of us don’t go beyond the first two search
results, and 89 percent don’t look down past the first page. “What the
first page looks like,” Michael’s strategist, Jered Higgins, told me
during my tour of their offices, “determines what people think of you.”
As a writer and journalist—as well as a father and human being—this
struck me as a really horrifying way of knowing the world.”

“
What had begun as a schadenfreude-motivated
Phineas Upham Google alert had led Graeme into the mysterious world of
“black-ops reputation management.” The purpose of the fake sites was
obvious—to push reports about the tax-evasion charges so far down the
search results that they’d effectively vanish. Nobody had heard of the
European Court of Justice’s “Right to Be Forgotten” ruling at that
point—it was still two years from existing—but somebody was evidently
fashioning some clumsy homemade U.S.-based version for Phineas Upham.

“

“
I told my dining companion, Michael Fertik, that
he was the only person from the mysterious reputation-management world
who had returned my e-mail. “That’s because this is a really easy sector
in which to be an unappealing, scurrilous operation,” he said.
“Scurrilous in what way?” “A couple of them are really nasty fucking
people,” Michael said. “There’s a guy who has some traction in our
space, who runs a company, he’s a convicted rapist. He’s a felony
rapist. He went to jail for four years for raping a woman. He started a
company to basically obscure that fact about himself, I think.” Michael
told me the name of the man’s company. “We’ve built a data file on him,”
he said.

“

“Man, remember Justine Sacco? #HasJustineLandedYet. God that was awesome. MILLIONS of people waiting for her to land.”

“
And so the worst thing, Justine said, the thing
that made her feel most helpless, was her lack of control over the
Google search results. They were just there, eternal, crushing. “It’s
going to take a very long time for those Google search results to change
for me,” she said.

“and, in response to a small number of posters
suggesting that maybe a person’s future shouldn’t be ruined because of a
jokey photograph, “HER FUTURE ISN’T RUINED! Stop trying to make her
into a martyr. In 6 months no one except those that actually know her
will remember this.”

[did not turn out to be true.]

There is evidence that “De-shaming” may have more positive outcomes than shaming

“Knee-jerk shaming is knee-jerk shaming and I
wondered what would happen if we made a point of eschewing the shaming
completely—if we refused to shame anyone. Could there be a corner of the
justice system trying out an idea like that?”

“If shaming worked, if prison worked, then it
would work,” Jim said to me. “But it doesn’t work.” He paused. “Look,
some people need to go to prison forever. Some people are
incapable … but most people …” “It’s disorienting,” I said,
“that the line between hell and redemption in the U.S. justice system is
so fine.”

“This has been a book about people who really
didn’t do very much wrong. Justine and Lindsey, certainly, were
destroyed for nothing more than telling bad jokes. And while we were
busy steadfastly refusing them forgiveness, Jim was quietly arranging
the salvation of someone who had committed a far more serious offense.
It struck me that if deshaming would work for a maelstrom like Raquel,
if it would restore someone like her to health, then we need to think
twice about raining down vengeance and anger as our default position.”

“Throughout the 1980s, Gilligan ran experimental
therapeutic communities inside Massachusetts’s prisons. They weren’t
especially radical. They were just about “treating the prisoners with
respect,” Gilligan told me, “giving people a chance to express their
grievances and hopes and wishes and fears.” The point was to create an
ambience that eradicated shame entirely. “We had one psychiatrist who
referred to the inmates as scum. I told him I never wanted to see his
face again. It was not only antitherapeutic for the patients, it was
dangerous for us.” At first, the prison officers had been suspicious,
“but eventually some of them began to envy the prisoners,” Gilligan
said. “Many of them also needed some psychiatric help. These were poorly
paid guys, poorly educated. We arranged to get some of them into
psychiatric treatment. So they became less insulting and domineering.
And violence dropped astoundingly.”

[…] “[The new governor] said, ‘We have to stop this idea of giving
free college education to inmates,’” Gilligan told me, “‘otherwise
people who are too poor to go to college are going to start committing
crimes so they can get sent to prison for a free education.’” And so
that was the end of the education program.

[..]
Only a handful of therapeutic communities inspired by his Massachusetts ones exist in American prisons today.