#i got so bored and understimulated that i started reading all the mail on the counter

[mintedaisies]

been desperately craving to go back to my bookworm days and, this time, delve into the world of monster romance novels

[curlicuecal]

Public Shame

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.