"Everyone will land, but some people fly first class"
March 4, 2015 5:52 AM   Subscribe

Ronson’s argument is essentially a reactionary liberalism taking shelter in the privilege of the status quo: while the ideals of twitter shaming campaigns are well-founded, their application, in practice, is problematic. They go too far. Innocents have suffered. His rhetorical appeal, therefore, is like the many liberals who have written books and essays and memoirs about how they joined the communist party (or Occupy, or whatever) only to discover that it didn’t instantly solve everything painlessly and precisely, who find fault with every activist who isn’t literally the saintliest fantasy of MLK and Gandhi rolled into one. The theory is (still) good, they always say, but the practice leaves something to be desired. I’m all for anti-racism, but you know what, I can’t get on board with disrupting people’s commute.
Aaron Bady: On Landings, Soft and Otherwise, and Aggressive Lacks of Proportion.
posted by MartinWisse (52 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
Yes, but - okay, look, Justine Sacco gets shamed all over the internet for her racist tweet, and loses her job, and that's good, and all who participated should be proud of themselves. Cheryl Abbate gets shamed for her handling of a reactionary student in class - and certainly suffers more than Sacco - and that's bad, and John McAddams should be fired. Many people believe both these things, and I would argue that they are only incompatible if we try to argue that this is about internet shaming qua shaming.

It's not; it's about power. And that is why it's reasonable to talk about internet shaming from both experiential and tactical standpoints.

If we're strictly talking about internet shaming as right or wrong in itself, then either Sacco should be fired and Abbate should basically suck it up (although McAddams failed in his responsibility as faculty to some degree) or neither Sacco nor Abbate should have been shamed. We can't say "it's okay to shame and harass Sacco because I think her views repulsive, but we should not shame and harass Abbate because I agree with her and think she did a good job".

But obviously we're not. Internet shaming is a skirmish in a larger war about who gets to enforce the rules. Basically, what everyone wants is to be able to shame and punish people we think are bad. One guy wants to shame and punish trans women because he thinks being trans is a sin and gets a kick out of it; one guy wants to shame and punish racists so that we can expel them from public life. We here find the second viewpoint sympathetic and the first disgusting and immoral. (I mean, correctly so.) In a sense, we all agree that shaming and punishing via internet is a good thing; we just disagree about who should be doing it.

This suggests to me that we need to discuss internet shaming from a tactical standpoint and from the standpoint of how it is experienced.

Tactically, several considerations come to mind, both persuasive to me but contradictory:

1. The right/the racists/etc are much meaner and more powerful, and they are willing to go after people for stuff the left generally won't use. (Ie, minor sexual scuttlebutt, divorces, people's appearance, accent, etc) They are also much more willing to use plausible threats of violence - as nasty as some of that "go kill yourself" stuff on SJ tumblr can be, it's generally not from people who are going to SWAT you. So if there's a general culture of internet shaming, it's going to hurt us more, as witness what happened to Adria Richards.

2. But if there's no way to shut down the internet culture of shaming, it would be foolish to abandon the tactic - ie, if the Adria Richardses of the world are going to be attacked and destroyed anyway, it would be stupid not to attack back even if we can't get as good results.

A subsidiary consideration: the culture of internet shaming spills over into stuff that is outside the middle class political left/right divide, as was outlined in Ronson's article - no one really got into the anecdote about the girl who was shamed and then fired for taking a silly photo of herself outside a military cemetery, but that one seems very telling to me. It suggests, for one thing, that there's a lot of libidinal satisfaction in shaming quite outside the usual political considerations. It also suggests that there's a lot of what you might call "low theory" going on about symbolic politics that's getting enacted on and amongst working class people. It also suggests the incredible vulnerability of all workers to this sort of thing, not just relatively high profile people.

From the experiential standpoint: shaming is experienced differently by different people in different social milieux. I feel like there is so little serious discussion about this from anyone's standpoint - if you try to talk about it among activists, it's either "ha ha circular firing squad the left lol" or else "clearly you are the privileged whiner here"*. And in general it's not talked about elsewhere at all.

I don't even have a theory of the experience of shaming. And honestly, I wish Ronson had written a story that really tried to explore shaming rather than pinning his star to Sacco - some stuff about workplace bullying would have been useful, for instance, and talking to a larger number of people who were shamed for fairly ordinary stuff like the girl with the photo.

I surmise that the way people experience shaming depends a lot on their social networks - who has multiple networks, for instance; who has multiple forms of social capital. It probably also depends a lot on sort of the moral framework the individual has - although that's hugely modulated by the social setting.

I think it would be worth studying how shaming relates to gender. I wonder (based on observation) if people who grow up being treated as women** experience shaming differently, given that people who grow up in this way are so deeply pressured to make others feel good, feel bad if they are disliked regardless of the cause, trivialize their own emotional well-being, etc.

*Seriously, the number of tumblr situations I witnessed - before the last one finally drove me away from tumblr, mostly - where one person would be the gleeful leader of shaming (or report on the real-world shaming in which they engaged) and get lots of pats on the back, only to be revealed as worthy of shaming themselves...it got so that I started to anticipate that anyone I admired on tumblr would either have a terrible secret and deserve a bad fate (ie, be revealed as a rapist, mostly) or would have a "terrible" secret and be mobbed until they disappeared. And that was when I found that I no longer enjoyed my corner of tumblr.

**I have a lot of complicated feelings about all of this, because I don't identify as a woman and - were circumstances different - would not be passing as one [in most settings]. But I also recognize that I personally learned a lot of "how women should be" survival stuff that is with me still, no matter how I identify. I recognize that "socialized [gender]" is a dogwhistle for TERFS who want to attack trans women, so I am reluctant to use that framing (also I suspect that being socialized into femininity for AFAB people works really differently than being socialized into masculinity for AMAB people). But anyway, my point is that I think I picked up a lot of the standard "ignore your feelings, make other people feel good or you're a bad person" woman-training stuff.
posted by Frowner at 6:32 AM on March 4, 2015 [51 favorites]


O twitter, whatever did we do for drama before you?
posted by octobersurprise at 6:36 AM on March 4, 2015 [4 favorites]




Who do you think is more "powerful" Amanda Marcotte or Milo Yianoppolis? - they basically have the exact same job for different "sides" of any given "hot take" issue.

Of course, the sensible reaction is to run away from any story you think is likely to attract either of their interests. But, culture wars do have that tendency to steamroller over anyone interested in slightly more edifying things.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 6:49 AM on March 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


O twitter, whatever did we do for drama before you?

Chased French aristocracy, Frankensteins, that kind of thing.
posted by Artw at 6:51 AM on March 4, 2015 [16 favorites]


Come on now, you're better than this kind of false equivalence.

Why yes, a mob of goodies chasing some baddies is TOTALLY DIFFERENT than a mob of baddies chasing some goodies!
posted by Artw at 6:53 AM on March 4, 2015


I thought this article was kind of a mess; at first I thought he was saying "internet shaming is helping punish racism and white people shouldn't complain even if they are undeserving victims, you gotta break some eggs etc." but then I reread it, and it seems more like he's saying "horrible public shaming is part of life for women and minorities, if the internet spreads it around to white people and men so much the better" which is still kind of unsettling. Also comparing mob nastiness on the internet to a "flawed social movement" seems like a really glaring misunderstanding of how and why people are horrible on the internet.
posted by daisystomper at 6:59 AM on March 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


Why yes, a mob of goodies chasing some baddies is TOTALLY DIFFERENT than a mob of baddies chasing some goodies!

But it kind of is, right? I mean, it's a bit different if one is, say, executing Mussolini or if one is killing "heretics" outside of Munster in 1535. Because otherwise all we're saying is that not only are "good" and "bad" utterly matters of opinion (which is, in a way, what I believe) but that there's no point in trying to create some kind of intersubjective, provisional meaning for "good" or "bad" that will [do something]. The universe is blank and meaningless and history is a slaughtering bench, but we've still got to eat.

I mean, the very idea of "mob" is a social idea (loaded with class and race ideology, for that matter).

We're reduced to the old problem of "what do we think right and wrong are and how do we know". I think everyone wants to reduce this to the civic ("private matters of morality can be left to the individual because we have all agreed on a public code of behavior so that we can all get along") except this keeps breaking down, either because people don't want to extend it fairly ("my political opinions are private and I should not be fired for them, but your political opinions show you to be a discipline case and a radical unionizer and therefore you can't do your job and should be fired") or else it breaks down under the question of what is public and what is private ("I can have racist opinions if I want, that's personal"; "no, you can't, because no one can be a racist between their ears and an egalitarian in life").

Everyone is an individualist when it might come down to them, right? No one wants to be internet-shamed. And yet you might plausibly argue that a few people rendered unemployable would be a pretty small cost if it made being publicly racist unacceptable - as a society we make all kinds of similarly unappealing decisions about public matters all the time, on both the left and the right.

Mainly, I would just like the post-scarcity utopia to arrive ASAP so I can go live on an orbital somewhere.
posted by Frowner at 7:05 AM on March 4, 2015 [22 favorites]


In a sense, we all agree that shaming and punishing via internet is a good thing; we just disagree about who should be doing it.

Well, speak for yourself. Having watched a few internet shaming campaigns, I incline toward the view that they are generally ineffective whenever they might be ethical and somewhat less than ethical whenever they are effective. It's hard to shame the powerful and easy to shame the helpless.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:07 AM on March 4, 2015 [18 favorites]


I want to expose racists just as much as anybody, but if the only consequence of Internet shaming a racist is that you get him fired from his job at Burger King, you're not exactly speaking truth to power here.
posted by jonp72 at 7:07 AM on March 4, 2015 [8 favorites]


Of course, the sensible reaction is to run away from any story you think is likely to attract either of their interests.

I've disagreed plenty with Marcotte but Milo is a toxic blight on the Internet. But sure, let's toss them both on the same heap.
posted by kmz at 7:09 AM on March 4, 2015


Artw: "Chased French aristocracy, Frankensteins, that kind of thing."

We've been through this, it's Frankenstein's monsters.
posted by RobotHero at 7:13 AM on March 4, 2015 [8 favorites]


Well, speak for yourself. Having watched a few internet shaming campaigns, I incline toward the view that they are generally ineffective whenever they might be ethical and somewhat less than ethical whenever they are effective. It's hard to shame the powerful and easy to shame the helpless.

I don't know what I think. (I don't really know what "I" am as an identity, anyway, except limited.) On one hand, I don't care for getting people fired, because I feel like that's mostly a tactic of the right. On the other hand, I recognize that I'm limited, and when I read, say, feminists of color who support getting people fired over racist stuff [that does not happen at work], I tend to think "hm, how is my experience contouring my perspective?" Obviously, there's some idea of what "I" am, here, because I'm saying to myself "I want to be a person who corrects for my limitations and I take feminists of color seriously but not Fox News", but I don't know.

I think a lot of people at least in part want to punish the people we think are bad and don't really worry a lot about fairness in the process. I've spent a lot of time in large group settings, left right and not easy to reduce to left/right, and I think that's where a lot of us go a lot of the time.

I don't like humans very much. We're a mistake - not smart enough to hack our problems, too smart to be trusted to act on instinct.
posted by Frowner at 7:14 AM on March 4, 2015 [11 favorites]


Who do you think is more "powerful" Amanda Marcotte or Milo Yianoppolis? - they basically have the exact same job for different "sides" of any given "hot take" issue.

It's not about individual power exclusively, though. Yianoppolis is siding, at least in GamerGate (though as far as I can tell he's this kind of douchebag on most issues), with the people with significant institutional power; they have patriarchy and institutionalized misogyny on their side and are combining that with am ambivalent law enforcement mechanism and platforms that are generally only willing to pay lip service to fixing the hate groups that use them for harassment and threats. I don't read a lot of Marcotte's work, but it's the job of feminism to dismantle the patriarchal, oppressive systems that those jerks prop up.

I think the author of this piece had a good point about how the last Sacco piece we saw here conflated Adria Richards' shit with the people who she was calling out, as if a) she asked for or could have expected it to blow up the way it does when men's bullshit is usually so flagrantly ignored and b) calling out people for making unwelcoming environments is just as bad as making those environments. The reaction against her has been sexist as hell, and though as a white person I'm not as great at seeing nuance in how people respond to race as people who experience racism firsthand, it's disproportionate enough to make me think it's also super racist.

Anyway, a lot of this plays into the attempt to make total jackasses like Yianoppolis look better by virtue of comparing them to actual advocates for social justice, and it's a line of unadulterated horseshit, but it's one that's supported by the way journalism works, the way we're trained to think debate works, etc. It's common enough that you could make it the central square of your Internet Discussion Of Something Involving Bigotry bingo board, though.
posted by NoraReed at 7:16 AM on March 4, 2015 [13 favorites]


> "Yes, but - okay, look, Justine Sacco gets shamed all over the internet for her racist tweet, and loses her job, and that's good ..."

Not everyone agrees with this. I don't.
posted by kyrademon at 7:21 AM on March 4, 2015 [7 favorites]


If I were an optimist, I would probably think the best possible thing that could come out of all this is the collapse of social media as everyone realizes maybe they shouldn't just burble out every little thing that pops into their brain.

However I am a pessimist, so that will of course not happen.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 7:29 AM on March 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


But it kind of is, right? I mean, it's a bit different if one is, say, executing Mussolini or if one is killing "heretics" outside of Munster in 1535. Because otherwise all we're saying is that not only are "good" and "bad" utterly matters of opinion (which is, in a way, what I believe) but that there's no point in trying to create some kind of intersubjective, provisional meaning for "good" or "bad" that will [do something]. The universe is blank and meaningless and history is a slaughtering bench, but we've still got to eat.

But, look, here's the thing. We're talking about online communication here. I am all for people being more careful about how they communicate, but I'm also for people being forgiven for their mistakes, and remembering that people are human beings.

The problem is that online communication is, I think, considered equivalent to offline communication. If I'm at work and I say something inappropriate, then it's perfectly within a coworkers rights to call me out on it, and that wouldn't be a fun day for either of us but it might be necessary. But if I tweet, especially to a personal account, and suddenly have thousands of people telling me my behaviour is unacceptable it suddenly becomes much less pleasant.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 7:31 AM on March 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


I would probably think the best possible thing that could come out of all this is the collapse of social media as everyone realizes maybe they shouldn't just burble out every little thing that pops into their brain.

little known fact: the krell were actually destroyed by social media
posted by octobersurprise at 7:36 AM on March 4, 2015


I would probably think the best possible thing that could come out of all this is the collapse of social media as everyone realizes maybe they shouldn't just burble out every little thing that pops into their brain.

It worked for me. My 'social media' involvement has become all input and no output (unless you call a few MeFi comments a day 'social media output'), and I had a blog that made the first 'blogroll' in 1999 until I got publicly shamed for a bad joke (that some people thought was inviting hackers to attack their blogs while others got the joke that I was comparing myself to better bloggers). And my input is very selective (using old-school RSS to follow a few people's tumblrs and old-school blogs, no twitter, no facebook). MeFi posts like this one are almost the only way I avoid being blissfully ignorant of the open sewer the Internet has become, reminding me of the wisdom of my strategy.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:02 AM on March 4, 2015 [7 favorites]


Society brings forth innumerable things to nurture privileged jerks.
Privileged jerks have done nothing good with which to recompense society.
Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame.

(Apologies to Zhang Xianzhong)
posted by officer_fred at 8:20 AM on March 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Ronson’s argument is essentially a reactionary liberalism taking shelter in the privilege of the status quo

Whereas Bady's argument, quite the opposite, is essentially a reactionary liberalism taking shelter in the pose of leftism
posted by RogerB at 8:40 AM on March 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


I have no solutions to offer. No real advice. The point I really wanted to make was the utter inability of shaming to change someone who isn't ready to accept their guilt. Probably no one is publicly shaming rapists in the hope that they'll mend their ways. People are shamed when the community has given up on them. People are shamed because it's the only punishment they're willing to (and have the means to) mete out. So I suspect I'm trying to make a couple of points that don't directly relate to the discussion at hand, but holy hell I wrote all this and it's getting posted (Thanks Adderall!).

Calling abusers out can definitely be beneficial in a few ways. We don't want creeps to have the opportunity to victimize more people through silence, and warning people away from toxic serial offenders is a public service. Publicly announcing that you stand with the injured party is definitely a good thing to do (if they express that support is appreciated---they might want to not deal with it at the moment, and that is a valid response to trauma).

Shame is a tremendously awful experience. I should know, as I fit every single criteria for Avoidant Personality Disorder, which, at it's core, is driven by feelings shame, and by the fear of that pain. Nothing and anything triggers my fear of being Fundamentally Awful---it is part of my daily experience and the largest shaper of my life's story. I think it gives me some small insight into how shame functions.

We evolved as social creatures who don't survive well individually; to be rejected by one's community cues the nervous system to expect death. Luckily, in this networked age, there is more than one community that each of us belong to, and to be kicked out of one isn't the life-or-death situation that our evolution prepared us for.

Shame is such an incredibly bad sensation that people will jump through any cognitive hoops to avoid it. The easiest and most common solution is to declare to oneself, "I am correct, and the people trying to shame me are crazy." Unless the target already respects your opinion, shaming someone will invariably lead them to self-justify and harden their opinion. I see this so clearly because I'm so rarely able to do it. My default assumption is that anyone expressing even the mildest disapproval is justified in doing so. People who casually reject being shamed stand out to me. Honestly almost everyone is better than I am.

There are rare people who will consider the possibility that they are wrong, who, when told they are incorrect, will engage in self-reflection and examine their behavior. Yet even those saintly souls will rarely extend such consideration to those who shame them. Entertaining the possibility one is wrong is a courtesy, and people do not extend courtesy to those who are attacking them. Rapists and abusers are probably not that caliber of person.

Guilt is a slightly different emotion than shame. Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, but the difference between guilt and shame is the difference between telling someone "you know better than that," vs. asking them "how could you?!" See how the assumptions differ in each?

When we guilt someone, we're holding them to a higher standard. We're saying that if they genuinely change there's hope for them. With shame, you say that they're permanently broken, they are ejected from the community without recourse, and there is no reason for them to apologize because there's no coming back. In both cases, one is saying the accused has done something extremely wrong. It's just that one holds the possibility of change and one strangles it.

Victims have no moral obligation to forgive their abusers! And no online community needs to tolerate rapists. I absolutely do not dispute that and that is not my point. This whole discussion, however, is not about the victims relationship to their victimizer, but about communities' relationship towards offenders. It's about whether their can ever be mob "justice." As Frowner so ablely put it above, the left will suffer more if this becomes common place, because the right is way more willing to pull way nastier shit.

There can be mob punishment, but there can never be mob justice.

I suppose that I'm implying that guilting offenders, as opposed to shaming them, would be a superior approach (in a slightly-closer-to-ideal world---in an ideal world, there would be no victimization in the first place). I realize that it's a form of tone policing. I accept that criticism. If picking up the torches and pitchforks and going after someone else's abuser makes someone who's been wounded feel strong and healed, I do genuinely accept the validity of those emotions: I know intimately the despair of PTSD, I know what it's like to pick up the pieces after of trauma, violence, and abuse. I've lived it. My friends have lived it. Anything that helps heal those wounds I support, and if it makes rapists feel bad on their insides, fuck 'em. However, I think there's the fallacy implicit in this formulation. I don't think we can shame the unrepentant into feeling sorry for what they've done. I also think that there occasionally those who ARE capable of repenting, who can realize that the worst mistake of their life was hurting someone (instead of merely being upset that they got caught and called out). And I think that those fixable people can be actively hindered from figuring out their brokenness by shaming campaigns. They'll feel besieged and mistake themselves for the victim. This is the worst possible outcome of an already bad situation, and it's in absolutely nobody's best interest.

I guess what I mean is that, on top of publicly standing behind the injured and warning people away from serial offenders, that if one really feels a need to try and right a wrong in the world, that it might be more effective to privately message the guilty, and through that direct channel insist that what they did was wrong. To insist that they have an obligation to fix whatever's broken in their head before they hurt other people. That they know better than this. In an ideal world. Well, a slightly more ideal world than this one. Maybe.

I just can't pretend that publicly shaming people people is making the world a better, safer, more just place. My sympathy is with victims of oppression and abuse. I'm certainly not policing pain or healing. I'm just splitting hairs, bean plating, and making the probably academic point that not everything that can be justified is truly beneficial. Also, my APD sense is tickling, so I feel compelled to note that I've never myself been the target of a call out/shame campaign. I've never raped or abused anyone. Just in case there could be suspicion about my fervor about the topic. I mean, beyond the suspicions my weird, damaged brain permanently has about everything I do.
posted by wires at 8:45 AM on March 4, 2015 [25 favorites]


No one wants to be internet-shamed.

Rule 34.
posted by PMdixon at 8:58 AM on March 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Aaron Bady has been bugging me late me and it bugs me that he didn't do his due diligence by reading the Metafilter thread about the Jon Ronson article, because if he had, he would have realized that in a later article for the Guardian Ronson seems to have learned from his initial mistake and removed the initial false equivalence he implied about the Donglegate scandal. Seriously, the major takeaway of that article is exactly what Bady's trying to say here: that structural inequalities mean that some people land on their feet post-shaming and others don't.

Frowner's use of the word "libidinal," above, was spot-on, and I think explains a lot of my visceral discomfort with these tactics. It strikes me as deeply yucky that Aaron Bady can be so cavalier about Justine Sacco landing 'first class' when he doesn't pause to note that when these shame campaigns target women, they almost always involve a revolting undercurrent of rape threats. Mass humiliation carries an undercurrent of sexual sadism, it absolutely does, and even aside from the explicit worded threats, thousands and thousands of people on the internet announcing "I hate you, and I know your name, I know what you look like, I know where you work, I know where you live, I know what time you're landing at the airport, and I'm going to tell everyone," is terrifying. Although neither the Ronson nor the Bady article really treat this with the seriousness it deserves, I would argue that it is probably more traumatic than losing one's job. I mean, I know which one I'd choose.

Maybe, maybe you can argue that the sum total of the suffering Justine Sacco underwent is balanced out by the necessity of moving into a world where hateful speech has consequences. I do genuinely think that this is a difficult issue. Social media can absolutely be a tool for overturning the powerful. But Bady's smug certainty that he knows where rightness lies rubs me the wrong way.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 9:13 AM on March 4, 2015 [10 favorites]


"...smug certainty that he knows where rightness lies..."

Ok, that's all online communication. Including here. Since my beliefs are more correct, I should be allowed to do things "incorrecter" people can't. smh
posted by umberto at 9:54 AM on March 4, 2015


We are a world at war, our government makes information gathering war on us with the future plan to shame and blackmail. No one is immune, with various algorithms at play to guide the deep manipulators in changing the larger flow, with seemingly minor, unrelated tweaks. A job lost here, say Briam Williams pre election coverage, or credibility shading, a liberal blogger here, a worker who will somehow shift allegiances within a corporation there.

The web has tightened in the last several years, what was once your social media account, is now an extension of the company you work for. For those who work in corporate opinion forming, public relations, corporate acquisitions, no, and I mean no, communication is private. Surely institutions of higher learning teach classes on personal security that deal with more relevant subject matter than your bank accounts.

Calling people out for anything in business, can only ever happen to people who work for the competition. With the whole world being hacked people who speak had better speak clearly, and establish a rhetoric and style, because very soon, the powers that really are, will speak for your hacked person, and that stuff is hard to take back.

In this era we self emolate, eviscerate, x-ray the presents under our christmas trees, and hold our babies and children up for public scrutiny, while crying over lack of privacy. Our kids did not sign off on this publicity.

Civility goes a long way to deflect abuses. In all other matters, document the "dickage" and "bitchage," and go after the offences using protocol. In terms of the web, I am grateful the ugly mind of the communal goobers has extroverted for all to view, because it is important to know what civilization is up against. We have been shelterd in many cases from the visceral ignorance and hatred loose in the world we drive through, to arrive inside our garages, apartments, or gatherings of trusted others.

Being a public entity equals living in an x-rayed fishbowl, the flow is established, you want to divert, or act effectively to effect change or make sordid revelations about the wretched nature of your psyche, or your treasured delusions, make sure the company you work for is a part of your crazy posse, and make sure your doings will look good on your kid's electronic resume.
posted by Oyéah at 9:56 AM on March 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


Since my beliefs are more correct, I should be allowed to do things "incorrecter" people can't.

I'm not sure where you got that from my comment, umberto, but it's the opposite of what I was trying to convey.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 10:04 AM on March 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


On-line harassment, doxxing and smear campaigns can have a lot more serious consequences for people than "disrupting people’s commute" as the asshole who wrote this piece condescendingly puts it. A lot of times, people targeted by harassment campaigns have had to move, disappear from the internet, and deal with threats of real-world physical violence.

Bullying is bullying, and harassment is harassment, regardless of whether you defend it with claims that you "defending ethics in journalism" or hypocritical uses of liberal rhetoric.

Bady is way off base, and hypocritical, in his rhetorical use of "privilege" in his defense of harassment. The people who engage in this kind of behavior are usually upper-middle-class or affluent white people who think they have an inherent right to attack and bully other people and get away with it because of who they are, whether they're gamergaters, liberals or overt racists. The targets of their harassment are frequently members of non-white ethnic groups, especially women, who are trying to speak for themselves rather than let affluent white American liberals speak for them.

Bady tries to duck this issue by cherry-picking two victims who are American and relatively privileged and insisting that we only talk about those two cases, but he's defending all cases of internet harassment, and condescendingly sneering at all victims, whoever they are and whyever they were targeted. Those two cases don't begin to represent the range of people who've been victims of internet harassment, even by liberals.

Bady wants us to go along with his snark and condone harassment whenever it happens. No!
posted by nangar at 10:16 AM on March 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


"Chased French aristocracy, Frankensteins, that kind of thing."
"We've been through this, it's Frankenstein's monsters.


I favor "Monsters Frankenstein."
posted by Iridic at 10:19 AM on March 4, 2015


Ok, that's all online communication. Including here. Since my beliefs are more correct, I should be allowed to do things "incorrecter" people can't.

Ronson's piece isn't this kind of communication, though -- it's actually a *check* on this idea, and is essentially inviting people to consider that maybe some tactics are problematic even in service of good values.

Somehow, the author seems to translate this position into "a reactionary liberalism taking shelter in the privilege of the status quo." This doesn't make any sense to me unless one truly believes we simply can't make progress to a better world without using Twitter, among other things, to shame people and if possible shame them enough to make them "liability to their [employers] interests" and get them fired along with making them pariahs.
posted by weston at 10:19 AM on March 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


Bady wants us to go along with his snark and condone harassment whenever it happens. No!

I... didn't get that from the essay. What I got is that internet shaming intersects (that word again!) with forms of privilege in a variety of ways, and it's both facile and incorrect to equate Justine Sacco and Adria Richards' experiences.

It strikes me as deeply yucky that Aaron Bady can be so cavalier about Justine Sacco landing 'first class' when he doesn't pause to note that when these shame campaigns target women, they almost always involve a revolting undercurrent of rape threats.

He rarely strikes me as cavalier, but this is definitely a thing w/rt the shaming of women online. It always always always involves rape threats, and turns a straightforward "How could you do X, this is awful!" into "You suck and I'm going to [insert horrifying thing here] to punish you!"

I really like wires' long comment above, especially regarding the distinction between guilt and shame. That said, I think you're missing a couple of elements of the Internet Shame Protocol:

a. Internet shaming serves to notify those who might engage in [racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic] behavior: We do not accept this in our civilized society and you should feel bad is both a way of saying We support you to the oppressed, and a way of moving the window of acceptable discourse. The audience is not, in fact, the original transgressor, but everyone else out there. Which is why so few people do engage in the quiet direct message to encourage guilt rather than public shaming.

b. Internet shaming serves as a tribal marker. I'm one of the good guys, can't you tell? Didn't you see me tweet that link to the call-out of Rick Castle's homophobic comment at the Edgar Awards? [Note: I do not believe Rick Castle is particularly homophobic.] Again, the audience isn't Rick Castle, but the rest of the anti-oppression activists in my circle, so they will know I'm on their side.

All that said, I'm more and more uncomfortable with the idea that people should lose their jobs for tweeting badly. OTOH, rape and death threats? Maybe they should lose their jobs, if it serves to discourage that behavior. But only if it does serve: and I have begun to wonder if negative reinforcement is singularly ineffective in this context.
posted by suelac at 10:52 AM on March 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


Every time we have a race thread on Metafilter I am led to wonder what would happen if all the effort people spent on attempting to protect racists and misogynists from the consequences of their actions was instead spent on making a more equitable world. That might be a better way to help the targets of racism and sexism not have to pick between disliking bullying and finding something nice in seeing those who work against them get a little bit of comeuppance. But that would require actually giving up privilege and why do that when you can instead enjoy clucking?
posted by dame at 11:20 AM on March 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


Personally, I sometimes feel like Twitter should introduce a new feature, let's call it "Echo Chamber". When someone sends you a hateful/threatening message, with one click you can do two things: Add that user to a special blocklist, and transparently forward that message (with @handles substituted appropriately) to everyone else on that blocklist, from the original sender.
I figure the ensuing feedback loop of vitriol and confusion will end up burning the mob to the ground overnight.
posted by NMcCoy at 12:06 PM on March 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


We've been through this, it's Frankenstein's monsters.

You need to deal with your hunchbackpack of privilege, buddy.
posted by y2karl at 12:12 PM on March 4, 2015


This thread is weird.

1. I have no idea what many of you are even trying to say. The language and writing here is so nested in abstractions that ideas are disappearing up their own asses. For once I don't think this is (just) a reading comprehension fail on my part; I think a lot of posts here are just...incoherent. Maybe slow it down, pare it down and think through what your core message is? Maybe try to draw it out to something more concrete? Maybe try to distinguish between "shaming," "harrassment," "criticism" and "consequences for [bigoted] actions," which seem to be getting all kinds of conflated all over the place. I don't know. I'm having a hard time parsing a lot of posts. It's a longish read, it gets navelgazey and I totally started to skim, but most of the responses seem to be projecting readings on the article that don't fit.

2. It seems like a lot of people are sympathizing with and invested in sympathizing with Sacco, which surprises me. I could care less about Sacco; she is a non-story. She said something cartoonishly racist, people on the internet criticised her for it and she lost her (PR) job. Then she immediately got another high paying job and has suffered no real consequences but wants to be more cautious about engaging publicly. After saying something cartoonishly racist. I...don't see much wrong with that. Losing a job for saying something cartoonishly racist is something that I guess could be bad in the abstract, but in actuality it's a non-issue. She immediately found another high paying job. She lives in a completely different reality than the Cellas of the world, even though both have access to the same platform.

Were there gendered insults and rape/violence threats mixed in with the criticism? It's easy to believe, and that's obviously not great, but that isn't really the thrust of the discussion around the incident, nor is it the catalyst for criticism. She said a cartoonishly racist thing and got a slap on the wrist. I'm just...surprised the thread seems to be so invested in defending her, and the position of Obliviously Privileged Person she occupies in the essay and most discussions around her. Unless I'm reading it wrong. I really can't tell. See 1.

Also:

I recognize that "socialized [gender]" is a dogwhistle for TERFS who want to attack trans women, so I am reluctant to use that framing (also I suspect that being socialized into femininity for AFAB people works really differently than being socialized into masculinity for AMAB people).

Yeah, please just do not even.
posted by byanyothername at 1:47 PM on March 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


byanyothername - I think it's possible to think that it's not okay to lob rape/death threats at the likes of Justine Sacco while still thinking she faced few material consequences for doing a racist-ass thing.

that being said the conversation in this thread seems to be eliding a bunch of different stuff around people being shitty to one another in a variety of fashions and contexts into "MEAN ON THE INTERNET: Y OR N?" which is rendering analysis difficult
posted by beefetish at 3:22 PM on March 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Well, speak for yourself. Having watched a few internet shaming campaigns, I incline toward the view that they are generally ineffective whenever they might be ethical and somewhat less than ethical whenever they are effective. It's hard to shame the powerful and easy to shame the helpless.

I'm also extremely suspicious as to whether there's enough proof for a lot of these kinds of things. Like, how do we even know who posted some of this stuff, and that it was really the person who created the account?

Sooner or later someone is going to get gamergate level harassed for something their friend posted as prank on their facebook/twitter/whatever when they were drunk. The post will get screenshotted, disseminated, and anything they say after the fact will be ignored as "nice try".

This isn't some dumb hypothetical. It's probably already happened, and it'll probably happen on that tumblr eventually. It's one of those "the probability approaches 1 over a period of time" situations. I've been around since if not the beginning, the very early modern era of internet mobs back when 4chan allowed raid posts and such. For a lot of people, even on the "good" side, it really feels like the actual harassment/public shaming/reposting so more people can join in is the end game. It's like masturbation.

I've supported this kind of thing less and less, almost exponentially as i've gotten older. And i was really sad to see a bunch of internet as fuck progressive types latch on to things like getting racists fired. It's one thing to bust a nut doing that, but you lose me as soon as you start acting like it's that different from any other internet mobbing.

Another element of it that pisses me off is that it's juvenile. Like, it seems to be just as much about getting them rekt as it does about "justice". I'd support these people mass spamming companies to change their social media policies, workplace conduct policies, etc so that they're just breaking their employers rules by doing this. Individual harassment feels like it's more about harassment than getting stuff done. It slides in that same gross quadrant i put shit like isanyoneup in.

pretty much:

I want to expose racists just as much as anybody, but if the only consequence of Internet shaming a racist is that you get him fired from his job at Burger King, you're not exactly speaking truth to power here.

The whole thing reminds me of arguments for and against guns/gas guzzling trucks/whatever that boil down to "yea, it's bad when THOSE people do it but when i do it then it's ok because i have reasons".

If you can describe the act or object by itself, without any context, and it sounds bad... then you should think long and hard about how and why you're using it, and also about mission creep.

Because it's really, really easy to become the people you were just righteously talking shit on two tweets ago.


So yea, at this point i pretty much only support this kind of thing when it's used against people who are using the same weapon. And i'd prefer, cold war style, that no one used it at all. I'm hoping we get to a point of "you can't be a gator type and dox people without getting doxed yourself 20 minutes later" so that no one does it and everyone knows you're launching an ICBM by doing it.
posted by emptythought at 4:02 PM on March 4, 2015 [6 favorites]


> the conversation in this thread seems to be eliding a bunch of different stuff around people being shitty to one another in a variety of fashions and contexts into "MEAN ON THE INTERNET: Y OR N?" which is rendering analysis difficult

I think it would help if article linked in the original post wasn't a completely dishonest defense of on-line harassment.
posted by nangar at 4:03 PM on March 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


> ... you should think long and hard about how and why you're using it, and also about mission creep.

It's not mission creep, it's just finding excuses for bullying.
posted by nangar at 4:18 PM on March 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


Were there gendered insults and rape/violence threats mixed in with the criticism? It's easy to believe, and that's obviously not great, but that isn't really the thrust of the discussion around the incident, nor is it the catalyst for criticism. She said a cartoonishly racist thing and got a slap on the wrist.

Yeah, I am completely not okay with "well, that's not the thrust of the conversation" when it comes to people real-life stalking a woman by following her not just to the airport but to her landing gate because they thought she said something racist once. And being stalked, for years, is anything but a slap on the wrist.
posted by corb at 4:54 PM on March 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


No, the article* isn't about "finding excuses for bullying." It's about how treating Sacco-as-victim the same as a genuinely marginalized person receiving actual harassment draws attention and energy away from actual marginalization, harassment and oppression. Sacco isn't a fucking martyr; she's a highly privileged person who said a cartoonishly racist thing in public, got publicly criticized and fired for it (which I'm 100% okay with, especially considering she suffered no real consequences there). It's easy to believe she may also have received gendered harassment (which is not okay as a general rule), but these are all separate reactions to her being cartoonishly racist in public.

What happened to her is not equivalent to the harassment received by actually marginalized people or even that received by someone like Anita Sarkeesian (who probably has comparable levels of privilege). Pretending that it is is extraordinarily disingenuous and effectively just ignoring intersectionality altogether. She's not fighting the good fight and facing an angry internet mob for it; she's lazily reinforcing oppression from the safety of her own privilege. Some people criticized her for it. Some other people fired her for it. Some people (probably) harassed her for it. It's (probably) fair to see the last as a symptom of wider misogyny, but to pretend that the first two are on the same level as harassment received by people for whom losing a job would actually matter is to retreat into and defend privilege.

And then there's those who were the butt of her stupid racist joke; but who cares about them?




* Maybe it's a rambling mess, I don't know. I don't want to get into a back and forth defending the piece itself. There's a much larger point here that is being aggressively, deliberately missed.
posted by byanyothername at 7:53 PM on March 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


Losing a job for saying something cartoonishly racist is something that I guess could be bad in the abstract, but in actuality it's a non-issue.

Um... am I the only one who thinks the tweet was meant to be a joke at white people's expense? That is, the intent is to draw attention to the idea that ebola is somehow a black person's disease and thus doesn't matter. I mean, its inarticulate as hell and she should absolutely have apologised for it but, and this is super important: she had 200 followers on twitter! A weird comment on twitter to 200 people shouldn't necessarily be interpreted as someones secret inner thoughts on race!

And yes, she absolutely was wrong to write that tweet, but it's not actually impossibly hard to find things people have written take them out of context and decide to fire them becuase of that. I'm sorry, but that's pretty terrible. I appreciate that what happened to Sacco wasn't the worst thing that has ever happened, but I don't think it's unreasonable to say it's a bad thing. I'm not saying we can't call people out on their actions and behaviours, but I think the internet, or more specifically twitter, has demonstrated itself to be a terrible way to do it.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 12:22 AM on March 5, 2015 [6 favorites]


Um... am I the only one who thinks the tweet was meant to be a joke at white people's expense?

Please follow online protocol: always attribute the most despicable of motives to the object of derision, who deserves all the spite and malice one can muster.
posted by y2karl at 7:55 AM on March 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


Seems like there's a lot of space between losing one's job and being the object of an internet hatestorm.
posted by PMdixon at 8:04 AM on March 5, 2015


Do we really need to do the "is ironic racism actually racist" discussion with the explanation of how it is possible to be harmful and racist even if one is intending not to be thing again? I feel like we've done that on the Blue enough times lately that any attempts to get people to explain it again are indistinguishable from a troll-y derail, since you can probably read that hashed and rehashed out in the "related posts". If you really need info on that, Google "ironic racism".
posted by NoraReed at 8:51 AM on March 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think no one's doing the "is ironic racism actually racist" thing, but more "is ironic racism to a small group a sin requiring the loss of one's job and also severe stalking and harassment initiated against someone."
posted by corb at 9:47 AM on March 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


Yeah basically what Corb said. Or what my comment said. I'm not saying what she tweeted was cool or anything, just that maybe losing one's job over it is a bit much.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 10:54 AM on March 5, 2015


Nora, "intent doesn't matter" is an explanation that people respond to what you actually write, not what you meant. So, if you say something that sounds hateful, people are going to get angry.

Trotting this out as moral defense for a sustained and coordinated campaign of harassment is a bit different. What you're claiming is that when we're punishing people for doing a bad thing, it doesn't really matter whether they did the bad thing or not.

If people are actually just angry about something you said, and it was misinterpreted, it can usually be defused by a response along the lines of "mea culpa, I'm sorry, I totally didn't mean it like that". Bullies, on the other hand, see apologies as a sign of weakness on the part of their prey and will maintain or step up their attacks. This is usually a good way to distinguish between honest anger and bullying.

(I don't know anything about the Justine Sacco case, so I can't comment about that.)
posted by nangar at 11:08 AM on March 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Which is mitigated by she got another job.

But I understand feeling uneasy about it, because it's essentially punishment proportioned not to match the offense, but to match the extent the offense goes viral on the internet.

So if you want to argue the merits of this particular case and if you convince me that justice was done in this particular case, I'm still going to have the feeling that justice was done completely by coincidence, stopped-clock style.
posted by RobotHero at 11:11 AM on March 5, 2015


This is really a wholy new phenomenon. This is what Andy Warhol meant. We now live in a world where whole percentage points of the global population can both turn their attention to you and tell you what they think of you. If they like you, we call it virality and there's an entire industry trying to capture that lightning in a bottle. If they don't like you it's an internet hatestorm. The great irony is that it is in some sense a completely impersonal force that at some time takes effect in deeply personal ways.

I mean, it's just percolation theory. As we become able to transmit what is really, in some sense, gossip at faster and faster speeds, it becomes easier and faster to form giant connected components. (Basically, think about each piece of information as having an associated social graph the edges of which are transmissible, both by means of interest (we both care) and ability (we talk). Viral information is just for that which there is a giant component. Speed of transmission is important here, as the metaphorical network is constructed of those interactions in the span of time before we see the next shiny thing. When we have to actually whisper gossip, it can't get as far before the next scandal happens. Giant components will tend, among other places, to form along shibboleths and identity affilations, for obvious reasons.)

There is no more inherent of a (correctly directed) moral component to this process than among any other human group endeavour. Supermarket tabloids may very well be the best analog to the likely distribution of objects.

I dunno. The future is weird. I think the primate hierarchy games are gonna look really ugly with computer help.
posted by PMdixon at 1:20 PM on March 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


We've been through this, it's Frankenstein's monsters.

We have been through this.
posted by maxsparber at 5:43 AM on March 7, 2015


You know, I was actually thinking about this thread when I saw the thing go up about the racist SAE chant video. On the one hand, that chant was disgusting and I have little sympathy with the guys leading it. On the other hand, I'm old enough I suppose to be vaguely creeped out by a world where anyone, at any time, might be recording you and the entire trajectory of your life can be ruined by one of those casual recordings. I am old enough to remember when we were afraid of the government doing that - but it's not the government that did it at all, it's ourselves, and I just...have really, really complicated feelings about that I suppose.
posted by corb at 9:48 AM on March 11, 2015 [4 favorites]


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