Theater of Shame: The rise of online humiliation

Abstract

Theater of ShameThe rise of online humiliation Charlie Tyson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution On the internet, people can be selected at random and held up for the instant scorn of thousands. [End Page 122] men punish with shame," wrote the sixteenth-century poet Thomas Wyatt. It is the "greatest punishment on earth, yea! greater than death." Other forms of punishment—torture, solitary confinement—may do more to break the body and spirit. But the primitive power of shaming, and the reliability with which shame punishments are administered informally by the community as well as formally by the state, make it an especially disturbing mode of discipline. The ubiquity of shame punishments across many cultures—from the penal tattooing of [End Page 123] slaves and criminals in ancient Rome to the stocks, pillory, and cucking stool of early modern England to the practice in modern China, only recently outlawed, of roping together suspected sex workers and forcing them to march barefoot through the streets—alerts us to the likelihood that we are dealing with a human propensity that can never be banished, only contained. Shame is a consequence of many punishments. Being branded as a criminal, a deviant, or an outcast, whether with a hot iron or an orange jumpsuit, inevitably entails a humiliating loss of status. But there is a class of punishments in which shaming is the primary objective. In Shakespeare's England, for instance, the stocks and the pillory were only part of an elaborate roster of humiliations. Convicted persons, writes the historian Keith Thomas, might be branded, whipped, mutilated, carted through the streets to the sound of bells, stripped half-naked or dressed in embarrassing clothes, made to wear placards describing their offenses, or forced to ride backwards on a donkey while onlookers jeered. The feature that unites these penalties is the exhibition of the offender to the public. Shame punishments are a kind of theater in which the suffering is real and the audience is encouraged to participate. At their core is the agony of coerced display. Humiliating costumes and props or various forms of disfigurement (a shaved head, a sliced-off ear, an insignia carved into the forehead) underscore the kinship between shaming rituals and the structure of drama. Public shaming is one of humanity's most revealing categories of spectacle, a radical form of theater in which the community expresses its moral views by inflicting real injuries. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault claimed that from the nineteenth century onward, punishment for crimes became more secret, less theatrical. In post-Revolutionary France, the open cart transporting convicts to the guillotines was replaced by a closed carriage. At last, the guillotine was moved inside prison walls. "Punishment," he wrote, "had gradually ceased to be a spectacle." The cruelest punishments in contemporary American society indeed occur away from public view, in prisons, detention camps, [End Page 124] and border facilities. But the public's hunger for disciplinary spectacles has not dwindled for lack of food. In the digital world that we are building together, we have given rituals of public correction a central place. An ambient culture of shame saturates the online social environment. On such platforms as Twitter or TikTok or YouTube the risk of humiliation is ever present. Some online performers have neutralized the threat of cringe through stylized self-embarrassment: comedians riff on their own narcissism; dancers engage in cartoonish slapstick, reminiscent of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin (as if, on the internet, the history of cinema is replaying itself), ensuring that they pie themselves in the face before anyone else can. The rest of us, fated to play "ourselves" before an unknown and fickle audience, must improvise other defenses. Cancel culture, callouts, online harassment, mob justice, accountability: all of these terms refer to structurally similar phenomena (the targeting of the one by the many, in front of an audience), yet none offers a neutral description. What is decried as "cancel culture" is sometimes just spirited criticism; what is endorsed as "accountability" is sometimes gratuitous and cruel. Given the confusion and sophistry that mar discussion of online shaming, it is worth keeping two facts in mind. The first...