Excerpt: This is a murder mystery without a murder. Think of it like a Brian De Palma movie from the 1970s: a streetwalker is found dead in an alleyway, and the detective assigned to the case is about to write it up as another transaction gone awry until he begins to see the clues that unravel a sprawling political conspiracy.
The body is incidental.
Preface: Ghosts and Murders
They found a body on the race-track;
No identifying signs
In his pocket was a notebook
With a number inside
And Guadalajara’s just a few miles down the line.
Brian Eno and John Cale
Crime In The Desert
This is a piece about Shame on the internet. This is not a piece about #MeToo.
This is a ghost story and a murder mystery, impelled by the remains of happenings that resembled events. What follows inaugurates a series of essays on social media as a set of apparatuses that manifest hidden systems of power.
In Spring 2017, I watched people attack me online and even wish for my death in direct and indirect ways. The screeds came not from rabid, easily despised Gamers or right-wing fanatics for whom my multiple identities as a brown queer leftist woman and animal lover had finally proven too much, but from leftists. What follows is a set of analyses and theories about belonging on social media, about how worlds and communities are imagined and re-imagined on the internet, about ghostly economies of power and influence, about the migration of social patterns of exclusion and inclusion onto the internet, about the invention of a genre of writing that can describe and analyse women’s theories about what happens to them without their having to first weep and moan in modes of confession and fits of memoir.
A brief history: I had just published “The Dangerous Academic Is an Extinct Species” in Current Affairs. Three thousand words in length, the essay’s central point was that there is not much left (pun intended) that is truly radical about academia and academics. Three hundred of the words, ten percent, were about George Ciccariello-Maher. In December of 2016, the then-professor at Drexel University had sent out what he claimed was an “ironic” tweet about wanting “white genocide” for Christmas. The resulting internet uproar had resulted in a backlash against him, prompting several leftists to claim that he was acting on behalf of marginalised populations and that his free speech rights as a political radical were being violated. I pointed out that his tweet had been cryptic, that no marginalised populations had asked to be saved, that much of his politics was posturing as radical, and that the controversy was mostly self-curated. That brief segment incited much ire, unbridled and ferocious, from several commenters.
Over the course of several days, I watched what looked like a scene from Jaws, except that the Big Angry Shark was now joined by all his very hungry friends and family. The waters of “Leftbook,” a loose conglomeration of people and personalities identified or self-identifying as leftists (I count myself among them) churned for hours and days as commenters took to the view that my critique of academia was merely a front for attacking Ciccariello-Maher. The first to draw blood was Doug Henwood, who occupies a somewhat king-like space in Leftbook. He called me a misanthrope who had a personal vendetta against Ciccariello-Maher, and proclaimed I was unfair to academe. Following his example, several others including Nikhil Singh, Susan Kang, Jodi Dean, Laleh Khalili, and Bruce Robbins, went on the attack, either on their own walls or those of numerous others. At some point, I lost track of how many more had posted the piece simply to vent about how much they hated it. I began getting concerned messages from friends and strangers, all puzzled by the level of vitriol. Responses to the essay included several distortions that even ignored its arguments.
For instance: Kang, who teaches at John Jay in New York, claimed that one of my main points was that only a few white professors engage in political discourse. This was an incorrect summation and not a very subtle bit of race-baiting; it was also a rather ridiculous approach, given the irrefutable point that academe is dominated by white men – which is what I had actually stated. I had also written that academia hoards its resources through expensive, paywalled journal articles, at which she sneered that I clearly did not know how to access academic journals from a public library, using New York’s system as an example of free access. Her words ignored that this was not exactly the point of the entire essay and she left unremarked upon my larger critique that academia shields its research behind paywalls from the very taxpayers who subsidise its expensive journal articles. New York is an exception, as the tens of thousands of independent scholars in North America are well aware, because access to journals is nearly impossible or at least hugely complicated without a university affiliation. Not everyone has academic friends who can share their passwords, which are usually linked to sensitive information like student grades. Emily Drabinski made similar points about library access — even though, as a librarian, she surely knew better. But then in all this commotion, as Henwood’s fans and friends rushed to join the mob, truth was to be as rare as an affordable one-bedroom in Park Slope. The racism charge would keep cropping up: on Ciccariello-Maher’s wall, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor noted that I had targeted him because he was white and that I had left her alone because she is black.
The pettiness and hyperbole kept mounting, as did the spite and barely concealed violence. Elsewhere, Khalili angrily insisted that I should not have named Ciccariello-Maher. This reminded me of the famous opening scene from the film L.A. Confidential. Was I supposed to have been academe’s Hedda Hopper, writing “Off the record … on the QT … and very … Hush-Hush”? Robbins popped in to write, “This woman is all ignorance and aggression.” Anyone who lived through the late 1990s will understand why I flinched at such blatant misogyny. On Facebook and Twitter, leftists were posting that “racist troll columnists” were “targeting leftists rather than killing themselves.” Recall that I had already been declared a racist against beleaguered white male academics. Greg Grandin delivered the pronouncement, “Someone should tell her to kill her darlings, wring the neck of the swan, or better yet, just stop writing.” By then, the talk of killing and demands to know why I had even been published — all of this coming from the same people who bemoaned Ciccareillo-Mahers’s loss of freedom of speech — had been rising, so you will understand why I chose and still choose to read Grandin’s words not as a judgement on my writing and what he saw as my wordiness, but as the conscious or unconscious desire to see an end to more than my writing. All this, Dear Reader, is merely a hint of what transpired across several walls and Twitter. Shit went down, and shit was dark.
Some, like Dean, clearly not aware of what it meant to write,or at least write well, for a non-academic audience, harrumphed suggestions on how they would have written it, with one of them detailing how he would have graded it as a paper. Hell hath no fury like an academic separated from her footnotes and Lit Review. Several, including Henwood and Singh (whose slyly vicious commentary on his wall deserves an entire piece), explicitly and implicitly demanded to know from my editor why he had published it, a strange response from those who simultaneously insisted that I had disregarded Ciccariello-Maher’s free speech rights. Ironically, weeks later, when the essay was posted again by readers, it was immediately taken down as spam or unfit for sharing, and it only re-appeared after days of agitation from me and several friends and supporters. There were no nipples embedded in the piece and it was a critique of the Left, not the Right, so I knew it had not been yanked by conservatives. Months later, Henwood’s name would appear on the “Shitty Media Men” list. A little while after that, perhaps aware that his attack on me could countradict his image as a leftist feminist, he took his post down (he may well resurrect it at any point).
Internet thunderstorms, potent but localised and usually specific to particular groups of people, are hardly uncommon on social media. On Twitter, Donald Trump may have inaugurated an entire field of studies, The Twitter Presidency.
So, Dear Reader, you might well ask, what made this one particularly important or even interesting? And, really, who am I?
I study the internet, a lot. In relation to its genealogy, I am like the Coelacanth, sometimes referred to as a living fossil because it survives as a reminder of a time when some fish were just beginning to walk onto land. Here’s another analogy: in Buffy, the famed vampire-slayer runs into one of her most ferocious foes, Kakistos, a demon so ancient, so pure in both his form and his evil that his hands have remained cloven hooves. You get the point: the dude was around a really long time, until a giant log to his heart did him in (mere stakes would not do).
I am, if you like, a fish-shaped, ancient demon, walking out of the water on cloven hooves, my gills flapping furiously as they turn into nostrils.
Which is to say: I’ve been around on this here internet a really long time. I was one of the first bloggers, appearing on The Bilerico Project (now LGBTQ Nation), a gay blog, where I began writing for a larger public — often writing against gay marriage. You can imagine how popular I was among the gay marriage set. I also write about academia, a lot. My general critique emerges from a left perspective and not a conservative one (arguably, actually, I’m the only one who makes the points I make — my gender precludes my stating this more plainly: I fear being called arrogant). My perspective confuses a lot of people who are unable to comprehend that I love academia and academic work and think both need massive change if they are to survive, and have absolutely no desire for a tenure track position. I have, at various times, been called a troll, a misanthrope, and other names that, Dear Reader, I would blush to repeat here (my gender prevents me from doing so).
So, I understand internet screeds and squabbles, and I understand what it looks and feels like to be the target of a great deal of ire. And I have never been bothered by criticism or critique (if that were the case, I wouldn’t have been a writer for as long as I have been). But what happened in the Spring of 2017 seemed different.
What the fuck just happened? was a question my friends and I found ourselves asking. What made so many people with CVs much longer than mine decide that I posed such a threat to them and academe that they had to rage at me, engaging the language and tactics of the very trolls they otherwise disdained? What ancient wellspring of paranoia, fear, loathing, and deep, high anxiety had I discovered?
Like many Gen-X queers who came of age and out before “community” even had the word “online” attached to it, I was raised by packs of lesbians. So, of course, my first course of action was to set about processing, with friends and colleagues, armed with several tubs of non-Israeli, BDS-affirming hummus. I knew I wanted to write about what happened, but I knew I didn’t want it to be about what happened to me. I could see a set of relationships embedded in various forms of capital that were swirling around the essay, relationships that demonstrated a more granular form of power than might be obvious in offline worlds. I was struck by the intensity and ferocity of the emotions. I understood too well Henwood’s personal vindictiveness (I had cut ties with him months prior, knowing full well he would eventually find a way to strike back, as he now had), but the viciousness of the others seemed bizarre, especially coming from strangers. I knew this was on one level, certainly, about the cultish tendency of people to congregate in groups, and the responses I saw were so bizarre (trust me when I tell you there are mountains of ludicrousness still to be revealed), so inadvertently hilarious even that I briefly considered pitching a screenplay (“It’s Mean Girls meets Godfather”).
But mostly, I wanted to think and write about power, the sort that circulates on the underbelly of social media, the kind that moves unseen through the sometimes sludge-filled sewers of Facebook and Twitter before decontamination teams come in to scoop out the shit. I knew that their proclaimed defense of Ciccariello-Maher was only a facade for something else, but what?
As Benedict Anderson and others have written in numerous texts and disciplines, communities imagine themselves, bring themselves into being through print and other forms of media. It is fashionable among certain sets to speak of social media with contempt, to express a disdain for it, but the fact is that it has penetrated our lives in ways we might neither support nor desire.
We could observe that the “online left” on social media is inconsequential. To some extent, that is true (consider, for instance, that few if any online leftists — or even offline ones — even came close to predicting Trump’s win). There is, dare we say, an actual left which doesn’t declare its politics so explicitly and yet goes about constructing alternatives to the horrors of modern-day capitalism. In Chicago, where I live, it was a coalition of mostly Black (and mostly queer) young women from groups like Assata’s Daughters who put together the #ByeAnita campaign which brought the reign of Illinois State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez to an end (Alvarez had repeatedly ignored the widespread problem of police brutality). As I write this, they are involved in trying to shut down plans for a “Cop Academy” proposed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Such groups use social media as tools; they don’t define their activism by it.
Yet, it’s also impossible to ignore the ways in which social media and online writing are part of several leftist organising efforts. It’s even harder to ignore — and foolish to do so so — the links between a left publishing world, a left organising world, and a left academic world. As the neoliberal university weakens for all except overpaid administrators, academics are under enormous pressure to become “relevant” and to maintain “public engagement” (popular buzz phrases in the halls of academe today). Faculty everywhere are receiving subtle and not-so-subtle hints that their work should reach out to what is construed as a wider public. Increasingly, PhDs, scrambling to find jobs, feel the pressure to not just turn to left press outlets, hoping to find careers as scholar-writers, but to establish a “social media presence,” often without even having graduated. They are forced to maintain active social media profiles in the hopes of becoming “public intellectuals” long before they’ve had the chance to understand what it means to be intellectuals in the first place. Call me a luddite, but I happen to think that intellectual work needs to originate and be nurtured away from, not in the public eye. The risks of such “engagement” are considerable and unevenly felt by women and people of colour. While macho white male academics can get away, for at least a while, with posturing about beating up fascists, women and other minorities can see their lives and careers destroyed after single tweets, even extremely well-thought-out ones; they are much less likely to be gifted with “visiting scholar” appointments and invitations to participate on panels about the Antifa.
In all of this, figures like Doug Henwood now command unprecedented influence and attention. It is possible, Dear Reader, that you have no idea who Henwood is, but as the left-leaning host of a regular radio show with a semi-academic background, he provides a long-standing venue for academics to discuss their sometimes esoteric work in a way that makes them seem more “relevant” (disclosure: I have been among them). Combine such influence with the fact that academics like Singh, who works on prison issues and race, straddle both activist and academic worlds, and you begin to see that what looks mere online carping amongst lefties even in informal spheres like Leftbook in fact has an effect on offline structures of power. The simple fact that editors often reach out to writers like me based on our social media observations is just one example of the reach of social media. There is still a generation of established academics who can afford to coast along without any social media connections at all but in a decade or so, it may be impossible for anyone to be any kind of academic without a social media profile (and this will be altogether disastrous for academia, but I’ll save my observations on that point for another piece).
In left academia and left activist circles, wealth is not counted in money but resources that only universities can afford, like library privileges, access to scholarly journals, meeting rooms, visiting scholarships, and paid presentations. Academics may not make millions, but they exert considerable influence: over students and junior faculty who rely on them for everything from recommendation letters to entrance into conferences and archives, over colleagues applying for grant money at their or other institutions, over a myriad often tiny spheres which seem invisible to the outside world. They are like tardigrades densely swarming and colliding in loose packs but seen only under a microscope (David Lodge’s novel Small World remains one of the best representations of academia, in its detailing of tiny academic groups’ arcane rituals and anxieties). Academics live in a world where very few can choose the cities they live in, where “influential” articles can take years to appear in journals only read by a few hundred at best, and where salaries especially in the liberal arts can be shockingly tiny in proportion to the years it takes to get a degree. The real currency in this world is not money but influence and networks.
As institutions lose basic resources and even tenured faculty are told to tighten their belts, they and their students have taken to entering what academe once snootily dismissed as “mass media” outlets. Established lefty writers like Henwood, with their media venues and attached to publications like The Nation, become all the more influential in these shifting tides, boosting articles and profiles and determining in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, through online discussions and links, the tenor and directions of what counts, in some ways, as left discourse. The recent rise in lefty-ish publications filled with op-eds and analyses by academics is seen as a hopeful sign by some who see places of employment but, as the failed prognostications of 2016 make clear, not much of this writing is likely to do more than provide a resting place for groups of academics who find (unpaid, scabbed) work that lets them talk to each other, in effect, replicating the structure of paywalled academic journals.
In this context, Dear Reader, to put it bluntly: The major force behind the large-scale condemnation of my work and the effort to expel me was a combination of ass-kissing and furious rage that so many self-styled emperors who identified with Ciccariello-Maher, all suffering from the angst brought about by the dying of the neoliberal university, had been called out as naked egomaniacs.
Which is to say: the presence and workings of an online left and are ignored at the cost of ignoring its ghostly ecologies of power, the allocation of resources, material and immaterial, that drives its presence online. These power relations migrate online. And race and gender are integral to how online and consequently offline communities negotiate power.
Which brings me, briefly, to the relationship between the theme of this piece, Shame, and the #MeToo hashtag phenomenon.
The #MeToo moment may well have opened up several necessary conversations about sexual abuse — frankly, I have my doubts about that, to be explored in a separate piece — but it has also foreclosed the possibility of talking about gendered abuse that is not sexual and outside the confines of sex. And it compels women everywhere to discuss anything that happens to them only in the form of the confessional or the memoir.
Men retain the privilege of writing and talking about any topic they wish to discuss and no matter how personal and vengeful the motivation, how hateful the screeds they unleash. It is always assumed that they speak only as disinterested but curious thinkers and their spite and animosity are read as brilliant commentary; men are never questioned about the origin of their invectives. Recall, if you will, the reverence with which men like Alexander Cockburn (admittedly one of my favourite writers) and Christopher Hitchens (not) are praised for their acidic wit. The latter is often even forgiven his racist and xenophobic politics on account of said wit. Recall, if you can, the names of two women who are praised for the same without being simultaneously domesticated or having their lives rendered sad-behind-the-scenes. Dorothy Parker is not allowed to be simply brilliant; it has been decided that her scathing wit was a way for her to cope with the fact that she was “troubled” or “damaged” (favourite terms for women who are strong and express themselves, as I know too well) and felt “rejected, betrayed, unwanted.”
To return briefly to Henwood: his criticism of me in the original post actually began with his pointing out that I had unfriended him: “A little while back, Yasmin Nair pre-emptively unfriended me because she thought I was about to attack her for offenses unspecified. I wasn’t, but now I am.” Only a part of that preamble was true: I had in fact written to him on December 30 of 2016, to let him know that I had grown tired of his toxicity and clear evidence of rage and that, yes, I saw signs that he was bubbling up in rage against me, and that given all stress already in my life (he had once been a friend and confidant and knew what I meant — no doubt his next move will be to reveal all of that), I was not inclined to have to shut down a petulant hissy-fit on my wall at an always inconvenient moment. While he now scrubbed that particular context from the history of our interactions (to which I have never before alluded in public because I believe that the end of a friendship is a private matter), he did admit to a bias against me. Yet no one raised the issue that, perhaps, his attack on me — even named by him as such — and my work was motivated by a need to exact revenge, even though he literally began with a personal note about me. When Kathleen Geier (disclosure: a friend and neighbour), one of the few to write in defense of my work (Geier, to be clear, said she did not agree with everything in it), pointed out that I had after all defended Steven Salaita, Henwood burst into another fit of rancour: “I’ll admit that my view of Salaita is soured by his having stood me up for an interview we arranged weeks in advance, and then being a dick about it when he cancelled. George, however, is a warm and friendly human.” No one even asked Henwood why he had no complaints about his white friend Amber Frost having written a far more, dare we say, personal piece about George Ciccariello-Maher. In the very same publication.
In case this battering ram of evidence has not yet made itself clear: Henwood openly, explicitly, and confidently (and with some distortion of the truth) revealed the level of personal animus that directed his supposed politics. Salaita, whose case is a horrific example of neoliberal universities and politicians actually targeting radical professors, and who is not white and has recently decided to stop looking for academic positions because of the persistent blacklisting, was not worthy of support because he had been “a dick” — not for an ideological reason, but a deeply personal one — while “George” was to be supported because he is “warm and friendly.” Henwood’s clear personal animus and his motivation in attacking me — which I believe to be as gendered as much as it was raced — was effectively disappeared, made invisible even as it sat there, the words in plain sight. But the claim that I had been paid by a reputable publication to write a three thousand word piece simply to make a personal attack on a man was supported and circulated widely. Even today, whenever I make a point about leftists’ hypocrisy on several matters, someone will inevitably pop up, sometimes in a personal message, to insist that my critique only comes about because of my “personal beef” with some of them. I still continue to write for leftist publications, so it’s not as if the attempt to cast me out from Civilised Left Discourse succeeded. But because power works in unseen ways, I have no doubt that what I call The Dodo Fracas (a reference to my point that the radical academic is as extinct as that hapless bird) has certainly limited my appearance in at least a few places.
I knew I would have a difficult time translating these effects of gender and race without being read as someone who is simply taking things personally, especially since there is literally no genre for women to write of things that happen to them without having to render themselves broken and damaged by what happened, no discursive space where we are allowed to contemplate and present our experiences within analytic frameworks without being accused of centering ourselves too much, of making everything too much about us. Complaints or critiques of situations, if based in personal experiences, no matter how slight, will only be read as bitter and vengeful when issued by women.
In effect, women who wish to write theoretically about matters grounded in things that happened to them have to invent their own genre of writing. This was why it took so long for me to write about this, even long after I had discerned the theoretical contours of what happened, long after I knew I had the analysis in place. A complication in this matter is that I have been and continue to be a strenuous critic of standard-issue diversity and identity politics; my positions on these issues have meant that white leftists in particular see me as an easy target, assuming that my critique of such politics somehow means that I cannot claim race and gender as the bases of attacks on me. As to that: I’ve always maintained that a critique of identity politics does not mean a negation of the ways in which people’s identities can prove to be grounds for exploitation and discrimination, a point that, I find, is much too sophisticated for vast swaths of the deeply racist white left to grasp.
I knew that writing about what happened to me would mean that, in some people’s eyes, I might cease to be a writer, a critic, a theorist, an analyst. I would, Dear Reader, henceforth be that most contemptible of creatures: A Woman.
I decided that the best way to think about what happened outside the me-ness of it all was to first dissect the several moving parts of complex structures through which online communities (not just left ones) operate. This would have to include social media, something that is an effect of technology but which has inserted itself into our consciousness as if it were part of our DNA. I began to look at the dominance of emotions, particularly the fraught conversations and anxieties that involved naming people, especially people in power, on the internet (I can think of more than one colleague who still panics every time I talk about writing what you’re reading here, precisely because I take the names of people they’re terrified of angering). Even though the God of Screencaps has enabled me to compile a detailed chronology of nearly every post and comment made at the time, I have chosen to not begin this series with a detailed forensic analysis of what happened to me in Spring 2017. Rather, I begin it with a treatment of the concept of Shame on the internet. It may well be that by the time I come to an explication of The Dodo Fracas, I will decide that understanding that particular moment no longer matters, much as one might remove the scaffolding from around a building once it is built.
This is, instead, a murder mystery without a murder. Think of it like a Brian De Palma movie from the 1970s: a streetwalker is found dead in an alleyway, and the detective assigned to the case is about to write it up as another transaction gone awry until he begins to see the clues that unravel a sprawling political conspiracy.
The body is incidental.
In parts of the world like North America, social media is used in addition to and sometimes instead of traditional news outlets and also to find and forge political and social connections hitherto unimagined. When considering internet phenomena, we tend to forget how relatively recent they are — and also how limited, in terms of actual access and ease of use, and how lopsided all of that really is. The United States is shockingly backward in terms of internet access but remains hugely influential in terms of setting the terms of the debate on several fronts, including cultural representations and the circulation of online discourse(s). We ignore social media, and its sludgy inner workings and their relationship to outer political formations, at our peril. Online, communities imagine themselves into being in many of the same ways they did in an era dominated by print, but the force of an illusion of proximity is heightened by the visceral sense of belonging that online networks like Facebook are so adept at generating. We tend to forget that our online relationships — including our relationships to people we actually know in real life — are mediated through power relations that are plainly visible but not mentioned explicitly: the very definition of power. What keeps those power relations sustainable is a host of emotions extracted from users to make them feel invested in the system. What follows is a dissection of one of those emotions, so potently felt and discussed that it generates its own niche market in publishing: Shame.
Shame: The Diagnoses
If the internet were an animal, it would be an angry octopus, a writhing mass of neurons, responses, and emotions, tentacles lashing out in every direction, each emerging from deep within a filthy darkness.
Of all the emotions we see manifested on social media, few emerge as vividly as Shame. Shame might be the act of shaming others, or the sense of feeling it for acts committed (or alleged). For the shamed, those upon whom shame is visited, shame makes the world simultaneously expand and contract. A person might experience the overwhelming sense that the whole world is watching. She might also feel that the entire world has been reduced to the size of her room, as the shaming unfolds on her screen.
The term “world-making,” often used in social justice circles, refers to visions of change for the world, possible utopias. But when it comes to shame and shaming online, world-making is about the expansion and contraction of lives, of possibilities being foreclosed, of no end in sight during very public forms of humiliation.
Online shaming has, according to many, reached epidemic proportions, as hinted at in the title of Sue Scheff’s book, Shame Nation: The Global Epidemic of Online Hate. In a few short literal spaces, an “epidemic” conflates the national and the global. Scheff is hardly the only one writing on the subject. Writers and experts who appear on talk shows and news segments to talk about “cyberbullying” insist that it is a new and much more deadly phenomenon because the internet allows for anonymity. But anonymous attacks, as any fan of Agatha Christie novels, where “poison pen” letters abound in tiny hamlets, or Mean Girls, knows, are a hardly a phenomenon of the internet. Certainly, what the internet and social media allow for is the sheer magnitude of the numbers of people who can shame people. Women and minorities are, as per the course of history, the most likely to be targeted for their sexual lives.
Scheff comes to her topic with experience in the litigation of shaming. In 2006, she was awarded $11.3 million, for “Internet defamation” by Carey Bock. According to this NBC report, Bock had called Scheff a “con artist,” a “crook,” and a “fraud” in an online forum. While the award was significant — Scheff uses it to bolster her reputation as an expert on the matter of online shaming — it’s unclear whether she has seen or will see any of the money: Bock, a Hurricane Katrina survivor, appears to be indigent.
No matter. Scheff’s larger point is that anyone can take on the bullies and win, a lot. Like many of the so-called experts on the matter, Scheff depends upon creating a sense of apocalyptic doom about the extent to which online shaming damages our existence. In order to, in essence, create a market for their strategies and solutions, books like hers cannot spend too much time pondering an end to the larger structural conditions that create a culture of shaming in the first place, such as outdated and puritanical ideas about sex and commitment. Discussing the problem of teen girls being shamed by peers and boyfriends for sexting, Scheff writes, “For teen girls, the odds of a sext landing a serious boyfriend are even more far-fetched.” But it’s unlikely that teens are looking for anything more than a hookup or interested in having “serious” boyfriends. Scheff’s commentary is analogous to telling a woman who might have been assaulted by one of the many men she slept with that promiscuity is no help towards getting married.
There’s a mercenary edge to Scheff’s book; it’s full of subtle and not-so-subtle hints to readers that they should use the services of sites like Reputation Defender which promise, for fees, to remove any traces of online infamy or disrepute. And she tends to grovel to celebrities, presenting the supposed “activism” of people like Lady Gaga without any critique or questions (she names the singer’s “foundations” even though it’s unclear what they actually do). Celebrity is her currency, and the names and words of famous people abound in her pages: the book has a foreword by Monica Lewinsky.
Jon Ronson’s 2015 So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed aims to be the thinking person’s guide to the world of (mostly online) bullying; excerpts appeared in the New York Times and The Guardian. The book has been criticised by several writers, including Daniel Engber who points out that it dismisses serious allegations against Jonah Lehrer, the writer whose articles and books were revealed to be a pit of plagiarism. Jacob Silverman points out that Ronson ignores factors like class and gender which determine the unequal effects of shaming on both the shamed and shamers. Ronson also paints several disparate moments as alike, to make grandiose claims about the extent of public shaming. In his view, the General Motors surveillance and attempted entrapment of Ralph Nader in the 1970s is like the shaming of Lehrer. But Nader was not publicly shamed: he was the subject of an intense political conspiracy.
Ronson’s erasure of such complexities is in service of his dramatic view (one that sells copies) that online shaming is now widespread and a new phenomenon. He writes:
And then one day it hit me. Something of real consequence was happening. We were at the start of a great renaissance of public shaming. After a lull of almost 180 years (public punishments were phased out in 1837 in the United Kingdom and in 1839 in the United States), it was back in a big way.
This is nonsense. Anyone even remotely engaged with public life knows that public shaming has survived long and well after 1839. Cultural texts of all sorts have echoed and reflected our general obsession with not just finding out the secrets of others but promptly airing them in public. The sentence “Something of real consequence was happening” is a cheap writer’s trick, a way of making the reader believe that a fundamental shift has occurred.
Ronson and Scheff, whose combined books are typical of the current public conversations on shame, perpetuate the same narrative: that online shaming is a new phenomenon simply because the technology it appears on, the internet, is itself relatively new. But this is like pretending that political gossip only came about with the advent of the printing press when, in fact, it has existed for millennia, as long as we have had politics and politicians in our midst. Social media is not, in the end, drastically new. As in the case of the internet itself, its technological newness, the shiny brightness of seemingly invisible forms of transmission and its quality of existing in and out of nothing, gives it the appearance of being born without antecedent, without ancestry, without history.
Of course, it’s not as if there is no difference in the phenomenon of online shaming and the sort that happened without the internet. In the 1981 film Absence of Malice, a Catholic woman’s abortion is revealed in a report by a newspaper journalist. On the day of publication, the woman desperately goes from house to house, doorstep to doorstep, trying to collect and hide every physical copy from her family and neighbours. She eventually commits suicide. Today, the story would have been shared a million times over in the space of half an hour and remain online for years, if not forever. In 2010, Annmarie Chiarini, an English professor in Maryland, walked into her classroom realising that every single one of her students might have viewed previously private nude photos of her, photos posted by an ex just forty-eight hours earlier.
So, it’s not as if the internet has not transformed how shame snakes its way through our lives in much faster and more insidious ways. But we cannot ignore the mechanisms that keep shame alive in the first place.
Both shame and the internet are historically constructed entities and deeply contextual, rather than omnipresent parts of our physical, mental, cultural and political DNA. A Catholic woman’s abortion is less likely to be held against her in the same way it could have been in 1981 in, say, a small American town, but it might still be deadly news in Poland, where abortion is severely restricted (it should, of course, be noted that while abortion is not always shamed in the United States, it is virtually unavailable to most women because of draconian legal restrictions). As both Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian can attest, the “accidental” release of sex tapes can inaugurate hugely profitable careers in manufactured reality and celebrity. But we also know that a college professor’s life could be badly affected by the spreading of nude photos online.
The solutions that Scheff and Ronson propose are the sort that only keep shame alive. Scheff is particularly obsessed with the idea that the best way to retaliate to online shaming is to be successful in gaining more social media presence. Did a hundred people shame you about your weight on Instagram? Get a hundred thousand other people to love your photos: that will show them! Ronson believes that paying data-scrubbing companies is an excellent solution and goes so far as to persuade one of them, Reputation.com to work with Lindsey Stone. In 2012, Stone was photographed giving the finger to a sign that said “Silence and Respect” at Arlington National Cemetery. Online retribution was swift, and she lost her job. In the book, Ronson writes smugly about how successful Reputation.com was in replacing all the negative online responses to Stone with only positive ones, by seeding the internet with images and posts about, for instance, her vacation trips.
But, actually: today a web search for “Lindsey Stone” still brings up her notoriety and the photo that began the controversy. A leading entry? An excerpt from Ronson’s book about her.
Shame: An Origin Story
Shame, both the act of shaming and the feeling of being shamed, can result in entire lives being wiped out in the blink of a cursor. Few know this better than the woman who has spent half her life battling the effects of a massive shaming campaign, the woman whose experience qualified her to write the foreword to Scheff’s book: Monica Lewinsky.
In 1995, Lewinsky began an unpaid internship at the White House. She was twenty-one, and had already boasted to friends about getting her “presidential kneepads on.” Within the year, she saw her wildest fantasy — blowing the President of the United States — come wildly, madly true.
In 1998, Lewinsky was forced to testify about her affair. Her private conversations with Linda Tripp were taped; the transcripts of those and lengthy descriptions of her encounters were spread worldwide, through the internet, to remain there indefinitely. Twenty years later, Lewinsky’s life remains overshadowed by events that only spanned two years, and her name has entered the annals of culture. Clinton, ever the lawyer, penetrated her with a cigar. The resulting set of Freudian jokes that still appear everywhere, like tumbleweeds from a long-disappeared desert. Newspapers had only just begun to migrate to the internet, and the placement of her testimony and the Starr Report on websites meant that her humiliation would be archived and easily available for all to see, indefinitely. She was not fashionably thin, and her fashion choices included an unfortunate beret (who among us has not had an unfortunate beret phase?). She was ripe for mocking, and mock we did.
For years, Lewinsky tried to reinvent herself, leaving the US to get a Masters at the London School of Economics, after trying to become a bag designer. At a Forbes event in 2014, she declared, “I was Patient Zero, the first person to have their reputation completely destroyed worldwide via the internet.”
But was she? Did “the internet” as we understand it really exist at the time? And did Lewinsky’s shaming really take place even in the incipient version of the internet?
The Lewinsky story first broke in January 1998 in The Drudge Report, which began as an email listserv before becoming an online aggregator of news items with a distinctly conservative slant.
The internet at the time, Web 1.0, existed without social media and smartphones. So when Lewinsky refers to herself as the first person to be shamed on the internet, she is not really referring to the internet as we understand it. In fact, much of what happened to her — the gossip, the revelations, the attacks — appeared in what we call Old Media: Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Washington Post, and other print publications. The internet then was little more than chat rooms. Furthermore, Lewinsky’s public outing as Clinton’s lover came about through old-fashioned, Watergate-style intrusions and spying.
Lewinsky was not the victim of online bullying; her problem was that mass media had migrated online to the internet. Hers was not a sex scandal in itself but a political conspiracy that used sex to attempt the ouster of a Democratic president. The last Democratic sex scandal had involved Gary Hart, but he had only been a presidential hopeful. Donna Rice had quickly reinvented herself as a paragon of virtue and a conservative critic of teen sexual activity (when in doubt about how to reinvent oneself after a sex scandal, reach for the children). Lewinsky was never able to escape and reinvent herself. Clinton was the fish that `the Republicans were after; she was simply the bloody water churned in the wake of the expedition, but the matter had devastating consequences for her.
The body is incidental.
Twenty years later, Lewinsky seeks to reinvent herself as a guru of the anti-cyberbullying crowd, its Reigning Goddess, the Alpha in what is now supposedly a field of millions. Even if hers was not a case of online bullying, it is a fact that she is now forced to occupy the world in the most public way imaginable because the records of her humiliation are archived online. Few others have had to endure such a fishbowl existence. Years later, Justine Sacco would learn what it meant to live with the whole world staring at her.
Event Viral: The Justine Sacco Story
In 1818, a ship sailing from New York to Liverpool could take a month, with passengers suffering from inedible food and hostile fellow passengers (arguably not unlike the experience for most air travelers today). By the time Justine Sacco landed in Cape Town International Airport on December 20, 2013 , she had flown much farther, nearly nine thousand miles, starting in New York, breaking a day-long journey into two, alighting briefly at Heathrow before getting on a plane to Johannesburg.
The senior director of communications at the gigantic, Barry Diller-owned media corporation InterActiveCorp (IAC), Sacco tweeted to her 170 followers about her trip just before starting on the last leg of her journey: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” For years afterwards, Sacco would try to explain that the tweet was meant to be ironic, to mock the white people who do hold such views about AIDS and whom it affects. But at the time, her words were read literally, as a racist joke.
Sacco spent most of her time napping during the flight without checking Twitter. So, presumably, she was shocked and surprised when she alighted to find strangers waiting for her to emerge. Photos of her walking out of the terminal made their way on Twitter. What she did not know was that her AIDS tweet had gone viral: the whole world had been watching. Thousands of people had spread a hashtag, #HasJustineLandedYet; those able to do so because of the accident of time and location showed up to record her arrival.
Justine Sacco had become a “Twitter superstar”, as The Guardian put it. In about twenty-four hours, Sacco’s entire life was cast onto a virtual screen, she lost her job, and she was the subject of widespread condemnation, even from her own father who pronounced her an “idiot.” Major news outlets reported on the matter as if it were news, lending the twitter storm the aura of a global happening.
Justine Sacco was now an event.
But how does something or someone become an event on social media? What does it mean to become a “Twitter superstar” without even knowing of such a change in status? How do we think about eventness and world-making in such a context?
The eventness of Sacco was created by the media. Buzzfeed published a piece, “This Is How A Woman’s Offensive Tweet Became the World’s Top Story.” The report was just a collection of tweets put together as a timeline. These included one by by Twitter user Jim Forrest, @todaysabacus, which claimed to show the density of attention paid to Sacco: a map of the world with several red dots in different parts. On the map of the US, the entire country was a bright red, as was, apparently, all of Europe and the southernmost tip of Australia, but beyond that, very little: this was not exactly the “whole world” watching.
In a response to Forrest, user @40deuce tweeted, “Saw your tweet on @buzzfeed. That’s a @Marketwired Sysomos heat map, isn’t it?” Why, yes, responded Forrest: “Gotta love the tool. So easy to use.” @40deuce is the account of Sheldon Levine, a self-described “Digital Marketing and Social Media Manager.” Who wrote blogs for Sysomos, which are no longer available online. Sysomos describes itself as “a unified, insights-driven social platform that gives marketers the easiest way to Search, Discover, Listen, Publish, Engage, and Analyze
at scale across earned, owned, and paid media.” Digging further yields no real answers as to what, exactly, it is that Sysomos does but, apparently, the “world’s leading brands” are willing to put their faith in the company’s “Insights-Driven Social Platform.” The language is part Mystic, part Steve Jobs, a kind of PanWorldTechno dialect understood only by those who inhabit a world in which it is somehow possible and even desirable to use phrases like “Actionable Insights.”
This is not to imply anything too nefarious about Forrest or Levine (the former seems to have disappeared from view) — I suspect they are bit players trying to leverage pixel dust into financial opportunities. Whether or not Forrest and Levine are real people, the point is that they operate like bots. Their jobs, and that of companies like Sysomos, are about getting people to pay attention to the possibilities of paying attention that can be created on social media. The eventness of Justine Sacco came about not because millions were actually paying attention, but because a system of data manipulation, boosted by people like Levine and Forrest, combined with a creepy amount of surveillance — people did watch, people did show up at her terminal — and a significant amount of old-fashioned nastiness on the part of several people all came together to create the impression of a spectacle. The simulation of eventness was brought about by a circular logic, a confabulation among social media users and social media drivers: If we watch, we must record it as having been watched.
There are 48 million fake Twitter accounts.
The body is incidental.
When it comes to the attention we pay to such “events” like Justine Sacco: are we paying attention because we are actually paying attention or because we have been told we are paying attention?
Attention is the new currency, the commodity traded on social media networks; the entire system is based on the idea that more attention will bring in more money. As a result, stories like that of Justine Sacco become viral events portrayed as gigantic media phenomena when in fact they were barely seen out of the corners of our collective eyes.
Conclusion: Towards Revolutionary Disconnection
Monica Lewinsky was not Patient Zero, and the whole world was not watching Justine Sacco. It could be argued that the feeding frenzy I described at the beginning simply does not matter, that it represents a miniscule fragment of an always illusory set of communities, pond scum under a microscope. And online “communities” tend to resemble ever-shape-shifting amoebae, breaking and dividing into multiple pieces that in turn drift towards new clusters of organisms. But even in a tiny slice of the internet like Leftbook, several moving parts, represented by people and forces (including anxiety about a worsening job market and the need to prove that academics do matter) confabulated to drive me out. The fact that they have not succeeded in silencing me does not mean that a similar move towards violent expulsion might not be visited upon someone else. More importantly, the point is that we need to think about the web of power relations that manifest themselves in such instances. In particular, we have to think about the role of gender and race, given that women and women of colour in particular are more subject to scathing social scrutiny than men (witness: our president).
The internet might seem like Dory, the blue fish in Finding Nemo who can’t remember what happened from one minute to the next. But the body has muscle memory, even if the mind “forgets.” How online communities respond at particular moments to what they perceive as a threat has consequences in terms of how power is constituted and reframed in both virtual and offline spaces.
What if, instead of assuming that the internet needed to bring us together, we simply considered it a tool, not a substitute for justice or organising?
The internet is a technology, and yet most of our interactions on it are mediated through power relations that are often in plain sight but which no one wants to ponder too deeply for fear that the myth of collectivity be stripped away. Social media is a disparate set of effects brought about by a collusion between corporations, but its mythology occludes those mechanisms of power and currency by installing instead origin stories and tall tales, legends about how “the whole world” was watching. But the myth of an origin story and the sensation that numerous Twitter accounts are following a “story” as it unfolds on social media lend credence to the idea that, at any given time, something is happening on social media — and that we have to be on it as witnesses and participants. If we were to dissect and see social media more clearly, to see where all the tentacles really come from, to ask simple questions like, “Who is telling us to look in this direction?”, we might see it for what it is: an apparatus made up of many moving parts, all of whose effects can be traced in very material renditions of power and commerce.
But creating origin stories of “cyberbullying” and their imagined reach allows us to imagine both shame and the internet as ahistorical parts of our consciousness, self-evident bits of our social and cultural and even political DNA. Such a perception ignores that the internet has a history, that our attention has a history, and that those who are shamed need not feel compelled to fold into themselves and disappear. The internet is not a lifeforce, devouring our lives to feed itself. It is merely a technological innovation, albeit one on which much of our economic, political, and cultural lives depend, much like the telegraph or the telephone, to be used and repurposed for our ends.
What if Sacco’s employer had pushed back against the screaming online hordes and simply stated, “We understand the anger, but we will first discuss the matter with Justine Sacco, who has never before indicated such bigotry.” What if people had paid heed to such words and moved on with their lives? What if, instead of jumping to conclusions in the first place, they had simply asked Sacco, in tweets, “That’s rather vile. Do you really mean that?”
Shame and shaming are not eternal, unchanging concepts. Shame has a history even if as an emotion it has been around as a regulatory tool. Unwed mothers are shamed but a society that values them as people and takes care of them and their children is one where such shame cannot survive. Women who sleep around and pursue sexual gratification for its own sake — and who get abortions — are shamed as sluts but a society that neither cares about moral codes and believes people should seek and find what makes them happy is a society where such is possible. A photograph posted in a moment of levity should be dismissed as such, not considered a life sentence to eternal damnation.
What online shaming gives us is inclusion in a Public of Shame, the ability to manifest ourselves as Properly Outraged Citizens, as People Who Belong. We make and remake ourselves online, not just as trolls who attack and dox women, but in the most seemingly innocuous ways when we participate in frenzied modes of expulsion. The fact that much of this also happens on the “left” as we understand it should give us pause. To return, again briefly, to #MeToo: it’s worth remembering that the vast majority of those accused are not shadowy, ultra-right religious men but instead represent a broad spectrum of left-liberal-progressive politics. Of all the many startling revelations that we have yet to absorb, this is the one many of us who are Not-on-the-Right have not yet grappled with.
I write about this as someone on the left, and point out all of this not to destroy the left, such as it is, but to render it more visible, to expose the various structures through which it and its denizens exert power, sometimes for good but often not. One of the biggest problems facing the left today is that it is terrified of power itself: it’s terrified of having any and it desperately, fervently, and quite erroneously works on the assumption that it is not in any way implicated in often troubling systems of power. The only way the left can grow power is to recognise where it lies, and to recognise how it invidiously uses power.
Part of the problem with left politics, a significant even if relatively small but powerful part of which chooses the web to instantiate itself, lies with the fact that social justice is often conceived in terms of collectivities and collectivity is central to how the left conceives itself, to how it sees the world progress. For example: the repairing of harm done to individuals is increasingly seen in terms of collectives doing the work, which is often a necessary corrective to the brutality of prison systems that isolate and brutalise individuals in the name of justice. But as too many of us inhabiting, for instance, queer radical spaces understand too well, collectivity can also take on toxic and damaging roles and lead to the damnation and ruination of people. Can we think about society not in terms of collectivities forged in endless solidarity in public but as the work we put in to create a better world?
We ignore social media at our peril. Can we use it as tools and not let it define us? We have been persuaded that the internet brings the promise of Radical Connectivity. But what if, instead of seeking endless connection in a virtual or real world, we sought Radical Disconnection instead? Is it time to stop thinking through the forced collectivities of social media and start thinking about the possibility of unbelonging instead? Can we think outside of the endless sense of timelessness forced upon us by hours of internet life and instead think ourselves into a time of actual history and movements forward?
Many, many thanks to the readers who patiently ploughed through multiple drafts of this: Kate Sosin Oeser, Richard Hoffman Reinhardt, and Matt Simonette. Any faults are my own.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. I make a point of citing people and publications all the time: it’s not that hard to mention me in your work, and to refuse to do so and simply assimilate my work is plagiarism. You don’t have to agree with me to cite me properly; be an ethical grownup, and don’t make excuses for your plagiarism. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Images: Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Time (1930); 18th century print, Octopus; Frantisek Kupka, The Gallien Girl (1910); Procession with Mask of Shame, c. 18th century; Vincent Van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, (1890).
