The Urge to Persecute

People have always sought to project evil onto their neighbours, and that desire now extends to random strangers on the Internet. Malcolm Gaskill shows how the science of witch-hunting took a leap forward in the Enlightenment period, thanks to the meticulous assembly and analysis of data to confirm or confound hypotheses, and describes how one seventeenth century German woman was found innocent of witchcraft only after the intervention of her son, who was able to use these same tools in her defence. Of course it helped that her son happened to be one of the greatest intellectuals of the period, Johannes Kepler.

Empiricism made witchcraft possible as an actionable crime before it made it an impossible one. Kepler saved his mother through formidable concentration, sticking to a firm line of reasoning and dissecting his opponents’ arguments, point by point.

In this week's news, two tech executives were spotted cuddling one another at a Coldplay concert, drawing attention to themselves by ducking in a guilty fashion when they realized they were being shown on the big screen. Internet sleuths were able to discover their identity, public shaming ensued, and jobs and marriages were lost - an example of what Cathy O'Neil calls Networked Shame. In his commentary on the incident, Brandon Vigliarolo noted our willingness to persecute someone for a perceived wrong despite not knowing the full story. 

Vigliarolo then went on to remind us of the eagerness with which other tech executives are pushing mass surveillance, which will apparently keep everyone on their best behavior through the use of constant real-time machine-learning-powered monitoring. 

Because we can trust machine learning to know the full story before jumping to conclusions, can't we?

---

See also: Witnessing Machines Built in Secret (November 2017), Metrication and Demetrication (August 2021), The Purpose of Shame (April 2022)

---

Malcolm Gaskill, Money, Sex, Lies, Magic (London Review of Books, 38/13, 30 June 2016) 

Malcolm Gaskill, Social media witch-hunts are no different to the old kind – just bigger (Guardian, 13 October 2016)

Cathy O'Neil, The Shame Machine (New York: Crown, 2022) 

Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Picador 2015)

Geoff Shullenberger, The Scapegoating Machine (The New Inquiry, 30 November 2016)  

Brandon Vigliarolo, Ellison declares Oracle all-in on AI mass surveillance, says it'll keep everyone in line (The Register, 16 September 2024)

Brandon Vigliarolo, Coldplay kiss-cam flap proves we’re already our own surveillance state (The Register, 18 Jul 2025)