The Purpose of Shame

Weapons expert @mathbabedotorg Cathy O'Neil is best known for her account of algorithms as weapons (of math destruction). Her new book tackles a related topic, the use of shame as a weapon. 

Many people have written about the psychology and sociology of shame. O'Neil's focus is on how shame is manufactured and mined, how organizations gain commercial and sociopolitical benefit from propagating shame, how individuals are coopted into circuits of shame, and (to quote her subtitle) who profits in the new age of humiliation.

One use of the shame machine is to persuade people to buy products and services. O'Neil describes her own experience being targetted with fat-shaming advertisements. Such advertisements are designed to make people feel ashamed, and to believe that the advertised product will somehow help. She also notes how shame can undermine a person's capacity for rational evaluation, and trigger impulsive actions. 

Shame is also used socially, to reinforce social norms. In some cases this is centrally planned - for example, in China where people are publicly shamed for acts that are officially disapproved, such as jaywalking. In other cases, this can be the result of what O'Neil calls Networked Shame, where people feel empowered to shame strangers, supposedly for their own good. As if pointing out the health risks of obesity to a fat person is somehow being kind and helpful to them.

Immediately following the 2020 US presidential election, Judith Butler noted how Trump and his supporters saw the left as a shame machine.

Shame occupied a permanent and necessary place in the Trumpian scenario insofar as it was externalized and lodged in the left: the left seek to shame you for your guns, your racism, your sexual assault, your xenophobia! The excited fantasy of his supporters was that, with Trump, shame could be overcome.

Of course shame was not really overcome, it was merely redirected onto others, using a version of the Shame Machine that Geoff Shullenberger calls the Scapegoating Machine, tracing back to René Girard. (O'Neil also references Girard.)

So shaming the Other becomes a political tool. Making people feel ashamed that they need help is a lot cheaper and more convenient than actually helping them, so politicians make unfortunate circumstances shameful (addiction, homelessness, single parenthood, etc) as a way of signalling that people in such circumstances don't deserve our help. And by creating a sense of Us and Them, it reinforces loyalty to populist politicians. Shullenberger credits Peter Thiel, a former student of Girard, for helping to plan Trump's successful 2016 campaign, and notes that like the social media platforms on which it has thrived, Trumpism channels violence mainly toward victims it wishes to marginalize.

While there is nothing new about public humiliation and scapegoating, the Internet and social media clearly provide new affordance to those wishing to shame others. Is that merely an unfortunate side-effect of an otherwise beneficial and beneficent technology? Not surprisingly, O'Neil doesn't think so.

Digital titans, led by Facebook and Google, not only profit from shame events but are engineered to exploit and diffuse them. In their massive research labs, mathematicians work closely with psychologists and anthropologists, using our behavioral data to train their machines. Their objective is to spur customer participation and to mine advertising gold. When it comes to this type of intense engagement, shame is one of the most potent motivators. ... It spurs traffic and boosts revenue.

One possible remedy, suggests O'Neil, is to redirect shame back towards the powerful, or what she calls punching up. She notes how Google could itself be shamed, for example in relation to its treatment of Timnit Gebru, and notes at least the possibility of what she calls healthy shame. She ends, not with a plan to end all shame, but with some recommendations for detoxifying shame.

---

Judith Butler, Is the show finally over for Donald Trump? (The Guardian, 5 November 2020)

Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction (New York: Crown, 2016)

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

Geoff Shullenberger, Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection (Cyborgology, 13 August 2016) The Scapegoating Machine (The New Inquiry, 30 November 2016)

Related posts: Weapons of Math Destruction (October 2016), Ethical Communication in a Digital Age (November 2018), Dark Data and the US Election (November 2020)