So You’re Still Being Publicly Shamed
The Right wants you to believe that a coddled, overly sensitive left is propping up cancel culture. But punitive, hyper-surveillant ways of interacting online are built into the structure of privately owned social media companies, and they’re practiced across the political spectrum. The Left must insist on a better way.
Ronson is right to identify the bad incentives built into the design of social media platforms as a contributing factor in generating this culture of mutual surveillance and hair-trigger denunciation. Stacey MacNaught / Flickr
The excesses of what’s now called “cancel culture” are usually associated by mainstream and right-wing media with progressives and the Left. But one of the most striking stories about online mob justice in Jon Ronson’s 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is about a public shaming dished out by ultrapatriotic conservatives.
Lindsey Stone and her friend Jamie worked with adults with learning disabilities for a nonprofit called Living Independently Forever (LIFE). They seem to have been very good at their job. Jamie started a jewelry club that Ronson said was a “hit” with some of her clients. They convinced LIFE to buy a karaoke system and took the clients bowling. The pair was popular with both the clients and their parents.
When they weren’t at work, they liked to take jokey pictures of each other irreverently doing things like smoking in front of “No Smoking” signs. They’d post the pictures on Facebook for a few “likes” from friends. Like most social media users, they didn’t pay much attention to their privacy settings.
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