I don’t think they’d feel responsible for the loss of his job, for one thing causality is impossible to prove in pile-ons, which (like firing squads) are collective in ways that disperse responsibility.

Public responses to “cancellation” all too often curdle any possibility of sincere engagement-or sincere regret-into PR strategies for the very reason that all of it is incredibly, and stickily, public.

That’s not the case anymore-and that matters if we’re talking about inner ethical transformations. No external party can hold them accountable. No one will ever know how horrible it was. Any evidence of what they said is lost now. Say someone said or wrote something mean about Lewinsky 20 years ago. We can barely remember what we read two hours ago the idea that we might consciously revisit whether we said something unkind about a stranger six months ago-well, it seems unlikely.Īnother factor is the relative privacy people have when it comes to their older misjudgments. But six months isn’t long enough to produce plausible deniability for a former self, and social media doesn’t exactly incentivize habits of introspection. It’s easier for people to disavow positions they held 20 years ago if former versions of ourselves sucked, we can flatter ourselves that we’ve grown. Regret is as intimate and introspective an emotion as there is, and we don’t tend to expend that kind of energy on people on the internet. The firehose of your notifications is yours alone. Because unlike a spectacle-oriented in-person shaming (in the stocks, say, which your community witnesses), a feature of online harassment is that no one really sees what you’re going through. The documentary does all the things you would expect such a documentary to do-it successfully captures what the overwhelming volume feels like it contextualizes why people doing the shaming derive some pleasure from it-and then it also tries to explain why shaming has gotten worse now. The thesis is, unsurprisingly, that it’s all bad.

The emphasis rather is squarely on the effect: What does disproportionate shaming do to the subject? To the shamers? To society? Lewinsky, for example, admits she made many. The documentary is only mildly interested in relitigating the implicit argument isn’t that people don’t make mistakes. Being mocked by late-night hosts is bad, but the pain of being rejected en masse by one’s peers is at the core of 15 Minutes of Shame.Īs a director, Joseph, who also made Catfish: The TV Show, makes clear that the rightness or wrongness of whatever each person did is not the issue (though each is presented in a sympathetic light).

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