So you’ve been publicly scapegoated: Why we must speak out on call-out culture

The publication of Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is the culmination of a recent trend: people of means and privilege engaged in well-remunerated shallow handwringing about “public shaming,” particularly through social media. 

It joins a growing pantheon of articles that are distinguished by their one-dimensional treatment of a genuine social problem: Michelle Goldberg’s Nation essay on “Toxic Twitter Feminism” (full disclosure: I was interviewed for that piece) and Jonathan Chait’s recent effort in New York Magazine being two clear examples thereof.

What these works all have in common is that they attempted to address something that has exorcised radical activists for years: the mob mentality that grabs ahold of us when we use social media, where we lose ourselves in the censorious crowd eager to punish someone (almost always a single individual) who gave great offense. In other words, the screaming, directionless crowds on the internet who descend onto someone unlucky enough to get their attention.

What they also have in common is that they paid next to no attention to the complicated discourse that has emerged around what has come to be known as “call out culture,” and opted instead for easy scapegoats, false equivalences, and inexpertly mashing together often contradictory and uncited arguments.

How August Never Ended

Ronson’s book, which interviews several people targeted by public shaming campaigns and attempts to make meaning of their experience, reaches an utter nadir of cluelessness in this regard. In a not-so-spirited attempt at being fair, he managed to make the vituperative harassment of technologist Adria Richards a “two sided” affair. Richards, who posted pictures to Twitter of two men making lewd jokes at the PyCon tech conference in 2013, was barraged by fusillade after fusillade of vicious online harassment that ultimately drove her from her home.

She faced credible death threats, photoshopped pornography, pictures of her head shopped into grotesque murder scenes, harassing the customers of the startup she worked for, a DDoS attack against her employer, brigading every part of her web presence, remorselessly mobbing her and her employers until they finally cried uncle and offered her firing as a sacrifice to appease this angry digital god.

This isn’t past-tense, however. Years later, she is still being harassed and it takes next to no energy to coax random folks out of the woodwork who are ready and willing to justify all this. A few months ago, I had a lengthy rant on Twitter about “public shaming” and how I was horrified by both the public auto-da-fé of Justine Sacco and Adria Richards. Though some leftists still cling to the idea that Sacco deserved the hell she was put through and considered the crowdsourced bullying campaign just desserts for an ill-considered tweet, they let me have my say and politely agreed to disagree. When I talked about Richards, however, I was quickly mobbed by people, all men if their names and avatars were to be believed, who strained to argue that Richards deserved what she got and that she was wrong to “publicly shame” the men whose pictures she posted to Twitter.

It was a thicket of whataboutery that made for a nice A/B test; a white woman who was mobbed for saying something racist versus a black woman who was mobbed for speaking out against sexism. Who was Twitter’s faceless swarm more willing to forgive?

Ronson was sympathetic to one of the men in Richards’ infamous photo, who was also ultimately fired. But he creates a deeply misleading false equivalence between the two which is best crystalized in the fact that I couldn’t tell you the man’s name if I wanted to. He managed to avoid the permanent infamy that seems to have coalesced around Richards. He quickly put his life back together and got a new job in short order, while Richards is still trying to get past this debacle and find gainful employment in the industry that seemed to turn its back on her.

She is rebuilding her life, still continuing to successfully attend the PyCon conference where it all began and partaking in hackathons, volunteer work, and more. But she labours under an ongoing barrage that her counterparts like Sacco do not.

Further, Ronson’s account has inspired genuine toxicity. Consider this astonishing paragraph written by Rachel Cooke in her Observer review of Ronson’s book:

“Perhaps the person whose behaviour I most abhorred in this book – I was frankly in awe of the forbearance shown by Ronson as he interviewed her – is a woman called Adria Richards, who in 2013 overheard two guys making silly pseudo-jokes about dongles at a conference for tech developers. Offended by their chat, she photographed them, and posted the picture on Twitter. Two days later, one of these men – who knows on what grounds, exactly – was “let go” from his job. Richards’s satisfaction both in this, and in the “fear” she claims she felt when she overheard his puerile chatter, is so intense it seemed to me to border on something close to sexual excitement.” (emphasis mine)

One hardly knows what to say to this, really. Suggesting Richards was aroused by the circumstances that led to a ruinous plague of trolls descending on her beggars belief; it feels positively Victorian in its perverse combination of pornographic thought and moral outrage.

As Slate’s reviewer, Jacob Silverman, put it, the book simply suffers from a lack of political awareness that might’ve allowed Ronson to truly understand his subjects and properly contextualize their experiences. What we’re left with is a profoundly shallow treatment of social media, public shaming, and the dynamics of toxic behavior online, in and outside of activism.

A better account might make sense of game developer Zoe Quinn’s resigned aphorism: “August Never Ends.” August, the birth month of the GamerGate harassment campaign, was when Quinn was barraged by attacks that drove her from her home and are, as of this writing, yet to end. It’s a reminder that “shaming” is an inapt word for this phenomenon, which continues to affect men and women rather differently.

August never ended for Quinn, nor has it for other women in gaming who continue to suffer from the ongoing barrage of a hard, embittered core of professional harassers.

Toxic Thinkpiece Misrepresentation

Ronson, Chait, and Goldberg all have in common a certain level of theoretical incoherence which is created precisely by the simplicity of their narratives and the way they attempt to foist blame for the phenomenon on a small group to which they are ideologically opposed. Feminist writer Sady Doyle put it best when she critiqued Chait’s “That’s Not Very PC Of You” essay:

The profound laziness of Chait’s work becomes clear when you attempt to engage. As many feminist writers pointed out, it’s essentially a confusing, confused mish-mash of every article a woman has written about Internet conflict and rage cycles in the past five years, served with a hefty dose of blatant racism and white male tears that invalidates the very ideas it’s stealing.

If you agree with parts of it and hate other parts, that’s not because Chait is presenting a complex idea, or even because he’s incoherent: It’s because he’s copping his points from about a half-dozen other essays, and those essays actually don’t agree with each other.

Meanwhile Michelle Goldberg’s essay was best known for making a scapegoat of black feminists for all of feminism’s toxicity problems, casting activist Mikki Kendall as a bullying villain, and Black Twitter as a contagion. Though Goldberg interviewed several women of color, myself included, who were inveterate critics of leftist toxicity she studiously ignored what I and others said about this problem not being unique to feminism, Twitter, or people of color.

Notably, Goldberg revealed more of her own unfortunate biases in a later essay for The New Yorker in which she gave transphobic radical feminists a free pass on their own genuine toxicity (including stalking, doxing, threats, and so on) while upbraiding trans women for our often justified anger at TERF behavior. I naively thought that Goldberg’s concern about online toxicity would make TERFs a natural target for her ire; what became clear is that her empathy seems to be reserved for those most like herself.

The danger of these articles does not just lay in the misrepresentations they promote as fair-minded detachment, but also in the responses they inevitably provoke from the very toxic quarters they seem to be criticizing. In the wake of Goldberg’s Nation essay, several left-wing activists immediately rallied to have the term “toxic activism” recognized as a dog-whistle code for women of color (especially black) activists and rallied against what they called the “gentrification of the internet.” For those of us living in neighborhoods threatened with the pall of actual gentrification this seemed a bit over the top, to say the least.

But the worst part was that it put the squeeze on all of us who were caught in the middle: women of color and trans folks, lefties, feminists, and radicals who had very deep reservations about call-out culture, purity politics, and the veneration of rage in activist circles. We were caught between a Nation article that had engaged in racist scapegoating, and uncompromising radicals who seemed to want no discussion of toxicity whatsoever, using Goldberg as a foil to justify their aims.

It turned the discussion into another iteration of “rich white women versus the rest of us” in a way that allowed many activists of all backgrounds to escape public accountability for the ways in which they bully, harass, or lead mobs against ideological targets. This made an already difficult internal discussion even more fraught.

Goldberg, Chait, and Ronson alike all fail to recognize how their self-styled bravery, because of its wantonly shallow offensiveness, manages to poison the very discussion they claim to want to start. It forces people like me to take sides when I’d rather be the one in the middle trying to cooly analyze the complexities of the situation. And, not to put too fine a point on the matter, they’re paid for popular articles and book advances, while the platoon of trans people and people of color who’ve discussed this matter for ages on our blogs and social media in a considerably more sophisticated way have not seen a cent for our troubles.

To wit, I’d rather have seen The Nation pay Mattie Brice, Brittney Cooper, or Jamia Wilson to write an article about toxic feminist activism.

***

Time and again we see these antiseptics to virtual toxicity revealed as virulent poisons that merely deepen the corrosion of our discourse.

The solution is not, I realized, to remain silent and wait for the storm of controversy to pass. There will always be another one. Those of us who have written, thought, or spoken about this — even in shadowed whispers — need to keep speaking out about call-out culture and toxic activism, both against the ideological purists who tell us we’re providing ammunition to the “enemy” and the professional scapegoaters who seek to farm clicks and book advances off of this issue.

We can no longer afford to allow the issue to be co-opted by those who seek to use peoples’ legitimate fear of social media mobbing to shore up the irresponsibility of the privileged, especially while people like Adria Richards suffer in the meantime.