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This is getting pretty bad. The thing that really bugs me is when people are shamed for things they did 20 or 30 years ago. 20 years ago I was prank calling peo

This is getting pretty bad. The thing that really bugs me is when people are shamed for things they did 20 or 30 years ago. 20 years ago I was prank calling people and saying some pretty awful stuff to them. Would I do it now? No, of course not. I've changed. Should I be shamed for something that long ago? I don't personally think it's productive. I guess there's a balance, though. If I had questionable character now perhaps it would be relevant to include past information. And also, what's the cutoff? Five years? Ten? At what point do we say "that's recent enough to be a reflection on you?" I don't know. I do know we seem to be reaching back ever-further to find ways to smear people we don't like. It's a constant drive to feel outraged about something. As if there isn't enough bad stuff going on already...

alexpetralia 8y ago
Need some sort of exponential weighted moving average function: weight most recent the most.
- ghaff 8y ago
  It's not just time-based though. Most of us can probably recall recent examples where someone did or said something stupid or in poor taste. But they didn't deserve to lose their job or even had their career badly damaged because that was the easiest way for some company to placate the Internet mob.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    We've ended up with a stochastic system for dealing with these social conflicts. The response seems disproportionate because most of the time there is no response. It's as if rather than fining people for littering, there's no fine and no enforcement, but every now and again someone gets attacked by anti-littering terrorists.
  - dfxm12 8y ago
    Depends what their job is, no? As an example, anonymous blue collar workers shouldn't lose their jobs (and they rarely do). Politicians should maybe have to face more consequences (and they rarely do). Entertainment stars are somewhere in the middle, but for some reason seem to get the most attention. Now, "placate the Internet mob" is a bit disingenuous here. What's the Internet mob going to do if not placated? Tweet more? Oh no. They don't have any real power. Let's take Roseanne as an example. An Internet mob didn't take her show off the air. ABC execs did. You can blame tweets all you want, but it was ultimately up to ABC. Did they do it because of the tweets? Were they looking for one last straw? They have to answer to that. Did this badly damage Roseanne's career? Listen to Joe Rogan talk to Roseanne about this. He's trying his hardest to lead her into blaming that "Internet mob" for badly damaging her career, but all she says is, "I've got a new tour already lined up for 2019 and I've been spending more time in Hawaii with my son". Does that sound so bad? Kevin Hart has 3 movies coming out this year. Louis CK has been performing at clubs. Aziz Ansari is on tour. It's hard to find someone who was badly damaged by an Internet mob...
apocalypstyx 8y ago
I sometimes think about part of Fredric Jameson's remarks on one of the distinctions between modernity and postmodernity being an atemporality, that under postmodernity there is only the ever-present now. And I wonder if things like this are part of that, that we technically still recognize time, in the sense that we know we get off at five o'clock, but at the same time inherently don't recognize that in a sort of broader context, so people are forever what they were, are, always was, will be. So under such strictures, such makes a certain sense, in descriptive terms, that there is no what someone was but only what they are.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  True post-modernism should also dissolve a staunch moral evaluation framework thus dampening outrage. What we have is some mix of modernism (rejection of classical thought) and fundamentalism (harsh judgement with black and white morality).
  - fallous 8y ago
    I'm not sure that dissolving a staunch moral evaluation framework necessarily results in a dampening of outrage. Absent an objective moral framework what is left is a subjective moral framework that is not debatable and thus cannot be externally challenged as "correct" or "incorrect." If my own unassailable framework is the only vaguely truth-like metric by which to measure anything, it seems to me that outrage is the perfectly predictable response towards anything with which I disagree since anything that does not agree with my moral framework is not moral.
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    is should but society would dissolve if it actually happened. the moral backlash is a backlash to the beginning stages of the amoralism - atheism, freedom of thought and sexuality have ripple effects on traditional social structures that are built on concepts of restriction and standardisation. where do you put your pent up hate without being hurtful? you attack the people who are perceived as hurtful first
  - maze-le 8y ago
twiceaday 8y ago
To play devils advocate, the public idolizes celebrities. This boosts celebrities to new stratas of popularity. When their public image gets tarnished it becomes much harder to idolize them thus magnifying the damage. The boom bust cycles are inevitable.
dalbasal 8y ago
I don't think these questions have legible answers. Before social media, someone might smear, criticize or judge you for prank calls you made 20 years ago. Some wouldn't. It's not court. The difference between then and now is implications. The world we're in now can take those criticisms and amplify them, making them the central theme if your public persona. It can becone thing people know about you first. In an important sense prank calls aren't a good example. Most things that get the amplified shame treatment are not individual example of wrongdoing. They're individual examples that can (rightly or wrongly) be used as examples or symbols of a political injustice of some sort, as they see it. I really don't think we can sort the rights and wrongs of this stuff, make it fair or consistent. What we need to do is lower the stakes, if we can.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > Before social media, someone might smear, criticize or judge you for prank calls you made 20 years ago This sort of thing used to be a staple of small-town life; everyone knew everything that you ever did and you could be defined by a childhood incident. The only way out of it was to leave. Now we have made the world smaller.
  - dalbasal 8y ago
    That's a good analogy. There's something to it.
  - longdefeat 8y ago
    "The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There is no evidence of that in any situation that we have ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage and impatient with each other. [Man’s] tolerance is tested in those narrow circumstances very much. Village people are not that much in love with each other. The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations." McLuhan
- agumonkey 8y ago
  > I don't think these questions have legible answers. A lot of things today are intensely emotional (angry, indignant, scandalized) events over non legible answers. The only conclusion I have so far is: this decade is akin to a mass scale depression where anything is a source of madness.
Nasrudith 8y ago
I think the true answer is that we need to apply nuance and context to things instead of emotional knee-jerking. At the same time we should judge for past in both positive and negative ways. If they supported apartheid for fear of communism then you certainly are right to question their moral and practical judgment (even accepting the fear the action is counterproductively shoving the oppressed to the arms of the enemy). If they made racist jokes but moved on and supported civil rights for all let it lie. It brought to mind one thing from a parent referring to someone as being a radical liberal for supporting gay marriage in the 1980s. Now their view is throughly vindicated - visionary not radical is the appropriate term.
- OpenBSD-supreme 8y ago
  In light of communism's miseries and death tolls, Apartheid is far more preferable to it. With hindsight, drop me in 1930s Germany when the NSDAP faced off against Antifa and I would have donned the swastika and burned communist literature side by side with them!
rayiner 8y ago
Shame serves an important social function. It is how society enforces norms without having to create a punitive consequence for every bit of undesirable behavior. It's not just about you--by shaming you for something you did in the past, society reinforces what behaviors are undesirable and encourages people to feel shame for engaging in those same behaviors in the present. Shaming people for things they did in the past is particularly important for reinforcing changes in norms. There are a lot of behaviors that were accepted 30 years ago that are not okay now. We shame people for engaging in that conduct not because it makes sense to hold people to behavioral norms that didn't exist at the time they engaged in the conduct, but to reinforce those norms in the present.
Novashi 8y ago
It isn't just the older generation (and actions done 20-30 years ago) doing dumb things and getting shamed for it. The newer generation grows up without learning the implications of mass surveillance, mass long-term storage, mass searching and indexing, and encountering driven people looking to shame others just for fun. (example: one of the kids of the parents accused in the college admission scandal tweeted about "studying is hard" or something to that effect and it came into my twitter feed and everyone was having a laugh) If you decide that people NOW shouldn't be shamed for behavior 20-30 years ago, why even bother shaming? I know I'll be different in 20-30 years in the future, so maybe don't shame me (as much) in the present, as long as the actions aren't too heinous. Maybe I don't end up changing, in which case, more shaming would seem 'normal', but the advantage there is that someone has to remember to come check on me. I could gamble that there's a bigger outrage and the internet mob moves onto something else. The upside of this is that the internet is learning how many people are really bad people. Part of the outrage culture comes from that. Most of these details were hidden in an information-deprived world, and importantly, lack of searching and indexing to actually find all of it. Maybe it will get so bad that new identities become a much bigger industry and that becomes a social norm. A new identity and probably a new home country is probably the best short-term solution today for this if anyone feels unjustly shamed by society.
- kodw 8y ago
  You have observed something that points at a much deeper problem. The problem lies in our use of language. Language is the key. > I know I'll be different in 20-30 years in the future, Psychologist Wendell Johnson, pointed out that we create many problems for ourselves by using Static Language to express or capture a reality that is ever changing - “Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, good and bad, right and wrong, about similarities and normals and kinds, about simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.” "really bad people" is an example of that static constraint on language. People are not static but ever changing (which all our marketers are very conscious off which is why we get an iphone 4,5,6,7 etc not just an iphone). To get people to accept that reality is dynamic, social media and news media have to reflect on their signaling. Signals like clicks/views/likes/retweets/upvotes all reinforce static world views.
noonespecial 8y ago
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. Awsome. Here's all of them. Sincerely, Internet
Taylor_OD 8y ago
This is especially interesting when it comes to comedians being fired for tweets/work they made in the past. I've heard it compared to being fired for ones current coding position because one has 10 year old code on their github that is trash / poor quality. Of course, that seems absurd. But comedians are fired for jokes they made years ago when they come to light. Was the joke bad? Probably. By today's standards and the standards that we hold comedians to. But back then times were different and the joke may have been more culturally acceptable. Moreso they have refined their style and grown. As you said, they've changed. It's incredibly frustrating because the shame culture only exists to eat itself alive. You could be a picture perfect person one day and the next be demonized by something you don't even remember doing from years ago.
- arandr0x 8y ago
  I mean, I definitely don't think anybody should be fired for something they did 20 years ago no matter how egregious, but it's misrepresentation to say the problem is bad work. The problem is the work is needlessly and unapologetically aggressive/hurtful to certain people. The equivalent would be losing your coding job today because your github has a 20 year old rootkit on it that cost a few people their credit scores. Which, still unacceptable, but a bunch of your coworkers would still hate you for having stolen people's information and benefitted from it.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > But comedians are fired for jokes they made years ago when they come to light. Could you give an example of this?
  - LiquidSky 8y ago
    Not sure what the parent meant, but the example of Kevin Hart losing the Oscar hosting gig this year because of tweets from 2010-11 that used anti-gay slurs comes to mind.
    - dfxm12 8y ago
      I gotta wonder if that's why he was fired by the Academy. It doesn't make sense that they are afraid of controversy in light of some of the recent people who they honored, like Casey Affleck & Mel Gibson.
LiquidSky 8y ago
>Should I be shamed for something that long ago? I don't personally think it's productive. I see your point, but surely you see how this is a bit self-serving, that you'd give yourself a pass. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with holding people to long-ago behavior, but the argument is that your actions had consequences on other people, often people who didn't have a voice at that time. It's easy for the white person who said/did racist things in their past to say it was a long time ago and they've changed so what's the big deal (note: not accusing you of this, just an example) whereas the black people on the receiving end might see it differently. When I was growing up it was very common and acceptable to use f*g/other gay slurs as a normal part of conversation. I could say that it didn't mean anything and was just how we talked, but then again I'm not gay and didn't have to live with it.
Fei8reim 8y ago
> It's a constant drive to feel outraged about something. Are people actually outraged or do they pretend to be outraged because it gets other's attention to their issue? And doesn't that take attention away from issues that are less... click-baity? Essentially, isn't this another negative outgrowth of the attention economy?

alexpetralia 8y ago

Need some sort of exponential weighted moving average function: weight most recent the most.

ghaff 8y ago
It's not just time-based though. Most of us can probably recall recent examples where someone did or said something stupid or in poor taste. But they didn't deserve to lose their job or even had their career badly damaged because that was the easiest way for some company to placate the Internet mob.
- pjc50 8y ago
  We've ended up with a stochastic system for dealing with these social conflicts. The response seems disproportionate because most of the time there is no response. It's as if rather than fining people for littering, there's no fine and no enforcement, but every now and again someone gets attacked by anti-littering terrorists.
- dfxm12 8y ago
  Depends what their job is, no? As an example, anonymous blue collar workers shouldn't lose their jobs (and they rarely do). Politicians should maybe have to face more consequences (and they rarely do). Entertainment stars are somewhere in the middle, but for some reason seem to get the most attention. Now, "placate the Internet mob" is a bit disingenuous here. What's the Internet mob going to do if not placated? Tweet more? Oh no. They don't have any real power. Let's take Roseanne as an example. An Internet mob didn't take her show off the air. ABC execs did. You can blame tweets all you want, but it was ultimately up to ABC. Did they do it because of the tweets? Were they looking for one last straw? They have to answer to that. Did this badly damage Roseanne's career? Listen to Joe Rogan talk to Roseanne about this. He's trying his hardest to lead her into blaming that "Internet mob" for badly damaging her career, but all she says is, "I've got a new tour already lined up for 2019 and I've been spending more time in Hawaii with my son". Does that sound so bad? Kevin Hart has 3 movies coming out this year. Louis CK has been performing at clubs. Aziz Ansari is on tour. It's hard to find someone who was badly damaged by an Internet mob...

apocalypstyx 8y ago

I sometimes think about part of Fredric Jameson's remarks on one of the distinctions between modernity and postmodernity being an atemporality, that under postmodernity there is only the ever-present now. And I wonder if things like this are part of that, that we technically still recognize time, in the sense that we know we get off at five o'clock, but at the same time inherently don't recognize that in a sort of broader context, so people are forever what they were, are, always was, will be. So under such strictures, such makes a certain sense, in descriptive terms, that there is no what someone was but only what they are.

malvosenior 8y ago
True post-modernism should also dissolve a staunch moral evaluation framework thus dampening outrage. What we have is some mix of modernism (rejection of classical thought) and fundamentalism (harsh judgement with black and white morality).
- fallous 8y ago
  I'm not sure that dissolving a staunch moral evaluation framework necessarily results in a dampening of outrage. Absent an objective moral framework what is left is a subjective moral framework that is not debatable and thus cannot be externally challenged as "correct" or "incorrect." If my own unassailable framework is the only vaguely truth-like metric by which to measure anything, it seems to me that outrage is the perfectly predictable response towards anything with which I disagree since anything that does not agree with my moral framework is not moral.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  is should but society would dissolve if it actually happened. the moral backlash is a backlash to the beginning stages of the amoralism - atheism, freedom of thought and sexuality have ripple effects on traditional social structures that are built on concepts of restriction and standardisation. where do you put your pent up hate without being hurtful? you attack the people who are perceived as hurtful first
- maze-le 8y ago

twiceaday 8y ago

To play devils advocate, the public idolizes celebrities. This boosts celebrities to new stratas of popularity. When their public image gets tarnished it becomes much harder to idolize them thus magnifying the damage. The boom bust cycles are inevitable.

dalbasal 8y ago

I don't think these questions have legible answers. Before social media, someone might smear, criticize or judge you for prank calls you made 20 years ago. Some wouldn't. It's not court. The difference between then and now is implications. The world we're in now can take those criticisms and amplify them, making them the central theme if your public persona. It can becone thing people know about you first. In an important sense prank calls aren't a good example. Most things that get the amplified shame treatment are not individual example of wrongdoing. They're individual examples that can (rightly or wrongly) be used as examples or symbols of a political injustice of some sort, as they see it. I really don't think we can sort the rights and wrongs of this stuff, make it fair or consistent. What we need to do is lower the stakes, if we can.

pjc50 8y ago
> Before social media, someone might smear, criticize or judge you for prank calls you made 20 years ago This sort of thing used to be a staple of small-town life; everyone knew everything that you ever did and you could be defined by a childhood incident. The only way out of it was to leave. Now we have made the world smaller.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  That's a good analogy. There's something to it.
- longdefeat 8y ago
  "The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There is no evidence of that in any situation that we have ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage and impatient with each other. [Man’s] tolerance is tested in those narrow circumstances very much. Village people are not that much in love with each other. The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations." McLuhan
agumonkey 8y ago
> I don't think these questions have legible answers. A lot of things today are intensely emotional (angry, indignant, scandalized) events over non legible answers. The only conclusion I have so far is: this decade is akin to a mass scale depression where anything is a source of madness.

Nasrudith 8y ago

I think the true answer is that we need to apply nuance and context to things instead of emotional knee-jerking. At the same time we should judge for past in both positive and negative ways. If they supported apartheid for fear of communism then you certainly are right to question their moral and practical judgment (even accepting the fear the action is counterproductively shoving the oppressed to the arms of the enemy). If they made racist jokes but moved on and supported civil rights for all let it lie. It brought to mind one thing from a parent referring to someone as being a radical liberal for supporting gay marriage in the 1980s. Now their view is throughly vindicated - visionary not radical is the appropriate term.

OpenBSD-supreme 8y ago
In light of communism's miseries and death tolls, Apartheid is far more preferable to it. With hindsight, drop me in 1930s Germany when the NSDAP faced off against Antifa and I would have donned the swastika and burned communist literature side by side with them!

rayiner 8y ago

Shame serves an important social function. It is how society enforces norms without having to create a punitive consequence for every bit of undesirable behavior. It's not just about you--by shaming you for something you did in the past, society reinforces what behaviors are undesirable and encourages people to feel shame for engaging in those same behaviors in the present. Shaming people for things they did in the past is particularly important for reinforcing changes in norms. There are a lot of behaviors that were accepted 30 years ago that are not okay now. We shame people for engaging in that conduct not because it makes sense to hold people to behavioral norms that didn't exist at the time they engaged in the conduct, but to reinforce those norms in the present.

Novashi 8y ago

It isn't just the older generation (and actions done 20-30 years ago) doing dumb things and getting shamed for it. The newer generation grows up without learning the implications of mass surveillance, mass long-term storage, mass searching and indexing, and encountering driven people looking to shame others just for fun. (example: one of the kids of the parents accused in the college admission scandal tweeted about "studying is hard" or something to that effect and it came into my twitter feed and everyone was having a laugh) If you decide that people NOW shouldn't be shamed for behavior 20-30 years ago, why even bother shaming? I know I'll be different in 20-30 years in the future, so maybe don't shame me (as much) in the present, as long as the actions aren't too heinous. Maybe I don't end up changing, in which case, more shaming would seem 'normal', but the advantage there is that someone has to remember to come check on me. I could gamble that there's a bigger outrage and the internet mob moves onto something else. The upside of this is that the internet is learning how many people are really bad people. Part of the outrage culture comes from that. Most of these details were hidden in an information-deprived world, and importantly, lack of searching and indexing to actually find all of it. Maybe it will get so bad that new identities become a much bigger industry and that becomes a social norm. A new identity and probably a new home country is probably the best short-term solution today for this if anyone feels unjustly shamed by society.

kodw 8y ago
You have observed something that points at a much deeper problem. The problem lies in our use of language. Language is the key. > I know I'll be different in 20-30 years in the future, Psychologist Wendell Johnson, pointed out that we create many problems for ourselves by using Static Language to express or capture a reality that is ever changing - “Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, good and bad, right and wrong, about similarities and normals and kinds, about simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.” "really bad people" is an example of that static constraint on language. People are not static but ever changing (which all our marketers are very conscious off which is why we get an iphone 4,5,6,7 etc not just an iphone). To get people to accept that reality is dynamic, social media and news media have to reflect on their signaling. Signals like clicks/views/likes/retweets/upvotes all reinforce static world views.

noonespecial 8y ago

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. Awsome. Here's all of them. Sincerely, Internet

Taylor_OD 8y ago

This is especially interesting when it comes to comedians being fired for tweets/work they made in the past. I've heard it compared to being fired for ones current coding position because one has 10 year old code on their github that is trash / poor quality. Of course, that seems absurd. But comedians are fired for jokes they made years ago when they come to light. Was the joke bad? Probably. By today's standards and the standards that we hold comedians to. But back then times were different and the joke may have been more culturally acceptable. Moreso they have refined their style and grown. As you said, they've changed. It's incredibly frustrating because the shame culture only exists to eat itself alive. You could be a picture perfect person one day and the next be demonized by something you don't even remember doing from years ago.

arandr0x 8y ago
I mean, I definitely don't think anybody should be fired for something they did 20 years ago no matter how egregious, but it's misrepresentation to say the problem is bad work. The problem is the work is needlessly and unapologetically aggressive/hurtful to certain people. The equivalent would be losing your coding job today because your github has a 20 year old rootkit on it that cost a few people their credit scores. Which, still unacceptable, but a bunch of your coworkers would still hate you for having stolen people's information and benefitted from it.
pjc50 8y ago
> But comedians are fired for jokes they made years ago when they come to light. Could you give an example of this?
- LiquidSky 8y ago
  Not sure what the parent meant, but the example of Kevin Hart losing the Oscar hosting gig this year because of tweets from 2010-11 that used anti-gay slurs comes to mind.
  - dfxm12 8y ago
    I gotta wonder if that's why he was fired by the Academy. It doesn't make sense that they are afraid of controversy in light of some of the recent people who they honored, like Casey Affleck & Mel Gibson.

LiquidSky 8y ago

>Should I be shamed for something that long ago? I don't personally think it's productive. I see your point, but surely you see how this is a bit self-serving, that you'd give yourself a pass. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with holding people to long-ago behavior, but the argument is that your actions had consequences on other people, often people who didn't have a voice at that time. It's easy for the white person who said/did racist things in their past to say it was a long time ago and they've changed so what's the big deal (note: not accusing you of this, just an example) whereas the black people on the receiving end might see it differently. When I was growing up it was very common and acceptable to use f*g/other gay slurs as a normal part of conversation. I could say that it didn't mean anything and was just how we talked, but then again I'm not gay and didn't have to live with it.

Fei8reim 8y ago

> It's a constant drive to feel outraged about something. Are people actually outraged or do they pretend to be outraged because it gets other's attention to their issue? And doesn't that take attention away from issues that are less... click-baity? Essentially, isn't this another negative outgrowth of the attention economy?