On shame and spite
Right on schedule, social media (Bluesky specifically) is tearing itself apart over AI. Those who are (justifiably) anti-AI are drawing thick lines in the virtual sand, quote dunking and dog-piling onto tech figures and developers who've indicated any "support" for the tech. Users are being vindictively added to labelled lists based on their imperfect attempts to explain their positions. Ad hominem attacks are in full force in cases where the target has carelessly used "woke" phrasing like "lived experience". As though the sin of their attempt to explain compounds their original sin of using AI. I'm not going to screenshot anyone here because I'm extremely done with dunk culture. Apparently we learned nothing from the past decade of online ostracization, a decade that literally spawned a spite-fuelled movement of malignant patriarchal fascism.
People I once respected are succumbing to the highs of dunk-sycophancy. It's easier to be angry. And it feels good to find a target who you perceive as part of what's harming you. But this past decade has produced a lot of research showing that weaponized shame is counterproductive and tightly linked to maladaptive (or harmfully adaptive) behaviour.
Brian Lawlor
I keep seeing users defend their weaponization of shame specifically, sharing memes and bluntly insisting, "shame works". It doesn't. Just because a swarm of angry users have convinced each other it does, it doesn't. And weaponizing it puts everyone in more danger.
Shame and aggression : Theoretical considerations
An analogy: A lot of people have died using heroin. It's a bad drug. We all know it's a bad drug. But do we dogpile onto its users? Do we quote-dunk on anyone who admits to using it? No. Because heroin use is so heavily stigmatized (and REGULATED), we hardly see its users, they're part of the underclass now. Is that better? Are we all super satisfied with that outcome? Out of sight, out of mind right?
And if heroin wasn't regulated, whose fault would that be? If the government invested its entire economy into it, decided to make it widely available across workplaces and incentivized institutions and businesses across the continent to use it, whose fault would that be??
AI is not a regulated tech and every Western government is pushing its use. Many workplaces have mandated its use. Whose fault is that?
Do we blame the developers who were mandated to adopt it? Who were existentially incentivized to "find legitimate uses" for it? Who are barely consenting beta-testers caught in the global rollout of the tech? Programmers trying to find ways to leverage it against hyperscalers? An entire network of tech workers trying to find a less harmful middlepath?
The decentralization movement is one of the few levers of effective resistance we have against tech-fascism. One of the people who has led that movement is the current target of the "anti-AI" ilk on Bluesky. That this movement is also loudly "anti-Bluesky" while obsessively using Bluesky is a flav of dissonance I can only attribute to virtual dementia. Bluesky? You're mad at Bluesky? The platform that offers unintrusive, ad-free chronological and customizable feeds, and allows users to port their own data between systems? The platform that respects data privacy rights and encourages community cultivation? Y'all are gonna surgically dissect that space and bully its staff? Sorry but what is wrong with you?
Did a bigger account tell you they were bad? Did you read the actual exchanges and decide for yourself that harms were caused? Did you try to empathize with both parties or did you indulge your biases because the swarm preordained the harm had indeed been caused? Did you think??
"Shame works", they say as they torch lines of communication between their silos and people legitimately trying to help them.
"Shame works", they say as their followers trying to engage in good faith dialogue with tech folks witness their incoherent anger, attribute the sour taste of it to the "anti-AI" movement, and quietly mute/unfollow.
"Shame works", they say as we boil like frogs in the toxic environments created by movements literally generated through the last decade of online shame cycles.
"Shame works", say the hard right, the tech-fascists, the MAGA swarms, who target and bully people into suicide.
Enter spite
There is a profoundly more potent motivator than shame, one that research has shown to be as powerful as altruism: spite.
I've often joked about spite being one of my personal favourite motivators. In the past, I've acknowledged its usefulness when men or others have belittled me or underestimated my abilities. I've joked that spite was a big reason my flower farm worked years ago. "I'll show them" was something I felt on multiple occasions.
But spite-as-motivator isn't just a speculative hunch. Spite was shown to have played a significant role in "conspiracy ideation and covid-19 conspiracy beliefs":
And in another research paper titled, 'I’ll Show You: Spite as a Reactive Attitude', the abstract states:
Spite is typically considered a vicious emotion that causes us to engage in petty, vindictive, and sometimes self-destructive behavior. Even though it has this bad reputation, I will argue that spite is a reactive attitude. Spite is emotional defiance of another’s command: to spite you, I will do something exactly because you told me not to. Our liability to feelings of spite presupposes that we recognize others as having practical authority, which is why it qualifies as a reactive attitude.
I've written previously about how important regulation of our feelings might truly be in terms of our collective causal stories. This is a clear demonstration of that. We know how we feel when people try to shame us. We know how the feelings of defiance, anger and "fuck them" kick in. How is it so hard for us to consider others feel that too?
And how would you feel if the person who publicly shamed you went on to dunk-quote you and rally their followers against you? How would you feel?? If someone blocks someone else for dunking on them with disproportionate rage (disproportionate being the key word there), that block is a very reasonable response! Someone you don't even know is losing their shit and rallying their followers against you because you... suddenly represent what they hate? Yeah that's terrifying. That's a very good reason to block someone, especially after you try to have a conversation with them and they just dunk on you again. Yes block that shit.
I feel a deep sense of dismay over the erosion of empathy we're witnessing again, and I'm positive it's related to mass digital dementia – people's minds hardening (literally losing plasticity) into digitally-induced binary thought. Maybe there is simply no healthy form of social media.
From the article, 'Understanding Digital Dementia and Cognitive Impact in the Current Era of the Internet: A Review' – and I will note that while the article addresses "developing brains", there's no reason to think brains who've used such systems heavily for 10+ years wouldn't be affected in similar ways:
Digital media's influence on the developing brain encompasses motor skills, language, and cognition. Excessive digital media use in young adults correlates with lower cognitive empathy, affecting interpersonal understanding and facial recognition. Studies link heavy reliance on web-based media to decreased white matter integrity, crucial for language skills. Adolescents may be more vulnerable to anxiety and unrealistic expectations due to digital media overuse.
And I'm not even saying that we have to be "civil" or "polite", I'm saying we can be grownups and express ourselves without trying to make the person we disagree with... what? Go away? Stop existing? Seriously, what do we expect someone to do after we've dunked on them? Cry in a dark corner and then emerge a changed person? Sure, many will do that, but the person they emerge as will likely just be full of spite, and will only contribute more passionately to the inertia you so publicly opposed. You've just motivated them to be worse. Good job.
Obviously, I'm really annoyed by this, because it feels like the beginning of another nosedive into a fresh pile of societal shit. Previous online shame-based movements may have shifted the culture, but they did not make the world "better", they empowered the people they hated by shaming them and fuelling spite.
I was there the first time a social media movement loudly shamed and ridiculed a public figure online, starting around 2014 on Twitter. That person is now the overtly fascist President of the United States.
We have to do better.
And in case I haven't made it obvious, the direction we should be funnelling our anger at is the hyperscaler corporations (AWS, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Oracle...) and the governments subsidizing them – governments actively investing our entire economies into AI. Like it's absurd we're fighting with each other about who uses it and who doesn't while simultaneously going about our days using hyperscaler products like gmail, Instagram, Youtube, Android OS, MS Office, XBOX (ps video games are literally AI and have been since video games were invented), iPhones, iMacs, Airpods, most of the world's data storage – made by those same tech corporations coercing the world into consuming AI through nonconsensual installation across personal and business systems. We need to be mad at the EVIL AI CORPORATIONS that are OPENLY BLEEDING US DRY. We should be dunking on them constantly, but nobody does because something in the back of our minds knows it would expose our hypocrisy.
And re: doing "anti-AI" better, this video is a very good watch.
