by Don Hall

Not often but once in a while I wonder how Amy Cooper is doing.

Amy Cooper was the woman whose life was completely destroyed by Chris Cooper, a guy with a history of antagonizing dog owners in Central Park by yelling at them about leashing their pets. When they didn't respond in deference, he'd pull out dog treats to entice the animals away from their owners. He'd sometimes pull out his phone just as the owners started to get pissed or scared and post it on Facebook as a callout against white supremacy.

Amy was unfortunate enough to encounter Chris, get a crap connection on her phone as she'd tried to call 911, and was filmed repeating that he was a black man threatening her.

Every story written about this encounter—from The New York Times to Variety—painted her as a toxic racist rather than a lone woman in a park being antagonized by a strange man with dog treats. She lost her job, she was forced to move due to being doxxed, she lives in hiding and fear now.

Don't believe me? Check out the real story (including the 911 call she made).

As we are just now starting to push back on the poisonous nature encouraged by social media, an unregulated wild west of our very worst natures, the demise of empathy and rise of narcissism, the Pandora's Box of our worst demons unleashed, I have to point out that I've been skeptical of this trend since the beginning.

That is, once I found myself participating in it and realized that I was a gleeful dickhead dancing on the mistakes and misfortunes of people I didn't even know for sport. 

Public shaming has become the new lynching. Now let that sit and before you lose your shit over the use of a word that traditionally has been the vicious mob justice most associated with Klan whites against innocent blacks, take a moment to understand the term.

Lynching is an extrajudicial punishment by an informal group. It is an extreme form of informal group social control such as charivari, skimmington, riding the rail, and tarring and feathering, but with a drift toward the public spectacle. Separated from the obvious racial implications, lynching is simply, as Oswaldo Mobrey explains in The Hateful Eight, 'frontier justice.'

Perhaps comparing public internet shaming as 'lynching' goes too far, though. While the Shame Pile On online can be devastating (and in the cases of a lot of kids, lead to suicides) it does not involve actually killing anyone. It's more like killing someone's reputation. In a world where online reputation is held in such high regard—employers, parents, potential mates all check social media profiles—destroying a reputation can have serious real world implications.

“A life had been ruined. What was it for: just some social media drama? I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It’s all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people.” ― Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed

It's fitting that Monica Lewinsky both produced and narrated 15 Minutes of Shame now on HBOMax. She, who has endured far more than fifteen minutes of it has pulled herself out of the stocks and has come out swinging.

This is a genuine documentary, absent much of the one-sided propaganda so joyously celebrated in our culturally divided pre-Civil War stance. It is evenhanded, looks at the issue from a multitude of angles and informs us not only where our perverse joy in other's misfortunes comes from but how the algorithms of social media push us to embrace our worst selves.

Instead of telling the audience what to think, Lewinsky and director Max Joseph do that thing that documentaries should do—ask questions and seek out answers.

In the wake of Faceborg being outed as the Frankenstein's Monster it has become and the slow but steady push of other countries placing regulations on the internet, my own conclusion is this: the horror show on display every hour of every day is not the fault of the platforms any more than the island was at fault in Lord of the Flies. It is us. It is we who can't seem to help ourselves.

And the admonition that we should all do better is meaningless until we can establish what better looks like. Until we can decide that and then actually work to become better people than we are, we don't deserve the platforms and shouldn't be allowed to drive the broken, potholed information highway.