Is Everything a “Humiliation Ritual”?

As Naomi Klein writes in her book Doppelganger, “Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right—the feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden.”

Or, as internet researcher Marcus Gilroy-Ware puts it: “conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct”—namely, a suspicion of those in power.

In this case, what’s being hidden from us is that a few, massive corporations increasingly control our existence. The internet is not a public square—it’s more like a carnival-funhouse mirror maze. The price of admission is our thoughts (in the form of tweets, for example), our visual representations of ourselves (e.g. TikToks and Instagram posts), and our emotional energy (the inordinate amount of time we spend on social media). Our supposed reward at the other side of the maze is social connection, or money, or simply a hit of dopamine to get us through the day. But while we’re in there, everything we do and say gets warped and refracted into a billion nonsensical or incomplete pieces. Nuance gets lost. Only small parts of ourselves get represented. And thus our fullness, our humanity is stripped from us. By the time we exit the mirror maze, we feel confused, shattered, discombobulated—it’s a humiliating experience all around.

And, of course, controlling this mirror maze are the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, masters of distortion and refraction. This is not a conspiracy theory: researchers have found that social media companies purposefully boost content that’s likely to elicit strong emotions like anger and disgust, because those emotions get people to engage the most, further feeding their machine. Musk formalized this when he took over Twitter and began paying out users based on how many replies their posts received.

No one is immune from our attention economy, not even celebrities. Though being famous has, of course, always partially been about creating a spectacle, these days celebrities have more competition than ever to keep our eyeballs on them. And so there doesn’t need to be some secret plot, some master pulling the puppet strings, to explain why celebrities are dressing strangely or saying out-of-pocket things. They’re just the most visible and practiced members of the same system we’re all part of—the one that encourages all of us to fight for attention.

There is, of course, a life outside of the mirror maze. But we’ve become so accustomed to our life inside of it, that even when we’re not participating in it, we can’t help but see all of life as if it were for public consumption and attention. Things we do in private or semi-private become humiliation rituals because the assumption is that everything we do now is for public approval. It’s why people post pictures of their fellow humans, say, reading in public, shaming them for what they assume is an attempt to grab attention.

But there’s the fault line—the place where we can actually fight back.

Life on the internet, or at least the current version of the internet in which everything is warped by a few corporations, may be inherently humiliating. But there’s still a life outside of it, and if we want to have any hope of retaining our dignity, we must fight to keep that part—the “real world”—free from our algorithmically-induced ways of thinking. We have to allow ourselves to be cringe, to do things for ourselves and not for the eyes of others.

The other option is the most humiliating thing of all: not being forced by the uber-rich into debasement, but doing it to ourselves.