Public shame is one of the oldest social technologies humans have ever invented.
The stocks. The scarlet letter. Excommunication. The struggle session. The blacklist. Every culture, in every century, has built rituals for the public punishment of deviance — rituals that punish through visibility, not through harm repair.
The internet didn’t invent any of this. It industrialized it.
On May 12, 2026, BuzzFeed’s Hannah Marder published a near-perfect specimen of the genre. The listicle is titled “I Just See Him As A Sad, Broken Human Being”: 41 Celebs People Used To Love And Now Can’t Even Stand To Look At. It strip-mined the highest-upvoted comments from a single Reddit thread and packaged them as cultural fact. The 41 entries range from a convicted serial sex offender to a Wolverine actor who is friends with a billionaire the writer dislikes.
The article is unremarkable. That’s the point. It’s exactly what a shame ritual looks like in 2026 — fast, dispersed, frictionless, with no editorial standard and no possibility of repair. We’ll use it throughout this piece as a microscope. The case is BuzzFeed. The pattern is the world.
The substrate changed; the impulse didn’t
Anthropologists are clear that nearly every human society has had some form of collective shaming ritual — a way of using the group’s gaze to enforce conformity, signal in-group membership, and punish deviance without (usually) physical violence. Public shame is, in evolutionary terms, a cheap substitute for war. It works because humans are wired to fear social exile more than almost any other punishment.
Premodern shame rituals had three features that limited their damage:
- Proximity. The shamer and the shamed had to share physical space. You could not pillory someone three counties away.
- Time decay. The crowd dispersed. The pillory ended. The scarlet letter faded. Memory eroded.
- The possibility of repair. Most premodern rituals had a built-in exit — penance, restitution, banishment-then-return. The community needed its members back.
The internet removed all three. The shamer and the shamed no longer share space. The crowd never disperses, because the thread never closes. The archive does not erode. And — the genuinely new part — there is no exit. No penance the timeline will accept. No restitution that clears the receipt. (We’ll come back to the cleanest example below.)
The internet also added something premodern shame did not have: a financial incentive for the pile-on itself. The Puritan magistrate did not get paid per villager who threw a stone. BuzzFeed does get paid per click on its listicle. Reddit’s upvote algorithm rewards whichever comments aggregate the loudest consensus. X surfaces the hottest quote-tweet. The shame ritual is not just a psychological event anymore. It is also a business model — and someone is monetizing every revocation.
That is the actual difference between an analog village pillory and a Reddit thread. Not the mechanism. The lack of an off-ramp, and the presence of an owner.
Everything that follows is a feature of the older shame impulse, amplified by the new substrate.
The Five Mechanisms of Public Shame
1. Parasocial mourning
Premodern shame had a useful constraint: you could only shame people you knew. The merchant who short-weighted you. The neighbor who slept with someone else’s spouse. The constable who took bribes. The shamed party was a person, with a face, with relationships in your village. The shaming had social context.
Mass media broke this. Radio, then television, then social media built an illusion of intimacy between viewers and figures who do not know the viewer exists. Psychologists call the relationship parasocial — one-sided, imagined, intimate on one end and entirely unaware on the other. We’ve written about why each Enneagram type forms parasocial relationships and how those bonds collapse under stress.
What matters here is what happens when the parasocial relationship cracks.
No commenter quoted in the BuzzFeed article has ever met any of the people they are denouncing. Not one. The relationship they had with J.K. Rowling was the relationship a reader has with a book they loved at twelve. The relationship with Neil Gaiman was the relationship a college kid has with the man who hugged them at a signing. When the image cracks, what gets lost is the image — not the person. The person was never accessible in the first place.
So the grief gets metabolized as denunciation. I lost respect usually means the construct in my head no longer matches the data, and I do not have a clean way to grieve the construct. “I just see him as a sad, broken human being” is a sentence about Will Smith only on the surface. Underneath, it is the sound of a parasocial bond breaking and the speaker trying to keep their self-concept intact while it does.
Public shame in the parasocial era is grief work in disguise. The vehemence is the size of the loss.
2. Splitting
All shame rituals — premodern and modern — require splitting.
The term comes from object-relations theory (Melanie Klein): the developmental incapacity to hold “good” and “bad” qualities in the same person at the same time. Infants split mother into “good mother” (who feeds) and “bad mother” (who delays). Maturity is the gradual integration of those two — the recognition that the same person can be both, and that the same person continuing to exist depends on tolerating that contradiction.
Splitting is the moral grammar of every shame ritual in human history. The witch cannot also be your neighbor who used to bring you bread. The traitor cannot also be your friend who fought beside you. The blacklisted writer cannot also be your colleague who taught you the craft. The shamed party has to be reduced to their worst data point, because the ritual cannot tolerate the whole person.
The BuzzFeed listicle is splitting in slideshow form. Every entry follows an identical grammar:
I loved [celebrity]. Then [X happened / I learned X]. Now I cannot even look at them.
No integration. No “and.” Only the pivot. The person, once all-good, becomes all-bad. The earlier good is retroactively contaminated.
“Part of what’s bad about him is that what he did renders a lot of his act unfunny in retrospect,” reads one comment about Louis C.K. Renders unfunny in retrospect. The art did not change. The viewer’s capacity to hold the art alongside the man’s admission changed. The comedy is being asked to do what the viewer’s psychology cannot.
Eric Clapton said something genuinely racist in 1976. He also wrote “Layla.” A mature mind holds both. A split mind picks one and pretends the other is now retroactively false. Splitting feels like clarity. It is actually a refusal of complexity — and a precondition for collective punishment.
3. Identity laundering through condemnation
Who throws the stone has always mattered as much as who is being stoned.
In Puritan Salem, a credible accusation of witchcraft was also a credible signal that the accuser was not, themselves, a witch. In Maoist China, the most aggressive participants in the struggle session received the most credit for revolutionary purity. In 1950s Hollywood, naming names cleared your own. The mechanism is ancient: public denunciation laundered the denouncer’s identity. The price of admission to the in-group was the public sacrifice of someone else.
Modern denunciation runs on the same circuit, in a smaller venue.
When I tell you “I used to love Bill Burr but now I see what a coward he is,” I am telling you two things. The first is about Burr. The second is about me — and the second is the one I am actually selling. I am telling you I am morally evolved. I am telling you I noticed before you did. I am telling you my taste is calibrated. I am telling you my membership in the in-group is paid up.
The celebrity is the prop. The audience is me.
This is why public denunciation almost always uses the language of personal revelation rather than the language of evidence. “I just see him differently now.” “Something just shifted for me.” “I can’t unsee it.” The vocabulary is about the speaker’s internal state, not the target’s external acts — because the speaker’s internal state is, in fact, the subject.
The pattern is direction-agnostic. Right-coded shame rituals run on the identical mechanism — the speaker’s identity is laundered through public sacrifice of a former hero. The aesthetics differ. The structure is the same. This is also why shame rituals tend to be mutually unrecognizable to their opposite tribe: each side experiences the other’s denunciation as obviously partisan while experiencing their own as obviously moral. The mechanism is invisible to the participant by design.
4. The permanent archive (receipts as moral currency)
This is the mechanism the internet genuinely changed.
Pre-screenshot, the half-life of a public mistake was the news cycle. You did the thing. There was a story. You apologized, or didn’t. The story moved on. People grew. The community absorbed the cost. Shame rituals had decay built in, because human memory had decay built in.
Post-screenshot, every utterance is permanent and re-litigatable. Clapton’s 1976 stage rant is searchable. A 2014 tweet is searchable. A 2008 photograph with a now-disgraced friend is searchable. The archive never forgives, because the archive is not a person. It is a substrate.
This produces a moral economy in which growth is structurally impossible. The person is not the current behavior. The person is the worst available receipt about them, weighted by recency only when the recency damns them harder than the archive does.
The function of the receipt is not to track who someone currently is. The function is to keep available, in perpetuity, the option to revoke them. (We’ll see this in operation when we get to Snoop, below.)
This is also what makes online shame fundamentally crueler than its premodern ancestors. The Puritan adulterer could outlive the scarlet letter. The McCarthy-era blacklisted could die before the archive closed. The Reddit-shamed cannot. The receipt outlives them.
5. Outsourcing moral attention
Public shame has always had a hidden function that nobody admits to: it is a cheap substitute for the harder moral work of one’s actual life.
A finite amount of moral attention is available to a finite human being. The people in your life — the colleague you treated impatiently, the parent who needs a call, the friend you have not been honest with, the neighbor whose name you do not know — exist in a relational field where your action would actually compound or relieve harm.
Denouncing Quentin Tarantino on Reddit does none of that.
It feels morally productive, which is the trap. Hours of attention can be spent in the comment section earnestly grieving the loss of Joss Whedon’s legacy — attention that has zero effect on Whedon, zero effect on his alleged victims, zero effect on the next showrunner abusing the next cast, and zero effect on the moral life of the commenter except to certify that they have one.
Premodern shame was at least local. The merchant pilloried in the village square was punished by the same people he had short-weighted. Modern shame has no such loop. The denouncer and the denounced have no relationship, no shared substrate, no possibility of meaningful exchange. The denunciation is pure emission with no return — a moral pressure-release valve that vents into the timeline.
Of the five mechanisms, this is the most invisible, because the other four make the participant feel something. Outsourced moral attention is the one that does the most damage by feeling the least. It quietly substitutes for the relational work of the real life around you, and produces, after years of habit, a person who is fluent in stranger-condemnation and rusty at apologizing to their own roommate.
The categorical collapse — what shame rituals always do to standards
Public shame, untethered from a specific harm done to a specific person within a specific community, always collapses categories. The witch trials collapsed every form of “strange woman” into one bucket. McCarthyism collapsed “Communist sympathizer,” “Jewish intellectual,” and “homosexual” into one bucket. Once the standard becomes “we collectively dislike this person,” every grievance fits.
BuzzFeed’s list, viewed without flinching, is exactly this collapse at internet scale. In one shared bucket of “celebrities we have lost respect for”:
- Convicted serial sex offender, 60+ accusers (Bill Cosby)
- Co-stars of a convicted rapist who wrote leniency letters (Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis)
- Pending allegations, unadjudicated (Russell Brand, Marilyn Manson)
- Admissions and accountability already entered (Louis C.K.)
- Political support the writer dislikes (Snoop Dogg, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Hugh Jackman)
- Friendship with someone the writer dislikes (Jackman, again — because Kushner, because Murdoch)
- An old apology the writer no longer accepts (Eric Clapton, from 1976)
- Personal infidelity in a private marriage (Dave Grohl, Tiger Woods)
- A grandfather not knowing how to answer his grandson (Snoop on Lightyear)
- Being weird on Twitter (Grimes)
- Comedy material the writer did not enjoy (Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr)
- A legal position the UK Supreme Court agreed with (J.K. Rowling)
- A mental health crisis, with brain-injury context that the subject and some clinicians have described and others contest (Kanye)
It cheapens the heavy entries. The reader who skimmed past Cosby’s name (entry #35) processed it at the same emotional temperature as Snoop’s (entry #5) and Hugh Jackman’s (entry #6). Cosby’s victims deserved more than to be entry #35 in a slideshow that also contains “he is friends with Rupert Murdoch.”
The sloppiness is the giveaway. A serious moral framework — one trying to distinguish accountability from preference — would never produce this list. A list that flattens everything is not enforcing a standard. It is performing a tribe.
How to tell a shame ritual from an accountability process
There is a single diagnostic test: what happens when the target repairs.
A genuine accountability process has a shape. It names a specific harm to a specific party. It names what is owed. When the harm is repaired — through restitution, behavior change, or proportionate public apology — the process closes. The relationship is restored, modified, or honestly ended. The point of the process is the repair.
A shame ritual does not have this shape. It names the target but rarely the specific harm. It demands denunciation but not restitution. And critically: when the target repairs, the ritual does not stop. There is no exit. The wall is forever.
Snoop’s entry is the cleanest demonstration of this distinction available. He apologized publicly. He partnered with the leading LGBTQ media advocacy organization in the country. He released a children’s song titled “Love Is Love” with explicit content: “It’s a beautiful thing that kids can have parents of all walks [of life].” BuzzFeed quotes every step of this. And keeps him on the list anyway.
If public apology, partnership with GLAAD, and a children’s song titled “Love Is Love” do not count as repair, then nothing counts as repair. Because the ritual is not about repair. The ritual is about preserving the permanent option to revoke. The receipt is a leash, and the leash is the point.
Once you see this in Snoop’s entry, you see it everywhere — both in the listicle and outside it. The thing being preserved is not a standard. It’s the in-group’s right to punish.
When the social pressure does move the needle
None of this is an argument that public attention never produces accountability. It does. The MeToo wave gave prosecutors political cover that legal systems alone had not generated — Weinstein has been convicted, overturned, retried, and convicted again across two states, but the institutional residue is concrete: extended civil windows for sexual abuse claims, weakened NDA enforcement, statute-of-limitations reform in multiple states. Cosby’s civil and criminal exposure broke partly because the cumulative weight of dozens of specific, dated, named accusations made the case impossible to dismiss as a single woman’s grudge. Those processes worked because they had the shape of an accountability process: specific harm, specific party, evidence, a tribunal, a result. They are categorically different from “Hugh Jackman is friends with Rupert Murdoch.”
Confusing the two is what cheapens the first. Every listicle that puts a convicted serial rapist next to a comedian-the-writer-finds-unfunny makes the next real case harder to land. That is the structural cost of the ritual, paid by the people the ritual claims to defend.
When the ritual aims at you
Most analyses of public shame are addressed to the would-be participant. But half the people clicking a headline like this have been on the other side — or have watched a friend, a colleague, a sibling go through it — and are not asking how to refrain. They are asking how to survive. A few field notes from people who have lived through it:
The first hour matters most. The instinct will be to over-apologize, over-explain, or over-fight. All three escalate. The ritual feeds on the target’s energy and treats every reply as new fuel. The version that ages best is usually small, slow, and only what is verifiably true. Most of the early damage is inflicted by people responding while still flooded. A 24-hour pause, where possible, is worth more than any single sentence drafted inside it.
The crowd in the thread is not your judge. The timeline is not a deliberative body and cannot be persuaded as one. Your real review board is much smaller: the people who know you, your family, your collaborators, the institutions with a relational or contractual stake in your conduct. Reach those parties directly and privately. The timeline is not entitled to a hearing. Most of the audience will not remember the incident in six months; the people whose opinions actually matter will, and they are reachable by something other than a quote-tweet.
Repair is for the harmed, not the audience. If you did something wrong, repair it to the person you harmed — restitution, behavior change, an apology that costs you something. The timeline will not accept any of this and is not designed to. Repair anyway. Living through the aftermath as a person you respect is the part the archive cannot revoke. The point of repair was never to clear the receipt. It was to become the kind of person for whom the receipt no longer describes the present.
The 9takes lens: which types engineer shame rituals, and how to survive them
The Enneagram is, among other things, a developmental map. Each type has a baseline pattern, a growth direction (integration), and a deterioration direction (disintegration). Maturity, across all nine types, is the same shape: the capacity to hold paradox without collapse.
Public shame rituals run on the shadow side of three types in particular. Every type can participate — that’s the whole point of crowd dynamics — but these three’s deeper structures make them the engineers of the ritual.
Type 1 — the Reformer. Healthy 1 is principle, fairness, the willingness to do the right thing when it costs. Unhealthy 1 is the perpetually disappointed moralist who treats imperfection as betrayal. The Reformer’s voice is the engine of most denunciations in the BuzzFeed entries: these people should have been better. The world should have been better. I am right to be angry that it wasn’t. Notice how many of the comments read as moral reports rather than emotional ones. That is the One’s signature.
Type 6 — the Loyalist. Healthy 6 is fidelity to a worthwhile group, the willingness to maintain a covenant when convenience would break it. Unhealthy 6 is loyalty tested by ritual denunciation: if I do not publicly denounce, I am suspect. My belonging requires sacrifice. Comment sections are saturated with Six energy — the slightly anxious, slightly performative re-up of in-group credentials. Salem’s accusations ran on Six energy. So do today’s quote-retweets.
Type 4 — the Individualist. Healthy 4 is depth, the willingness to feel things others bypass. Unhealthy 4 reads the target’s flaw as a contamination of the self: their failure taints the version of me who loved them. The me who admired this person needs to be repudiated, because I do not want that me anymore. This is why so many shame-ritual entries are nostalgic — the participants are not really mourning the celebrity. They are mourning the younger self who loved without knowing.
The other six types leave fingerprints too. Eight brings the punishment energy — the move from this person did wrong to this person must be made to suffer. Two brings the social-cohesion enforcement — the polite, helpful version that frames denunciation as care for the group. Three brings image management at the audience level — calibrating which side to be visibly on, regardless of private conviction. Seven, Nine, and Five more often spectate than engineer: Seven scrolls past, Nine quietly defers to whichever side has more energy, Five watches and writes essays like this one. The crowd is the whole Enneagram. The engineers are usually One, Four, and Six.
We’ve gone deeper on these dynamics in Cancel Culture by Enneagram Type: Who Cancels and Who Gets Cancelled.
The growth move — for One, Four, and Six alike — is integration. The One integrates to Seven and learns imperfection can coexist with goodness. The Six integrates to Nine and learns not every membership requires a sacrifice. The Four integrates to One and learns the earlier self does not need to be repudiated to make space for the current self.
Integration is the capacity to say:
Eric Clapton said something racist in 1976. He apologized. He also made transcendent music. The man, the apology, and the music are all real. I do not have to revoke any of them to be honest about all of them.
That sentence is structurally impossible inside a shame ritual. The list cannot do it. The thread cannot do it. The upvote economy cannot reward it.
You can, though. And the choice to do so is one of the most consequential developmental moves available to a modern adult.
What growing up looks like
The BuzzFeed article ends, as every BuzzFeed article ends, with an invitation:
What celebrity did you lose all respect for? Let us know in the comments.
That is the prompt. It is also the question to refuse.
Notice what is not being asked. Not who is doing real harm right now and what response is owed? Not what is the difference between a crime and a tweet? Not what do I owe the people I actually know? The prompt is asking you to perform the same ritual the article just demonstrated: pick a parasocial figure, declare your revocation, drop it in the box, get scored.
Public shame survived this long because it works on the participant. It is, biologically and developmentally, a satisfying hit — grief converted to outrage, in-group membership re-validated, self-concept restored, moral attention spent. The same hit that ran Salem runs Reddit. The substrate changed. The dopamine didn’t.
The harder move is to refuse the prompt entirely.
I have done this too. I have pulled a name off my mental shelf, decided the new data made the old admiration unrecoverable, and felt the small satisfying click of a revocation cast. And then, months later, quietly and alone, walked the revocation back when the receipt turned out to be incomplete — without telling anyone, because that’s not the part of the ritual the audience rewards. Anyone honest about their own timeline has a version of this story. Most of us have several.
Mature moral attention is finite, local, and integrative. It distinguishes between Cosby and Jackman. It distinguishes between a current pattern and a 1976 receipt. It distinguishes between accountability — which narrows and specifies — and shame, which expands and flattens. It does the unsexy work of holding contradictions instead of collapsing them. It does not waste itself on strangers when the people it owes attention to are in the same building.
It does not require that you forgive anyone. It does not require that you become a fan of Kanye again, or that you stop being angry at the public figures whose effects on the world genuinely concern you. It only requires that you stop using forty-one names you will never meet as the place where your moral attention goes to die.
The opposite of cancel culture is not “everyone is fine.” The opposite of cancel culture is integration — the ability to say the same person can be gifted and cruel, principled and wrong, beloved and accountable, and that none of those facts cancel any of the others. Public shame cannot teach you that. The Enneagram, used well, can.
The next time the prompt arrives — let us know in the comments — try noticing whose grief you are about to launder, whose tribe you are about to renew membership in, and whose real life around you could use the attention instead. That is the only “losing respect” worth having.
Lose respect for the ritual. Keep your respect for the harder work of actually seeing people — including the famous ones you will never know, and especially the unfamous ones you do.