Cathy O'Neil's The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation offers a trenchant account of how corporations and governments deploy and monetize shame in contemporary US society. Although the book is in part an indictment of shame and its damaging effects, O'Neil is also interested in its potential to call out those in power. For O'Neil, the author of Weapons of Math Destruction (2017) and a leader in the field of algorithmic audits, the distinction between good and bad shame is the difference between “punching down”—using shame to further punish outsiders—and “punching up.” Pointing to shame's origins in the regulation of community norms, O'Neil suggests that the denigration of those who fall short is not shame's only use; it also underwrites collective efforts to curb unbridled exercises of power. Although the volatility of shame—its potential to miss its target or to spread far beyond it—is not fully...
The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation, by Cathy O'Neil
Heather Love is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007) and Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (2021). She is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the coeditor (with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus) of a special issue of Representations (“Description across Disciplines”). In 2023 she published Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, coedited with James F. English. Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. She is currently working on a new project (“To Be Real,” supported by the Guggenheim Foundation), concerning the uses of the personal in queer writing.
Heather Love; The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation, by Cathy O'Neil. Critical AI 1 October 2023; 1 (1-2): No Pagination Specified. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/2834703X-10734086
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