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...

You do not currently have access to this content.