Alan Jacobs


#
The eros of weakness and power that fuels public shaming shows up in one last uncanny and sickening detail of Sacco’s case: the delight her shamers took in the fact that, for 11 hours after she’d sent her fateful tweet, Justine Sacco was in the air, off Twitter, devoid of agency, both deaf and mute, basically unconscious. She was the very image of passivity and proneness and ruin. Her shame-mob, which convened and grew around this image in the hours before she woke to take it in herself, found it highly arousing.