One of the strange and slightly creepy pleasures that I get from using Twitter is observing, in real time, the disappearance of words from my stream as they are deleted by their regretful authors. It’s a rare and fleeting sight, this emergency recall of language, and I find it touching, as though the person had reached out to pluck his words from the air before they could set about doing their disastrous work in the world, making their author seem boring or unfunny or ignorant or glib or stupid. And whenever this happens, I find myself wanting to know what caused this sudden reversal. What were the tweet’s defects? Was it a simple typo? Was there some fatal miscalculation of humor or analysis? Was it a clumsily calibrated subtweet? What, in other words, was the proximity to disaster? I, too, have deleted the occasional tweet; I know the sudden chill of having said something misjudged or stupid, the panicked fumble to strike it from the official record of utterance, and the furtive hope that nobody had time to read it.
Any act of writing creates conditions for the author’s possible mortification. There is, I think, a trace of shame in the very enterprise of tweeting, a certain low-level ignominy to asking a question that receives no response, to offering up a witticism that fails to make its way in the world, that never receives the blessing of being retweeted or favorited. The stupidity and triviality of this worsens, rather than alleviates, the shame, adding to the experience a kind of second-order shame: a shame about the shame. My point, I suppose, is that the possibility of embarrassment is ever-present with Twitter—it inheres in the form itself unless you’re the kind of charmed (or cursed) soul for whom embarrassment is never a possibility to begin with.
It’s fascinating and horrifying to observe the spectacles of humiliation generated by social media at seemingly decreasing intervals, to witness the speed and efficiency with which individuals are isolated and subjected to mass paroxysms of ridicule and condemnation. You may remember that moment, way back in the dying days of 2013, when, in the minutes before boarding a flight to South Africa, a P.R. executive named Justine Sacco tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding! I’m white.” In the twelve hours that she spent en route to Cape Town, aloft and offline, she became the unknowing subject of a kind of ruinous flash-fame: her tweet was posted on Gawker and went viral, drawing the anger and derision of thousands of people who knew only two things about her: that she was the author of this twelve-word disaster of misfired irony and that she was the director of corporate communications for the massive media conglomerate I.A.C. There was a barrage of violent misogyny, terrible in its blunt force and grim inevitability. Somebody sourced Sacco’s flight details, at which point the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet started doing a brisk trade on Twitter. Somebody else took it upon himself to interview her father at the airport and post the details to Twitter, for the instruction and delight of the hashtag’s followers. The New York Times covered the story. Sacco touched down in Cape Town oblivious to the various ways, bizarre and very real, in which her life had changed. She was, in the end, swiftly and publicly fired.
This was not a celebrity or a politician tweeting something racist or offensive; Sacco was unknown, so this was not a case of a public reputation set off course by a single revealing misstep. This misstep was her public reputation. She will likely be remembered as “that P.R. person who tweeted that awful racist joke that time”; her identity will always be tethered to those four smugly telegraphic sentences, to the memory of how they provided a lightning rod for an electrical storm of anger about heedless white privilege and ignorant racial assumptions. Whether she was displaying these qualities or making a botched attempt at a self-reflexive joke about them—an interpretation which, intentional fallacy be damned, I find pretty plausible—didn’t, in the end, have much bearing on the affair. She became a symbol of everything that is ugly and wrong about the way white people think and don’t think about people of color, about the way the privileged of the planet think and don’t think about the poor. As Roxane Gay put it in an essay on her ambivalence about the public shaming of Sacco: “The world is full of unanswered injustice and more often than not we choke on it. When you consider everything we have to fight, it makes sense that so many people rally around something like the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet. In this one small way, we are, for a moment, less impotent.”
As Sacco’s flight made its way south, over the heads of the people in whose name the Internet had decided she should be punished, I found myself trying to imagine what she might have been thinking. It was likely, of course, that the tweet wasn’t on her mind at all, that she was thinking about meeting her family at the arrivals lounge in Cape Town, looking forward to the Christmas holiday she was going to spend with them. But then I began imagining that she might, after all, have been thinking of her last tweet, maybe even having second thoughts about it. As early as her takeoff from Heathrow, perhaps, right as the plane broke through the surface of network signals, leaving behind the possibility of tweet-deletion, she may have realized how people would react to her joke, that it might be taken as a reflection of her own corruption or stupidity or malice. By that point, it would have been too late to do anything about it, too late to pluck her words from the air.
And, of course, I wasn’t really imagining Justine Sacco, of whom I knew and still know next to nothing but, rather, myself in her situation: the gathering panic I would feel if it had been me up there, running through the possible interpretations of the awful joke I’d just made and could not unmake—the various things, true and false, it could be taken to reveal about me.
In his strange and unsettling book “Humiliation,” the poet and essayist Wayne Koestenbaum writes about the way in which public humiliation “excites” his empathy. “By imagining what they feel, or might feel,” he writes, “I learn something about what I already feel, what I, as a human being, was born sensing: that we all live on the edge of humiliation, in danger of being deported to that unkind country.” Justine Sacco is a deportee now; I’m trying to imagine what it must be like for her there in that unkind country, those twelve words repeating themselves mindlessly over and over again in her head, how the phrase “Just kidding!”—J.K.! J.K.!—must by now have lost all meaning or have taken on a whole new significance. In this mode of trial and punishment, I sometimes think of social media as being like the terrible apparatus at the center of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”: a mechanism of corrective torture, harrowing the letters of the transgression into the bodies of the condemned.
The weird randomness of this sudden mutation of person into meme is, in the end, what’s so haunting. This could just as well have happened to anyone—any of the thousands of people who say awful things on Twitter every day. It’s not that Sacco didn’t deserve to be taken to task, to be scorned for the clumsiness and hurtfulness of her joke; it’s that the corrective was so radically comprehensive and obliterating, and administered with such collective righteous giddiness. This is a new form of violence, a symbolic ritual of erasure where the condemned is made to stand for a whole class of person—to be cast, as an effigy of the world’s general awfulness, into a sudden abyss of fame.
Mark O’Connell is Slate’s books columnist, and a staff writer for The Millions. You can follow him on Twitter @mrkocnnll.
Illustration by Jordan Awan.