provocations

Provocations was a series of public workshops I organized at the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I designed and led two seminars on the theme of “Democracy and Sincerity,” one on Trolling, the other on Public Shaming.

One of the central fictions of democratic theory is that people are sincere. Yet we know from experience that this is often not the case. As more public encounters migrate to digital spaces, the assumption of sincerity seems increasingly fanciful. The scope for assuming fictional personas has radically increased. Anonymity weakens the norms of face-to-face interaction. Some digital platforms promote unobtrusiveness and likeability, while in others trolls deliberately provoke outrage in order to derail dialogue. Drawing on case studies and inviting participants to share thier own experiences, these two seminars will examine emerging modes of online interaction—trolling, virtue-signaling, public shaming—and ask hard questions about the meaning and value of sincerity in online public spaces. Is sincerity a necessary democratic virtue? Can we have civil discourse without it? When might insincerity be virtuous? How do we assess the sincerity of others, and interrogate our own tendencies to dissemble?

SINCERITY I: TROLLING

This workshop examines two very different cases of trolling. Lindy West’s story, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS,” exemplifies the transformative power of sincere engagement with an online harasser. In contrast, Tucker Max’s trolling of feminists illustrates how attempts at sincere engagement with trolls can backfire. Participants develop their own responses to various “trolling scenarios,” the aim being to think both normatively and strategically about how to respond to trolling in the digital public sphere. Excerpts from Angela Nagles’ Kill All Normies will be circulated before the workshop to contextualize the issue of trolling in relation to evolving online communities and America’s “culture wars.” 

SINCERITY II: PUBLIC SHAMING

The second workshop examines the issue of public shaming, reading excerpts from Ron Johnson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. A central objective is to think critically about the relationship between public shaming and sincere attempts to “educate” fellow citizens, whether political allies or opponents. At what point do demands for accountability become instances of public shaming? When does a request not to be “publicly shamed” amount to the demand that marginalized people perform emotional labor for more privileged citizens? Can shame (and related forms of discomforting affect) be a civic virtue or have democratic value?