Public shaming is usually horizontal status rivalry, not bottom-up resistance.

Evidence

But the Black feminist activist Loretta Ross cautions against the misperception that “calling out” is a tool of the many against the mighty, underscoring instead that “most public shaming is horizontal and done by those who believe they have greater integrity or more sophisticated analyses.” Vilification sucks as a strategy for solidarity, which requires carefully sieving differences to establish common goals; Ross thus teaches courses in the kinds of private communication, open conversations, and careful contextualizations that make up an alternative, the “call-in.” Immediacy’s surfacing of extreme affect poses as liberatory—authentic, righteous, spontaneous, unrepressed—but its delegitimation of mediation and auto-authority of presence, the impatience for intensity and the convicted certainties, vandalize relation. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 103

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the case for ‘call-in’ deliberative mediation as a direct political defense of mediation itself.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that vertical outrage culture is actually horizontal competition — a genuinely counterintuitive, dense point about the pseudo-liberatory politics of immediate affect.
• XREF: connects to: Public discontent targets inequality but not the threat to democracy itself. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 411