Increasingly, people are ignoring social norms in favor of a narrow self-interest. The results are disastrous.
This is the first in a series of columns about the decline of shame in the age of social media.
This past February, during the dead months of the N.B.A. season, I went on a podcast to talk about the long-standing problem of tanking, which, for non-sports fans, is when a team purposely loses games to improve its odds of drafting the next franchise star. Domonique Foxworth, the podcast’s eponymous host, is a former N.F.L. cornerback who went on to serve as the president of the N.F.L. Players Association and then, after retirement, became the chief operating officer of the N.B.A.’s player union. On the show, he framed tanking in terms of shame. The problem with the N.B.A., he suggested, was that we, as a sports-watching society, no longer enforced any social penalties on the front offices that actively try to lose games by fielding subpar rosters or encouraging coaches to sit their best players during crunch time. People think about everything as a matter of return on investment; for middling or bad teams, there is clearly more value in losing than in winning. “We’ve gone into an optimization culture that removes the guardrails that shame used to provide,” Foxworth said.
Foxworth’s lament has been stuck in my head ever since. Shame is one of the ways that groups of people mediate their norms without state intervention. This, of course, is not always a good thing. But any community without shame must have moral consensus, or else it risks splintering into the chaos of personal interpretation and individual will. How much of today’s societal collapse and atomization can be attributed to the blatant disregard for shame by what Foxworth called optimization culture? The answer might seem obvious, at first, and certainly this territory has been well trod since Donald Trump entered the political conversation, more than a decade ago. Still, I want to spend the next few weeks thinking a bit more about shame, specifically as a cultural backstop that prevents people from flagrantly violating norms.
First, a quick history of tanking. Teams have tanked for decades—the controversy has been a part of basketball discourse since at least 1984, when the Houston Rockets were accused of throwing their season to improve their shot at drafting the great center Hakeem Olajuwon. At the time, the last-place finishers in the N.B.A.’s Eastern and Western conferences would flip a coin to see who got the first pick. After the Rockets controversy, the N.B.A. introduced a lottery system. Every team that didn’t make the playoffs would be assigned an envelope; these envelopes were placed in a giant plastic bubble. During the first N.B.A. lottery, in 1985, the league’s commissioner, David Stern, reached into the plastic bubble and retrieved the envelope that happened to belong to the New York Knicks, who, of course, play in the biggest media market in the country, and who were thus able to draft Patrick Ewing, one of the most hyped college players of all time. Many still believe that the league froze the Knicks envelope so that Stern could identify it by touch.
Since then, the panic about tanking has waxed and waned. If there was a high-water mark, it was between 2013 and 2015, when Sam Hinkie, a former finance and management-consulting professional, took over as the general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers and installed what came to be called the Process, a multiyear plan to lose as many games as possible. Hinkie’s idea was simple and, on its face, incontrovertibly expedient: if the point was to win a championship, the Sixers needed star players; the best way to get star players was through high draft picks; the best way to get high draft picks was to lose. As with the Rockets, three decades before, the problem wasn’t so much the losing as it was the shamelessness with which the franchise conducted itself. Tanking was understandable, even acceptable, but much of the public—albeit less of it than one might have thought—wanted the Sixers to at least pretend that they were trying. Hinkie, basically, said no. He would not pretend.
Sometimes, though, these genealogies of behavior can seem beside the point, serving only to dull one’s analysis of the situation. Twenty-four-hour news cycles, social media, and smartphones may have altered our sensitivity to shame, but they don’t explain everything. Social media has certainly helped spread what Foxworth called optimization culture, but the hiring of M.B.A.s and quants into management positions across markets didn’t happen because Elon Musk changed the Twitter algorithm. The kind of thinking that they embody has always been part of American capitalism—still, it’s everywhere now, and it’s worse.
In tech, finance, and, to a lesser degree, politics, those preaching a piecemeal gospel rooted in maximum optimization believe that they have obviated society’s need for shame. There is a conflict between those who still believe in social barriers and those who believe that all actions should be based on a proper calculation of the return on investment. That conflict constitutes both the present and the future of America’s culture war. The optimizers have all the money; the empaths only really have one another—and the assurance, however fleeting, that there are more of us than there are of them.
Efficient and sometimes monstrous thinking existed in the past, of course, but it generally made some effort to hide. Today, everything from our kids’ sports leagues to our parents’ nursing homes are profit-optimized right in front of our faces. Shame can no longer curtail a private-equity firm from buying up children’s sports facilities and shaving away every soft edge that made them feel like community property. Like the N.B.A., our world at large will need intervention and direct regulation to counter the gospel of flagrant optimization. ♦
