I was discussing this the other day. Shame and shaming are alive and well. Especially if you do not agree with whatever paradigm is being pushed, like supporting sports team X or not holding the prevailing opinion.

Sit on public transport and listen to everyone playing music / watching tiktok without headphones. Shame is dead.

Shame is also a form of social control. Be ashamed you don't know your place, lower class person.

Lack of required shame used to be called being "uppity".

Could they change the rules so that there’s no or less incentive to “tank?”

I assume by "shame" they mean "manners".

fuck shame, attend to guilt

Shame us what you lose when your turn to someone or something you trust for empathy and instead receive the opposite. Our body-personality would not produce venom if we didn’t need it to survive.

Shame was more effective in the past is because it came with consequences - lost business, lower standing in the community, fewer romantic prospects. It used to be part a healthy survival instinct. Without repercussions, shame is just a handicap and those who don't have it have a massive advantage.

Regarding the article's example of "tanking" in NBA games in the opening paragraph, what would solve this is a switch from the franchise system to a promotion/relegation system. No team would bench their best players or throw a game when relegation to a lower division is on the line.

> Evil genius is just a lack of shame.

-- Cory Doctorow

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-04-11...

There seems to be a bit of a gap vis a vis solutions in the article - someone could set the system up so it doesn't incentivise tanking. The punishment for tanking should be that the teams performed poorly for no compensation. It's all very well to set up a system to encourage poor behaviour then shame the people who behave rationally. But it is much more sustainable in the long term to make good behaviour also strategically optimal.

> Post-Hinkie, the league experimented with variations of the lottery, but none of them could deter teams from losing on purpose.

I struggle to believe they've tried everything unless they're also talking about players betting against themselves (which probably is impossible to overcome without bans). Incentives aren't easy things but there has to be some system where winning > losing.

On that topic we're actually pretty lucky - in the real world, the winning strategy over long time-frames is almost always talking, prosperity and cooperation. Not obvious why the powers that be are so keen to involve other strategies that routinely deliver worse material and moral results.

Strange that this short article mostly focuses on the absence of shame in business and politics, which has been a constant for many times my lifetime. And we should blame social media for this, too? The only difference now is that everyone knows about backroom dealing. If the author didn't conspicuously omit the absence of shame in journalism, I feel like he'd be a step closer to an interesting observation.

How is shame different from "just being a decent person"?

Yeah, the world is fucked; there’s no nice way to say it. We are human; everything we do should in some way be making the world of humans just a little bit better. Not the whole world maybe, maybe just your family, or your neighbourhood, or the people where you work.

I like this quote from CS Lewis

“The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging his own garden--that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.”

The State, capitalism, all this shit. It’s not protecting me and my mates to be able to have a game of darts in the pub. It’s failed the pub test.

So fuck these fuckers! The greedy bastards that take it all for themselves. They want to live forever and dream of a utopian future built on the suffering of others today! Fuck em! We’ve seen this shit; Lenin wasn’t an enlightened forward thinking genius, he was a psychopathic bastard!

No more kings. Take the power away from these pricks, and let’s get back to: little bit by little bit, in every day in every way, try and make things better for ordinary human beings in this life.

Shame is only effective in a society of equals.

If one day you may become my boss better treat you well. If one day anyone may become my neighbor better treat anonymous people well. If my kid may end married with yours then I better treat you well.

For billionaires shame makes no sense. They will never have to confront the people that they abuse. Inequality makes consequences go away. The powerful have not shame because they feel entitled to not need it.

Even average people knows that they only need to care about the powerful. It is better to wrong your neighbor than the powerful politician that will retaliate against you.

Eliminate inequality and people will care again.

Shame for what?

OF prostitutes and iShowSpeed make more money than neuroscientists. There are more incentives to be a bozo than an educated “pillar of the community”.

Football / Soccer had "flopping" [1], which anyone who watched it in the early 2000s would recognize: every foul was accompanied by a "victim" writhing on the field in agony, in excess of anything you'd see in much more violent sports.

Apparently it's diminished a bit in recent years, but not because it's clearly shameful behavior: the leagues started issuing bans.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_(association_football)

45% of this article is about the NBA

Shame isn’t dead. Specific kinds of shame are increasingly on the way out, particularly when it comes to individuality and self-expression, but shame itself isn’t dying or dead so much as accountability flatly does not exist anymore.

When the author bemoans a lack of shame in how the NBA teams tank games to improve later draft odds instead of playing out every game with ferocity and pride, what they’re actually bemoaning is the lack of consequences for such negative behavior - and misattributing that to a lack of shame by fans towards the team instead of a lack of consequences from governing bodies. It’s a naive fantasy of how the world works rather than a stinging critique of real problematic behavior.

It also ignores the grim reality that many people simply have no concept of shame in any sense that could correct their behavior. Zuckerberg absolutely has no shame, nor does Musk or Thiel or Bezos; it is impossible to shame them into better, healthier behavior, just as it’s impossible to shame Sony into manufacturing physical media again, or shaming the driver that just cut you off in traffic without a turn signal and used their vehicle as a missile to get their way by honking your horn or flipping them off. Shame alone means fuck all absent consequences.

And the thing about shame is that it too is a weapon that has been wielded to horrific ends in the past. Relying on shame alone is how you get McCarthy and the Red Scare, how you repress LGBTQ+ identities, how you segregate people based on skin color or ethnicity or national origin. Shame is toxic, and the few areas we rely on shame as a weapon are also areas of some of the greatest societal harms at present: homelessness, malnutrition, poverty, convicted felons, all are shamed for existence to the point they’re encouraged to disappear from society by any means other than improvement, like a one-way gate rather than a crisis to be addressed. In light of how we currently weaponize shame, I don’t think relying on expanding its use to address grievances is the right call.

In a society that puts an individual’s own self-interest before society’s collective interest… yeah, that’s the obvious consequence.

This was so easy to predict it was actually predicted.

And we cannot go back unless we acknowledge that a lot of things we take for granted are shameful.

And I’m gonna go ahead and make a controversial example, just to give an explicit idea of the kind of topics are normalised: casual abortion.