The Sweet Power Of Modern Gladiators

Imagine a man who sees a woman on the street whom he has never met, walks up to her and informs her that she is ugly. Or a restaurant guest who leaves his own table, approaches the one beside it and tells a man he has never met that he looks old, that his wife is unattractive, and that he probably has nowhere near as much money as he is trying to suggest. Few of us would describe such behaviour as "expressing an opinion." We would be far more likely to wonder what compelled a stranger to take his own internal reaction - untempered by restraint, social convention, or even the most elementary awareness of the boundary between one's private perception and another person's space — and act upon it. It would be even stranger to hear the "critic's" explanation: the man in the restaurant was in a public place. By that logic, our stranger believes, the man had consented to being observed, judged and, ultimately, informed of every judgement his presence happened to provoke in other people. In the physical world, the absurdity of such an argument would be difficult to defend rationally. In the digital world, however, it has become one of its fundamental conventions.

The offences, authorities and public stages that determined what was worthy of condemnation have changed over the centuries, but the audience has always remained an essential part of punishment. The old saying, "let the people judge him," meant more than simply passing judgement on behalf of the community. It reflected something psychologically far more interesting: the community had to see the person who had broken its rules, recognise him as an offender and participate in his exclusion from it. Across historical periods and social classes, this dynamic has represented a peculiar form of privilege: the crowd, more powerful than the individual, takes pleasure in witnessing the fate it has imposed upon him.

In ancient Rome, damnatio ad bestias was more than an execution. The condemned were brought before tens of thousands of spectators, their deaths transformed into public spectacle — a form of eagerly anticipated entertainment. In medieval and early modern Europe, the pillory represented a very different degree of punishment, but rested on much the same logic. It was not enough to punish a person; he had to be placed where the community could see him. Passers-by were not merely part of the scenery. They could mock him, jeer at him, spit on him or throw things at him. The audience thus became an active participant in his humiliation. And it enjoyed it immensely. Even the location of the punishment was carefully chosen — a town square, a marketplace, a crossroads, a city gate — places through which the greatest numbers of people would pass. This did more than send a message about the dreadful fate awaiting anyone who violated what was expected of them or unsettled the majority simply by being different. It allowed society to reaffirm its own values through the degradation of another person. The more brutally a person's character and standing were torn down, the greater the crowd's confidence in its own virtue and moral rectitude became. Punishment, then, was no longer directed solely at an act — you had done something, and there were consequences. Public humiliation was directed at the person as a whole: at their identity and integrity. The offence ceased to be information about what a person had done and became evidence of who that person was. In this sense, people were often punished less for what they had done — some of the offences themselves were entirely trivial — than for the opportunity their punishment provided to attack something far more vulnerable: their identity. Public humiliation owed much of its appeal precisely to this possibility. Hence the branding, distinctive clothing, shaved heads, signs hung around the neck and other visible markers through which different periods turned moral or legal condemnation into something that could be seen. It was not enough for the community to know that you had been punished. The punishment had to become legible on the body, in one's clothing, or through one's position in public space.