The internet made ordinary people radically visible and the powerful professionally invisible.
Most people are now one bad moment away from becoming content. The wealthy remain several law firms away from consequence.
An ordinary person can be filmed behaving badly, identified within hours and driven from work or public life before the facts have settled. A company can underpay thousands of workers, poison land, conceal a dangerous product or destroy a community—and translate the damage into a fine, a settlement and a statement promising to “do better.”
The individual is named. The institution is processed.
One is shamed. The other budgets for it.
This is the central obscenity of our culture: we have built an extraordinarily efficient system for punishing visible human failure while preserving the anonymity of power. Ordinary people receive permanent moral identities. Elite wrongdoing disappears into procedure.
Exposure Is Not Power
The internet gave almost everyone a voice. It did not give everyone leverage.
Most of us can publish an accusation, circulate a video or join a pile-on. We cannot rewrite employment law, move capital, influence regulators or wait out years of litigation. Speech was distributed; ownership and authority were not.
Yet we began treating visibility as power. Because everyone could speak, the digital arena appeared democratic. In reality, some entered it with a username and an employer who could be contacted. Others arrived with lawyers, publicists, political access and enough wealth to survive almost any scandal.
This difference determines who can be punished.
An individual has a face, a searchable history and a finite tolerance for harassment. A corporation is a legal architecture. Its decisions pass through committees, subsidiaries and consultants until responsibility becomes impossible to locate. A billionaire can retreat behind staff. A government can classify documents. An institution can hire a new spokesperson.
Power survives by becoming abstract.
The rest of us remain painfully specific.
Elite Impunity Is Administrative
At street level, punishment is intimate. The target’s family is contacted. Their workplace is flooded with demands. Old photographs and private details are excavated. The penalty expands far beyond the original offence because the crowd has no formal limit and the internet has no concept of a completed sentence.
At the top, punishment becomes paperwork.
Executives who preside over wage theft, unsafe workplaces, predatory lending, mass surveillance or ecological destruction rarely experience the consequences as personal disgrace. Their conduct is reviewed, litigated and absorbed. A settlement is reached without admission of wrongdoing. A regulator imposes a fine smaller than the profit. A resignation comes with compensation. The institution rebrands and continues.
Serious harm is described as a compliance failure. Ordinary error is treated as evidence of a rotten soul.
This is how people capable of damaging millions remain respectable while a stranger who used the wrong phrase becomes permanently unemployable. Scale does not produce greater accountability. Often, it produces greater distance between the decision and the person who made it.
The more powerful the offender, the less human the offence appears.
The Machine That Redirects Anger
Online mobs are not purely spontaneous. Platforms cultivate them because anger is productive.
A 2026 Nature study found that engagement-ranked feeds amplified moralised, emotional and toxic political content compared with chronological feeds. They also caused people to overestimate the hostility of everyone around them. Nature
Earlier research found that users rewarded with likes and shares for expressing outrage became more likely to express it again. Outrage does not merely spread. It trains its participants. Nature Human Behaviour
Condemnation supplies moral certainty, group membership and measurable approval at once. Context supplies none of these quickly. Proportion is dull. Restraint resembles cowardice. Mercy can make the merciful person the next suspect.
The platform does not need to invent our cruelty. It only needs to rank it.
It also gives that cruelty a convenient direction. Structural power is difficult to confront. It is distributed across boardrooms, legislation, contracts, markets and bureaucracies. Another person’s mistake arrives already cropped, captioned and ready to share.
The powerful are difficult to reach. Our peers are always online.
Every Feed Needs a Scapegoat
Housing becomes unaffordable. Work becomes precarious. Public services deteriorate. Institutions lose credibility. Wealth accumulates above while insecurity spreads below.
The anger generated by these conditions is real. Social media offers it an immediate target, usually someone with no meaningful control over any of them.
Every feed wants a culprit because a culprit is easier to circulate than a system. Structural explanations require patience. A scapegoat has a photograph.
The ritual follows a stable pattern: isolate a remark, remove its context, convert an action into an identity, summon the crowd and demand professional or social death. Participation feels like power because something observable happens. A person loses work, safety, status or dignity.
The crowd experiences agency without acquiring it.
The stranger disappears. The rent is still due.
This is why public humiliation is so politically empty. It consumes moral energy while leaving the source of the grievance intact. Yesterday’s villain is destroyed, tomorrow’s is selected, and the institutions shaping both their lives remain untouched.
The crowd wins a body and loses the argument.
Meanwhile, Wealth Compounds
Those above the spectacle do not need the public to love them. They need the public to remain fragmented, distracted and incapable of sustained action.
According to UBS, global personal wealth rose by more than 10 per cent in 2025, with particularly strong gains among people holding more than US$5 million. Almost one million adults entered the US-dollar-millionaire class in a single year. UBS Global Wealth Report 2026
While scrutiny became radically dispersed, ownership did not.
The same platforms that invite us to expose ourselves are owned by people beyond the reach of ordinary exposure. They can monetise humiliation, amplify rage, harvest personal data and then present themselves as custodians of global conversation.
They profit from the fight and remain above it.
This is not a conspiracy requiring secret coordination. It is a system of incentives. Platforms earn attention. Political actors gain division. Employers gain a more frightened workforce. Concentrated wealth benefits when public anger is personalised rather than organised.
Power does not need to silence everyone. It only needs to keep everyone shouting at the wrong target.
Accountability Is Not Annihilation
Public criticism is not inherently wrong. Silence has protected abusers, corporations and governments for generations. Investigative journalism, whistleblowers, organised labour and movements such as #MeToo have shown that networked scrutiny can force powerful institutions to answer for what they once buried.
But accountability has a direction and a purpose.
It asks who possessed decision-making power, who benefited, who was harmed and what must change. It depends on evidence, proportion and the possibility of repair. It aims beyond the emotional satisfaction of seeing someone suffer.
Spectacle treats suffering as the outcome.
The distinction is clearest in the questions a crowd refuses to ask: Is the punishment proportionate? Can the accused respond? Is there any path back? Does this action change an institution, or merely ruin another replaceable person? Are we confronting power or demonstrating our obedience to the mood of the group?
When there is no limit to the penalty and no possibility of return, the object is not correction. It is sacrifice.
A culture built on sacrifice eventually makes honesty impossible. People stop admitting mistakes because confession supplies ammunition. Vulnerability becomes evidence. Public life fills with immaculate performances from ordinary people while those professionally trained in reputation management continue causing harm behind polished language.
We become ruthless toward imperfection and strangely tolerant of power.
Aim the Anger Upward
The answer is not to become silent, passive or less angry. Anger is often the correct response to injustice.
The question is where it goes.
Changing that direction requires more than individual kindness. Platforms must lose the right to amplify harassment without consequence. Virality needs friction. Targets need meaningful rights of reply and appeal. Context must be given time to travel.
More importantly, outrage must become organisation: unions, watchdogs, investigative reporting, public-interest litigation, regulatory pressure and political movements capable of pursuing power after attention has moved elsewhere.
Solidarity is not niceness. It is the refusal to mistake one another for the authors of conditions imposed from above.
The system’s triumph is not persuading ordinary people that the powerful are innocent. It is keeping us too busy prosecuting one another to prosecute them. Our humiliation becomes content. Our anger becomes revenue. Our divisions become insulation for people whose decisions carry consequences they will never personally endure.
That is the saddest spectacle: millions of people watching, judging and destroying one another while those capable of the greatest harm remain protected, respectable and free.
We do not need less anger.
We need better aim.
