Unredacted, Full Names

Walk through a city and everyone seems more or less tolerable. Tired, distracted, fighting their own invisible battles—human enough. Then you open the internet and find that a staggering number of those same people, the moment they get a keyboard and an unlimited character count, will publicly announce that the president is a racial slur, that a teenage rape victim was asking for it, or that feminism is personally responsible for ruining their ability to sit on a couch and do nothing in peace.

Matt Binder’s Public Shaming collected this rot and pinned it in place. The format was simple and brutal: pick a topic, find the worst tweets about it, publish them unredacted, full names intact. Obama as a racial epithet. Rape victims as sluts. Feminist women blamed for the outrageous inconvenience of having to acknowledge that women exist with rights. Binder focused on American subjects, which at the time felt like a localization problem but in retrospect was just the loudest strain of a global contagion.

There was something clarifying about the project. Not satisfying—clarifying. You already knew these people existed. Public Shaming just stripped away the ambient excuse that they were exaggerating, or performing, or bots. They weren’t. They signed their names to it and hit send. The head hurts. But at least you know what you’re dealing with.