corporations — the intern humpers and oil dumpers of the world — and we, the little folk, were the scandal connoisseurs and redemption dispensers: They screwed up, and we got to (a) feel briefly superior and (b) judge the sincerity of their apologias. But in a world of constant, ambient, thought-speed communication, there are no more Humilerati. Apologies are no longer a luxury market; they’re going retail, and fast. The flip side of Anyone Can Be a Celebrity is Everyone’s a Candidate for the Stocks.

After all, you don’t need talent, wealth, or power to post something offensive, not safe for work, or simply indiscreet and impolitic in a status update: Average Joes and Janes have been fired for just such indiscretions. You don’t have to travel with an army of paparazzi to end up with embarrassing and/or ass-baring photographs tagged to your profile. (How to preserve that lucrative endorsement deal with Your Mom in the wake of the table-dancing montage uploaded by some skeezy dude you met at ladies’ night?) You’re always one “hilarious” or “irreverent” or “edgy” or “spontaneous” tweet away from needing @bsolution just as much as Kanye does. In a self-surveilled society, when all of our half-cocked antics are shared with, at minimum, a few hundred people, every miscalculated bon mot, whoopsie up-skirt TwitPic, and awkward late-night revelation can have you spending the rest of your day playing out that all-too-familiar celebrity-crisis script: evade, laugh it off, spin, apologize, spin some more, then change your profile photo to a picture of a kitten and go dark until it eventually blows over.

And that’s just the garden-variety stuff. Thanks to instant distribution, a personal scandal can occasionally engulf the entire globe. You don’t need a famous name, or any name, or even a face. Last summer, a random Briton tossed a cat in a trash can while an out-of-focus security camera looked on; the righteous trolls at 4chan found Cat-Trashing Lady within a day and led the public to her door, literally, via Google maps. (An apology followed within 24 hours.) Much the same thing happened to Girl in a Red Hoodie, who was videotaped throwing puppies into a river: In a stunning reversal of the peasant-celebrity scandal food chain, no less a Hollywood eminence than Michael Bay demanded the puppy-drowner be brought to justice, and he offered a handsome reward for any information leading to her arrest. A mea culpa, written in broken English, appeared on YouTube shortly thereafter. (Bay, meanwhile, has yet to apologize for Bad Boys II.) Transparency has finally wrought the ultimate democratization: Celebrities are hunting you, Guy Who Downloaded Narwhal Porn on a Work Computer! And you, Girl Who “Accidentally” Bought Shoes Made of Orphans! Doesn’t it feel wonderful to need public redemption? To be plugged into the Shame Matrix? Now that ready self-abasement is here, it’s hard to imagine full digital citizenship without it.

That’s why I’m practicing my apology: The stammers, the downcast eyes, the #rededicatingmylifetojesus hashtag. I don’t know what I’m apologizing for yet, but I’m fairly certain that I’ll soon tweet things I’ll regret, post videos I’ll instantly deplore, and enjoy my share of Facebook death-threat groups. We all will. After all, you can’t swing a dead cat on the Internet without hitting someone’s sensitivities. Not that I’d swing a cat on (or off of) the Internet. I should be ashamed of even considering such a thing. And I will be, just as soon as I can organize a press conference.

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Authors: Scott Brown

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