You have the money. I have the public space and the power of documentation.
Stating this sentence, however directly, immediately exposes one to an accusation: that of blackmail. Publishing documented facts about an employer, while pursuing a financial claim against them, can be read as pressure — pay, or I keep publishing.
This text examines whether that reading is accurate, and under what conditions it ceases to be.
Blackmail, in its strictest sense — legal as much as ordinary — rests on a precise structure: a conditional threat, generally kept secret until its execution, whose withdrawal is offered in exchange for payment. The essence of blackmail is not the threat itself, but its covert character and its conditional character negotiated behind closed doors: pay, and it won't happen; don't pay, and here is what will happen.
A mechanism of documented publication that has already been made public fulfills neither of these two conditions. There is nothing secret — the content is published, dated, accessible to everyone, including the targeted party itself. There is nothing conditional behind closed doors — no offer of withdrawal is made in exchange for payment; the publication continues, whether the financial claim is satisfied or not, because its function is not transactional.
This distinction is not a nuance of vocabulary. It is the difference between two fundamentally different structures of action: one operates through the concealment of a future threat, the other through the immediate and permanent exposure of a fact that has already occurred.
What the public and dated documentation of institutional behavior achieves corresponds to a practice identified and theorized under the name naming and shaming. This practice is explicitly documented and claimed by human rights organizations (Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International use it as a declared method), where the publication of verified facts about the behavior of a powerful actor constitutes a recognized tool of non-violent, non-covert pressure.
The structural difference from blackmail lies precisely in the absence of secrecy and the absence of a negotiated counterpart: naming and shaming offers nothing in exchange for its silence, because it has no intention of falling silent. Its function is not to obtain a payment in exchange for non-publication, but to produce a reputational consequence directly stemming from the publication itself, whether or not that publication otherwise leads to a financial settlement.
There remains the deeper question, broader than the mere legal qualification: even setting aside the term blackmail, is it legitimate to use such a lever?
James C. Scott, already cited, posits that the weapons of the weak — reputation, narrative, visibility — are not degraded substitutes for material power, but a currency of a different nature, just as real. Pierre Bourdieu formulates a related mechanism: the conversion of a deficit in economic capital into symbolic capital, with the hypothesis of a deferred reconversion — the symbolic having value, in practice, only if it eventually produces a tangible effect.
What these two frameworks do not state explicitly, and what the formula "to each their own weapons" names directly, is a declared parity rather than a compensation: not "I make do with what I have, for lack of money," but "what I have is of a different nature, and of equivalent value to what you have." The legitimacy of this parity is not deduced from an abstract principle — it is observed in the fact that established power uses its own levers (lawyers, resources, procedural delays) without ever having to morally justify their use, which raises the following question: why would the symmetrical use of a different lever, by the party that has no access to the first one, alone call for justification?
If one accepts naming the lever of publication as a weapon among others, the question then turns symmetrically back onto the other party: what should we call the use of superior financial resources to impose waiting, exhaustion, renunciation?
This mechanism corresponds to what Marc Galanter documents in Why the "Haves" Come Out Ahead (1974): the structural advantage of the "repeat player" — the institutional actor who can absorb the cost and duration of litigation far better than an isolated actor, for whom every month of waiting represents a disproportionate burden. This asymmetry is never named as a weapon by whoever benefits from it — it is experienced as a mere background given, the normal course of things. Yet it produces a pressure effect just as real as the one attributed to publication: that of making the pursuit of the claim increasingly costly for the weaker party, until abandonment becomes rationally preferable to persistence.
Naming this mechanism as a form of pressure by financial means is therefore not a circumstantial rhetoric constructed to turn the accusation around. It is the symmetrical description, of the same nature, as the accusation initially made — the rendering visible of a lever usually left implicit because it never needed to name itself in order to act.
Setting aside the term blackmail does not amount to denying that this mechanism produces a real pressure effect. It does produce one, and that is precisely its function. What distinguishes this mechanism from blackmail is therefore not the absence of effect, but the nature of the mechanism that produces it: transparency rather than secrecy, the exposure of a fact that has already occurred rather than the threat of a future event conditioned on payment.
Naming and shaming is not a polite version of blackmail. It is a mechanism of a different nature, whose history, theorization, and legitimation in the field of human rights precede its application to the present case by several decades.
Auditum Memoria — Anthropology of Power
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