Jay Caspian Kang’s Fault Lines column is starting a series on the decline of shame in the age of social media, and its seed case is N.B.A. tanking. On a February podcast, Domonique Foxworth, the former player-union president, described front offices that openly lose on purpose: “We’ve gone into an optimization culture that removes the guardrails that shame used to provide.” Shame, Kang writes, is how groups mediate their norms without state intervention — not always good, but a community without it needs moral consensus, or it risks splintering into the chaos of personal interpretation and individual will.

The history is the usual tanking saga: the Rockets’ 1984 shamble for Hakeem Olajuwon, the coin flip that preceded the lottery, the frozen-envelope legend that gave the Knicks Patrick Ewing, and Sam Hinkie’s Process in Philadelphia — objectionable less for the losing than for refusing to pretend. Hinkie was forced out in 2016; tanking continued, and this summer the league announced a full revamp. The structural point: outrage is national by default now. When every fan can post and every columnist sees every lineup, a suspicious Utah rotation feeds a daylong news cycle. Front offices may not be more shameless than before — shame itself is being dictated by the media environment.

Kang stages two readings of that shift. The McLuhanite one, inherited from Neil Postman, treats morality as funneled through a new medium: most interactions are digital now, so fewer are mediated by shame — in person you don’t insult someone’s wife because you’d have to price in getting punched. The competing one treats shame as weakened by self-interested actors who broke the seal, making the league’s escalating rules a response to moral decline. Kang leans McLuhanite but stops short: social media spread optimization culture, but the hiring of M.B.A.s and quants into management didn’t happen because Elon Musk changed the Twitter algorithm. That thinking has always been part of American capitalism — it’s simply everywhere now, and worse.

Which lands him on his real subject: a conflict between people who still believe in social barriers and people who believe every action should be priced as return on investment. “The optimizers have all the money; the empaths only really have one another.” Efficient and sometimes monstrous thinking used to at least hide. Now the kids’ sports leagues and the nursing homes are profit-optimized in plain view, and shame can’t stop a private-equity firm from buying up youth sports and shaving away every soft edge that made them feel like community property. If the N.B.A. needed the lottery and a revamp to police tanking, Kang’s implied answer for the rest of the world is blunter: direct regulation.