At the Ryder Cup golf competition in the US, player Rory McIlroy became a lightning rod for the crowd, pushing well beyond the sport’s usual boundaries of civility. From the very first tee, the official MC whipped the audience into chanting “fuck you Rory!”, with spectators hurling homophobic abuse, and his wife being pelted with a beer cup.

Was this an unusual lapse in etiquette, or is it a marker of something more significant? Some commentators are suggesting that what we saw was, in fact, a crack in the fragile infrastructure of norms that determine how we behave in public, what is permitted, and what is beyond the pale. So, the deeper question is less about whether fans went “too far’ and more about what today counts as acceptable behaviour in public life? And if more people feel emboldened to cross those lines, whether on golf courses, in theatres, and in politics, what does that reveal about our shared social contract?

Fear of the crowd

Concerns about today’s Ryder Cup crowd are not new. In 1895, Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind defined crowds as irrational mobs, driven by unconscious forces and stripped of individual reason. Despite evidence to the contrary, this view has persisted, resulting in a century of widespread suspicion about mass gatherings. More recent readings suggest that Le Bon’s theory reflected his time: the upheaval of post-1871 Paris, class conflict, and the fear of a socialist uprising. As crowds expert Fergus Neville argues, calling crowds irrational was also a way of delegitimising dissent that concerned the wealthy classes:

“By a priori pathologising alternative visions of society as irrational, any challenge to the hierarchical social and political status quo was rendered mindless”

Of course, this framing is a familiar one even today, where any crowd, from protest to football terraces, is readily cast as a threat to order, as if any gathering is always dangerous.

The crowd as a place where social norms are enacted

Other thinkers saw crowds differently than Le Bon. Writer Barbara Ehrenreich pointed to medieval carnivals, occasions when authority was inverted, with peasants mocking priests and slaves serving their masters. She set out how these events were often politically ambiguous, acting as both a challenge to hierarchy and a safety valve for discontent. In one sense, perhaps the rowdy golf crowd had a similar air of inversion, albeit not in a carnivalesque way; nevertheless, etiquette was mocked, order turned upside down.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim famously suggested that crowds generate a ‘collective effervescence’: shared emotion that binds individuals into belonging. Stephen Reicher, builds on this, suggesting that crowds involve a cognitive transformation from personal to social level identification. It is through this that crowd members act meaningfully, reflecting the norms of their salient shared (social) identity. On this basis, studies of riots and protests have long shown that crowd actions are patterned and intelligible, not indiscriminate.

The question then is not whether crowds are rational or irrational, but which norms are being enacted, and who defines them.

Seen this way, the Ryder Cup crowd wasn’t losing a wild crowd out of control but instead was performing a script: triumphalism, masculinity, domination. In this distorted world, booing McIlroy was arguably a perverse act of solidarity to a set of shared norms.

How this reflects a new window of permission

The same apparent shift in norms is visible beyond sport and entertainment. In Manchester earlier this year, a Dolly Parton-themed musical was suspended after audience members shouted homophobic abuse at the stage. And the pattern stretches wider. NHS staff report unprecedented levels of aggression: attacks on A&E nurses in England have nearly doubled in six years, with staff describing being punched, spat on, and even threatened with acid. Nor is politics immune: more than half of UK MPs now say they feel unsafe because of threats from the public.

And surveys suggest this is widespread in everyday life. One recent survey found that nearly half of U.S. adults (47%) say the way people behave in public these days is ruder than before the COVID-19 pandemic. That includes 20% who say behavior today is a lot ruder. Another 44% of adults say public behavior is about the same, while only 9% say people are behaving a lot or a little more politely in public.

Cultural theorist Kirsty Sedgman explains this with the concept of a “window of permission.” She suggests that social norms are never fixed; they widen or shrink depending on what dominant cultural figures signal as acceptable. “As we see more politicians and public figures voicing these views,” she notes, “the window of what is acceptable is widened to encompass these abhorrent ideas”.

This helps explain why behaviours that once would have been unthinkable might now be experienced by perpetrators not as disruption but as righteousness. Like the Ryder Cup crowd, theatregoers, patients, or those challenging elected representatives may not see themselves as abandoning norms, but rather as enacting newly licensed ones.

Shitposting as statecraft

In late September, the White House circulated a video of its new presidential “Walk of Fame.” As the video moves along a sequence of portraits, it arrives at a framed photograph of an autopen signing Joe Biden’s name, an allusion to conspiracy theories about his supposed incapacity. Media scholar Robert Topinka suggests the clip is designed to elicit a dual response: amusement among supporters and indignation among critics. Crucially, he suggests it is this very polarity that constitutes the communication strategy, that of a shitpost: low-effort content, deliberately provocative, structured to rule out the possibility of good-faith engagement.

The outrage these sorts of posts provoke isnot incidental but integral to the narrative. As Topinka observes, the communicative cycle is straightforward: a meme is released, critics denounce it, supporters take pleasure in their anger, and the clip circulates far more widely than it otherwise would. Outrage generates visibility, and visibility becomes a measure of success. In this logic, the reaction is the mechanism.

Topinka argues that shitposting has morphed into a mode of governance, designed not to communicate policy detail but to define tribal political belonging through ridicule. The more opponents protest, the more the content is judged to have succeeded.

Here, too, Stephen Reicher’s research seems to apply: if crowds enact the norms they see modelled by dominant cultural figures, then when a government embraces trolling and mockery, a new set of behaviours becomes the collective script.

The psychology of norm breakdown

Social norms are best understood as fragile, contingent agreements that enable cooperation in collective life. At the Ryder Cup, verbal abuse directed at McIlroy was perhaps interpreted by participants not as transgression but as an affirmation of loyalty to the in-group, where hostility toward McIlroy marked belonging within the American crowd. In Manchester, the homophobic heckling is likely reframed by some audience members not as disruption but as a form of moral self-assertion, an expression of virtue framed as defending traditional values against what they perceived as progressive overreach.

And drawing on less extreme examples, we can see a range of differences in what people consider to be acceptable. Drawing on the same survey findings from the US, 89% of adults 65 and older say it is rarely or never acceptable to swear in public, but only 38% of adults under 30 say the same. And Americans in the oldest age group are also far more likely than the youngest adults to say it’s unacceptable to wear headphones or earbuds while talking to someone in person (76% vs. 36%).

This is consistent with Sedgman, who points out that social norms are never static, but shift as the “window of permission” expands, especially when political and cultural elites signal that once-taboo forms of hostility are acceptable, even virtuous. Topinka takes this further, demonstrating how political communication itself has begun to model trolling and shitposting as legitimate forms of statecraft.

Seen together, these perspectives reveal not a breakdown of order but a redrawing of its boundaries: as Reicher shows, crowds are not simply losing control; they are following new scripts written by the dominant figures.

Why this matters

To be sure, every generation has worried about declining standards. Plato lamented the volatility of the Athenian mob; Victorian critics fretted about disorderly theatres. Such anxieties often reflect a misplaced sense of cultural nostalgia as much as they do reality.

However, critics such as Topinka might suggest that the present moment is not a historical cycle of a lapse in civility, but a normalisation of aggressive behaviour as a legitimate form of participation. Behaviours once considered marginal are perhaps now increasingly reframed as loyalty and even patriotism. Sedgman warns that once the window of permission shifts, it is rarely restored to its earlier boundaries.

If you drive around the small town of Royston, in the UK’s Hertfordshire countryside but close to Cambridge and London, you quickly see a huge number of lampposts festooned with Union Jacks and St George's flags. The BBC names Billy Crotty, a tree surgeon, as the person responsible for the near-300 flags that line the road. He is quoted as saying, “We just wanted to make a stand for our country. We're proud to be English," and says that the reaction has been "99% positive."

This official story is a surge of patriotism, but of course, this is not how it is felt by many in the community, such as restaurateur Akbar Hussain, who the BBC reports as saying, "We're a little bit panicky. We're a little bit worried about what it all means for us."

Arguably, a decade ago, the received wisdom was that protest had moved online and the concern was about the rise of superficial engagement (or ‘clicktivism’), where users feel a sense of accomplishment from liking or sharing posts, but it rarely translates into meaningful political participation. A study by the Pew Research Centre found that while 66 per cent of users engage with political content, only a fraction participate in offline activities such as attending meetings, voting, or volunteering for campaigns. This apparent disconnect between online engagement and practical action was a source of concern about the effectiveness of social media as a tool for genuine involvement and engagement.

Flags as offline feeds

But surely there is something oddly ‘online’ about the display of flags. While each individual flag might not seem like much on its own, when you see dozens or hundreds lining a street, the sense is akin to posts on social media: one post might go unnoticed, but a constant stream grabs attention.

This copy-and-paste pattern, the same image repeated over and over, arguably mirrors how content spreads online. Media researcher Limor Shifman describes how internet memes rely on repetition to create impact. But while memes online often invite playful reinterpretation, in Royston the repetition is designed to reinforce a particular meaning, not open it up. The St George’s Cross isn’t being debated in a way that offers new ideas and framing, but, like a viral post that appears in every feed, the flags create saturation, with a particular dominant meaning rather than dialogue.

This is where cultural theorist Nathan Jurgenson’s concept of an “augmented society” is useful. He argues that online and offline life aren’t separate spheres, but are fused, constantly bleeding into each other. This means that what we’re seeing is political signalling ‘in real life’ that is shaped by the aesthetics and dynamics of the internet. As academics José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, Martijn de Waalargue argued as far back as 2018, contemporary protest is shaped by the infrastructures of platforms - including the incentives they create for visibility, repetition, and emotional intensity.

More recently, political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo argues that social media enables a particular ‘choreography’ where symbolic cues are substitutes for the formal organisation of party politics. The flags are what Gerbaudo would see as staged political performances that are governed by viral cues and group signalling that is informed through online conventions.

That said, it's important not to treat the aesthetic logic of repetition and symbolic saturation as fundamentally new. Northern Ireland has long provided a template for how flags and symbols structure political belonging. Here, flags signal territory, identity, and control, policing who belongs where. While these practices long predate the internet, social media seems to be accelerating and amplifying the same logics. Offline symbolism doesn’t disappear in a digital age; it gets accelerated and reformatted.

In fact, a three-year study of Hungary’s Fridays for Future finds that online and offline activism form a mutually reinforcing cycle: frontstage visibility and backstage organising develop in parallel, each fuelling the other. If we translate this to flag politics, the pattern seems clear: flags put up offline produce online content; the content drives more flags; the loop intensifies emotion and surveillance, on both sides.

Part of this intensification is the act of watching and being watched. In some areas, residents who remove flags have reported being filmed or photographed, their actions shared and condemned in local Facebook groups or Telegram channels. This echoes the online tactics of doxxing or brigading: public shaming, exposure, and a low-level form of digital policing. The aesthetics of online protest spill over into the affective economies of intimidation and control.

The fragility of online logics

And if we continue to import the logic of online into political life, we can see how this also imports its vulnerabilities. For example, just as hashtags can be hijacked, so too can flags. A famous example came in 2020 when the #WhiteLivesMatter hashtag, originally launched to undercut the Black Lives Matter movement, was overwhelmed by activists posting K-pop fancams, GIFs, and random videos, rendering the hashtag incoherent and unusable. This tactic, known as hashtag flooding, disrupted the intended message through saturation and absurdity.

A similar kind of subversion played out offline in Blackburn, where filmmaker Aeman Afzal created a spoof video that quickly went viral. Styled like a patriotic propaganda reel, it shows a man triumphantly painting a St George’s Cross on a roundabout, declaring “We are taking back our streets” only to be told he’s painted the wrong flag. He’s actually painted the Danish flag by mistake. Afzal, who is British Pakistani, said the film was about challenging division through humour. Just like flooded hashtags, the video disrupts symbolic certainty: it shows how even the most rigid displays can be re-coded, reframed, and given different interpretations.

What the Blackburn spoof seems to indicate is just how much the power of a symbol depends on everyone treating it seriously. As Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner argue, symbols gain force not simply because of what they depict, but because of the collective seriousness people attach to them. It’s like an unspoken agreement: the flying of this flag stands for something important, and we all act accordingly.

But the moment you introduce humour, irony, or even a simple mistake, that seriousness starts to be less certain, and the solemn performance becomes absurd. Once the emotional grip is loosened, the meaning of the flag becomes more open to different interpretations. This is precisely what meme culture does so well: it shows how even the most forceful images can lose their power when their seriousness is disrupted.

Back to Gerbaudo, he argues that digital platforms have shifted political parties away from deliberation and programme (the logic of parties), towards emotional expression and symbolic branding (the logic of digital platforms). The resulting ‘platform politics’ demands a constant performance of visibility, in order to resonate like a meme or a trending hashtag. But the strength of this visibility is also subject to the mechanisms that mean it can come with fragility, as in a world where political identity is constructed by internet logic, reputation and recognition can also be fleeting.

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Celine Song’s Materialists arrives in the aftermath of acclaim for Past Lives: this follow-up was billed as an “anti-capitalist romcom,” complete with an A24 “syllabus” of influences ranging from Broadcast News to The Age of Innocence. While reviews have been divided and wherever you land on its cinematic merits, one subplot deserves more scrutiny than it has received: the reveal that Pedro Pascal’s Harry has undergone limb-lengthening surgery to add six inches to his height.

Harry’s confession in the film is delivered without melodrama. Once 5’6”, he describes feeling invisible to women. Now, taller and smoother, he can stride into a room with the kind of confidence money usually buys. Lucy (Dakota Johnson), the professional matchmaker caught between Harry and her ex, John (Chris Evans), insists his height makes no difference to her attraction. And yet by the end, she chooses John: taller, conventionally alpha, the cultural script fully intact.

It is the neutrality with which Song treats Harry’s surgery that is striking. It is presented as one more rational investment in the marketplace of desire, akin to Lucy’s own “work” on her nose and chest. Beauty and height become capital; surgery becomes leverage. But it is at this point that the film stumbles: by not interrogating the assumption that women universally prefer taller men, Materialists ends up echoing a misogynist agenda. In manosphere and “looksmaxxing” communities, height is treated as a biological destiny. Women are framed as shallow arbiters, men as competitors forced to mutilate themselves to survive.

The data tells a very different story: Ipsos found that while two-thirds (65%) of men aged 16–24 believe women prefer taller partners, when asked what they actually value, the same age women prioritise humour (60%), kindness (53%) and honesty (49%). Only 4% rank height among their top five traits. This is pluralistic ignorance in action: people acting on what they think others want, even when those beliefs are wrong.

What Materialists dramatises is mirrored off-screen. A Guardian investigation this summer followed men travelling to Istanbul to have their legs broken and extended by a millimetre a day. The procedure is projected to be worth $8.6bn by 2030, with patients, primarily men, paying between $30,000 and $80,000 to gain a few inches. They endure months of physiotherapy, learn to walk again, and risk blood clots, nerve damage, and even death. One man, Frank, described turning the key on the rods in his femurs each day while his wife helped him on and off the toilet. His dream seems modest: to reach “average height” and be taller than his wife, but the road to getting there is harsh.

History shows this is nothing new. Chinese footbinding reshaped women’s feet for centuries to fit elite ideals. Prussia’s “Potsdam Giants” regiment prized extreme male height as a mark of national prestige. Cosmetic nose reshaping in the 19th and 20th centuries was marketed as essential for marriage prospects. Across time, myths about desirability have been reflected in bodies, painful, permanent, and always more about status than love.

But here we must consider a crucial gender-based asymmetry. Women have long endured a culture of body modification: breast augmentation, Botox, rhinoplasty, liposuction, not to mention the daily grind of dieting, waxing and make-up. These interventions are so normalised that they barely register as headline news. They are policed as “vain” or “tragic” but not treated as existential revelations. When men undergo similar modifications, however, it becomes spectacle, an object of fascination, ridicule, or pathos.

Why is this? Because masculinity has historically been constructed as “natural,” unadorned, authentic, which, in contrast to femininity, is framed as artificial, painted, and enhanced. Limb-lengthening punctures this illusion. It exposes male bodies as just as anxious, malleable, and commodified as female bodies have long been. That is why Harry’s surgery feels shocking: it forces recognition that men, too, are caught in the machinery of optimisation.

We may therefore consider this a levelling up – finally, men now get to experience what women have long lived with. But there is a difference, which is not in the act of surgery itself but in its framing. Women’s modifications have often been explained as submission to male ideals. Men’s, by contrast, are frequently narrated as competition with one another for scarce female attention, a logic that fits perfectly into manosphere discourse about “sexual marketplaces.” What is framed as individual choice is in fact gendered labour: women reshaping themselves for men; men reshaping themselves because they believe women demand it, even when women say otherwise.

But in the portrayal of Harry’s surgery as a rational choice, Materialists risks naturalising this script. Lucy may protest that height doesn’t matter, but the film’s resolution, choosing the taller man, re-inscribes the myth. In effect, it stages the manosphere’s case study: women’s stated preferences are dismissed as unreliable, while their “true” desires are confirmed through the narrative of the film.

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