It hasn’t been a good 24 hours for British banter merchants. Two incidents reported yesterday demonstrated that if you thought acts committed in the almighty name of bantz couldn’t get any worse, you were wrong. Having hit rock bottom, banter has found a trapdoor in the floor, opened it up and dived in.

In Benidorm a group of British tourists on a stag party allegedly paid a homeless man €100 to have the name of the stag tattooed on his face. Pictures of Tomek, a 34-year-old Pole, were put up on social media and then taken down following an outcry. The man whose name appears in the pictures to have been tattooed on Tomek’s forehead says the story has been misreported.

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In the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds, a group of teenage boys allegedly spat at a 49-year-old disabled woman, pelted her with eggs and covered her in flour. Their assault complete, they posed for a series of triumphant selfies. It makes you wonder what might be next for banter.

Will the nation’s top bantersaurs live-stream homeless people fighting to the death on their own YouTube channels? Will they throw children that can’t swim into the deep end and take bets on how long they take to drown? Will they rip off the clothes of elderly couples in the supermarket and then pose with them for a series of legendary selfies?

The truth is that we are already living in that world. Last January two teenage friends killed a homeless man with a machete because they thought it was “funny”. The murderers were later seen recreating scenes from the attack, laughing as they burned their own clothes.

Last year Snapchat footage showed a Cambridge law student in white tie goading a homeless man by trying to burn a £20 note in front of him. Members of Oxford’s exclusive Bullingdon Club – past members include David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson – are said to burn a £50 note in front of a homeless person as part of their initiation.

What makes these stories so depressing is the power imbalance. At a time when homelessness and poverty are on the rise and wealth inequality is soaring, banter is here to make the situation bleaker still. Being the victim of banter merchants – who essentially feel that vulnerable people are not fully human and therefore fair game – is part of this equation.

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It is also a micro example of a macro problem: vulnerable people are treated with contempt by our government, business and public institutions, so why should it be a surprise that they are then treated in the same way by individuals? The boredom experienced by the banter merchants combines with the insatiable need for social media content in a toxic mix. The removal of inhibitions provided by drink and drugs only adds to this.

On that night out in Benidorm, the stag party are said to have found someone they could use to create what they hoped would be a legendary bit of banter, something that would rack up the likes and the views on social media. His feelings were not considered because as a homeless person, he had no power to assert them. This is what we talk about when we talk about toxic masculinity – a macho, narcissistic performance that regards the vulnerable as weak and humiliates them for it.

The sadness is not only with the victims, though. There is an emptiness driving these sadistic stories that can’t simply be explained away with a line about bad apples unhinged by drink and drugs. Social media offers everyone the chance to have their 15 minutes of fame, but in doing so encourages people to up the ante – perhaps it’s only by getting a homeless guy to tattoo your mate’s name on his forehead that you are going to get the attention you crave.

It speaks, also, to the relative lack of opportunity available to the banter merchants. They have the prospect of puncturing lives of boredom and struggle with moments of performed cruelty. Conducted among a group of relative equals, banter – or something like it – can be a bonding experience, it can give people the feeling of community they long for and doesn’t have to humiliate the vulnerable. The problem is that in our society, the vulnerable are forever targets for humiliation.

• Oscar Rickett is a freelance journalist