ON December 20, 2013, Justine Sacco, the head of PR at an American magazine publisher, did the worst thing in her life. Just before boarding a plane from Heathrow to Cape Town, she tweeted her 170 followers in jaunty mood: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!” It wasn’t a terrific joke (she said it was a comment on white privilege), but the Twittersphere didn’t agree. By the time she touched down, 11 hours later, she was topping the “trending” list worldwide. For millions, she was a “disgusting racist”. In 11 days she was Googled 1,220,000 times. After calls from the publisher’s clients, Sacco was fired.
Ten months earlier, in October 2012, Lindsey Stone, a professional “caregiver”, took a group of patients on a trip to Washington DC. Lindsey and her friend Jamie enjoyed taking larky snaps of each other, so Lindsey was pictured at Arlington National Cemetery, shouting and extending a middle finger in front of a “Silence and Respect” notice. The girls posted it on Facebook, for fun. Hell followed. “Lindsey Stone hates the military and hates soldiers who have died in foreign wars,” was one response, and ”Send the dumb feminist to prison” and “F*** You whore. I hope you die a slow and painful death”.
There were thousands more. A “Fire Lindsey Stone” Facebook page attracted 12,000 “likes”. Her boss met her in the car park and told her to hand over her keys. Depressive and insomniac, she didn’t leave her house for a year.
Welcome to the world of shaming, social-media style, as presented in Jon Ronson’s riveting new book. The author of The Men Who Stare at Goats and The Psychopath Test reveals that he used to be an enthusiastic shamer, happily piling in with thousands of tweeters complaining about press bigotry or corporate bullying — or indeed three Warwick university academics who started a fake Twitter account in Ronson’s name. “When we deployed shame,” he writes, “we were utilising an immensely powerful tool. It was coercive, borderless and increasing in speed and influence. Hierarchies were being levelled out. The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratisation of justice.” He decided to inspect the next public shaming and report how efficient it was in righting wrongs. What he discovered shocked him.
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He met the American journalist Jonah Lehrer, whose life was ruined because he made up six Bob Dylan quotations for an article. When Lehrer was invited to deliver a speech of apology, a screen was rigged in his eye line so that viewers could live-tweet their increasingly abusive opinion of it. The 18th-century public pillory, which Ronson discusses at length, was briefly back in business.
He met “Hank” who, while sitting in the audience at a technical conference, was overheard making a schoolboyish joke about “big dongles” by a woman sitting in front of him. She took his picture and tweeted it with a smack on the wrist about the “dongle” joke, which, she claimed, “could be inferred as offensive to me”. Hank lost his job and posted about it on the Hacker News discussion board, whereupon the woman in turn was attacked with horrific misogynist abuse. Someone sent her a photograph of a beheaded woman with tape over her mouth.
Ronson has built a formidable reputation for writing with a light touch about private and organisational craziness. There is not much lightness in these stories; some read like descents to an unimaginable circle of hell. But it is easy to enjoy his unstoppable nosiness, his ferreting for clues, following links, testing social experiments and exposing their findings as flawed.
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He looks at shaming from a dozen perspectives. He interviews Max Mosley, the Formula One boss who sued the News of the World for exposing his “Sick Nazi Orgy with 5 Hookers” (in court, the defence proved there was nothing “Nazi” about it), to find out how he managed to survive a public shaming so blithely. Was it because he refused to feel ashamed, or just that nobody cares any more about a bloke in a sex scandal?
Ronson meets Judge Ted Poe, the Texan lawman who devises exquisite shaming punishments for transgressors, such as making a Houston teenager parade up and down outside high schools and bars carrying a sign reading: I KILLED TWO PEOPLE WHILE DRIVING DRUNK. Was it effective, or soul-destroying? (The former.) He goes to an S&M event called Public Disgrace in the San Fernando valley, organised by an outfit named Kink, and a shame-eradication workshop in Chicago where everyone tells their secrets and vocalises their resentments to people they have just met.
Ronson has a positive genius for telling stories, and leaving them open-ended. His interviewees don’t inhabit just a single chapter; they recur during the book, a Babel of the debased, emailing, answering calls, offering fresh insights into what “shaming” has done to them. It is sometimes unclear whether the victims feel actual shame, as in moral guilt, or just embarrassment, as in social awkwardness — being unable, for example, to find a new partner because their Google entry will always bring up their one-off transgression for all to see.
That said, it is an eye-opening education for the reader into the dreadful touchiness of the social-media world, forever on the lookout for something to be outraged by, avid for trouble, thirsty for schadenfreude, a flaming-torches gang longing for the signal to attack. But it is also fascinating about the modern world of online damage-limitation, of “reputation management” and the manipulation of Google search results to bury your past.
It is an education for the author, too. His initial delight in being part of “the democratisation of justice” gives way to concern about mob rule. Considering the fate of Lehrer, he muses: “I felt like a door had briefly opened before me, revealing some infinite horror-land filled with millions of scared-stiff Jonahs. How many people had I banished to that land during my 30 years of journalism?”
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By the end he decides not to join in any more public condemnations unless they are of behaviour that has hurt someone. His analogy is a good one. It was, he says, like becoming a vegetarian. “I missed the steak…but I could no longer ignore the slaughterhouse.”
Picador £16.99/ebook £10.99 pp278