WEBVTT

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In the early days of Twitter,
it was like a place of radical de-shaming.

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People would admit
shameful secrets about themselves,

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and other people would say,
"Oh my God, I'm exactly the same."

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Voiceless people realized
that they had a voice,

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and it was powerful and eloquent.

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If a newspaper ran some racist
or homophobic column,

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we realized we could do
something about it.

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We could get them.

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We could hit them with a weapon
that we understood but they didn't --

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a social media shaming.

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Advertisers would withdraw
their advertising.

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When powerful people
misused their privilege,

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we were going to get them.

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This was like the
democratization of justice.

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Hierarchies were being leveled out.

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We were going to do things better.

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Soon after that, a disgraced
pop science writer called Jonah Lehrer --

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he'd been caught plagiarizing
and faking quotes,

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and he was drenched in shame
and regret, he told me.

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And he had the opportunity

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to publicly apologize
at a foundation lunch.

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This was going to be the most
important speech of his life.

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Maybe it would win him some salvation.

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He knew before he arrived

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that the foundation was going to be
live-streaming his event,

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but what he didn't know
until he turned up,

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was that they'd erected a giant screen
Twitter feed right next to his head.

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(Laughter)

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Another one in a monitor screen
in his eye line.

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I don't think the foundation did this
because they were monstrous.

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I think they were clueless:
I think this was a unique moment

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when the beautiful naivety of Twitter

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was hitting the increasingly
horrific reality.

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And here were some of the Tweets
that were cascading into his eye line,

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as he was trying to apologize:

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"Jonah Lehrer, boring us
into forgiving him."

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(Laughter)

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And, "Jonah Lehrer has not proven
that he is capable of feeling shame."

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That one must have been written
by the best psychiatrist ever,

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to know that about such
a tiny figure behind a lectern.

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And, "Jonah Lehrer is just
a frigging sociopath."

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That last word is a very human thing
to do, to dehumanize the people we hurt.

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It's because we want to destroy people
but not feel bad about it.

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Imagine if this was an actual court,

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and the accused was in the dark,
begging for another chance,

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and the jury was yelling out,

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"Bored! Sociopath!"

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(Laughter)

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You know, when we watch
courtroom dramas, we tend to identify

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with the kindhearted defense attorney,

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but give us the power,
and we become like hanging judges.

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Power shifts fast.

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We were getting Jonah because he was
perceived to have misused his privilege,

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but Jonah was on the floor then,
and we were still kicking,

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and congratulating ourselves
for punching up.

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And it began to feel weird and empty
when there wasn't a powerful person

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who had misused their privilege
that we could get.

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A day without a shaming
began to feel like a day

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picking fingernails and treading water.

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Let me tell you a story.

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It's about a woman called Justine Sacco.

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She was a PR woman from New York
with 170 Twitter followers,

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and she'd Tweet little
acerbic jokes to them,

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like this one on a plane
from New York to London:

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[Weird German Dude: You're in first class.
It's 2014. Get some deodorant."

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-Inner monologue as inhale BO.
Thank god for pharmaceuticals.]

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So Justine chuckled to herself,
and pressed send, and got no replies,

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and felt that sad feeling that we all feel

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when the Internet doesn't
congratulate us for being funny.

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(Laughter)

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Black silence when the Internet
doesn't talk back.

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And then she got to Heathrow,
and she had a little time to spare

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before her final leg, so she thought up
another funny little acerbic joke:

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[Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS.
Just kidding. I'm white!]

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And she chuckled to herself, pressed send,
got on the plane, got no replies,

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turned off her phone, fell asleep,

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woke up 11 hours later,

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turned on her phone while the plane
was taxiing on the runway,

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and straightaway there was
a message from somebody

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that she hadn't spoken
to since high school,

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that said, "I am so sorry
to see what's happening to you."

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And then another message
from a best friend,

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"You need to call me right now.

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You are the worldwide number one
trending topic on Twitter."

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(Laughter)

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What had happened is that one
of her 170 followers had sent the Tweet

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to a Gawker journalist, and he
retweeted it to his 15,000 followers:

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[And now, a funny holiday joke
from IAC's PR boss]

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And then it was like a bolt of lightning.

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A few weeks later, I talked
to the Gawker journalist.

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I emailed him and asked him how it felt,
and he said, "It felt delicious."

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And then he said,
"But I'm sure she's fine."

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But she wasn't fine,
because while she slept,

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Twitter took control of her life
and dismantled it piece by piece.

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First there were the philanthropists:

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[If @JustineSacco's unfortunate
words ... bother you,

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join me in supporting
@CARE's work in Africa.]

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[In light of ... disgusting,
racist tweet, I'm donating to @care today]

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Then came the beyond horrified:

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[... no words for that horribly disgusting
racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco.

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I am beyond horrified.]

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Was anybody on Twitter
that night? A few of you.

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Did Justine's joke overwhelm
your Twitter feed the way it did mine?

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It did mine, and I thought
what everybody thought that night,

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which was, "Wow, somebody's screwed!

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Somebody's life is about to get terrible!"

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And I sat up in my bed,

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and I put the pillow behind my head,

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and then I thought, I'm not entirely sure
that joke was intended to be racist.

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Maybe instead of gleefully
flaunting her privilege,

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she was mocking the gleeful
flaunting of privilege.

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There's a comedy tradition of this,

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like South Park or Colbert
or Randy Newman.

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Maybe Justine Sacco's crime was not being
as good at it as Randy Newman.

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In fact, when I met Justine
a couple of weeks later in a bar,

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she was just crushed,

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and I asked her to explain the joke,

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and she said, "Living in America
puts us in a bit of a bubble

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when it comes to what is going on
in the Third World.

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I was making of fun of that bubble."

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You know, another woman on Twitter that
night, a New Statesman writer Helen Lewis,

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she reviewed my book on public shaming
and wrote that she Tweeted that night,

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"I'm not sure that her joke
was intended to be racist,"

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and she said straightaway she got
a fury of Tweets saying,

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"Well, you're just
a privileged bitch, too."

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And so to her shame, she wrote,

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she shut up and watched
as Justine's life got torn apart.

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It started to get darker:

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[Everyone go report
this cunt @JustineSacco]

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Then came the calls for her to be fired.

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[Good luck with the job hunt
in the new year. #GettingFired]

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Thousands of people around the world

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decided it was their duty
to get her fired.

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[@JustineSacco last tweet
of your career. #SorryNotSorry

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Corporations got involved,
hoping to sell their products

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on the back of Justine's annihilation:

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[Next time you plan to tweet something
stupid before you take off,

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make sure you are getting
on a @Gogo flight!]

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(Laughter)

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A lot of companies were making
good money that night.

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You know, Justine's name was normally
Googled 40 times a month.

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That month, between December the 20th
and the end of December,

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her name was Googled 1,220,000 times.

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And one Internet economist told me
that that meant that Google made

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somewhere between 120,000 dollars
and 468,000 dollars

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from Justine's annihilation, whereas
those of us doing the actual shaming --

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we got nothing.

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(Laughter)

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We were like unpaid
shaming interns for Google.

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(Laughter)

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And then came the trolls:

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[I'm actually kind of hoping
Justine Sacco gets aids? lol]

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Somebody else on that wrote,

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"Somebody HIV-positive should rape
this bitch and then we'll find out

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if her skin color protects her from AIDS."

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And that person got a free pass.

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Nobody went after that person.

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We were all so excited
about destroying Justine,

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and our shaming brains
are so simple-minded,

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that we couldn't also handle
destroying somebody

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who was inappropriately
destroying Justine.

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Justine was really uniting
a lot of disparate groups that night,

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from philanthropists to "rape the bitch."

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[@JustineSacco I hope you get fired!
You demented bitch...

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Just let the world know you're planning
to ride bare back while in Africa.]

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Women always have it worse than men.

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When a man gets shamed, it's,
"I'm going to get you fired."

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When a woman gets shamed, it's,

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"I'm going to get you fired
and raped and cut out your uterus."

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And then Justine's employers got involved:

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[IAC on @JustineSacco tweet: This is an
outrageous, offensive comment.

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Employee in question currently
unreachable on an intl flight.]

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And that's when the anger
turned to excitement:

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[All I want for Christmas is to see
@JustineSacco's face when her plane lands

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and she checks
her inbox/voicemail. #fired]

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[Oh man, @justinesacco
is going to have the most painful

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phone-turning-on moment ever
when her plane lands.]

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[We are about to watch this @JustineSacco
bitch get fired. In REAL time.

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Before she even KNOWS
she's getting fired.]

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What we had was
a delightful narrative arc.

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We knew something that Justine didn't.

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Can you think of anything
less judicial than this?

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Justine was asleep on a plane
and unable to explain herself,

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and her inability was
a huge part of the hilarity.

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On Twitter that night, we were
like toddlers crawling towards a gun.

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Somebody worked out exactly
which plane she was on, so they linked

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to a flight tracker website.

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[British Airways Flight 43
On-time - arrives in 1 hour 34 minutes]

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A hashtag began trending worldwide:

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# hasJustineLandedYet?

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[It is kinda wild
to see someone self-destruct

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without them even being aware of it.
#hasJustineLandedYet]

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[Seriously. I just want to go home
to go to bed, but everyone at the bar

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is SO into #HasJustineLandedYet.
Can't look away. Can't leave.]

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[#HasJustineLandedYet may be the best
thing to happen to my Friday night.]

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[Is no one in Cape Town going
to the airport to tweet her arrival?

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Come on, twitter! I'd like pictures]

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And guess what? Yes there was.

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[@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed
at Cape Town international.

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And if you want to know
what it looks like to discover

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that you've just been torn to shreds
because of a misconstrued liberal joke,

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not by trolls, but by nice people like us,

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this is what it looks like:

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[... She's decided to wear
sunnies as a disguise.]

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So why did we do it?

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I think some people were genuinely upset,

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but I think for other people,

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it's because Twitter is basically
a mutual approval machine.

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We surround ourselves with people
who feel the same way we do,

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and we approve each other,

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and that's a really good feeling.

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And if somebody gets in the way,
we screen them out.

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And do you know what
that's the opposite of?

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It's the opposite of democracy.

00:10:48.336 --> 00:10:52.333
We wanted to show that we cared
about people dying of AIDS in Africa.

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Our desire to be seen to be compassionate
is what led us to commit

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this profoundly un-compassionate act.

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As Meghan O'Gieblyn wrote
in the Boston Review,

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"This isn't social justice.
It's a cathartic alternative."

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For the past three years,

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I've been going around the world
meeting people like Justine Sacco --

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and believe me, there's a lot
of people like Justine Sacco.

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There's more every day.

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And we want to think they're fine,
but they're not fine.

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The people I met were mangled.

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They talked to me about depression,

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and anxiety and insomnia
and suicidal thoughts.

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One woman I talked to,
who also told a joke that landed badly,

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she stayed home for a year and a half.

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Before that, she worked with adults
with learning difficulties,

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and was apparently really good at her job.

NOTE Paragraph

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Justine was fired, of course,
because social media demanded it.

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But it was worse than that.

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She was losing herself.

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She was waking up in the middle
of the night, forgetting who she was.

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She was got because she was perceived
to have misused her privilege.

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And of course, that's a much better thing
to get people for than the things

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we used to get people for,
like having children out of wedlock.

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But the phrase "misuse of privilege"
is becoming a free pass

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to tear apart pretty much
anybody we choose to.

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It's becoming a devalued term,

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and it's making us lose
our capacity for empathy

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and for distinguishing between serious
and unserious transgressions.

NOTE Paragraph

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Justine had 170 Twitter followers,
and so to make it work,

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she had to be fictionalized.

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Word got around that she was the daughter
the mining billionaire Desmond Sacco.

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[Let us not be fooled by #JustineSacco
her father is a SA mining billionaire.

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She's not sorry.
And neither is her father.]

00:12:40.446 --> 00:12:42.269
I thought that was true about Justine,

00:12:42.293 --> 00:12:45.631
until I met her at a bar, and I asked her
about her billionaire father,

00:12:45.655 --> 00:12:47.568
and she said, "My father sells carpets."

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:47.592 --> 00:12:49.749
And I think back on
the early days of Twitter,

00:12:49.773 --> 00:12:52.503
when people would admit
shameful secrets about themselves,

00:12:52.527 --> 00:12:55.453
and other people would say,
"Oh my God, I'm exactly the same."

00:12:55.477 --> 00:12:59.650
These days, the hunt is on
for people's shameful secrets.

00:12:59.674 --> 00:13:01.716
You can lead a good, ethical life,

00:13:01.740 --> 00:13:06.174
but some bad phraseology in a Tweet
can overwhelm it all,

00:13:06.198 --> 00:13:09.182
become a clue to your secret inner evil.

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00:13:09.797 --> 00:13:12.236
Maybe there's two types
of people in the world:

00:13:12.260 --> 00:13:15.787
those people who favor
humans over ideology,

00:13:15.811 --> 00:13:18.717
and those people who favor
ideology over humans.

00:13:19.107 --> 00:13:21.755
I favor humans over ideology,

00:13:21.779 --> 00:13:24.540
but right now, the ideologues are winning,

00:13:24.564 --> 00:13:29.234
and they're creating a stage
for constant artificial high dramas

00:13:29.258 --> 00:13:31.686
where everybody's either
a magnificent hero

00:13:31.710 --> 00:13:33.318
or a sickening villain,

00:13:33.342 --> 00:13:36.359
even though we know that's not true
about our fellow humans.

00:13:36.383 --> 00:13:40.369
What's true is that
we are clever and stupid;

00:13:40.393 --> 00:13:43.579
what's true is that we're grey areas.

00:13:43.603 --> 00:13:46.481
The great thing about social media
was how it gave a voice

00:13:46.505 --> 00:13:47.901
to voiceless people,

00:13:47.925 --> 00:13:50.579
but we're now creating
a surveillance society,

00:13:50.603 --> 00:13:54.953
where the smartest way to survive
is to go back to being voiceless.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:55.423 --> 00:13:56.856
Let's not do that.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:56.880 --> 00:13:58.032
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:58.056 --> 00:14:03.774
(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:09.410 --> 00:14:10.895
Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Jon.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:10.919 --> 00:14:12.165
Jon Ronson: Thanks, Bruno.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:12.189 --> 00:14:13.363
BG: Don't go away.

00:14:14.939 --> 00:14:16.734
What strikes me about Justine's story

00:14:16.758 --> 00:14:19.191
is also the fact that if you
Google her name today,

00:14:19.215 --> 00:14:21.962
this story covers the first
100 pages of Google results --

00:14:21.986 --> 00:14:24.198
there is nothing else about her.

00:14:24.222 --> 00:14:26.810
In your book, you mention another story

00:14:26.834 --> 00:14:31.365
of another victim who actually got
taken on by a reputation management firm,

00:14:31.389 --> 00:14:36.473
and by creating blogs and posting nice,
innocuous stories about her love for cats

00:14:36.497 --> 00:14:39.213
and holidays and stuff,
managed to get the story

00:14:39.237 --> 00:14:43.160
off the first couple pages of Google
results, but it didn't last long.

00:14:43.184 --> 00:14:48.137
A couple of weeks later, they started
creeping back up to the top result.

00:14:48.161 --> 00:14:50.109
Is this a totally lost battle?

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00:14:50.483 --> 00:14:53.317
Jon Ronson: You know, I think
the very best thing we can do,

00:14:53.341 --> 00:14:57.915
if you see a kind of unfair
or an ambiguous shaming,

00:14:57.939 --> 00:15:01.339
is to speak up, because I think
the worst thing that happened to Justine

00:15:01.363 --> 00:15:04.379
was that nobody supported her --
like, everyone was against her,

00:15:04.403 --> 00:15:06.128
and that is profoundly traumatizing,

00:15:06.152 --> 00:15:09.974
to be told by tens of thousands of people
that you need to get out.

00:15:09.998 --> 00:15:14.088
But if a shaming happens and there's
a babble of voices, like in a democracy,

00:15:14.112 --> 00:15:17.208
where people are discussing it,
I think that's much less damaging.

00:15:17.232 --> 00:15:18.859
So I think that's the way forward,

00:15:18.883 --> 00:15:21.479
but it's hard, because if you do
stand up for somebody,

00:15:21.503 --> 00:15:23.199
it's incredibly unpleasant.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:23.223 --> 00:15:25.143
BG: So let's talk about your experience,

00:15:25.167 --> 00:15:27.175
because you stood up by writing this book.

00:15:27.199 --> 00:15:29.788
By the way, it's mandatory
reading for everybody, okay?

00:15:29.812 --> 00:15:34.122
You stood up because the book
actually puts the spotlight on shamers.

00:15:34.146 --> 00:15:37.178
And I assume you didn't only
have friendly reactions on Twitter.

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00:15:37.202 --> 00:15:39.882
JR: It didn't go down that well
with some people.

00:15:39.906 --> 00:15:40.907
(Laughter)

00:15:40.931 --> 00:15:43.035
I mean, you don't want
to just concentrate --

00:15:43.059 --> 00:15:46.456
because lots of people understood,
and were really nice about the book.

00:15:46.480 --> 00:15:49.833
But yeah, for 30 years I've been writing
stories about abuses of power,

00:15:49.857 --> 00:15:53.137
and when I say the powerful people
over there in the military,

00:15:53.161 --> 00:15:55.929
or in the pharmaceutical industry,
everybody applauds me.

00:15:55.953 --> 00:16:00.328
As soon as I say, "We are the powerful
people abusing our power now,"

00:16:00.352 --> 00:16:03.076
I get people saying,
"Well you must be a racist too."

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00:16:03.100 --> 00:16:05.775
BG: So the other night --
yesterday -- we were at dinner,

00:16:05.799 --> 00:16:07.714
and there were two discussions going on.

00:16:07.738 --> 00:16:10.786
On one side you were talking
with people around the table --

00:16:10.810 --> 00:16:12.973
and that was a nice,
constructive discussion.

00:16:12.997 --> 00:16:15.344
On the other, every time
you turned to your phone,

00:16:15.368 --> 00:16:16.929
there is this deluge of insults.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:16.953 --> 00:16:20.344
JR: Yeah. This happened last night.
We had like a TED dinner last night.

00:16:20.368 --> 00:16:24.168
We were chatting and it was lovely
and nice, and I decided to check Twitter.

00:16:24.192 --> 00:16:26.312
Somebody said, "You are
a white supremacist."

00:16:26.336 --> 00:16:29.310
And then I went back and had
a nice conversation with somebody,

00:16:29.334 --> 00:16:30.875
and then I went back to Twitter,

00:16:30.899 --> 00:16:33.987
somebody said my very existence
made the world a worse place.

00:16:34.011 --> 00:16:36.758
My friend Adam Curtis says

00:16:36.782 --> 00:16:40.590
that maybe the Internet is like
a John Carpenter movie from the 1980s,

00:16:40.614 --> 00:16:43.655
when eventually everyone
will start screaming at each other

00:16:43.679 --> 00:16:46.209
and shooting each other,
and then eventually everybody

00:16:46.233 --> 00:16:48.229
would flee to somewhere safer,

00:16:48.253 --> 00:16:52.153
and I'm starting to think of that
as a really nice option.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:52.177 --> 00:16:54.130
BG: Jon, thank you.
JR: Thank you, Bruno.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:54.154 --> 00:16:58.152
(Applause)