-
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,
-
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,
-
and it was powerful and eloquent.
-
If a newspaper ran some racist
or homophobic column,
-
we realized we could do
something about it.
-
We could get them.
-
We could hit them with a weapon
that we understood but they didn't --
-
a social media shaming.
-
Advertisers would withdraw
their advertising.
-
When powerful people
misused their privilege,
-
we were going to get them.
-
This was like the
democratization of justice.
-
Hierarchies were being leveled out.
-
We were going to do things better.
-
Soon after that, a disgraced
pop science writer called Jonah Lehrer --
-
he'd been caught plagiarizing
and faking quotes,
-
and he was drenched in shame
and regret, he told me.
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And he and the opportunity
-
to publicly apologize
at a foundation lunch.
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This was going to be the most
important speech of his life.
-
Maybe it would win him some salvation.
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He knew before he arrived
-
that the foundation was going to be
live-streaming his event,
-
but what he didn't know
until he turned up,
-
was that they'd erected a giant screen
Twitter feed right next to his head.
-
(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.
-
I think they were clueless:
I think this was a unique moment
-
when the beautiful naivety of Twitter
-
was hitting the increasingly
horrific reality.
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And here were some of the Tweets
that were cascading into his eye line,
-
as he was trying to apologize:
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"Jonah Lehrer, boring us
into forgiving him."
-
(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,
-
to know that about such
a tiny figure behind a lectern.
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And, "Jonah Lehrer is just
a frigging sociopath."
-
That last word is a very human thing
to do, to dehumanize the people we hurt.
-
It's because we want to destroy people
but not feel bad about it.
-
Imagine if this was an actual court,
-
and the accused was in the dark,
begging for another chance,
-
and the jury was yelling out,
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"Bored! Sociopath!"
-
(Laughter)
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You know, when we watch
courtroom dramas, we tend to identify
-
with the kindhearted defense attorney,
-
but give us the power,
and we become like hanging judges.
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Power shifts fast.
-
We were getting Jonah because he was
perceived to have misused his privilege,
-
but Jonah was on the floor then,
and we were still kicking,
-
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
-
picking fingernails and treading water.
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Let me tell you a story.
-
It's about a woman called Justine Sacco.
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She was a PR woman from New York
with 170 Twitter followers,
-
and she'd Tweet little
acerbic jokes to them,
-
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,
-
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.
-
And then she got to Heathrow,
and she had a little time to spare
-
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,
-
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.
-
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,
-
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,
-
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,
-
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,
-
like South Park or Colbert
or Randy Newman.
-
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,
-
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
-
when it comes to what is going on
in the Third World.
-
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,
-
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,
-
she shut up and watched
as Justine's life got torn apart.
-
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
-
on the back of Justine's annihilation:
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[Next time you plant 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.
-
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,
-
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
-
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,
-
and her inability was
a huge part of the hilarity.
-
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.
-
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?
-
It's the opposite of democracy.
-
We wanted to show that we cared
about people dying of AIDS in Africa.
-
Our desire to be seen to be compassionate
is what led us to commit
-
this profoundly un-compassionate act.
-
As Meghan O'Gieblyn wrote
in the Boston Review,
-
"This isn't social justice.
It's a cathartic alternative."
-
For the past three years,
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I've been going around the world
meeting people like Justine Sacco --
-
and believe me, there's a lot
of people like Justine Sacco.
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There's more every day.
-
And we want to think they're fine,
but they're not fine.
-
The people I met were mangled.
-
They talked to me about depression,
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and anxiety and insomnia
and suicidal thoughts.
-
One woman I talked to,
who also told a joke that landed badly,
-
she stayed home for a year and a half.
-
Before that, she worked with adults
with learning difficulties,
-
and was apparently really good at her job.
-
Justine was fired, of course,
because social media demanded it.
-
But it was worse than that.
-
She was losing herself.
-
She was waking up in the middle
of the night, forgetting who she was.
-
She was got because she was perceived
to have misused her privilege.
-
And of course, that's a much better thing
to get people for than the things
-
we used to get people for,
like having children out of wedlock.
-
But the phrase "misuse of privilege"
is becoming a free pass
-
to tear apart pretty much
anybody we choose to.
-
It's becoming a devalued term,
-
and it's making us lose
our capacity for empathy
-
and for distinguishing between serious
and unserious transgressions.
-
Justine had 170 Twitter followers,
and so to make it work,
-
she had to be fictionalized.
-
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.
-
She's not sorry.
And neither is her father.]
-
I thought that was true about Justine,
-
until I met her at a bar, and I asked her
about her billionaire father,
-
and she said, "My father sells carpets."
-
And I think back on
the early days of Twitter,
-
when people would admit
shameful secrets about themselves,
-
and other people would say,
"Oh my God, I'm exactly the same."
-
These days, the hunt is on
for people's shameful secrets.
-
You can lead a good, ethical life,
-
but some bad phraseology in a Tweet
can overwhelm it all,
-
become a clue to your secret inner evil.
-
Maybe there's two types
of people in the world:
-
those people who favor
humans over ideology,
-
and those people who favor
ideology over humans.
-
I favor humans over ideology,
-
but right now, the ideologues are winning,
-
and they're creating a stage
for constant artificial high dramas
-
where everybody's either
a magnificent hero
-
or a sickening villain,
-
even though we know that's not true
about our fellow humans.
-
What's true is that
we are clever and stupid;
-
what's true is that we're grey areas.
-
The great thing about social media
was how it gave a voice
-
to voiceless people,
-
but we're now creating
a surveillance society,
-
where the smartest way to survive
is to go back to being voiceless.
-
Let's not do that.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)
-
Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Jon.
-
Jon Ronson: Thanks, Bruno.
-
BG: Don't go away.
-
What strikes me about Justine's story
-
is also the fact that if you
Google her name today,
-
this story covers the first
100 pages of Google results --
-
there is nothing else about her.
-
In your book, you mention another story
-
of another victim who actually got
taken on by a petition management firm,
-
and by creating blogs and posting nice,
innocuous stories about her love for cats
-
and holidays and stuff,
managed to get the story
-
off the first couple pages of Google
results, but it didn't last long.
-
A couple of weeks later, they started
creeping back up to the top result.
-
Is this a totally lost battle?
-
Jon Ronson: You know, I think
the very best thing we can do,
-
if you see a kind of unfair
or an ambiguous shaming,
-
is to speak up, because I think
the worst thing that happened to Justine
-
was that nobody supported her --
like, everyone was against her,
-
and that is profoundly traumatizing,
-
to be told by tens of thousands of people
that you need to get out.
-
But if a shaming happens and there's
a battle of voices, like in a democracy,
-
where people are discussing it,
I think that's much less damaging.
-
So I think that's the way forward,
-
but it's hard, because if you do
stand up for somebody,
-
it's incredibly unpleasant.
-
BG: So let's talk about your experience,
-
because you stood up by writing this book.
-
By the way, it's mandatory
reading for everybody, okay?
-
You stood up because the book
actually puts the spotlight on shamers.
-
And I assume you didn't only
have friendly reactions on Twitter.
-
JR: It didn't go down that well
with some people.
-
(Laughter)
-
I mean, you don't want
to just concentrate --
-
because lots of people understood,
and were really nice about the book.
-
But yeah, for 30 years I've been writing
stories about abuses of power,
-
and when I say the powerful people
over there in the military,
-
or in the pharmaceutical industry,
everybody applauds me.
-
As soon as I say, "We are the powerful
people abusing our power now,"
-
I get people saying,
"Well you must be a racist too."
-
BG: So the other night --
yesterday -- we were at dinner,
-
and there were two discussions going on.
-
On one side you were talking
with people around the table --
-
and that was a nice,
constructive discussion.
-
On the other, every time
you turned to your phone,
-
there is this deluge of insults.
-
JR: Yeah. This happened last night.
We had like a TED dinner last night.
-
We were chatting and it was lovely
and nice, and I decided to check Twitter.
-
Somebody said, "You are
a white supremacist."
-
And then I went back and had
a nice conversation with somebody,
-
and then I went back to Twitter,
-
somebody said my very existence
made the world a worse place.
-
My friend Adam Curtis says
-
that maybe the Internet is like
a John Carpenter movie from the 1980s,
-
when eventually everyone
will start screaming at each other
-
and shooting each other,
and then eventually everybody
-
would flee to somewhere safer,
-
and I'm starting to think of that
as a really nice option.
-
BG: Jon, thank you.
JR: Thank you, Bruno.
-
(Applause)