by Jon Ronson
One night at the end of 2011, This American Life‘s creator Ira Glass saw Mike Daisey perform his show on stage at Joe’s Pub in New York City. Like everyone else he was spellbound, and so he offered Mike the chance to tell it on his programme. They tried to fact check. They asked Mike to put them in touch with his translator. But Mike said his phone number for her no longer worked. Some of his other facts had checked out, so they took his word for it.
I heard it go out live. I was driving through Florida. I pulled my car onto the side of the road and didn’t move until it had finished. People all over America were doing the same. We felt inexorably altered by the power of Mike’s narrative and became determined to take action. Most of us, it goes without saying, were inexorably altered back to how we’d been earlier that day by the time we’d had dinner or whatever. But some weren’t. One listener started a petition calling for better working conditions at Apple’s manufacturing plants. He delivered 250,000 signatures. Pressure was put on the company like never before. It announced that, for the first time in its history, it would allow third parties in to audit the factory conditions. The Mike Daisey episode became the single most popular podcast in This American Life‘s history.
But unbeknownst to Mike, his own Michael Moynihan was quietly digging.
He was Rob Schmitz, the Shanghai correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace. Some of Mike’s details had seemed suspicious to him. For instance, Mike had mentioned interviewing factory workers in a Starbucks. How could they afford that? Starbucks is even more expensive in China than in the West. So he tracked down Mike’s translator. And that’s when Mike’s story fell apart. There were no workers with hands that shook uncontrollably, no old man with a clawed hand. He hadn’t visited ‘ten’ plants in China. He’d visited three. And so on. It wasn’t that the horrors Mike described hadn’t happened - they had: 137 workers at an Apple plant had been sickened by n-Hexane, but it had happened back in 2010 and a thousand miles away, in a town called Suzhou. (In Apple’s February 2011 annual report, the company described the use of the toxic chemical as a ‘core violation’ of worker safety and said it had ordered the contractor to stop using n-Hexane.) Mike hadn’t met these Suzhou workers. He’d only read about them. It just made his story more enthralling to pretend he was there.
And so, on 16 March 2012, Ira Glass brought Mike Daisey back onto the air:
Ira Glass: Were you afraid that we would discover something if we talked to [the translator]?
Mike Daisey: No, not really.
Ira: Really? There was no part of you which felt, like, OK, the Hexane thing, didn’t really happen when I was there and … did you feel like there was something that we would discover by talking to her?
Mike: Well I did think it would unpack the complexities of, of like how, how the story gets told.
Ira: What does that mean, unpack the complexities?
Mike: Well it means, it means that, you know, just, like the Hexane thing. I mean I think I’m agreeing with you.
[ … ]
Mike: I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context … we have different languages for what the truth means.
Ira: I understand that you believe that but I think you’re kidding yourself. Normal people who go to see a person talk - people take it as a literal truth.
I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theatre. Brian, who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true.
Mike: We have different worldviews on some of these things.
Ira: I know. But I feel like I have the normal worldview. The normal worldview is somebody stands on stage and says ‘this happened to me,’ I think it happened to them, unless it’s clearly labelled as ‘here’s a work of fiction’.
[ … ]
Ira: I have such a weird mix of feelings about this. Because I simultaneously feel terrible for you, and also, I feel lied to. And also, I stuck my neck out for you. I feel like I vouched for you with our audience based on your word.
Mike: I’m sorry.
The tone of voice in which Mike said, ‘I’m sorry.’ It sounded like a child - a gifted, difficult, maverick child who thought he was bigger than the school - being made to stand in front of everyone and get chastened until he changed. In those three syllables he seemed to shift from defiant through to broken.
But then he was back online, his self-esteem apparently totally revived.
He felt proud to have recovered the way he did. ‘I’ve been obsessed with investigating literary scandals,’ he told me. ‘Nobody ever comes back from those things. At the scale and intensity of what I experienced? Nobody comes out intact.’
‘I know!’ I said. ‘Did you know from the start you’d survive?’
‘Oh no,’ Mike said. ‘Oh no. I thought about killing myself.’
I looked at him. ‘Really?’ I said.
‘Everything was on the table,’ he said. ‘I actively talked about killing myself. I actively talked about never performing again, just leaving the theatre and never performing again. We talked about getting divorced. Very openly.’
‘How was your wife during this?’ I said.
‘She was making sure I wasn’t alone,’ Mike said.
‘When was all of this happening?’ I asked.
‘The very worst part of the scandal was before anyone knew of the scandal,’ he said. ‘There was a week between my interview with Ira and the show airing. During that week I began to disassociate on stage. I was falling apart. I would freeze as I was doing the show. I would feel my mind take itself apart. That was the worst part. It was fucking terrible, the fear, and the feeling that you will dissolve.’
‘What were you most scared of?’
‘I was terrified that I would no longer be able to tell the narrative of my life,’ Mike said, ‘that every time I performed on stage his judgement of me would echo forever, deciding who and what I was.’
‘So what changed?’
Mike didn’t reply for a while. Then he said, ‘When Ira first asked me if I wanted to tell the story on his show I thought, “This is a test. If I really believe in this then the cowardly thing would be to not do the story. If I bury it, nothing will change.” He paused. ‘I knew that the story would explode in the consciousness, and then it would explode for me.’
I frowned. ‘You’re saying you knew from the beginning that you’d be exposed?’
Mike nodded. ‘What happened on that lake showed me that there’s a door,’ he said. ‘And the door is open a crack. And you can feel it. You can just die. You see? Once you accept that, it brings clarity. You want to do something in the world? Be willing to throw your life away. I was, “Fine. I’ll throw my life away. Fine.”’
‘What about the risk that the scandal, instead of shining a light on what was happening in China, would turn the light off?’ I said.
‘I would have worried about that a lot,’ Mike replied. Then he corrected his phrasing. ‘I worried about that a lot,’ he said. ‘I was really worried about that.’
He could see me looking uncertainly at him.
‘Look, nobody wants to hear that I am actually a heroic crusader and that I sacrificed myself,’ he said. ‘Nobody wants to hear that narrative. But that is, actually, the narrative. I knew there was no way it would withstand the scrutiny of becoming a major story. I knew it was going to fail.’
I was sure I was watching a man in the process of building a fictional history for himself. In this new version of events Mike had valiantly destroyed his reputation to save lives in China, like a suicide bomber. But at the time I felt I shouldn’t tell him that I’d worked this out about him. It seemed to be what was holding him together.
But I think he read all this in my face, because he suddenly said: ‘The way we construct consciousness is to tell the story of ourselves to ourselves, the story of who we believe we are. I feel that a really public shaming or humiliation is a conflict between the person trying to write his own narrative and society trying to writ
e a different narrative for the person. One story tries to overwrite the other. And so to survive you have to own your story. Or …’ Mike looked at me, ‘… you write a third story. You react to the narrative that’s been forced upon you.’ He paused. ‘You have to find a way to disrespect the other narrative,’ he said. ‘If you believe it, it will crush you.’
I was glad Mike Daisey had found a way to have a life. But I don’t think his survival method was helpful advice for Jonah or Justine. They had no storytelling career to fall back on. There was no third narrative for them. There was just the one. Jonah was the fraudulent pop-science writer. Justine was the AIDS tweet woman. They were tainted people and it wouldn’t take a sleuth to find it out. Their flaws were right there on the front page of Google.
Justine made good on her promise. Five months after our first meeting we had lunch in New York City’s Lower East Side. She filled me in on how her life had gone. She’d had a job offer right away, she said. But it was a weird one - from the owner of a Florida yachting company. ‘He said, “I saw what happened to you. I’m fully on your side.”’ But Justine knew nothing about yachts. So why did he want to hire her? ‘Was he a crazy person who thinks white people can’t get AIDS?’ She turned him down. Then she left New York. ‘In New York your career is your identity. I had that taken away from me.’ She went as far away as she could. To Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She got a volunteer job with an NGO working to reduce maternal mortality rates.
‘I thought that if I was going to be in this fucking terrible situation I should get something out of it, or at least try to make the most out of it and help people and learn.’ She flew there alone. ‘I knew where I was staying but there are no addresses. They don’t really have street names. English is not their national language.’
‘Did you like it in Ethiopia?’ I asked.
‘It was fantastic,’ she said.
And this is where Justine’s story could end. If you are one of the hundreds of thousands of people who tore her apart you may want to make this your closing image of her. You may want to picture her in some makeshift maternity hospital in Addis Ababa. Perhaps she’s bent over a woman in labour and she does something or other extraordinary to save the woman’s life. Perhaps she glances up then, and wipes the desert sweat from her brow, and she’s got a whole different facial expression - one of tough, proud wisdom or something. And it’s all because of you. Justine would never have gone to Addis Ababa had she not been publicly shamed and fired from IAC.
But who was Justine kidding? Addis Ababa was great for a month, but she wasn’t an Ethiopia person. She was a New York City person. She was nervy and sassy and sort-of debonair. And so she came back. To a town where things were still not OK for her. She had temporary work doing the PR for the launch of a dating website, but she was not back on her feet. She was still fired from her dream job. She was still ridiculed and demonized across the Internet.
‘I’m not fine yet,’ she said. ‘And I’ve really suffered.’
She pushed the food around her plate. When I thought of Justine I thought of a store looted in a riot. She may have left the door ajar, but she was all smashed up.
But I did notice one positive change in her. The first time we’d met she’d seemed ashamed - weighed down by the guilt that she’d ‘tarnished’ her family by pressing Send on that stupid tweet. I think she still felt ashamed, but maybe not quite so much. Instead, she said, she felt humiliated.
The week I had lunch with Justine the European Court delivered an unexpected judgment - the Right to be Forgotten ruling. If an article or blog about a person was ‘inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant’ - whatever those vague words meant - Google must if requested deindex it from their European sites (although not from Google.com). Tens of thousands of people applied to be forgotten straight away - there’d be more than 70,000 applicants within three months. Google complied vigorously, apparently assenting to practically every request. In fact it complied so vigorously - de-indexing swathes of Guardian and Daily Mail articles, for example, and then sending the newspapers automated notices informing them that they’d been de-indexed - that the company seemed to be intentionally creating chaos to stir up resistance to the judgment. Articles and websites sprang up across the Internet attacking the ruling and outing the forgotten: a football referee who had lied about his reasons for giving a penalty; a couple arrested for having sex on a train (who I’d forgotten all about until then); an airline, Cathay Pacific, accused of racism by a Muslim job applicant.
Justine, following the news from New York, had ‘conflicting feelings immediately’, she told me. It seemed like censorship to her. And it also seemed appealing. But she knew invoking it would be a disaster for her. If the world found out - imagine the frenzy. No. The Right to be Forgotten would improve the life of some actual transgressor - some barely shamed niche European former fraudster who slipped through the outers’ net, for instance - far more than it would improve the life of the super-shamed Justine Sacco.
And so the worst thing, Justine said, the thing that made her feel most helpless, was her lack of control over the Google search results. They were just there, eternal, crushing.
‘It’s going to take a very long time for those Google search results to change for me,’ she said.
11
THE MAN WHO CAN CHANGE THE GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS
In October 2012 a group of adults with learning difficulties took an organized trip to Washington DC. They visited the National Mall, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Smithsonian, Arlington National Cemetery, the US Mint. They saw the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. At night they sang karaoke in the hotel bar. Their caregivers, Lindsey Stone and her friend Jamie, did a duet of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’.
‘They had the greatest time on that trip,’ Lindsey Stone told me. ‘We were laughing on the bus. We were laughing walking around at night. They thought that we were fun and cool.’
Lindsey was telling me the story eighteen months later. We were sitting at her kitchen table. She lives down a long lane near a pretty lake in a seaside town on the East Coast of the United States. ‘I like to dance and I like to do karaoke,’ Lindsey said. ‘But for a long time after that trip I didn’t leave the house. During the day I’d just sit here. I didn’t want to be seen by anybody. I didn’t want people looking at me.’
‘How long did that last?’ I asked her.
‘Almost a year,’ she said.
Lindsey didn’t want to talk to me about what happened on that trip to Washington DC. I had written to her three times and she had ignored each of my letters. But a very peculiar circumstance had made it necessary for her to change her mind.
*
Lindsey and Jamie had been with LIFE - Living Independently Forever - for a year and a half before that trip. LIFE was a residence for ‘pretty high-functioning people with learning difficulties’, Lindsey said. ‘Jamie had started a jewellery club, which was a hit with the girls. We’d take them to the movies. We’d take them bowling. We got the company to purchase a karaoke sound system. We heard a lot from parents that we were the best thing that ever happened to that campus.’
Off duty she and Jamie had a running joke - taking stupid photographs, ‘smoking in front of a No Smoking sign, or posing in front of statues, mimicking the pose. We took dumb pictures all the time. And so at Arlington we saw the Silence and Respect sign. And inspiration struck.
‘So,’ Lindsey said, ‘thinking we were funny Jamie posted it on Facebook and tagged me on it with my consent because I thought it was hilarious.’
Nothing much happened after that. A few Facebook friends posted unenthusiastic comments. ‘One of them had served in the military and he wrote a message saying, “This is kind of offensive. I know you girls, but it’s just tasteless.” Another said, “I agree,” and another said “I agree,” and then I said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! It’s just us being douche-bags! Forget about it!”’
Whoa whoa whoa … wait. This is just us, being the douch
ebags that we are, challenging authority in general. Much like the pic posted the night before, of me smoking right next to a no smoking sign. OBVIOUSLY we meant NO disrespect to people that serve or have served our country.
- Lindsey Stone’s Facebook message, 20 October 2012
After that Jamie said to Lindsey, ‘Do you think we should take it down?’
‘No!’ Lindsey replied, ‘What’s the big deal? No one’s ever going to think of it again.’
Their Facebook settings were a mystery to them. Most of the privacy boxes were ticked. Some weren’t. Sometimes they’d half notice that boxes they’d thought they’d ticked weren’t ticked. Lindsey has been thinking about that ‘a lot’ these past eighteen months. ‘Facebook works best when everyone is sharing and liking. It brings their ad revenues up.’ Was there some Facebook shenanigan where things just ‘happen’ to untick themselves? Some loophole? ‘But I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist. I don’t know if Jamie’s mobile uploads had ever been private.’
Whatever: Jamie’s mobile uploads weren’t private. And four weeks after returning from Washington DC they were in a restaurant celebrating their birthday - ‘We’re a week apart’ - when they became aware that their phones were vibrating repeatedly. So they went online.
‘Lindsey Stone hates the military and hates soldiers who have died in foreign wars’ and, ‘Die cunt’ and, ‘You should rot in hell’ and, ‘Just pure Evil’ and, ‘The Face of a Typical Feminist. Fifty pounds overweight? Check. Sausage arms and little piglet fingers? Check. No respect for the men who sacrificed? Check’ and, ‘Fuck You whore. I hope I die a slow painful death. U retarded cunt’ and, ‘HOPE THIS CUNT GETS RAPED AND STABBED TO DEATH’ and, ‘Spoke with an employee from LIFE who has told me there are Veterans on the board and that she will be fired. Awaiting info on her accomplice …’ and, ‘After they fire her, maybe she needs to sign up as a client. Woman needs help’ and, ‘Send the dumb feminist to prison’ and, in response to a small number of posters suggesting that maybe a person’s future shouldn’t be ruined because of a jokey photograph, ‘HER FUTURE ISN’T RUINED! Stop trying to make her into a martyr. In 6 months no one except those that actually know her will remember this.’
