by Jon Ronson
His reply surprised me. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I really don’t know. I … Yeah. I don’t know.’
Scott explained that, being a tech person, he was more interested in the radar and the casing and the light bulbs than in the psychology. But during the past decade the mystery has galvanized social psychologists. And their conclusion: feedback loops.
Feedback loops. You exhibit some type of behaviour (you drive at 27 mph in a 25 mph zone). You get instant realtime feedback for it (the sign tells you you’re driving at 27 mph). You decide whether or not to change your behaviour as a result of the feedback (you lower your speed to 25 mph). You get instant feedback for that decision too (the sign tells you you’re driving at 25 mph now. Some signs flash up a smiley-face emoticon to congratulate you). And it all happens in a flash of an eye - in the few moments it takes you to drive past the Your Speed sign.
In Goetz’s Wired magazine story - ‘Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops’ - he calls them ‘a profoundly effective tool for changing behaviour’. And I’m all for people slowing down in school zones. But maybe in other ways feedback loops are leading to a world we only think we want. Maybe - as my friend the documentary maker Adam Curtis emailed me - they’re turning social media into ‘a giant echo chamber where what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing’.
We express our opinion that Justine Sacco is a monster. We are instantly congratulated for this - for basically being Rosa Parks. We make the on-the-spot decision to carry on believing it.
‘The tech-utopians like the people in Wired present this as a new kind of democracy,’ Adam’s email continued. ‘It isn’t. It’s the opposite. It locks people off in the world they started with and prevents them from finding out anything different. They got trapped in the system of feedback reinforcement. The idea that there is another world of other people who have other ideas is marginalized in our lives.’
I was becoming one of those other people with other ideas. I was expressing the unpopular belief that Justine Sacco isn’t a monster. I wonder if I will receive a tidal wave of negative feedback for this and, if so, will it frighten me back again, to a place where I’m congratulated and welcomed?
‘Feedback is an engineering principle,’ Adam’s email to me ended. ‘And all engineering is devoted to trying to keep the thing you are building stable.’
Soon after Justine Sacco’s shaming I was talking with a friend, a journalist, who told me he had so many jokes, little observations, potentially risque thoughts, that he wouldn’t dare to post online any more.
‘I suddenly feel with social media like I’m tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment,’ he said. ‘It’s horrible.’
He didn’t want me to name him, he said, in case it sparked something off.
We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age.
‘Look!’ we’re saying. ‘WE’RE normal! THIS is the average!’
We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it.
Bibliography and Acknowledgements
A note about the title. For a while it was going to be called, simply, Shame. Or Tarred and Feathered. There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. It was a surprisingly hard book to find a title for and I think I know why. It was something that one of my interviewees said to me: ‘Shame is an incredibly inarticulate emotion. It’s something you bathe in, it’s not something you wax eloquent about. It’s such a deep, dark, ugly thing there are very few words for it.’
My encounter with the spambot men was filmed by Remy Lamont of Channel Flip. My thanks to him, and to Channel Flip, and as always to my producer Lucy Greenwell. Greg Stekelman - formally known as @themanwhofell - helped me remember how Twitter mutated from a place of unselfconscious honesty into somewhere more anxiety-inducing. Greg is not on Twitter any more. His final tweet, posted on 10 May 2012, read: ‘Twitter is no place for a human being.‘ Which I think is pessimistic. I still love the place. Although I’ve never been shamed on it. Although neither had he. That line about how we don’t feel accountable during a shaming because ‘a snowflake never feels responsible for the avalanche’ came from Jonathan Bullock. My thanks to him.
I pieced together the story of how Michael Moynihan uncovered Jonah Lehrer’s deception mainly through my interviews with Michael - my thanks to him and to his wife Joanna - although a little background came from ‘Michael C. Moynihan, The Guy Who Uncovered Jonah Lehrer’s Fabrication Problem’ by Foster Kamer, published in the New York Observer on 30 July 2012.
My information about Stephen Glass came from ‘No second chance for Stephen Glass: The long, strange downfall of a journalistic wunderkind’, by Adam L. Penenberg, published in PandoDaily.com on 27 January 2014.
The story about Jonah’s trip to St Louis the day before his downfall came from ‘Jonah Lehrer Stumbles at MPI’, by Sarah J. F. Braley, published in meetings-conventions.com on 2 August 2012.
In our telephone interview, Jonah Lehrer spoke with me at length and on the record. After our telephone interview, however, he expressed misgivings about being included in the book, saying he didn’t want to put his wife and family through the experience again. But, his experience was too vital and too public - and the lessons learned too great - to leave out.
Thanks to Jeff Bercovici of Forbes magazine for putting me in touch with his friend Justine Sacco.
The life and work of Judge Ted Poe has been documented over the years by his nemesis, the legal scholar Jonathan Turley, in stories like ‘Shame On You’, published in the Washington Post on 18 September 2005. I learnt about the drink-drivers Mike Hubacek and Kevin Tunell from reading ‘A Great Crime Deterrent’ by Julia Duin, published in Insight on the News on 19 October 1998, and ‘Kevin Tunell Is Paying $1 a Week for a Death He Caused and Finding the Price Unexpectedly High’ by Bill Hewitt and Tom Nugent, published in People magazine on 16 April 1990.
I loved piecing together the history of group madness from Gustave Le Bon through to Philip Zimbardo. Five people were incredibly generous with their time and expertise - Adam Curtis, Bob Nye, Steve Reicher, Alex Haslam and, especially, Clifford Stott. Clifford kindly talked me through the perils of deindividuation in two long Skype conversations. I recommend his book, Mad Mobs and Englishmen? Myths and Realities of the 2011 Riots, co-written with Steve Reicher and published by Constable & Robinson in 2011.
My research into Le Bon’s history took me to Bob Nye’s book The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the 3rd Republic, published by Sage Publications in 1975, and to Nye’s introduction to the Transaction Publishers’ reprint of the Dover edition of The Crowd by Gustave Le Bon, published 1995. Some details about Le Bon’s relationship with the Anthropological Society of Paris came from Nature and Nurture in French Social Sciences, 1859-1914 and Beyond by Martin S. Staum, published by McGill-Queens University Press in 2011. I learned that Le Bon’s fans included Goebbels and Mussolini from reading Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy, written by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi and published by the University of California Press in 2000, and from The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, written by David Welch and published by Routledge 2002.
My research into Philip Zimbardo took me to ‘Rethinking the Psychology of Tyranny: The BBC Prison Study’, written by Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam and published in the British Journal of Social Psychology in 2006, and to Dr Zimbardo’s rebuttal, ‘On Rethinking the Psychology of Tyranny: The BBC Prison Study’, published in the same journal that same year.
The Gary Slutkin quotation about the London riots being like a virus came from Dr Slutkin’s own article, ‘Rioting is a Disease Spread from Person to Person - the Key is to Stop the Infection’, published in the Observer on 13 August 2011. The Jack Levin quote came from ‘UK Riots: “We Don’t Want No Trouble. We Just Want A Job”’, written by Shiv
Malik and published in the Guardian on 12 August 2011. It was Clifford Stott’s book and guidance that took me to both of those stories.
My interview with Malcolm Gladwell was broadcast on the BBC’s Culture Show on 2 October 2013. My thanks to the director Colette Camden, the series producer Emma Cahusac, and the series editor Janet Lee.
Although this book is full of new stuff, a few lines were self-plagiarized from a column and a feature I wrote for Guardian Weekend magazine. I’m referring to the story of how my son forced me to re-enact being thrown into a lake, and my interviews with Troy and Mercedes Haefer from 4chan. Parts of those interviews appeared in my story ‘Security Alert’, which was published in the Guardian on 4 May 2013. My thanks to Charlotte Northedge, who edited that feature.
My information about Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford came from The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley and published by 4th Estate in 2007, and from Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars, written by Martin Pugh and published by Jonathan Cape in 2005. I’d like also to thank Jil Cove of the Cable Street Group, a history project created to commemorate those people who fought back against the British Union of Fascists. Some biographical details about Max Mosley came from his interview with John Humphrys on BBC Radio 4’s On The Ropes, which was broadcast 1 March 2011, and also from ‘Max Mosley Fights Back’, written by Lucy Kellaway and published in the Financial Times on 4 February 2011. I also drew from Justice David Eady’s 24 July 2008 adjudication on Max Mosley v. News Group Newspapers Ltd, which can be read on bbc.co.uk.
I learned about the suicide of the Welsh lay preacher Arnold Lewis from three sources: News of the World?: Fake Sheikhs and Royal Trappings, which was written by Peter Burden and published by Eye Books in 2009; Tickle The Public: One Hundred Years of the Popular Press, written by Matthew Engel and published by Phoenix in 1997; and Ian Cutler’s self-published memoir, The Camera Assassin III: Confessions of a Gutter Press Photojournalist, which is available for free on his website - www.cameraassassin.co.uk.
I first learned about David Buss - the author of The Murderer Next Door - from Radiolab: The Bad Show, which was broadcast on WNYC on 9 January 2012. It was a producer at Radiolab - Tim Howard - who put me in touch with their former contributor, Jonah Lehrer. So my thanks to them for that too. The Murderer Next Door was published by Penguin in 2005.
Some background information on the Zumba prostitute ring in Kennebunk came from the story ‘Modern-Day Puritans Wring Hands Over Zumba Madam’s List Of Shame’ by Patrik Jonsson, which was published in the Christian Science Monitor on 13 October 2012.
For more on Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s days at Stanford, I recommend ‘The Birth of Google’ by John Battelle, which was published in Wired magazine in August 2005.
All my information about the Stasi came from Anna Funder’s brilliant Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, published by Granta in 2003 and by Harper Perennial in 2011.
My research into the terrible story of Lindsay Armstrong took me to ‘She Couldn’t Take Any More’, which was written by Kirsty Scott and published in the Guardian on 2 August 2002. My thanks to Kirsty for her article and for her help in putting me in touch with Lindsay’s mother, Linda.
The picture of Lindsey Stone at Arlington here was taken by Jamie Schuh.
Biographical information about Jim McGreevey came from his memoir, The Confession, published by William Morrow Paperbacks in 2007.
The picture of Drumthwacket here is copyright (c) ClassicStock / Alamy.
For more on Walpole Prison during the 1970s I recommend When The Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story In The Movement For Prison Abolition, by Jamie Bissonnette, with Ralph Hamm, Robert Dellelo and Edward Rodman, published by South End Press in 2008, and James Gilligan’s Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, published by Vintage in 1997. In 1981, the Massachusetts state senator Jack Backman wrote an open letter to Amnesty International complaining about conditions inside Walpole. I used a few lines from his letter in my description of life inside the prison. My thanks to Backman’s former aide S. Brian Wilson for publishing it online.
A huge number of economists and journalists and ad revenue people offered to help me understand how Google may have profited from the shaming of Justine Sacco. I’m very grateful to them all - Chris Bannon, Aarti Shahani, Jeremy Gin, Ruth Lewy, Solvej Krause, Rebecca Watson, Paul Zak, Darren Filson, Brian Lance, Jonathan Hersh, Alex Blumberg, Steve Henn, and Zoe Chace.
My thanks to Thomas Goetz for his help in tracking down the inventor of Your Speed signs, and to Richard Drdul for allowing me to use his picture of one here.
My wife Elaine was a brilliant early reader, as were my editors Geoff Kloske at Riverhead, Kris Doyle and Paul Baggaley at Picador, and Natasha Fairweather and Natasha Galloway at A. P. Watt / United Agents. They helped me think about ways to shape this book when I really needed help. Thanks also to Derek Johns, Sarah Thickett and Georgina Carrigan at A. P. Watt / United Agents; Casey Blue James, Laura Perciasepe and Elizabeth Hohenadel at Riverhead; Ira Glass, Julie Snyder and Brian Reed at This American Life; Jim Nelson and Brendan Vaughan at GQ; Ashley Cataldo at the American Antiquarian Society; Toni Massaro at the University of Arizona; Dan Kahan at Yale; and Sarah Vowell, Jonathan Wakeham, Starlee Kine, Fenton Bailey, Geoff Lloyd, Emma-Lee Moss, Mike McCarthy, Marc Maron, Tim Minchin, Daniel and Paula Ronson, Leslie Hobbs, Brian Daniels, Barbara Ehrenreich, Marty Sheehan, and Camilla Elworthy.
My biggest thanks go to my interviewees, especially Jonah Lehrer, Justine Sacco, Lindsey Stone, Hank, Adria Richards, and Raquel. These people had never before spoken to a journalist about what had happened to them. I was asking them to relive for me some of the most traumatic moments of their lives. Some of them took a lot of convincing, and I hope they think it was worthwhile.
Jon Ronson is an award-winning writer and documentary maker. He is the author of many bestselling books, including Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie, Lost at Sea, The Psychopath Test, The Men Who Stare at Goats and Them: Adventures with Extremists. His first fictional screenplay, Frank, co-written with Peter Straughan, starred Michael Fassbender. He lives in London and New York City.
ALSO BY JON RONSON
Them: Adventures with Extremists
The Men Who Stare at Goats
Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness
What I Do: More True Tales of Everyday Craziness
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries
Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie
First published 2015 by Picador
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Table of Contents
Dedication page
Contents
1. Braveheart
2. I’m Glad I’m Not That
3. The Wilderness
4. God That Was Awesome
5. Man Descends Several Rungs in the Ladder of Civilization
6. Doing Something Good
7. Journey To A Shame-Free Paradise
8. The Shame Eradication Workshop
9. A Town Abuzz Over Prostitution and a Client List
10. The Near Drowning of Mike Daisey
11. The Man Who Can Change the Google Search Results
12. The Terror
13. Raquel in a Post-Shaming World
14. Cats and Ice Cream and Music
15. Your Speed
Bibliography and Acknowledgements
About the Author
ALSO BY JON RONSON
Copyright page
