So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

  • • •

  Philip Zimbardo’s assistant e-mailed. “Unfortunately he is declining all further interview obligations until mid-fall due to a full schedule.” It was February. I asked her if maybe she could let me know if he was going to be involved in any de-individuation projects. She said she wouldn’t. “I receive many many many requests of this sort daily and simply cannot keep up with the requests to remember to be in touch with individuals.” I told her I’d spoken to Dave Eshelman and asked if I could at least do a fact check with Dr. Zimbardo. “He may be able to answer a few short questions in mid-May via e-mail,” she replied. And so in May I sent her Dave Eshelman’s quotes. “Doesn’t the phrase ‘doing something good’ point to the opposite of Dr. Zimbardo’s conclusions?” I wrote. “Dave Eshelman hadn’t been infected by an evil environment. He was trying to be helpful.”

  She forwarded my message to Dr. Zimbardo, writing: “Just send back to me! Or I fear he will continue corresponding with you directly!!” (I was accidentally copied in on the exchange.) Zimbardo e-mailed me back later that evening. “Please suspend your naiveté briefly,” he wrote. “Eshelman has publicly said he decided to be ‘the most cruel, abusive guard imaginable’ in videotaped interviews, that the prisoners were his ‘puppets,’ that he decided to push them as far as he could until they rebelled. They never did and he never let up. In fact, his degrading abuses escalated every night. Trying to be helpful? He created the evil environment that crushed innocent students and prisoners!”

  —

  Was Zimbardo right—and was I being naive? Was Dave soft-soaping his brutality all these years later? I did more research and discovered that I wasn’t the first person to have found the Zimbardo experiment a bit contrived. The Boston College psychologist Peter Gray—author of the widely used introductory textbook Psychology—published an essay in Psychology Today titled “Why Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment Isn’t in My Textbook.”

  Twenty-one boys (OK, young men) [there were actually twenty-four] are asked to play a game of prisoners and guards. It’s 1971. There have recently been many news reports about prison riots and the brutality of guards. So, in this game, what are these young men supposed to do? Are they supposed to sit around talking pleasantly with one another about girlfriends, movies, and such? No, of course not. This is a study of prisoners and guards, so their job clearly is to act like prisoners and guards—or, more accurately, to act out their stereotyped views of what prisoners and guards do. Surely, Professor Zimbardo, who is right there watching them (as the Prison Superintendent) would be disappointed if, instead, they had just sat around chatting pleasantly and having tea. Much research has shown that participants in psychological experiments are highly motivated to do what they believe the researchers want them to do.

  Gray felt Zimbardo’s critical error was in awarding himself the role of superintendent, instead of being some remote observer. And he was no aloof superintendent. Before the experiment began, he gave his guards a pep talk, as he later recounted in his own book The Lucifer Effect.

  “We cannot physically abuse or torture them,” I said. “We can create boredom. We can create a sense of frustration. We can create fear in them, to some degree. We can create a notion of the arbitrariness that governs their lives, which are totally controlled by us, by the system, by you, me, [Warden] Jaffe. They’ll have no privacy at all, there will be constant surveillance—nothing they do will go unobserved. They will have no freedom of action. They will be able to do nothing and say nothing that we don’t permit. We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. They’re going to be wearing uniforms, and at no time will anybody call them by name; they will have numbers and be called only by their numbers. In general, what all this should create in them is a sense of powerlessness. We have total power in the situation. They have none.”

  • • •

  For Gustave LeBon, a crowd was just a great ideology-free explosion of madness—a single blob of violent color without variation. But that wasn’t Twitter. Twitter did not speak with one voice. Within Justine Sacco’s pile-on, there had been misogynists: “Somebody (HIV+) must rape this bitch and we’ll see if her skin color protects her from AIDS.” There had been humanitarians: “If @JustineSacco’s unfortunate words about AIDS bother you, join me in supporting @CARE’s work in Africa.” There had been corporations promoting products, like the airplane Wi-Fi provider Gogo: “Next time you plan to tweet something stupid before you take off, make sure you are getting on a @Gogo flight! CC: @JustineSacco.”

  All these people had, just as Steve Reicher said, come together spontaneously, without leadership. I wasn’t one of them. But I’d piled on plenty of people like Justine. I’d been beguiled by the new technology—a toddler crawling toward a gun. Just like with Dave Eshelman, it was the desire to do something good that had propelled me. Which was definitely a better thing to be propelled by than group madness. But my desire had taken a lot of scalps—I’d torn apart a lot of people I couldn’t now remember—which made me suspect that it was coming from some very weird dark well, some place I really didn’t want to think about. Which was why I had to think about it.

  Six

  Doing Something Good

  I am a nobody,” said Hank, “just a guy with a family and a job, a middle America–type guy.”

  Hank wasn’t his real name. He’d managed to keep that aspect of himself a secret. He was talking to me via Google Hangouts from his kitchen in a suburban house in a West Coast American town I promised him I wouldn’t name. He looked frail, fidgety, the sort of man more comfortable working alone at a computer than talking to a human stranger via one.

  On March 18, 2013, Hank was in the audience at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara, California, when a stupid joke popped into his head, which he murmured to his friend Alex.

  “What was the joke?” I asked him.

  “It was so bad I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “It was about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle—a ridiculous dongle. We were giggling about that. It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”

  A few moments earlier, Hank and Alex had been giggling over some other Beavis-and-Butt-head-type tech in-joke about “forking someone’s repo.” “We’d decided it was a new form of flattery,” Hank explained. “A guy had been onstage presenting his new project and Alex said, ‘I would fork that guy’s repo.’”

  (In tech jargon “to fork” means to take a copy of another person’s software so you can work on it independently. Another word for software is “repository.” This is why “forking someone’s repo” works both as a term of flattery and also as sexual innuendo—just in case you wanted to know. I think it is a very special sort of hell where you’re compelled to explain to a journalist some terrible throwaway joke you made ten months earlier and the journalist keeps saying, “I’m sorry. I still don’t get it,” but that was the hell Hank found himself in during his Google Hangouts chat with me.)

  Moments after making the dongle joke, Hank half noticed the woman sitting in front of them at the conference stand up, turn around, and take a photograph. Hank thought she was taking a picture of the crowd. So he looked forward, trying not to mess up her shot.

  It’s a little painful to look at this photograph now—knowing what was about to happen to them. Those mischievous, stupid smiles that follow in the wake of a dongle joke successfully shared would be Hank’s and Alex’s last smiles for a while.

  Hank is on the left, Alex on the right.

  —

  Ten minutes after the photograph was taken, a conference organizer came down the aisle and said to Hank and Alex, “Can you come with me?”

  They were taken into an office and told there’d been a complaint about sexual comments. “I immediately apologized,” Hank said. “I knew exactly what they were talking about. I told them what we’d said, and that we didn’t mean for it t
o come across as a sexual comment, and that we were sorry if someone overheard and was offended. They were like, ‘Okay. I see what happened.’”

  And that was that. The incident passed. Hank and Alex were badly shaken up—“We’re nerdy guys and confrontation isn’t something we handle well. It’s not something we’re accustomed to”—and so they decided to leave the conference early.

  —

  They were on their way to the airport when they started wondering exactly how the woman sitting in front of them had conveyed her complaint to the conference organizers. They suddenly felt anxious about this. The nightmarish possibility was that it had been communicated in the form of a public tweet. And so, with apprehension, they had a look.

  A bolt of anxiety shot through Hank. He quickly scanned her replies, but there was nothing much—just the odd congratulation from a few of her 9,209 followers for the “noble” way she’d “educated” the men behind her. He noticed ruefully that a few days earlier the woman—her name was Adria Richards—had herself tweeted a stupid penis joke. She’d suggested to a friend that he put socks down his pants to bewilder TSA agents at the airport. Hank relaxed a little.

  The next day Adria Richards followed up her tweet with a blog post:

  Yesterday, I publicly called out a group of guys at the PyCon conference who were not being respectful to the community.

  She explained the background—how she was a “developer evangelist at a successful start-up” and that while the men had been giggling about big dongles, the presenter onstage was talking about initiatives to bring more women into the industry. In fact, he’d just projected onto the screen a photograph of a little girl at a tech workshop.

  Accountability was important. These guys sitting right behind me felt safe in the crowd. I got that and realized that being anonymous was fueling their behavior. This is known as Deindividuation. Theories of deindividuation propose [here Adria was quoting from Wikipedia] that it is a psychological state of decreased self-evaluation and decreased evaluation apprehension causing antinormative and disinhibited behavior. Deindividuation theory seeks to provide an explanation for a variety of antinormative collective behavior, such as violent crowds, lynch mobs, etc.

  Deindividuation. Here was Gustave LeBon and Philip Zimbardo springing into life once again, this time within Adria’s blog.

  I stood up slowly, turned around and took three, clear photos . . . There is something about crushing a little kid’s dream that gets me really angry . . .

  It takes three words to make a difference:

  “That’s not cool.” . . .

  Yesterday the future of programming was on the line and I made myself heard.

  —ADRIA RICHARDS, But You’re a Girl BLOG, MARCH 18, 2013

  But Hank had already been called into his boss’s office and fired.

  • • •

  I packed up all my stuff in a box,” Hank said, “then I went outside to call my wife. I’m not one to shed tears but . . . When I got in the car with my wife I just . . . I’ve got three kids. Getting fired was terrifying.”

  That night Hank made his only public statement. (Like Justine and Jonah, he had never spoken to a journalist about what had happened until he spoke to me.) He posted a short message on the discussion board Hacker News.

  Hi, I’m the guy who made a comment about big dongles. First of all I’d like to say I’m sorry. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position . . . [But] as a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have 3 kids and I really liked that job.

  She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate.

  “The next day,” Hank said, “Adria Richards called my company asking them to ask me to remove the portion of my apology that stated I lost my job as a result of her tweet.”

  • • •

  I sent Adria an interview request. “All right, pitch me via e-mail and if relevant, I’ll respond,” she replied. So I pitched. Successfully. We agreed to meet two weeks later. “We will meet in a public place for safety reasons,” Adria wrote. “Make sure to bring along your ID for verification.”

  —

  We settled on the international check-in desks at San Francisco Airport. I was expecting someone fiercer. But when I saw her half wave at me from across the terminal, she didn’t seem fierce at all. She seemed introverted and delicate, just like how Hank had come across over Google Hangouts. We found a café and she told me about the moment it all began for her—the moment she overheard the comment about the big dongle.

  “Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise up on your back?” she asked me.

  “You felt fear?” I asked.

  “Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”

  Which was why, she said, she “slowly stood up, rotated from my hips, and took three photos.” She tweeted one, “with a very brief summary of what they said. Then I sent another tweet describing my location. Right? And then the third tweet was the [conference’s] code of conduct.”

  “Danger?” I said. “What were you imagining might . . . ?”

  “Have you ever heard that thing, ‘Men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them’?” she said.

  I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She had, after all, been in the middle of a tech conference with eight hundred bystanders.

  “Sure,” Adria replied. “And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.”

  This seemed a weak gambit. Men can sometimes be correct. There is some Latin for this kind of logical fallacy. It’s called an ad hominem attack. When someone can’t defend a criticism against them, they change the subject by attacking the criticizer.

  “Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,” I said. “I know you didn’t call for him to be fired. But you must have felt pretty bad.”

  “Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him but it only goes so far. If he had Down syndrome and he accidentally pushed someone off a subway that would be different. . . . I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes I did.”

  • • •

  The evening Hank posted his statement on Hacker News, outsiders began to involve themselves in his and Adria’s story. Hank started receiving messages of support from men’s-rights bloggers. He didn’t respond to any of them. Later a Gucci Little Piggy blogger wrote that Hank’s Hacker News message had revealed him to be a man with

  a complete lack of backbone . . . by apologizing you are just saying, “I am a weak enemy—do with me what you will.” [In publicly shaming Hank, Adria had] complete and utter power over his children. That doesn’t piss this guy off?

  At the same time that Hank was being feted and then insulted by the men’s-rights bloggers, Adria discovered she was getting discussed on a famous meeting place for trolls: 4chan/b/.

  A father of three is out of a job because a silly joke he was telling a friend was overheard by someone with more power than sense. Let’s crucify this cunt.

  Kill her.

  Cut out her uterus with an xacto knife.

  Someone sent Adria a photograph of a beheaded woman with tape over her mouth. Adria’s face was superimposed onto the bodies of porn actors. Websites were created to teach people how to make the superimposing look seamless, by matching skin tones. On Facebook someone wrote, “I hope I can find Adria, kidnap her, put a torture bag over her head, and shoot a .22 subsonic round right int
o her fucking skull. Fuck that bitch make her pay make her obey.” (That message, Adria told me, although I couldn’t confirm it, was from a student at the New York City College of Technology.)

  “Death threats and rape threats only feed her cause,” someone eventually wrote on 4chan/b/. “I don’t mean stop doing things. Just think first. Do something productive.”

  Then her employer’s website and servers came under a massive DDoS attack, which caused them to crash—the automated version of one person or even thousands sitting at a computer manually pressing refresh relentlessly until the targeted website becomes overpowered and collapses. A group of attackers said the attacks would stop if Adria was fired. Hours later she was fired—publicly and without warning, according to SendGrid’s CEO, for dividing the community she was supposed to unite.

  “I slept on couches for most of 2013,” she later emailed me. “I cried a lot during this time, journaled, and escaped by watching Netflix. How do I feel about losing my job? I didn’t expect it. SendGrid [her employers] threw me under the bus. I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.”

  • • •

  A few days before I flew to San Francisco to meet Adria, I posted a message on 4chan/b/ asking for anyone personally involved in her destruction to contact me. The message was deleted in less than a minute. I posted another request. That one vanished after a few seconds. Somebody inside 4chan was silently erasing me whenever I tried to make contact. But my messages happened to coincide with the arrests of some hard-core 4chan trolls and DDoSers and activists, so suddenly there were real names out there. Which was how I came to meet a twenty-one-year-old 4chan denizen, Mercedes Haefer.