Jon Ronson talks about the shamed people in his new book

boing
21

This may be one of 'kind’s lacunae; but I’d be inclined to make an appeal for “Will hearing it save somebody else from potential trouble?”

Most rumor-mill (especially the online stuff) is pure petty malice for amusement’s sake; but some unpleasant talk about people is a warning. Are they a con-man? The kind of creep you don’t want to be alone with? Connected to some shady occurrences?

Especially in matters that occur outside the remit of a formal system of law, or without sufficient hard evidence for one to get involved; there are reasons other than a taste for the lurid to exchange dirt on people.

Obviously, most of the massive ‘social’ online pile-ons are nothing of this kind, mostly hitting targets chosen for weakness and ease, rather than dangerousness; but there are uses for bad reputation, some of them important.

6 Likes
22

The BoingBoingverse’s original reaction to the Justine Sacco incident:

1 Like
23

You make a good point. I guess my reply is that “kind” doesn’t have to apply only to the person being talked about: it is the height of kindness and fairness to warn potential future victims and to support past victims.

2 Likes
24

I can’t believe BB would defend Ronson’s treatment of Adria Richards’ story. Especially in asking this question: “I think that the people that you profiled, really, none of them did anything where they actually hurt someone, or tried to defraud anyone. Did you purposely pick people who were disproportionately punished for their transgression?”

Because Ronson’s book is clearly sympathizing with the guys - the guys who have jobs, the guys who were making off-color remarks in a professional setting, the guys who to this day still see nothing at all wrong with their actions. While Richards still doesn’t have a job, was threatened with rape and murder and a universe of other horrific acts, and feels pretty strongly that Ronson mis-represented his intent to her and then essentially took the side of the guys in his book.

I question, and we should all question, why a man losing his job due to his own life choices is a more important story to tell than a woman who, within 72 hours, became the target of a massive, organized harassment campaign that ended in her public firing. We need to ask why the man continues to enjoy anonymity yet a woman is threatened with physical, psychological, and economic violence for refusing to be silent about harassment that is illegal in all 50 states.

Most importantly, we need to ask why Jon Ronson decided, after benefiting for months on my free labor as he asked me time and time again to provide all sorts of information (including the name of the guy who is portrayed as the main subject of the article), to not tell my story.

Shame on you, Frauenfelder.

5 Likes
25

Why are you bringing up Malcolm Gladwell in an interview with Jon Ronson?

2 Likes
26

Famous people get redemption narratives in books with nice marketing budgets. Everyone else gets consequences. This is how we’re being trained to think. We want famous people to get second chances, or be safe from the results of being “shamed”. We want this for them because they’re famous, and therefore deserve better than the rest of us.

If a McDonald’s clerk wrote “Fuck you, [Fill in the racial/sex/gender/religion]” on a receipt and got caught in social media fired, he or she would not get mentioned here. Instead, it’s Monica Lewinsky, Justine Sacco and Shia LaBeouf.

What’s the common denominator here? Massive amounts of institutional protection for these people already exists. But god forbid they get the same treatment as everyone else. Can’t have that, can we?

3 Likes
27

I see what you did there! I honestly feel that there is a new style journalist that can talk about a subject where they seem like experts to anyone except anyone that has had more than a 100 level introduction to the field they are writing about. It is the whole Ted Talk Author personae. Ronson fits into this as does Gladwell. Both GREAT writers that can bring about a narrative that is entertaining, and yet almost devoid of any scientific understanding.

1 Like
28

Justine Sacco wasn’t famous though.

30

Non-academic book in ‘not being a piece of academic writing’ shocker

1 Like
31

I’m not asking for APA style dissertations, I’m expecting some real science when you are trying to purport yourself to be a science writer, writing about a scientific topic and purporting yourself to be an expert in a field because you have immersed yourself so deeply in it.

So yeah…theres that.

1 Like
32

@frauenfelder BOOK MURDERER!!

1 Like
33

From the write-up:

"At best a darkly ironic self-deprecation that could never fit into 140 characters, it resulted, within bare minutes, in an internet-wide scandal.

OH THE HORROR

1 Like
34

I don’t see where he ‘picks a side’ at all, simply because none of the people involved deserved what happened to them and he continuously says so. Every single situation doesn’t have to be a war between good and evil. Often, everybody just poorly managed the situation and nobody is actually the Big Bad.

The ‘guys’ didn’t deserve to be fired for a super silly little joke between them, not even a remotely hateful or violent one. The woman didn’t deserve to be fired and receive threats of violence. The fact that her consequences ended up being even worse than the men’s doesn’t make them or their own actions more evil. The situation spiraled way out of anyone’s control once it was made public.

Ms Richards was within her rights to complain to the conference’s management. Once she did, the management actually heeded her concerns and took care of the situation propotionately by warning the men. They accepted the warning and apologized. The whole thing ought to have stopped right there.

7 Likes
35

What we see in the people who rush to attack is much the same instinct as the folks who engage in “slut shaming” where they harass some 12 year old rape victim to the point of suicide. Their morality has an almost psychotic level of dissonance like the poeple who defend torture by essentially saing “It’s OK to do this because we are unconditionally good. Torture is moral because we are so ***NICE!!!***”

And as someone noted, this happens to people with no history of being jerks, based on nothing more than someones fatigued tweet. It’s like a national campaign labeling a truck driver that delivers sand as a “thief” as if thousands of people have suddenly decided he’s stealing sand, and they are violently outraged on behalf of the imaginary people who have been shortchanged of their imaginary sand. Justifying outrage against someone through the creation of a complete and elaborate paranoid fantasy world is familiar territory for anyone that has ever lived with an addict, personality disorder, or sociopath. People behave like that because they are fundementally ashamed of the sadistic little shit they are, so they project that onto someone else and try to destroy them. It’s literally the classic “witch hunt” where people are destroyed not for actual crimes but for allegedly thinking bad thoughts.

4 Likes
36

That thread is a moral graveyard. We can start with the fact that almost certainly none of us knew who Justine Sacco was. Here’s a fine example of a comment on that thread.

PUBLIC posts aren’t private and anyone with half a brain should know that. Privacy is, indeed, important, but she IN NO WAY wanted those tweets to be private. If you were able to look at her history, it’s REALLY evident that she enjoys the attention garnered from such “edgy” commentary.

I’m not going to say who said it, but it’s a regular.

This person has also said, in another thread,

Police officers generally aren’t going to give two shits about some random woman’s naked selfie floating around – except to insinuate, maybe, that it was their fault and they deserve it because they dared take a private photo (I was so upset at the time I hardly remember the two conversations I had with the cops, but let’s just say while they weren’t exactly assholes ,they weren’t really super nice or easy to talk to about something so personal and VIOLATING).

Now…I want to say something before I say anything else.

Please don’t go tracking down who said that. Some of you can figure it out easily enough. But let’s not. I’m using them as an example, but not for shaming an individual.

What I’m wanting to say is that all of us–all of us–are guilty of saying shitty, contradictory things at times. I know I am. I bring it up because I know of this person being a victim of public shaming, and having been blamed because hey, obviously she wanted people to see this, and here she is, saying a very similar thing, victim-blaming someone because if she didn’t want to lose her job because the Internet horde decided a random, unknown person’s weird tweet was worthy of losing her job, rape threats, and death threats.

deep breath

I for one am glad Mark posted this interview, because it’s a message this online forum needs. Look, if you look at any cause, whether it’s fighting against unfair privilege, GamerGate, anti-GamerGate, racism, sexism, what have you, it always starts with good intentions. I don’t know if it’s the pseudo-anonymity of the Internet, but it always seems like it starts out noble, and ends up being a poo-slinging fest. And it’s always justified in our eyes: my side has noble intentions. Those other guys? They’re assholes. They deserve whatever they get. When they do this thing to us, it’s terrible. When we do it to them, we’re doing so with noble intentions. There’s no way those other guys think they’re doing the right thing, because it’s obviously wrong. And when they point out the shitty things we supposedly did? Well, they’re wrong, because we know we’re right.

Personally, I’d love to see BoingBoing go back to the days of being here for the Happy Mutants. Remember when we all visited BoingBoing as an online destination to read about neat shit? It’s still there, but it sure seems like everything has an agenda. And if we read those stories, and we disagree? We won’t be invited back to discuss anything ever again. And what you get then is what the kids call a hugbox, a place where it’s completely non-confrontational because the only people allowed to discuss anything are the people who say, “I agree.”

And for God’s sake, people, stop and think before you get out the pitchforks.

7 Likes
37

This is also essentially the reason people (in the US, at least) are so unsympathetic towards prison reform. If one views oneself as incapable of transgression, then it become much easier to consider criminals inhuman. Apparently, the redemptive and restorative aspects of justice don’t mesh well with self-righteousness.

4 Likes
38

Nice mansplain there: you’ve got “implying stating the woman in question is mentally ill,” “connecting two unrelated parts of the story to make her seem particularly ridiculous,” and “arguing with a conclusion not in evidence.”

(Plus the inability to spell “losing.”)

4 Likes
39

I completely agree with this part of your comment.

However, have you read Ronson’s take on the situation? It really reads as exceptionally slanted and sympathetic to the “Richards is at fault here” narrative.

40

lol, mansplaining. That’s a good out when you can’t engage in an honest discussion with someone.

Do you honestly think the following is the reaction of a reasonable person to a childish joke?

She told me about 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.’”

This coming from somebody who had never experienced ‘sexual harassment’ in the workplace up to this point (according to that blog post you linked to), so it’s not like she’s already been primed and worn down or anything. Calling this sexual harassment as well is completely ridiculous, and frankly quite maddening, it trivialises genuine abuse. I can’t even see how you can reasonably claim it has anything to do with sexism (which that blog also described it as). Oddly enough she doesn’t seem to have any problems with dick jokes in general. So the only sexism I see here is that there should be one standard for women, and another men.

Which are the unrelated parts of the story you’re referring to?

You got me though on the extra “o” though, now I feel really bad.

3 Likes
41
  • Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen;
  • Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen in other locations than work.

Here are some questions for you:

Do you honestly think that only women who have experienced sexual harassment (why the scare quotes?) in the workplace are primed to be concerned about their safety? Or worn down from dealing with sexism on a daily basis?

Do you understand how PTSD triggers work?

Do you think that being alert and cautious around a strange man is something only a small percentage of women do?

4 Likes