Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Lehrer: In July 1838, Charles Darwin considered the possibility of marriage in his scientific notebook. His thoughts quickly took the shape of a list, a balance sheet of reasons to “marry” and “not marry.” The pros of wedlock were straightforward: Darwin cited the possibility of children (“if it please God”), the health benefits of attachment and the pleasure of having a “constant companion (& friend in old age).” A wife, he wrote, was probably “better than a dog anyhow.”

Gopnik: And the Darwins went on to have something close to an ideal marriage.

Lehrer: This might seem like an inauspicious start to a relationship, but the Darwins went on to have a nearly ideal marriage.

And so on, for a few paragraphs. Engber wasn’t totally sure this counted as plagiarism, “or if [Lehrer] modified his words to stop just short of doing so.” Or maybe both men had drawn from the same source: “In the footnotes Lehrer cites page 661 of Desmond and Moore’s 1991 biography of Darwin. Anyone who has a copy of that book is invited to check the wordings.”

But even if it wasn’t plagiarism, Engber was “convinced that Lehrer hasn’t changed his ways at all. He’s set his course as clearly as can be. He’ll recycle and repeat, he’ll puke his gritty guts out.”

No matter what transgressions Jonah had or hadn’t committed — it seemed to me — he couldn’t win. But his Book About Love is scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster around the same time that this book will appear, so we’ll all learn at once if it will win him some redemption.

During the months that followed, it became routine. Everyday people, some with young children, were getting annihilated for tweeting some badly worded joke to their hundred or so followers. I’d meet them in restaurants and airport cafés — spectral figures wandering the earth like the living dead in the business wear of their former lives. It was happening with such regularity that it didn’t even seem coincidental that one of them, Justine Sacco, had been working in the same office building as Michael Moynihan until three weeks earlier when, passing through Heathrow Airport, she wrote a tweet that came out badly.

—

It was December 20, 2013. For the previous two days she’d been tweeting little acerbic jokes to her 170 followers about her holiday travels. She was like a social media Sally Bowles, decadent and flighty and unaware that serious politics were looming. There was her joke about the German man on the plane from New York: “Weird German Dude: You’re in first class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant. — Inner monolog as I inhale BO. Thank god for pharmaceuticals.” Then the layover at Heathrow: “Chili — cucumber sandwiches — bad teeth. Back in London!” Then the final leg: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

She chuckled to herself, pressed send, and wandered around the airport for half an hour, sporadically checking Twitter.

“I got nothing,” she told me. “No replies.”

I imagined her feeling a bit deflated about this — that sad feeling when nobody congratulates you for being funny, that black silence when the Internet doesn’t talk back. She boarded the plane. It was an eleven-hour flight. She slept. When the plane landed, she turned on her phone. Straightaway there was a text from someone she hadn’t spoken to since high school: “I’m so sorry to see what’s happening.”

She looked at it, baffled.

“And then my phone started to explode,” she said.

—

We were having this conversation three weeks later at — her choice of location — the Cookshop restaurant in New York City. It was the very same restaurant where Michael had recounted to me the tale of Jonah’s destruction. It was becoming for me the Restaurant of Stories of Obliterated Lives. But it was only a half coincidence. It was close to the building where they both worked. Michael had been offered a job at The Daily Beast as a result of his great Jonah scoop, and Justine had an office upstairs, running the PR department for the magazine’s publisher, IAC — which also owned Vimeo and OkCupid and Match.com. The reason why she wanted to meet me here, and why she was wearing her expensive-looking work clothes, was that at six p.m. she was due in there to clean out her desk.

As she sat on the runway at Cape Town Airport, a second text popped up: “You need to call me immediately.” It was from her best friend, Hannah. “You’re the number one worldwide trend on Twitter right now.”

“In light of @JustineSacco disgusting racist tweet, I’m donating to @CARE today,” and “How did @JustineSacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!” and “No words for that horribly disgusting, racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond horrified,” and “I’m an IAC employee and I don’t want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever,” and “Everyone go report this cunt @Justine Sacco,” and from IAC: “This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight,” and “Fascinated by the @JustineSacco train wreck. It’s global and she’s apparently *still on the plane,*” and “All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail,” and “Oh man, @JustineSacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands,” and “Looks like @JustineSacco lands in about 9mins, this should be interesting,” and “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired,” and then, after Hannah frantically deleted Justine’s Twitter account, “Sorry @JustineSacco — your tweet lives on forever,” and so on for a total of a hundred thousand tweets, according to calculations by the website BuzzFeed, until weeks later: “Man, remember Justine Sacco? #HasJustineLandedYet. God that was awesome. MILLIONS of people waiting for her to land.”

—

I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body perfectly, everything smooth and sleek and luxurious, and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of torture — like she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy.

—

Over the years, I’ve sat across tables from a lot of people whose lives had been destroyed. Usually, the people who did the destroying were the government or the military or big business or, as with Jonah Lehrer, basically themselves (at least at first with Jonah — we took over as he tried to apologize). Justine Sacco felt like the first person I had ever interviewed who had been destroyed by us .

• • •

Google has an engine — Google AdWords — that tells you how many times your name has been searched for during any given month. In October 2013, Justine was googled thirty times. In November 2013, she was googled thirty times. Between December 20 and the end of December, she was googled 1,220,000 times.

—

A man had been waiting for her at Cape Town Airport. He was a Twitter user, @Zac_R. He took her photograph and posted it online. “Yup,” he wrote, “@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town international. She’s decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.”