Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

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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.

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.

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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 to 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.

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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.”