Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

“That was Adria Richards,” I said. “Justine Sacco was the AIDS-tweet woman.”

“Well, that was Twitter,” she said. “Twitter is a different beast from 4chan. It has more regular morals and values than 4chan. Adria Richards got attacked because she got a guy fired for making a dongle joke that wasn’t directed at anyone. He wasn’t hurting anyone. She was impeding his freedom of speech and the Internet spanked her for it.”

“And Justine Sacco?” I said.

“There’s a fair understanding on the Internet of what it means to be the little guy,” Mercedes said, “the guy rich white assholes make jokes about. And so the issue with Justine Sacco is that she’s a rich white person who made a joke about black sick people who will die soon. So for a few hours, Justine Sacco got to find out what it feels like to be the little guy everyone makes fun of. Dragging down Justine Sacco felt like dragging down every rich white person who’s ever gotten away with making a racist joke because they could. She thought her black AIDS joke was funny because she doesn’t know what it’s like to be a disadvantaged black person or be diagnosed with AIDS.” She paused. “Some sorts of crimes can only be handled by public consensus and shaming. It’s a different kind of court. A different kind of jury.”

—

I asked Mercedes to explain to me one of the great mysteries of modern shamings — why they were so breathtakingly misogynistic. Nobody had used the language of sexual violence against Jonah, but when Justine and Adria stepped out of line, the rape threats were instant. And the 4chan people were about the most unpleasant.

“Yeah, it’s a bit extreme,” Mercedes replied. “4chan takes the worst thing it can imagine that person going through and shouts for that to happen. I don’t think it was a threat that anyone intended to carry through. And I think a lot of its use really did mean ‘destroy’ rather than ‘sexually assault.’” She paused. “But 4chan aims to degrade the target, right? And one of the highest degradations for women in our culture is rape. We don’t talk about rape of men, so I think it doesn’t occur to most people as a male degradation. With men, they talk about getting them fired. In our society men are supposed to be employed. If they’re fired, they lose masculinity points. With Donglegate she pointlessly robbed that man of his employment. She degraded his masculinity. And so the community responded by degrading her femininity.”

• • •

The death threats and rape threats against Adria continued even after she was fired. “Things got very bad for her,” Hank told me. “She had to disappear for six months. Her entire life was being evaluated by the Internet. It was not a good situation for her at all.”

“Have you ever met her?” I asked him.

“No,” Hank replied. “There’s never been any contact between us since she turned around and took my photograph.”

Ten months had passed since that day. Hank had had ten months to allow his feelings about her to settle into something coherent, so I asked him what he thought of her now.

“I think that nobody deserves what she went through,” he replied.

• • •

Maybe it was [Hank] who started all of this,” Adria told me in the café at the San Francisco airport. “No one would have known he got fired until he complained,” she said. “Maybe he’s to blame for complaining that he got fired. Maybe he secretly seeded the hate groups. Right?”

I was so taken aback by this suggestion that I didn’t say anything in defense of Hank at the time. But later I felt bad that I hadn’t stuck up for him. So I e-mailed her. I told her what he had told me — how he’d refused to engage with any of the bloggers or trolls who sent him messages of support. I added that I felt Hank was within his rights to post the message on Hacker News revealing he’d been fired.

Adria replied that she was happy to hear that Hank “wasn’t active in driving their interests to mount the raid attack,” but she held him responsible for it anyway. It was “his own actions that resulted in his own firing, yet he framed it in a way to blame me… If I had a spouse and two kids to support I certainly would not be telling ‘jokes’ like he was doing at a conference. Oh but wait, I have compassion, empathy, morals and ethics to guide my daily life choices. I often wonder how people like Hank make it through life seemingly unaware of how ‘the other’ lives in the same world he does but with countless less opportunities.”

• • •

I asked Hank if he found himself behaving differently since the incident. Had it altered how he lived his life?

“I distance myself from female developers a little bit now,” Hank replied. “I’m not as friendly. There’s humor, but it’s very mundane. You just don’t know. I can’t afford another Donglegate.”

“Give me an example,” I said. “So you’re in your new workplace”—Hank was offered another job right away—“and you’re talking to a female developer. In what way do you act differently toward her?”

“Well,” Hank said. “We don’t have any female developers at the place I’m working at now. So.”

Another picture Adria took at the tech conference on the day of the dongle joke.

• • •

You’ve got a new job now, right?” I said to Adria.

“No,” she said.

• • •

Adria’s father was an alcoholic. He used to beat Adria’s mother. He hit her with a hammer. He knocked all her teeth out. After he left them, Adria’s mother fell apart. She didn’t feed or wash Adria. “Going to school was hard,” Adria wrote on her blog in February 2013. “The kids would tease me because my clothes were dirty and my shoes had holes. My hair was a complete mess. I felt ashamed. I was hungry all the time.” Adria ended up in foster care.

She sent me a letter she’d written to her father. “It’s Adria! How are you doing? I know it’s been a very, very long time. I want to see you. I love you, daddy. I’m 26 years old now. If you get this, please contact me as I really would love to see you.”

Her father didn’t write back. She hasn’t heard from him in decades. She thinks he’s probably dead.

When I asked Adria if her childhood trauma might have influenced the way she’d regarded Hank and Alex, she said no. “They say the same thing for rape victims. If you’ve been raped, you think all men are rapists.” She paused. “No. These dudes were straight up being not cool.”

• • •

I had shamed a lot of people. A lot of people had revealed their true selves for a moment and I had shrewdly noticed their masks slipping and quick-wittedly alerted others. But I couldn’t remember any of them now. So many forgotten outrages. Although I did remember one. The deviant was the Sunday Times and Vanity Fair columnist A. A. Gill. His wrongdoing was a column he wrote about shooting a baboon on safari in Tanzania: “I’m told they can be tricky to shoot. They run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed.357 blew his lungs out.” A. A. Gill’s motive? “I wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.”

I’d been about the first person to alert social media. This is because A. A. Gill always gives my television documentaries very bad reviews, so I tend to keep a vigilant eye on things he can be got for. And within minutes it was everywhere.

Following in Jan Moir’s footsteps, “AA Gill” is now a trending topic on Twitter, where [he is] being denounced for the murder of a primate. The Guardian, of course, is fanning the flames. They’ve been in touch with Steve Taylor, a spokesman for the League Against Cruel Sports, who said: “This is morally completely indefensible. If he wants to know what it [is] like to shoot a human, he should take aim at his own leg.”