Source: LBC
URL: http://www.lbc.co.uk/sexism-shame-scientist-considered-suicide-124010
Date: 28/01/2016
Event: Jon Ronson about Tim Hunt: "And he contemplated suicide."
Credit: LBC
People:
James O'Brien: What made you want to address this? And did you think there was a whole book in it, when you started?
Jon Ronson: Yeah, 'cause I realised that it was about - it was about something much bigger than Twitter, I suppose, it was about how, given the opportunity, we would destroy other people. Um, we were inventing a new way of being, where, instead of being curious and empathetic and compassionate, we were being cold and instantly judgemental. And, in fact, even calling for a bit of patience - so, like, one story was about a woman called Justine Sacco, who tried to make a liberal joke as she got on a plane to Capetown -
James O'Brien: So she was taking the mickey out of racists, wasn't she -
Jon Ronson: She was taking the mickey out of racists, she, er - but it, I mean, it was a terribly worded tweet, don't get me wrong -
James O'Brien: It was, of course it was. She worked in PR and she tweeted, turned off her phone, got on a plane -
Jon Ronson: And she tweeted "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!". And while she was asleep on the plane, Twitter dismantled her life. And one of the things that struck me about that was that the fact that she was asleep on a plane and unable to explain herself was part of the hilarity - people loved that -
James O'Brien: Yes.
Jon Ronson: - one tweet was "We're about to watch this Justine Sacco bitch get fired in real-time, before she even knows she's been fired".
James O'Brien: Relish...
Jon Ronson: Yeah, and I thought: that wasn't crazy people, like the people I wrote about in previous books, like powerful people all the way over there - that was us. And I thought: that's so interesting. So immediately I knew this was a big story.
James O'Brien: And you begin by explaining that you recognised that you were actually part of the problem - at the very beginning of Twitter, you were quite an early adopter and you kind of enjoyed piling in on people that you thought deserved it.
Jon Ronson: Yeah, and I'm the kind of social justicey type person - I'm a kind of, you know, I'm a politically correct person and I definitely felt some excitement when, say, a Daily Mail columnist wrote something racist or homophobic, or a corporation did something terrible. Um, and of course, decent social justice movements still happen on social media all the time - I think the Oscars So White campaign, at the moment, is an important thing. Um, it's about an insititution, it's not about taking a private individual, who hasn't really done anything that's wrong and then making them carry the weight of a massive ideology on their shoulders. So that's what I became really interested in, was how we'd shifted - look, we started loving shaming people so much that a day without a shaming felt like a day picking fingernails or treading water.
James O'Brien: You needed to find someone to have a pop at.
Jon Ronson: Yeah.
James O'Brien: But is that - do you think that, I mean, it's chicken and egg, isn't it, with the technology, because one thing - scold's bridles and stocks and the idea of publicly shaming people being as old as humanity itself. Is it just a variation on an old theme, or do you think it's actually a new social phenomenon?
Jon Ronson: I think it's new, because what you've got really profoundly, at the moment, is this kind of - the way that Twitter's set up is like a kind of mutual approval machine. So we surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do, we approve each other, and that's a kind of frantically exciting thing. And when somebody gets in the way of that, we scream them out. So it's a really - you know, we like to see ourselves as nonconformists on Twitter, but all this is a very conformist thing, where we're defining the boundaries of normality by, you know, tearing apart the people on the outside. And, in fact, in the old days - I spent some time up at the Massachusetts archives - and in the old days, public shaming, public humiliations were stopped because they were considered too brutal.
James O'Brien: Oh really.
Jon Ronson: Yeah, I found about this woman in the 1740s, called Abigail Gilpin, who had committed adultery, and she was going to be publicly flogged. And she was begging the judge - I found this court document - she was begging the judge, like "Flog me, fine, but not in public, please don't do it in public". It was the public nature of the punishments that horrified people.
James O'Brien: Hence the title So You've Been Publicly Shamed, as opposed to, I suppose, merely shamed.
Jon Ronson: Yeah.
James O'Brien: Do you have a - because you met up with a lot of the people involved. If I had a favourite - if that's the right word to use - I think the one I felt sorriest for was probably the bloke at the sort of lecture who did something, and the woman behind heard and took a picture of him, and he hadn't actually even put himself out there, really, had he.
Jon Ronson: Yeah, funny, at my show last night, somebody said - I was doing a public shaming show in Leicester Square last night - and somebody in the audience said "Well, you know, this isn't an important story to me, because I'm not on Twitter." And one answer to that is this: here was a guy who wasn't on Twitter, he was just in a conference -
James O'Brien: He turned to the bloke next to him and he just said something vaguely sexist, wasn't it -
Jon Ronson: Yeah, Beavis and Butt-Head-y, nothing - whispered it. Um, it was a kind of vaguely Beavis and Butt-Head-y kind of joke about "big dongles", a sort of tech joke. So the woman in front turned round and took a photograph and then they discovered later on, on their way to the airport - because they were then taken out of the conference and told there had been a complaint about sexual commments, and so they apologised and then left the conference. And I think all that's kind of fine, I mean, you know, but on the way to the airport, they thought "How did that happen?" Like suddenly we were just - and then they thought "That woman didn't put a picture on Twitter, did she?" So they checked on Twitter, and yeah, it was a picture of them with the caption "Not cool, jokes about big dongles right behind me". And the next day he was fired from his job. But then the woman who took the photo -
James O'Brien: This is where it gets absolutely crazy.
Jon Ronson: So he was fired -
James O'Brien: For bringing a company into disrepute, unwanted attention, yadda yadda.
Jon Ronson: And he's had three kids, so he posted his message on Hacker News, saying "Look, I'm really sorry for what I did, but I was fired. She just smiled and sealed my fate". And then she was bombarded - because - with death threats and rape threats. Because when a man gets shamed, it's something that'll get you fired. When a woman gets shamed, its's like "I'm going to rape you"... And so she got that - she had to move house, she had to go into hiding -
James O'Brien: She lost her job -
Jon Ronson: She lost her job. So that's what happens when all we can think to do is like pile shame onto shame, like dodgy builders, like, covering cracks.
James O'Brien: That's probably why I was - out of all the brilliant examples in the book, that was probably my favourite, because it really exploded any notion of there being any right and wrong in this process. It's all about the moment, and it's all about that adrenaline - well, you tell me what it's all about - what do these people get out of it?
Jon Ronson: Well, I think for some people it's genuine - you know, there's this - people who are kind of genuinely upset about - you know, Justine's tweet was genuinely offensive to some people. But then hipsters got involved. With Justine, people were tweeting, um, because the hashtag started to trend worldwide, hashtag #hasJustinelandedyet. And people were tweeting "#hasJustinelandedyet Maybe the best thing ever to happen to my Friday night". So you had compassionate people, you had hipsters, then you had trolls. Somebody wrote "Somebody HIV positive should rape this bitch and then we'll find out if her skin colour protects her from AIDS". Of course, nobody went after that person - that person got a free ride. So she was - a whole bunch of things were going on - there was genuine upset, there was performance piety, where people -
James O'Brien: Interesting phrase, yes of course, virtue-signalling, as they call it now, that kind of thing.
Jon Ronson: Yeah.
James O'Brien: I haven't read the new chapter. People who have already read the book, like me, should know that the paperback version has a new chapter in it. So I don't know whether you mention this, but I have to say I thought of you first when Tim Hunt found himself in the firing line of precisely this sort of process.
Jon Ronson: Yeah, I actually met Tim Hunt for the first time last night.
James O'Brien: For the people who've forgotten, he is the academic who made a - well, to my mind - a relatively innocuous comment about falling in love with women in laboratories but ended up being chased out of UCL.
Jon Ronson: It was, it was very similar to Justine in that he was on a plane, it was a joke, a stupid joke and he was - it's different to Justine because she's a private individual, he was a Nobel laureate, speaking in front of a room full of science writers. So he was kind of a dick. But, um -
James O'Brien: Apologies for Jon's language there - no, that's quite all right.
Jon Ronson: Essentially... But here was somebody who had to bear the weight of systemic failure. So women do find it hard to get a break in science, but - and there is obviously misogyny in the science world - but is it fair for this one guy, this elderly guy, this Nobel laureate, to have to carry all of that weight on his shoulders and be responsible, be kind of held responsible for all of that? And I was talking to him and his wife last night -
James O'Brien: Wow, they just came, did you invite them, or -
Jon Ronson: I did invite them to the talk. And he contemplated suicide. And people do kill themselves. And people - before you've been shamed, you don't realise the agony it is, this kind of relentless, sort of seemingly never-ending attacks on you, these waves of attack, like you've got a stomach bug -
James O'Brien: Some people would just say "Well, just turn it off, then".
Jon Ronson: Yeah, but - but he got fired, he got -
James O'Brien: There's no escape from it if you're a public figure.
Jon Ronson: Yeah, or even if you're a private individual, because your bosses are so scared that social media's going to get them next.
James O'Brien: You now have people that you've met who are desperately hoping that their new colleagues won't realise they're that person to whom that thing happened then.
Jon Ronson: Yeah, and then they're living in fear of being -
James O'Brien: Constant fear.
Jon Ronson: Yeah.
James O'Brien: Can we get the genie back in the bottle? We can't, can we.
Jon Ronson: I think the only way to do it is to have kind of conversations like this and to be more - I've been living in America too long, because the word that popped into my mind was "holistic". [They laugh.]
James O'Brien: Good lord, you certainly have...
Jon Ronson: But just - because you have a thousand people screaming at one person, even though tech utopians like to think of Twitter as a new form of democracy, that's actually the opposite of democracy. Whereas having conversations like this, even if people disagree, um, is democracy.
James O'Brien: And it gets it out there and it means some people will think twice before piling in next time, somebody has got the target painted on their backside. I knew this was going to happen - we're already out of time. What are you working on next?
Jon Ronson: I'm going to make - I'm making a drama, and I'm going to make a podcast series.
James O'Brien: Fantastic. Jon Ronson, it's a real pleasure. As I said, we wouldn't be able to scratch the surface of why we're interested - do you know, I bought my boss a copy of The Psychopath Test?
Jon Ronson: And is he a...?
James O'Brien: We'll leave it there... Um, Jon Ronson - his book So You've Been Publicly Shamed is out now in paperback. I would also heartily recommend The Psychopath Test and Them and indeed The Men Who Stare at Goats. Have I missed anything out?
Jon Ronson: Er, Lost at Sea.
James O'Brien: Thank you very much.