So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Everyone on the Internet needs to read So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which describes the way virtual lynch mobs can ruin people's lives over minor transgressions or stupid jokes. Anyone who has read this book would think twice before sending that snarky tweet, and the world would be a better place for it.

Ronson follows his usual wandering path, writing of his initial thrill when a shaming went his way, talking to people who got beat up on Twitter, investigating how people deal with the aftermath, showing what happens when you start a social media lynch mob and they turn on you, investigating how people in porn deal with shame, discuss theories of shaming, and trying to get a handle on the whole thing.

Ronson brings life to his interviewees, showing their fears, their mistakes, their triumphs. Some come across as nice people caught up in a bad situation, some as transgressive personalities who find their path to redemption cut off, a couple as out-in-out smug jerks.

The result is a typically fascinating Ronson book. And one that, if read by enough people, could just possibly make the internet a slightly more civil place.

I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

Ronson is adept at journalism much in the same way that Louis Theroux is; they appear non-threatening in all kinds of ways, and then nestle themselves into their interview subject, and manage to extract answers by being quite direct. That, and the fact that they're both quote good writing, are key in their results, which are good.

In this book, Ronson delves into shaming and hate, two major factors on the Internet. Nowadays, people get shamed because of all kinds of things, including inadvertent posts. Some of the questions he answers are: why do people team up to shame people online? Why are are the most acrimonious persons online anonymous? And considering that some of those whose crimes (and non-crimes) have been shared, duplicated, laughed at and re-posted a billion times: is it possible to "delete" those public search results when somebody searches for your name?

There are even named shaming and bully groups on the Internet, e.g. Anonymous, who may even do some good, despite all of the problems they create.

Ronson even examines shaming as justice for people who have been sentenced by the law, i.e. where Ted Poe, Texan judge, is concerned, and makes it problematic (which is good):

Ted Poe’s punishments were sometimes zany - ordering petty criminals to shovel manure, etc. - and sometimes as ingenious as a Goya painting. Like the one he handed down to a Houston teenager, Mike Hubacek. In 1996 Hubacek had been driving drunk at 100 mph with no headlights. He crashed into a van carrying a married couple and their nanny. The husband and the nanny were killed. Poe sentenced Hubacek to 110 days of boot camp, and to carry a sign once a month for ten years in front of high schools and bars that read, I KILLED TWO PEOPLE WHILE DRIVING DRUNK, and to erect a cross and a Star of David at the scene of the crash and to keep it maintained, and to keep photographs of the victims in his wallet for ten years, and to send $10 every week for ten years to a memorial fund in the names of the victims, and to observe the autopsy of a person killed in a drink-driving accident. Punishments like these had proved too psychologically torturous for other people.

A seventeen-year-old boy called Kevin Tunell had in 1982 killed a girl, Susan Herzog, while drink-driving near Washington DC. Her parents sued him, and were awarded $1.5 million in damages. But they offered the boy a deal. They would reduce the fine to just $936 if he’d mail them a cheque for $1, made out in Susan’s name, every Friday for eighteen years. He gratefully accepted their offer. Years later the boy began missing payments, and when Susan’s parents took him to court he broke down. Every time he filled in her name, he said, the guilt would tear him apart: ‘It hurts too much,’ he said. He tried to give the Herzogs two boxes of pre-written cheques, dated one per week until the end of 2001, a year longer than was required. But they refused to take them.

Judge Ted Poe’s critics - like the civil rights group the ACLU - argued to him the dangers of these ostentatious punishments, especially those that were carried out in public. They said it was no coincidence that public shaming had enjoyed such a renaissance in Mao’s China and Hitler’s Germany and the Ku Klux Klan’s America: it destroys souls, brutalizing everyone, the onlookers included, dehumanizing them as much as the person who was being shamed. How could Poe take someone with such low self-esteem that they needed to, say, rob a store, and then hold them up to officially sanctioned public ridicule?

Also, it's interesting to think of what pops up when you search for your own name on the Internet:

I kept remembering something Michael Fertik had said to me at the Village Pub in Woodside. ‘The biggest lie,’ he said, ‘is “The Internet is about you.” We like to think of ourselves as people who have choice and taste and personalized content. But the Internet isn’t about us. It’s about the companies that dominate the data flows of the Internet.’

Of course, does this mean that Internet disasters that bode an Internet destruction for some may earn some companies money?

Now, I suddenly wondered. Did Google make money from the destruction of Justine Sacco? Could a figure be calculated? And so I joined forces with a number-crunching researcher, Solvej Krause, and began writing to economists and analysts and online ad revenue people. Some things were known. In December 2013, the month of Justine’s annihilation, 12.2 billion Google searches took place - a figure that made me feel less worried about the possibility that people were sitting inside Google headquarters personally judging me. Google’s ad revenue for that month was $4.69 billion. Which meant they made an average of $0.38 for every search query. Every time we typed anything into Google: 38 cents to Google. Of those 12.2 billion searches that December, 1.2 million were people searching the name Justine Sacco. And so, if you average it out, Justine’s catastrophe instantaneously made Google $456,000.

But he thought it would be appropriately conservative - maybe a little too conservative - to estimate Justine’s worth, being a ‘low-value query’, at a quarter of the average. Which, if true, means Google made $120,000 from the destruction of Justine Sacco.

Maybe that’s an accurate figure. Maybe Google made more, or possibly less. But one thing’s certain. Those of us who did the actual annihilating? We got nothing.

In other words, yes, Google and Twitter and other companies that you use to search for data make money off not handling public shamings. These companies can bow down to organisations, companies and governments that want data on individuals, but they won't remove it even though it's the demise of that person. And persons.

All in all, Ronson goes through a bunch of interesting cases where people have been shamed, how they've handled it and he also tries to delve into his own shaming, both shamings of himself and how he's shamed others. It's a quite interesting book.

I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

Ronson is adept at journalism much in the same way that Louis Theroux is; they appear non-threatening in all kinds of ways, and then nestle themselves into their interview subject, and manage to extract answers by being quite direct. That, and the fact that they're both quote good writing, are key in their results, which are good.In this book, Ronson delves into shaming and hate, two major factors on the Internet. Nowadays, people get shamed because of all kinds of things, including inadvertent posts. Some of the questions he answers are: why do people team up to shame people online? Why are are the most acrimonious persons online anonymous? And considering that some of those whose crimes (and non-crimes) have been shared, duplicated, laughed at and re-posted a billion times: is it possible to "delete" those public search results when somebody searches for your name?There are even named shaming and bully groups on the Internet, e.g. Anonymous, who may even do some good, despite all of the problems they create.Ronson even examines shaming as justice for people who have been sentenced by the law, i.e. where Ted Poe, Texan judge, is concerned, and makes it problematic (which is good):

Ted Poe’s punishments were sometimes zany - ordering petty criminals to shovel manure, etc. - and sometimes as ingenious as a Goya painting. Like the one he handed down to a Houston teenager, Mike Hubacek. In 1996 Hubacek had been driving drunk at 100 mph with no headlights. He crashed into a van carrying a married couple and their nanny. The husband and the nanny were killed. Poe sentenced Hubacek to 110 days of boot camp, and to carry a sign once a month for ten years in front of high schools and bars that read, I KILLED TWO PEOPLE WHILE DRIVING DRUNK, and to erect a cross and a Star of David at the scene of the crash and to keep it maintained, and to keep photographs of the victims in his wallet for ten years, and to send $10 every week for ten years to a memorial fund in the names of the victims, and to observe the autopsy of a person killed in a drink-driving accident. Punishments like these had proved too psychologically torturous for other people.

A seventeen-year-old boy called Kevin Tunell had in 1982 killed a girl, Susan Herzog, while drink-driving near Washington DC. Her parents sued him, and were awarded $1.5 million in damages. But they offered the boy a deal. They would reduce the fine to just $936 if he’d mail them a cheque for $1, made out in Susan’s name, every Friday for eighteen years. He gratefully accepted their offer. Years later the boy began missing payments, and when Susan’s parents took him to court he broke down. Every time he filled in her name, he said, the guilt would tear him apart: ‘It hurts too much,’ he said. He tried to give the Herzogs two boxes of pre-written cheques, dated one per week until the end of 2001, a year longer than was required. But they refused to take them.

Judge Ted Poe’s critics - like the civil rights group the ACLU - argued to him the dangers of these ostentatious punishments, especially those that were carried out in public. They said it was no coincidence that public shaming had enjoyed such a renaissance in Mao’s China and Hitler’s Germany and the Ku Klux Klan’s America: it destroys souls, brutalizing everyone, the onlookers included, dehumanizing them as much as the person who was being shamed. How could Poe take someone with such low self-esteem that they needed to, say, rob a store, and then hold them up to officially sanctioned public ridicule?

Also, it's interesting to think of what pops up when you search for your own name on the Internet:

I kept remembering something Michael Fertik had said to me at the Village Pub in Woodside. ‘The biggest lie,’ he said, ‘is “The Internet is about you.” We like to think of ourselves as people who have choice and taste and personalized content. But the Internet isn’t about us. It’s about the companies that dominate the data flows of the Internet.’

Of course, does this mean that Internet disasters that bode an Internet destruction for some may earn some companies money?

Now, I suddenly wondered. Did Google make money from the destruction of Justine Sacco? Could a figure be calculated? And so I joined forces with a number-crunching researcher, Solvej Krause, and began writing to economists and analysts and online ad revenue people. Some things were known. In December 2013, the month of Justine’s annihilation, 12.2 billion Google searches took place - a figure that made me feel less worried about the possibility that people were sitting inside Google headquarters personally judging me. Google’s ad revenue for that month was $4.69 billion. Which meant they made an average of $0.38 for every search query. Every time we typed anything into Google: 38 cents to Google. Of those 12.2 billion searches that December, 1.2 million were people searching the name Justine Sacco. And so, if you average it out, Justine’s catastrophe instantaneously made Google $456,000.

But he thought it would be appropriately conservative - maybe a little too conservative - to estimate Justine’s worth, being a ‘low-value query’, at a quarter of the average. Which, if true, means Google made $120,000 from the destruction of Justine Sacco.

Maybe that’s an accurate figure. Maybe Google made more, or possibly less. But one thing’s certain. Those of us who did the actual annihilating? We got nothing.

In other words, yes, Google and Twitter and other companies that you use to search for data make money off not handling public shamings. These companies can bow down to organisations, companies and governments that want data on individuals, but they won't remove it even though it's the demise of that person. And persons.All in all, Ronson goes through a bunch of interesting cases where people have been shamed, how they've handled it and he also tries to delve into his own shaming, both shamings of himself and how he's shamed others. It's a quite interesting book.

I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

Ronson is adept at journalism much in the same way that Louis Theroux is; they appear non-threatening in all kinds of ways, and then nestle themselves into their interview subject, and manage to extract answers by being quite direct. That, and the fact that they're both quote good writing, are key in their results, which are good.In this book, Ronson delves into shaming and hate, two major factors on the Internet. Nowadays, people get shamed because of all kinds of things, including inadvertent posts. Some of the questions he answers are: why do people team up to shame people online? Why are are the most acrimonious persons online anonymous? And considering that some of those whose crimes (and non-crimes) have been shared, duplicated, laughed at and re-posted a billion times: is it possible to "delete" those public search results when somebody searches for your name?There are even named shaming and bully groups on the Internet, e.g. Anonymous, who may even do some good, despite all of the problems they create.Ronson even examines shaming as justice for people who have been sentenced by the law, i.e. where Ted Poe, Texan judge, is concerned, and makes it problematic (which is good):

Ted Poe’s punishments were sometimes zany - ordering petty criminals to shovel manure, etc. - and sometimes as ingenious as a Goya painting. Like the one he handed down to a Houston teenager, Mike Hubacek. In 1996 Hubacek had been driving drunk at 100 mph with no headlights. He crashed into a van carrying a married couple and their nanny. The husband and the nanny were killed. Poe sentenced Hubacek to 110 days of boot camp, and to carry a sign once a month for ten years in front of high schools and bars that read, I KILLED TWO PEOPLE WHILE DRIVING DRUNK, and to erect a cross and a Star of David at the scene of the crash and to keep it maintained, and to keep photographs of the victims in his wallet for ten years, and to send $10 every week for ten years to a memorial fund in the names of the victims, and to observe the autopsy of a person killed in a drink-driving accident. Punishments like these had proved too psychologically torturous for other people.

A seventeen-year-old boy called Kevin Tunell had in 1982 killed a girl, Susan Herzog, while drink-driving near Washington DC. Her parents sued him, and were awarded $1.5 million in damages. But they offered the boy a deal. They would reduce the fine to just $936 if he’d mail them a cheque for $1, made out in Susan’s name, every Friday for eighteen years. He gratefully accepted their offer. Years later the boy began missing payments, and when Susan’s parents took him to court he broke down. Every time he filled in her name, he said, the guilt would tear him apart: ‘It hurts too much,’ he said. He tried to give the Herzogs two boxes of pre-written cheques, dated one per week until the end of 2001, a year longer than was required. But they refused to take them.

Judge Ted Poe’s critics - like the civil rights group the ACLU - argued to him the dangers of these ostentatious punishments, especially those that were carried out in public. They said it was no coincidence that public shaming had enjoyed such a renaissance in Mao’s China and Hitler’s Germany and the Ku Klux Klan’s America: it destroys souls, brutalizing everyone, the onlookers included, dehumanizing them as much as the person who was being shamed. How could Poe take someone with such low self-esteem that they needed to, say, rob a store, and then hold them up to officially sanctioned public ridicule?

Also, it's interesting to think of what pops up when you search for your own name on the Internet:

I kept remembering something Michael Fertik had said to me at the Village Pub in Woodside. ‘The biggest lie,’ he said, ‘is “The Internet is about you.” We like to think of ourselves as people who have choice and taste and personalized content. But the Internet isn’t about us. It’s about the companies that dominate the data flows of the Internet.’

Of course, does this mean that Internet disasters that bode an Internet destruction for some may earn some companies money?

Now, I suddenly wondered. Did Google make money from the destruction of Justine Sacco? Could a figure be calculated? And so I joined forces with a number-crunching researcher, Solvej Krause, and began writing to economists and analysts and online ad revenue people. Some things were known. In December 2013, the month of Justine’s annihilation, 12.2 billion Google searches took place - a figure that made me feel less worried about the possibility that people were sitting inside Google headquarters personally judging me. Google’s ad revenue for that month was $4.69 billion. Which meant they made an average of $0.38 for every search query. Every time we typed anything into Google: 38 cents to Google. Of those 12.2 billion searches that December, 1.2 million were people searching the name Justine Sacco. And so, if you average it out, Justine’s catastrophe instantaneously made Google $456,000.

But he thought it would be appropriately conservative - maybe a little too conservative - to estimate Justine’s worth, being a ‘low-value query’, at a quarter of the average. Which, if true, means Google made $120,000 from the destruction of Justine Sacco.

Maybe that’s an accurate figure. Maybe Google made more, or possibly less. But one thing’s certain. Those of us who did the actual annihilating? We got nothing.

In other words, yes, Google and Twitter and other companies that you use to search for data make money off not handling public shamings. These companies can bow down to organisations, companies and governments that want data on individuals, but they won't remove it even though it's the demise of that person. And persons.All in all, Ronson goes through a bunch of interesting cases where people have been shamed, how they've handled it and he also tries to delve into his own shaming, both shamings of himself and how he's shamed others. It's a quite interesting book.