by Jon Ronson
On 17 March 2013 Hank was in the audience at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara 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 Butthead 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 on stage 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 Hangout 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 that 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 and Alex’s last smiles for a while.
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, “OK. I see what happened.”’
Hank is on the left, Alex on the right.
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 to wonder 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 on stage 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 that it is a psychological state of decreased self-evaluation 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 were Gustave Le Bon 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, 18 March 2013
But Hank had already been called into his boss’s office and fired.
*
‘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 …’ Hank paused. ‘When I got in the car with my wife I just … I’ve got three kids. Getting fired was terrifying.’
That night Hank made his only public statement (like Justine and Jonah, he had never spoken to a journalist about what had happened before he spoke to me). He posted a short message on the discussion board Hacker News:
Hi, I’m the guy who made a comment about big dongles. First of all I’d like to say I’m sorry. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position. [But] as a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have 3 kids and I really liked that job.
She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate.
‘The next day,’ Hank said, ‘Adria Richards called my company asking them to ask me to remove the portion of my apology that stated I lost my job as a result of her tweet.’
*
I sent Adria an interview request. ‘All right, pitch me via email and if relevant, I’ll respond,’ she replied. So I pitched. Successfully. We agreed to meet two weeks later. ‘We will meet in a public place for safety reasons,’ Adria wrote. ‘Make sure to bring along your ID for verification.’
We settled on the international check-in desks at San Francisco Airport. I was expecting someone fiercer. But when I saw her half wave at me from across the terminal she didn’t seem fierce at all. She seemed introverted and delicate, just like how Hank had come across over the Google Hangout. We found a cafe and she told me about the moment it all began for her - the moment she overheard the comment about the big dongle.
‘Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise up on your back?’ she asked me.
‘You felt fear?’ I asked.
‘Danger,’ she said. ‘Clearly my body was telling me, “You are unsafe.”’
Which was why, she said, she ‘slowly stood up, rotated from my hips, and took three photos.’ She tweeted one, ‘with a very brief summary of what they said. Then I sent another tweet describing my location. Right? And then the third tweet was the [conference’s] code of conduct.’
‘You talked about danger,’ I said. ‘What were you imagining might … ?’
‘Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?’ she said.
I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She had, after all, been in the middle of a tech conference with 800 bystanders.
‘Sure,’ Adria replied. ‘And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.’
This seemed a weak gambit. Men can sometimes be correct. There is some Latin for this kind of logical fallacy. It’s called an ad hominem attack. When someone can’t defend a criticism against them, they change the subject
by attacking the criticizer.
‘Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,’ I said. ‘I know you didn’t call for him to be fired. But you must have felt pretty bad.’
‘Not too bad,’ she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. ‘He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him but it only goes so far. If he had Downs Syndrome and he accidently pushed someone off a subway that would be different … I’ve seen things where people are like, “Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.” Yes, I did.’
*
The evening Hank posted his statement on Hacker News, outsiders began to involve themselves in his and Adria’s story. Hank started to receive messages of support from men’s-rights bloggers. He didn’t respond to any of them. Later a Gucci Little Piggy blogger wrote that Hank’s Hacker News message had revealed him to be a man with:
a complete lack of backbone … by apologizing you are just saying, ‘I am a weak enemy - do with me what you will.’ [In publicly shaming Hank, Adria had] complete and utter power over his children. That doesn’t piss this guy off?
At the same time that Hank was being feted and then insulted by the men’s-rights bloggers, Adria discovered she was getting discussed on a famous meeting place for trolls: 4chan/b/.
A father of three is out of a job because a silly joke he was telling a friend was overheard by someone with more power than sense. Let’s crucify this cunt.
Kill her.
Cut out her uterus with an xacto knife.
Someone sent Adria a photograph of a beheaded woman with tape over her mouth. Adria’s face was superimposed onto the bodies of porn actors. Websites were created to teach people how to make the superimposing look seamless - by matching skin-tones. On Facebook someone wrote, ‘I hope I can find Adria, kidnap her, put a torture bag over her head, and shoot a .22 subsonic round right into her fucking skull. Fuck that bitch make her pay make her obey.’ (That one, Adria told me, although I couldn’t confirm it, was from a student at the New York City College of Technology.)
‘Death threats and rape threats only feed her cause,’ someone eventually wrote on 4chan/b/. ‘I don’t mean stop doing things. Just think first. Do something productive.’
Soon after that, the website belonging to Adria’s employers, SendGrid, vanished offline. Someone had set a malicious program onto it. It’s known as a DDoS attack. It’s the automated version of a person sitting at a computer manually pressing Refresh relentlessly until the targeted website becomes overpowered and collapses.
Hours later, Adria was fired from her job.
*
A few days before I flew to San Francisco to meet Adria, I posted a message on 4chan/b/ asking for anyone personally involved in her destruction to contact me. The message was deleted in less than a minute. I posted another request. That one vanished after a few seconds. Somebody inside 4chan was silently erasing me whenever I tried to make contact. But my messages happened to coincide with arrests of some hardcore 4chan trolls and DDoSers and activists, and so suddenly there were real names out there. Which was how I came to meet a twenty-one-year-old 4chan denizen, Mercedes Haefer.
In her Facebook photograph Mercedes wears a comedy moustache and bunny ears. Now we sat opposite each other in a vast, opulent loft apartment above an old grocery store in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It belongs to her lawyer, Stanley Cohen. He’s spent his career representing anarchists and communists and squatter groups and Hamas, and now he was representing Mercedes.
The crime she was accused of (and would later plead guilty to: she is awaiting sentencing as I write this) is that in November 2010 she and thirteen other 4chan users DDoSed PayPal as revenge for them refusing to accept donations to WikiLeaks. You could donate to the Ku Klux Klan via PayPal, but not to WikiLeaks.
The FBI showed up at her Las Vegas apartment one morning at 6 a.m. ‘I answered the door and they said, “Mercedes, do you mind putting your pants on?” To be honest, being arrested is really fun. You get to troll the FBI, you get to wear fancy handcuffs, you get to pick the music in the car. But the indictment was boring. I napped through it.’
I spent a few hours with Mercedes. She was on the surface quite troll-like - a lover of jubilant online chaos. She told me about her favourite 4chan thread. It was started by ‘a guy who’s genuinely in love with his dog, and his dog went in heat, and so he went around collecting samples and injecting them into his penis and he fucked his dog and got her pregnant and they’re his puppies’. Mercedes laughed. ‘That’s the thread I told the FBI about when they asked me about 4chan, and some of the officers actually got up and left the room.’
This aspect of Mercedes wasn’t so interesting to me because I didn’t see this story as being a story about trolls. Focusing on trolls would be taking the easy option - blaming the renaissance of public shaming on some ludicrous, outrageous minority. A scattering of trolls may have piled into Justine and Adria, but trolls didn’t fell those people. People like me felled them.
But I got to know and like Mercedes during the months that followed - we emailed each other a lot - and really she wasn’t much of a troll at all. Her motives were kinder than that. She was also someone whose shaming frenzy was motivated by the desire to do good. She told me about the time 4chan tracked down a boy who had been posting videos of himself on YouTube physically abusing his cat ‘and daring people to stop him’. 4chan users found him ‘and let the entire town know he was a sociopath. Ha ha! And the cat was taken away from him and adopted.’
(Of course the boy might have been a sociopath. But Mercedes and the other 4chan people had no evidence of that - no idea what might or might not have been happening in his home life to turn him that way.)
I asked Mercedes what sorts of people gathered on 4chan.
‘A lot of them are bored, under-stimulated, over-persecuted powerless kids,’ she replied. ‘They know they can’t be anything they want. So they went to the Internet. On the Internet we have power in situations where we would otherwise be powerless.’
This was a period of sustained draconian prosecutorial bombardment - an effort by the authorities to subdue people like Mercedes into submission. But when I asked her if she thought the prosecutions would end their DDoSing and trolling campaigns, her response was sharp and trenchant.
‘The police are trying to claim the area,’ she said. By ‘area’, she meant the Internet. ‘Just like in the cities. They gentrify the downtown, move all the poor people into ghettos and then start trolling the ghettos, stopping and frisking everyone …’
As it happens, shortly before I met Mercedes the New York Police Department released figures on how many times their officers had stopped and frisked New Yorkers during the previous year. It was 684,330 times. That was 1,800 stop and frisks each day. Of those 1,800 people - according to the New York Civil Liberties Union - ‘nearly nine out of ten have been completely innocent’.
In July 2012 a civil rights lawyer, Nahal Zamani, interviewed victims of the policy for a research paper - ‘Stop And Frisk: The Human Impact’.
Several said that being stopped and frisked makes you ‘feel degraded and humiliated’. One went on to say: ‘When they stop you in the street, and then everybody’s looking, it does degrade you. And then people get the wrong perception of you. That kind of colors people’s thoughts towards you. People might start thinking that you’re into some illegal activity, when you’re not. Just because the police [are] just stopping you for - just randomly. That’s humiliating [on] its own.’ [Another said] ‘It made me feel violated, humiliated, harassed, shameful, and of course very scared.’
- ‘Stop And Frisk: The Human Impact’, Center for Constitutional Rights, July 2012
By some strange circular coincidence it was Jonah Lehrer’s fellow New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell who had popularized the stop and frisk policy. When it was first implemented in the 1990s - it was called Broke
n Windows back then - Gladwell wrote a landmark New Yorker essay about it, ‘The Tipping Point’. He called it ‘miraculous’. There was a correlation between coming down heavy on petty criminals like graffiti artists and fare dodgers, his essay argued, and New York’s sudden decline in murders.
‘A strange and unprecedented transformation’ was happening across New York City, he wrote. There used to be volleys of gunfire. Now there were ‘ordinary people on the streets at dusk, small children riding their bicycles, old people on benches, people coming out of the subways alone. Sometimes the most modest of changes can bring about enormous effects.’
Gladwell’s essay was a sensation - one of the most influential articles in the magazine’s history. It sold the aggressive policing tactic to thoughtful, liberal New York City people - the sorts of people who wouldn’t normally support such a draconian idea. He gave a generation of liberals permission to be more conservative. He became a marketing tool for the Broken Windows theory. His book The Tipping Point went on to sell two million copies, launching his career and the careers of the countless other pop-science writers who followed in his footsteps, like Jonah Lehrer.
But Gladwell’s essay was wrong. Subsequent data revealed that violent crime had been dropping in New York City for five years before Broken Windows was implemented. It was plummeting at the same rate all over America. This included places - like Chicago and Washington DC - where war hadn’t been declared on fare dodgers and graffiti artists. When I interviewed Gladwell in 2013 for a separate project - the BBC’s Culture Show - I brought up with him the topic of stop and frisk and Broken Windows. A pained, remorseful look crossed his face. ‘I was too in love with the Broken Windows notion,’ he said. ‘I was so enamoured by the metaphorical simplicity of that idea that I overstated its importance.’
Stop and frisk continued through the 2000s and into the 2010s and one by-product of it was that some repeatedly frisked young people sought revenge in online activism - by joining 4chan. It wasn’t only Mercedes who told me this. Soon after we met I had a cloak-and-dagger meeting outside a subway station in Queens with a 4chan friend of hers. A battered car pulled up. The driver was young, white, of Spanish heritage and wore a big crucifix. I still don’t know his real name. He said I should call him by his Internet name: Troy.