by Jon Ronson
He took me to a cafe where he grumbled about how things weren’t like they used to be, about the good old days when you couldn’t leave your mobile phone on a cafe table around here without it being stolen. I told Troy that the good old days sounded terrible to me, but he explained that with gentrification comes collateral damage - constant stop and frisks of any young people who don’t look like preppy hipsters: ‘Going to the store, coming home from school, ruining your whole day. It’s disgusting. It’s dangerous to walk the borders around here.’ It was these police inequities that compelled Troy to join 4chan, he told me.
‘The police are saying, “Look at what we can do to you on your own turf,”’ Mercedes continued. ‘“This is not your space. It’s our space, and we’re letting you exist here.”’ People socialize on Facebook because where do you go to loiter in New York any more? The Internet is our space and they’re trying to take it, and it’s not going to happen because it’s the Internet.’
‘And you know more about how it works than they do?’ I asked her.
‘Fuck them,’ she said. ‘They’re idiots. If you understood medicine in Massachusetts at a certain time, you were a witch and they would burn you. There aren’t a lot of people these days who can get past Facebook. So explain to them how a router works and you’re a magician. You’re a dark wizard. “We need to lock them away forever because we don’t understand how else to stop them.” Part of the reason all these kids have become experts on the Internet is because they don’t have power anywhere else. Skilled trade is shrinking. That’s why they went there. And then, holy shit, it blew up.’
I asked Mercedes about the attack on Justine. She said, ‘Sacco? The one that got those guys fired for joking about dongles?’
‘That was Adria Richards,’ I said. ‘Justine Sacco was the AIDS tweet woman.’
‘Well, that was Twitter,’ she said. ‘Twitter is a different beast to 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 met her since?’ I asked him.
‘No,’ he replied.
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 cafe at San Francisco Airport. ‘No one would have known he got fired until he complained. 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 I didn’t say anything in defence of Hank at the time. But later I felt bad that I hadn’t stuck up for him. So I emailed 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,’ he replied. ‘I’m not as friendly. There’s humour, 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 towards 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 in 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.’ AA 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 AA Gill always gives my television documentaries very bad reviews and 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 is he 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’s like to shoot a human, he should take aim at his own leg.’
- Will Heaven, Daily Telegraph, 27 October 2009
Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received, one stuck out: ‘Were you a bully at school?’
Was I a BULLY at school?
When my son was five years old he one day asked me, ‘Did you use to be fat?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was fat when I was sixteen. And I was thrown in a lake for being fat.’
‘Wow!’ he said.
‘There are two lessons to be learned from this,’ I said. ‘Don’t be a bully and don’t be fat.’
‘Will you show me what it looked like?’ he asked me.
‘Me being fat or me being thrown in a lake?’ I asked.
‘Both,’ he said.
I puffed up my cheeks, waddled self-consciously around the room, fell over, and said, ‘Splash!’
‘Will you do it again in slow motion?’ said Joel. ‘And put a cushion under your shirt?’
So I did. This time I added dialogue: ‘Please don’t throw me in the lake! No! Splash!’
‘Will you sound more scared?’ said Joel.
‘PLEASE!’ I shouted. ‘I might drown. Please. No, NO!’
Joel glanced, startled, at me. It was his fault that I’d gone that far. He’d been like Sam Peckinpah, forever directing me to make it more grotesque, basically getting me to mime the swallowing of dirty water as I struggled to the surface. But I think he’d trusted that within my re-enactment I would at all times retain some dignity.
But then he smiled.
‘You were SO fat!’ he said.
My life has basically been a good one, but my mind forever returns to those two years in Cardiff - between 1983 and 1985 - when I was bullied every day, stripped and blindfolded and thrown into the playground. Those years hover over me, when I walk into new rooms, meet new people.
*
It seemed to me that everybody involved in the Hank and Adria story thought they were doing something good. But really they only revealed that our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow, the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to just instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks.
I remembered something that Jonah Lehrer had said to me back in Runyon Canyon. He’d said, ‘I look forward to reading your book so I can learn how people find a way out of shame.’
I hadn’t thought about writing some sort of a public shaming recovery guide. But what he’d said stayed with me. Were there old-timer shamees out there who had managed to survive theirs intact and could offer enlightenment to the distraught victims of this new shame dynamic? Were there people out there who had found a way out of shame? I knew just where to start.
7
JOURNEY TO A SHAME-FREE PARADISE
F1 Boss Has Sick Nazi Orgy With 5 Hookers
EXCLUSIVE: Son of fascist Hitler lover in sex shame
FORMULA One motor racing chief Max Mosley is today exposed as a secret sadomasochist sex pervert. The son of infamous British wartime fascist leader Oswald Mosley is filmed romping with five hookers at a depraved NAZI-STYLE orgy in a torture dungeon.
Before hammering away at the girls he plays a cowering death camp inmate himself, having his GENITALS inspected and his hair searched for LICE - mocking the humiliating way Jews were treated by SS death camp guards in World War II …
At one point the wrinkled 67-year-old yells ‘she needs more of ze punishment!’ while brandishing a LEATHER STRAP over a brunette’s naked bottom. Then the lashes rain down as Mosley counts them out in German: ‘Ein! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Funf! Sechs!’
With each blow, the girl yelps in pain as grinning, grey-haired Mosley becomes clearly aroused. And after the beating, he makes her perform a sex act on him.
His Jew-hating father - who had Hitler as guest of honour at his marriage - would have been proud of his warped son’s command of German as he struts around looking for bottoms to whack. Our investigators obtained a graphic video of his sick antics.
- Neville Thurlbeck, News of the World, 30 March 2008
Max Mosley sat across from me in the living room of his west London mews house. We were alone. His wife Jean was at their other house, where she now spends most of her time. As Max told the Financial Times‘ Lucy Kellaway in 2011, ‘She doesn’t like going out, she doesn’t want to meet people.’
Nobody I could think of had ridden out a public shaming as immaculately as Max Mosley had. A powerful and hitherto not especially well-liked society man, the head of the FIA, Formula One racing’s governing body, photographed by the News of the World‘s hidden cameras in the most startling sex situation imaginable given his particular Nazi associations, he had somehow managed to emerge from the scandal completely intact. In fact it was even better than intact. People liked him more than ever. Some people thought of him as a standard-bearer for our right to feel unashamed. That’s how I thought of him. And now Max was every shamee’s aspiration. I wanted him to talk me through how he did it.
But he looked embarrassed by my question. ‘I’m no good at introspection,’ he said.
‘But you must have some clue,’ I said. ‘You stood at the news stand that Sunday morning reading the News of the World article …’
‘It was immediate,’ Max said. ‘It was a whoosh. It was, “This is war.”’ Then he trailed off and gave me a look to say, ‘I’m sorry, but I really don’t do introspection.’
I think he was as curious about the mystery as I was. But he didn’t know the answer.
‘You had a strange childhood …’ I tried.
‘I suppose my upbringing toughened me up a bit,’ he said. ‘From a very early age I realized that my parents weren’t like other people’s parents …’
Until that Sick Nazi Orgy headline the thing Max Mosley was most famous for - unless you were a Formula One racing fan - was his parents. Max’s father was Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder in 1932 of the British Union of Fascists. He gave Nuremburg-style speeches in London during which hecklers were illuminated by spotlights and viciously beaten in front of the crowd. Oswald Mosley stood on stage and watched. Max’s mother was the beautiful socialite Diana Mitford. She and her sister Unity were so besotted with Hitler - with whom they both became friendly - they’d send each other letters like this one from Unity to Diana:
23 December 1935
[…] The Fuhrer was heavenly, in his best mood, & very gay. There was a choice of two soups & he tossed a coin to see which one he would have, & he was so sweet doing it. He asked after you, & I told him you were coming soon. He talked a lot about Jews, which was lovely. […]
With best love & Heil Hitler!
&n
bsp; Bobo
Hitler attended Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford’s wedding, which took place at Joseph Goebbels’ house in 1936. Max was born in 1940 and when he was a few months old his parents were interned for the duration of the war at Holloway Prison in north London. Those were his first memories - visiting his imprisoned parents, ‘which doesn’t strike you as unusual when you’re three, but as you get older you realize they’re disliked by a big section of society. Still, they were my parents, so I was completely on their side. When someone argued with me about my father it was easy for me to win because I knew all the facts.’
‘What did people say about your father that wasn’t true?’ I asked.
‘Oh, you know, “He was a friend of Hitler.” Well, without going into whether that was a good or a bad thing, I knew he only met Hitler twice and he actually didn’t like him. My mother was a friend, undoubtedly, and her sister, but not my father.’
‘Why didn’t your father like Hitler?’ I asked.
‘I think he thought he was …’ Max screwed up his face.
‘A bit blah?’ I said.
‘Something of a poseur,’ agreed Max. ‘To that sort of Englishman. But then again he quite got on with Mussolini of whom the same could have been said. I suspect he saw Hitler as this other man who was in the same line of business as him but much more successful. And my mother liked him. I don’t think there was any affair but … well, you can see it. Anyway. To me the whole thing has been an enormous nuisance and encumbrance.’
Max drifted into the motor racing world. Nobody cared about his father there. As he told Autosport magazine in 2000, he knew he was where he belonged when he overheard someone say, ‘Mosley. He must be some relation of Alf Moseley, the coachbuilder.’ Max was in his mid twenties when he started in the racing world, and had just begun going to S&M clubs.