by Jon Ronson
Anna Funder wrote Stasiland back in 2003—fourteen years after the fall of the Stasi and three years before the invention of Twitter. Of course, no prurient or censorious bureaucrat had intercepted Justine Sacco’s private thoughts. Justine had tweeted them herself, laboring under the misapprehension—the same one I labored under for a while—that Twitter was a safe place to tell the truth about yourself to strangers. That truth telling had really proven to be an idealistic experiment gone wrong.
Anna Funder visited a Stasi officer whose job had been to co-opt informants. She wanted to know how—given that informant pay was terrible, and the workload was ever burgeoning, with more and more behaviors getting redefined as enemy activities—he managed to persuade people to get on board.
“Mostly people just said yes,” he told her.
“Why?” she asked him.
“Some of them were convinced of the cause,” he said. “But I think mainly because informers felt they were somebody, you know? Someone was listening to them for a couple of hours every week, taking notes. They felt they had it over other people.”
That struck me as a condescending thing for the Stasi man to say about his informants. And it would be a condescending thing to say about Twitter users too. Social media gives a voice to voiceless people—its egalitarianism is its greatest quality. But I was struck by a report Anna Funder discovered that had been written by a Stasi psychologist tasked with trying to understand why they were attracting so many willing informants. His conclusion: “It was an impulse to make sure your neighbor was doing the right thing.”
—
In October 2014, I took a final drive up to visit Lindsey Stone. Four months had passed since I’d last spoken to her or Farukh—I hadn’t called them and they hadn’t called me—and given that they’d taken her on only for my benefit, I’d half wondered if maybe it had all been quietly wound down in my absence.
“Oh God, no,” said Lindsey. We sat at her kitchen table. “They call me every week, week after week. You didn’t know that?”
“No,” I said.
“I thought you guys were talking all the time,” she said.
Lindsey got out her phone and scrolled through her innumerable e-mails from Farukh. She read out loud some blog posts his team had written in her voice, about how it’s important when traveling to use the hotel safe—“Stay alert, travelers!”—and how if you’re in Spain you should try the tapas.
Lindsey got to preapprove everything and she’d told them no only twice, she said: to the post about how much she was looking forward to Lady Gaga’s upcoming jazz album (“I like Lady Gaga, but I’m not really excited about her jazz album”) and to her tribute to Disneyland on the occasion of its fiftieth birthday: “Happy Birthday, Disneyland! The Happiest Place on Earth!”
“‘Happy Birthday, Disneyland!’” Lindsey blushed. “I would never . . . I mean, I had a great time at Disneyland . . .”
“Who doesn’t?” I said.
“But still . . .” Lindsey trailed off.
—
After we both laughed about the “Happy Birthday, Disneyland” blog post, we both stopped laughing and felt bad.
“They’re working so hard,” Lindsey said.
“And it’s what they have to do,” I said.
“Yeah,” Lindsey said. “One of my friends from high school said, ‘I hope it’s still you. I want people to know how funny you are.’ But it’s scary. After all that’s happened, what’s funny to me . . . I don’t want to go anywhere near the line, let alone cross it. So I’m constantly saying, ‘I don’t know, Farukh, what do you think?’”
“This journey started with my identity being hijacked by a spambot,” I said. “Your personality has been taken by strangers twice now. But at least this second time around it’s nice.”
—
Lindsey hadn’t typed her name into Google for eleven months. The last time had been a shock. It was Veterans Day and she discovered some ex–army people “wondering where I was, and not in a good way.”
“They were thinking about tracking you down so they could re-destroy you?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
She hadn’t looked since. And now she swallowed and began to type: L . . . I . . . N . . .
—
Lindsey shook her head, stunned. “This is monumental,” she said.
Two years before, the photograph stretched to Google Images’ horizon—uninterrupted mass-production shaming, “pages and pages and pages,” Lindsey said, “repeating endlessly. It felt so huge. So oppressive.”
And now: gone.
Well—nearly gone. There was still a scattering of them, maybe three or four, but they were interspersed with lots of photographs of Lindsey doing nothing bad. Just smiling. Even better, there were lots of photographs of other Lindsey Stones—people who weren’t her at all. There was a Lindsey Stone volleyball player, a Lindsay Stone competitive swimmer (the different spelling didn’t seem to matter to Google Images). The swimmer had been captured mid-stroke, moments from winning the New York State 500-yard freestyle championship. The photo was captioned: “Lindsay Stone had the right plan in place and everything was going exactly to plan.”
A whole other person, doing something everyone could agree was lovely and commendable. There was no better result than that.
Fifteen
Your Speed
We have always had some influence over the justice system, but for the first time in 180 years—since the stocks and the pillory were outlawed—we have the power to determine the severity of some punishments. And so we have to think about what level of mercilessness we feel comfortable with. I, personally, no longer take part in the ecstatic public condemnation of people unless they’ve committed a transgression that has an actual victim, and even then not as much as I probably should. I miss the fun a little. But it feels like when I became a vegetarian. I missed the steak, although not as much as I’d anticipated, but I could no longer ignore the slaughterhouse.
—
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.”
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 thirty-eight cents for every search query. Every time we typed anything into Google: thirty-eight 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 it wouldn’t be accurate to simply multiply 1.2 million by thirty-eight cents. Some searches are worth far more to Google than others. Advertisers bid on “high-yield” search terms like “Coldplay” and “jewelry” and “Kenya vacations.” It’s quite possible that no advertiser ever linked its product to Justine’s name. But that wouldn’t mean Google made no money from her. Justine was the worldwide number-one trending topic on Twitter. Her story engrossed social media users more than any other that night. I think people who wouldn’t otherwise have gone onto Google did specifically to hunt for her. She drew people in. And once they were there, I’m sure at least a few of them decided to book a Kenya vacation or download
a Coldplay album.
I got an e-mail from the economics researcher Jonathan Hersh. He’d come recommended by the people who make Freakonomics Radio on WNYC. Jonathan’s e-mail said the same thing: “Something about this story resonated with them, so much so that they felt compelled to google her name. That means they’re engaged. If interest in Justine were sufficient to encourage users to stay online for more time than they would otherwise, this would have directly resulted in Google making more advertising revenue. Google has the informal corporate motto of ‘Don’t be evil,’ but they make money when anything happens online, even the bad stuff.”
In the absence of any better data from Google, he wrote, he could only offer a “back of the envelope” calculation. 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. Or maybe Google made more. But one thing’s certain. Those of us who did the actual annihilating? We got nothing.
• • •
From the beginning, I’d been trying to understand why—once you discount Gustave LeBon and Philip Zimbardo’s theories of viruses and contagion and evil—online shaming is so pitiless. And now I think I have the answer. I found it in, of all places, an article about a radical traffic-calming scheme tested in California in the early 2000s. The story—by the journalist Thomas Goetz—is a fantastically esoteric one. Goetz writes about how in the school zones of Garden Grove, California, cars were ignoring speed signs and hitting “bicyclists and pedestrians with depressing regularity.” And so they tried something experimental. They tried Your Speed signs.
© Richard Drdul
—
After I read Thomas Goetz’s article about Your Speed signs, I spent a long time trying to track down their inventor. He turned out to be an Oregon road-sign manufacturer named Scott Kelley.
“I remember exactly where I was when I thought of them,” he told me over the telephone. “It was the mid-1990s. I was over by my girlfriend’s house. I was driving through a school zone. And my mind just pictured one of the signs up on a pole.”
“What made you think they’d work?” I asked him. “There was nothing about them to suggest they’d work.”
“Right,” said Scott. “And that’s where it gets interesting.”
They really, logically, shouldn’t have worked. As Thomas Goetz writes:
The signs were curious in a few ways. For one thing, they didn’t tell drivers anything they didn’t already know—there is, after all, a speedometer in every car. If a motorist wanted to know their speed, a glance at the dashboard would do it . . . And the Your Speed signs came with no punitive follow-up—no police officer standing by ready to write a ticket. This defied decades of law-enforcement dogma, which held that most people obey speed limits only if they face some clear negative consequence for exceeding them.
In other words, officials in Garden Grove were betting that giving speeders redundant information with no consequence would somehow compel them to do something few of us are inclined to do: slow down.
Scott Kelley’s idea, being so counterintuitive, proved a marketing nightmare. No town official anywhere in America was placing orders. So he did the only thing he could—he sent out free samples for testing. One ended up in his own neighborhood.
“I remember driving by it,” he said. “And I slowed down. I knew there was no camera in it taking my picture. Yet I slowed down. I just went, ‘Wow! This really does work!’”
In test after test the results came back the same. People did slow down—by an average of 14 percent. And they stayed slowed down for miles down the road.
“So why do they work?” I asked Scott.
His reply surprised me. “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know. I . . . Yeah. I don’t know.”
Scott explained that, being a tech person, he was more interested in the radar and the casing and the lightbulbs than in the psychology. But during the past decade, the mystery has galvanized social psychologists. And their conclusion: feedback loops.
—
Feedback loops. You exhibit some type of behavior (you drive at twenty-seven miles per hour in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone). You get instant real-time feedback for it (the sign tells you you’re driving at twenty-seven miles per hour). You decide whether or not to change your behavior as a result of the feedback (you lower your speed to twenty-five miles per hour). You get instant feedback for that decision too (the sign tells you you’re driving at twenty-five miles per hour now, and some signs flash up a smiley-face emoticon to congratulate you). And it all happens in the flash of an eye—in the few moments it takes you to drive past the Your Speed sign.
In Goetz’s Wired magazine story—“Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops”—he calls them “a profoundly effective tool for changing behavior.” And I’m all for people slowing down in school zones. But maybe in other ways feedback loops are leading to a world we only think we want. Maybe—as my friend the documentary maker Adam Curtis e-mailed me—they’re turning social media into “a giant echo chamber where what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing.”
We express our opinion that Justine Sacco is a monster. We are instantly congratulated for this—for basically being Rosa Parks. We make the on-the-spot decision to carry on believing it.
“The tech-utopians like the people in Wired present this as a new kind of democracy,” Adam’s e-mail continued. “It isn’t. It’s the opposite. It locks people off in the world they started with and prevents them from finding out anything different. They got trapped in the system of feedback reinforcement. The idea that there is another world of other people who have other ideas is marginalized in our lives.”
I was becoming one of those other people with other ideas. I was expressing the unpopular belief that Justine Sacco isn’t a monster. I wonder if I will receive a tidal wave of negative feedback for this and, if so, will it frighten me back again, to a place where I’m congratulated and welcomed?
“Feedback is an engineering principle,” Adam’s e-mail to me ended. “And all engineering is devoted to trying to keep the thing you are building stable.”
—
Soon after Justine Sacco’s shaming, I was talking with a friend, a journalist, who told me he had so many jokes, little observations, potentially risqué thoughts, that he wouldn’t dare to post online anymore.
“I suddenly feel with social media like I’m tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment,” he said. “It’s horrible.”
He didn’t want me to name him, he said, in case it sparked something off.
We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age.
“Look!” we’re saying. “WE’RE normal! THIS is the average!”
We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it.
Bibliography and Acknowledgments
A note about the title. For a while it was going to be, simply, Shame. Or Tarred and Feathered. There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. It was a surprisingly hard book to find a title for, and I think I know why. It was something that one of my interviewees said to me: “Shame is an incredibly inarticulate emotion. It’s something you bathe in, it’s not something you wax eloquent about. It’s such a deep, dark, ugly thing there are very few words for it.”
My encounter with the spambot men was filmed by Remy Lamont of Channel Flip. My thanks to him, and to Channel Flip, and, as always, to my producer Lucy Greenwell. Greg Stekelman—formally known as @themanwhofell—helped me remember how Twitter mutated from a place of unself-conscious honesty into something more anxiety-inducing. Greg is not on Tw
itter anymore. His final tweet, posted on May 10, 2012, reads: “Twitter is no place for a human being.” Which I think is pessimistic. I still love the place. Although I’ve never been shamed on it. Although neither has he. That line about how we don’t feel accountable during a shaming because “a snowflake never feels responsible for the avalanche” came from Jonathan Bullock. My thanks to him.
I pieced together the story of how Michael Moynihan uncovered Jonah Lehrer’s deception mainly through my interviews with Michael—my thanks to him and to his wife, Joanne—though a little background came from “Michael C. Moynihan, The Guy Who Uncovered Jonah Lehrer’s Fabrication Problem,” by Foster Kamer, published in The New York Observer on July 30, 2012.
My information about Stephen Glass came from “No Second Chance for Stephen Glass: The Long, Strange Downfall of a Journalistic Wunderkind,” by Adam L. Penenberg, published by PandoDaily on January 27, 2014.
The story about Jonah’s trip to St. Louis the day before his downfall came from “Jonah Lehrer Stumbles at MPI,” by Sarah J. F. Braley, published on Meetings-conventions.com on August 2, 2012. In a telephone interview, Jonah Lehrer spoke with me at length and on the record. After our telephone interview, however, he expressed misgivings about being included in the book, saying he didn’t want to put his wife and family through the experience again. But his experience was too vital and too public—and the lessons learned too great—to leave out.
Thanks to Jeff Bercovici of Forbes magazine for putting me in touch with his friend Justine Sacco.
The life and work of Judge Ted Poe has been documented over the years by his nemesis the legal scholar Jonathan Turley in stories such as “Shame on You,” published in The Washington Post on September 18, 2005. I learned about the drunk drivers Mike Hubacek and Kevin Tunell from reading “A Great Crime Deterrent,” by Julia Duin, published in Insight on the News on October 19, 1998, and “Kevin Tunell Is Paying $1 a Week for a Death He Caused and Finding the Price Unexpectedly High,” by Bill Hewitt and Tom Nugent, published in People magazine on April 16, 1990.