MALE SPEAKER: Right.
JON RONSON: Hello.
MALE SPEAKER: Hello, everybody.
It's my massive pleasure
to introduce Jon Ronson.
We're incredibly
lucky to have him.
He is in the middle of
doing five sold out nights
at Leicester Square Theatre,
which, he just told me before,
is taking its toll a little bit.
JON RONSON: It's playing
havoc on my mental health.
MALE SPEAKER: But
he also is very
keen to stress that whilst
this is the current book,
he's happy to take
questions on anything,
and may even actually
appreciate some questions not
on the current book, which
slightly throws my prep, but--
JON RONSON: Oh no.
That's fine too.
Can I just say this is the most
beautifully designed place,
but I've already
discovered a flaw, Which
is that too much hand
sanitizer comes out.
Yeah.
There was a little mini-pond
of hand sanitizer in my hand.
MALE SPEAKER: Yeah.
That's--
JON RONSON: Yeah.
MALE SPEAKER: Right.
Let's get started.
We will wrap up
at one, because we
know some people have
meetings to go to,
so we have just the
best part of an hour.
So I'd still like to start with
a couple questions on the book.
JON RONSON: Sure.
Well, Google gets a
mention in the book.
MALE SPEAKER: It's
the most relevant book
that you've done in terms of
the internet and social media.
So let's start at the beginning.
For those of you who
haven't read the book,
the book starts with
this thing which
Jon would call a
spambot-- three academics
would call an infomorph-- which
impersonates Jon on Twitter.
It moves very quickly
from a strange interest
in fusion cooking to dreaming
about #time and #cock, which
not unreasonably upsets the man.
He interviews them, puts
the interview on YouTube,
and then the comments
erupt under the video.
And in the book,
you say you won.
Why do you start with a victory?
JON RONSON: Well,
because I hope that I'm
using this word in the
right way-- Pyrrhic victory.
It felt-- is that the right?
MALE SPEAKER: Could be.
JON RONSON: OK.
MALE SPEAKER: You need to
say a bit more before I
can qualify whether it's
a Pyrrhic victory or just
a victory.
JON RONSON: Because
it felt great.
Suddenly, I say in the
book, I felt a lot braver.
Basically, these three academics
created this Jon Ronson spam
bot, which was being
followed by people
who I knew from real life.
And as you point out,
it was tweeting things
like, I am dreaming something
about time and cock.
So all these people that
I knew from real life
were obviously wondering why I
had suddenly become so candid
about dreaming about cock.
And so I had a
confrontation with them.
And they said at the time
that just brushed past me,
but now I think was the most
important thing that they said.
They said the internet
is not the real world.
And this was in 2012, I think.
And I think that was the
general view way back
in 2012, that the internet
is not the real world.
Could you hear everything that
I said just then, by the way?
OK, good.
And also, they were
basically look,
my identity is not important.
In this utopian
new age, identities
kind of belong to everybody.
And that really upset me.
And it upset me way more
than it ought to have done,
because it was just a
stupid Twitter spam bot.
But it got to a profound thing--
our identity really matters.
You spend your life
working out what
movies you like,
what you care about,
what you don't care about.
And suddenly, all that
was hoisted away from me.
And for me, it was like a tiny,
little, ridiculous spambot
thing.
But to leap forward for just a
second, the people whose lives
are destroyed on social media,
that seizing of an identity
is profoundly traumatizing.
MALE SPEAKER: Yes,
and maybe let's move
to that, because
that's obviously
the central tenet of the book.
It's around those people whose
lives are turned upside down.
The next story
about a shaming is
about a journalist,
a writer who is
found to have made up some
quotes about Dylan and others.
And when this story
breaks, his life
pretty much collapses, at
least for a good while.
But there's an interesting
section in there,
where you're talking with the
other investigative journalist
who'd found out the
mistakes that he'd made.
And he's discussing the
actual pressing of send
on the article, knowing what
it's going to do to this guy.
And he describes the
process as fucking horrible.
Have you ever had
similar dilemmas
on anything you've written
about the impact of what
you're writing?
JON RONSON: Well, it's funny.
I remember he said
to me, this guy
Michael Moynihan, who
discovered this journalist had
been fabricating quotes.
This was a big successful,
Malcolm Gladwell-type writer,
called Jonah Lehrer, And he
knew that if he pressed send,
he would ruin this man's life.
It was transgressions,
real transgressions.
MALE SPEAKER: Proper
journalistic errors.
JON RONSON: Yeah, but
he hadn't killed anyone.
MALE SPEAKER: No.
JON RONSON: But if
he pressed send,
he would ruin this
person's life.
And in fact, Michael said
the same thing to me.
He said, have you ever
been in this position
that if you press send, you
would ruin somebody's life?
And I thought, have I?
And I said to him, I don't know.
Because journalists
are constantly
playing psychological
tricks on themselves to make
ourselves feel not so bad
about bad things that we do.
But I don't think I
have ever done that.
I don't think I've ever
ruined anyone's life.
I mean, some people
have been upset with me.
MALE SPEAKER: Sure.
JON RONSON: A number of people
have been upset with me.
But a huge number of
people have been very
happy with what I've written.
And obviously, those are
the stories I like more.
What I particularly
like, by the way,
is when opposing factions
both like what I wrote.
And that happened quite
recently with Katie Hopkins.
She loved it, and the people
who hate her loved it.
That's when I feel I've
really done a good job.
Because I'm not
about being a mugger.
I'm about being curious and
finding common ground and so
on.
Yes.
MALE SPEAKER: Moving through
the book at some pace
so we get time, we will take
questions from the floor
fairly soon.
We'll come out with mics.
So do wait for the
mics when we do that.
The shamings take
another turn when
you tell the story
of two tech guys
at a developer conference
who get called out
for making some jokes
between themselves
by a female attendee
at that conference.
And then the whole thing
turns, that actually she
gets taken down much more
nastily, much more viciously
than the two guys
in the first place.
Why do you think happens?
And why do you think it is that
the level of hatred directed
at women is much nastier
than it is at men?
JON RONSON: Yeah, I
mean there is no doubt
that the range of insults is way
worse when it's a woman being
shamed than it's a man.
I mean, you get the odd--
I was thinking those three
academics who I put on YouTube,
the comments underneath did
include-- So men do
sometimes get that,
but in general, I
would say women have it
way worse than men.
When a man is
getting shamed, it's
I'm going to get you fired.
When a woman's
getting shamed, it's
rape threats and death threats.
Actually, on stage last night,
I asked Bridget Christie
that question.
And she said-- you were
in the crowd, Nick.
Can you remember what
he response was to that?
MALE SPEAKER: You were too
busy taking notes, I think,
weren't you?
JON RONSON: Well,
it was basically
that women are held responsible.
Women have to be really good
at a million different things.
And so I think this was
Bridget's explanation.
So there's lots of different
ways you can attack women.
Women have to be good at sex,
so you can attack them sexually.
Women have to be
good at homemaking,
so you can attack
them as a homemaker.
So that was Bridget's
explanation.
What I realized is that
whilst social justice is
doing very well, there's also
a huge naissance of misogyny.
And I suppose it's possible--
I'm thinking on my feet here,
but I suppose it's possible that
the two things are connected,
that people who are
against social justice
are taking a ferocious
response-- men's rights
activists battling feminists.
Things have become
very polemical.
So maybe those two
things are connected.
MALE SPEAKER: This
comes up of couple
times in the book, that people
say that they are now finding
themselves being much quieter,
either on social media or even
physically, saying that
they're not risking jokes,
and they're tending
towards bland.
And obviously, when you tell
the story of optimizing-- god,
I've gone blank--
Lindsey, Lindsey Stone,
down the Google rankings,
it's just a see of blandness,
of liking cats and other stuff.
Do you see that as a risk?
And do you see that
that's happening?
JON RONSON: I do
see it as a risk,
but my argument
is a nuanced one.
And the one thing that really
bugged me this last year
was that a small group of people
decided to be ferociously,
actively against the
book, because they saw it
as an attack on social
justice, which it's not.
And in fact, these
were people who
hadn't read the
book, because it's
impossible to criticize
the book in that way
if you've actually read it.
What this book is about
in terms of social justice
is that it's a book against
what one person described
as a cathartic alternative
to social justice.
The destruction of
people like Justine Sacco
is not social justice.
It's this easy, nasty
imitation of social justice.
So for me, it's very easy
to make that distinction,
but what's happening
as a result of this
is some people because the
attacks are no longer just
on people who deserve it, but
also people who don't deserve
it-- although, of
course, deserve,
I'm just saying that
because it's easy.
MALE SPEAKER: Yes,
there are certainly
shades of gray about
who deserves, I think.
JON RONSON: Yeah, a racist
cop who shoots somebody
deserves it.
A woman who makes a
liberal joke that comes out
badly doesn't deserve it.
They're being treated with
a similar level of ferocity
literally.
Both lives are being upended.
Actually, the racist cops
tends to recover a lot quicker
than the PR woman
with 170 Twitter
followers who makes a liberal
joke that comes out badly.
So yeah, as a result
of that, as a result
of the people with the power,
i.e. us, abusing our power
and going after everybody
because we just love to shame,
and destroying people
who don't deserve it,
everybody's nervous.
It's a fearful time for people.
So even when somebody's being
shamed and people are thinking,
oh, I don't think that
person deserves it,
nobody says anything.
It's like the bully has
taken over the school.
And as we saw, people
are killing themselves.
And so I hooked Lindsey
Stone, who was a shamed woman,
I hooked her up
with reputation.com,
who are Google's enemy, Google's
nemesis, reputation.com,
because they say, well,
Google's not got the right.
Who gave Google the right to
basically do everything, do
all of this?
So reputation.com manipulates
the Google algorithms.
I don't know how
successful they are.
I think maybe sometimes
successfully, sometimes
less so, because
it's a moving target.
You're constantly changing your
algorithms, like Bond villains.
And what I found really
sad was that Lindsey
was this kind of audacious,
nice, really nice person.
She worked with adults
with learning difficulties.
You couldn't have
a nicer person.
And she did this
stupid joke, which
meant nothing and was destroyed
all over the internet,
and was crushed.
I mean, her mental health
was damaged more profoundly
than anybody I met, because
she was a private individual,
and believed, read tweet,
every Facebook comment,
believed every single word.
I mean, Jesus, I am a public
figure with pretty thick skin,
and it still profoundly upsets
me when something like that
happens to me.
So for Lindsey, I mean, she
didn't leave home for a year
and a half, suicidal thoughts,
anxiety, depression, insomnia.
So I hooked her up
with reputation.com.
And the way they
did it, as you said,
was to swamp Google
with stuff that
would supplant this silly
audacious joke, which
meant nothing.
And it was blogs about how
much Lindsey Stone loves cats
and how much she's looking
forward to the new Lady Gaga
video, and what her favorite
types of ice cream were.
MALE SPEAKER: Yeah, just a
stream of innocuous content,
basically.
JON RONSON: Yeah, and it
just made me think, my god.
Is this the society we've
created for ourselves, where
the way to survive
is to be bland?
Which isn't to say-- I say
that from the perspective
of a politically correct person.
None of this is me
saying let's return
to a world where everybody
can be offensive.
Because I don't feel that.
It's a nuanced point.
MALE SPEAKER: Do you think
comedians have more leeway?
I've not really
picked up an example
of a comedian getting slated.
Frankie Boyle, maybe, actually,
now that I think about it.
But Justine Sacco says it.
She says, I'm not a
character in "South Park."
I'm not a comedian.
So she had no business
trying to attempt to a joke.
Do comedians have a bit more
forgiveness, do you think?
Their stock and trade is to
try and be funny and push
some boundaries.
JON RONSON: They
have more forgiveness
because there's more
built-in context.
But I don't blame Justine.
I don't blame Justine for
anything that happened at all.
The tweet, for people
who don't know,
that got Justine destroyed
was, "going to Africa.
Hope I don't get AIDS.
Just kidding.
I'm white."
And then she got on the
plane, turned off her phone,
and while she was asleep,
she was destroyed.
Now obviously, it's a
terrible combination of words.
But the joke was intended, like
"South Park," or Randy Newman,
it was intended to mock her
own privilege, her own bubble
of privilege.
The way she described the joke
to me was, living in America
puts us in a bubble
when it comes to what
is going on in the third world.
I was making fun of the bubble.
So she was ridiculing herself.
Now, it was her own fault
for not making that clear.
But she only 170
Twitter followers.
Nobody ever replied
to any of her jokes.
She was a comedian
in an empty room.
And yet while she was
asleep on a plane,
she became the world wide,
number one trending topic
on Twitter.
She was googled one
million 220,000 times
that night, whereas
the month before, he
had been googled 40 times.
MALE SPEAKER: She worked
in PR, which didn't help.
JON RONSON: Definitely
didn't help.
And I'll tell you what
else didn't help--
the fact that she was blonde.
In her Twitter
avatar, she looked
like someone who had fun
and parties in New York.
So misogynists hated that.
She really united a lot
of disparate groups.
So this is the thing that I
found most awful about this,
and I thought the
world lost its mind.
Which is that she was asleep
on a plane, unable to explain
her joke, and not only did
that not matter to people,
people loved that
about the situation.
One person tweeted, we are about
to watch this Justine Sacco
bitch get fired in real
time before she even knows.
MALE SPEAKER: They were tracking
the plane, weren't they?
JON RONSON: Yeah,
flight tracker website,
#worldwide,
#hasjustinelandedyet?
MALE SPEAKER:
Yeah, that's right.
JON RONSON: People
were tweeting,
"#hasjustinelandedyet may be
the best thing to ever happen
to my Friday night" and so on.
I mean, we're talking
100,000 tweets that night
while she was asleep on a plane.
So the fact was the
decontextualization
of the tweet was
brilliant for people.
People loved it.
And in fact, if anybody said,
as indeed Helen Lewis, the "New
Statesmen" writer said
that night on Twitter,
I'm not sure that that joke
was intended to be racist.
I'm not sure that this woman
deserves what she's getting,
the response was, well, you're
just a privileged bitch too.
Calling for waiting for evidence
was seen as pathetic weakness
by us.
MALE SPEAKER: Any questions
from the floor of the stage?
I've got a ream of
questions, and I'm
very happy to keep going, but
I don't want to monopolize it.
One here, Adam.
Can you just wait
for mic, please?
We'll now have this
slightly awkward pause
for the microphone.
I'll try and fill.
AUDIENCE: So when
you were talking,
all I could think
about was remember
that landlord in Bristol?
A girl got murdered.
And then he was just on the
front of all the papers.
It was like, he's a weirdo.
He did it.
And actually he had nothing,
or he was just questioned.
Now he's had to have a
haircut, dye his hair,
he can't go out,
because people saw it.
Even though they've convicted
a guy who's admitted doing it,
and there's loads of evidence
that proves that he did do it,
he cannot get this image--
he just cannot shift it.
JON RONSON: Because
he didn't do it.
AUDIENCE: Because
he didn't do it,
and he was on the front
page of every paper.
So the paper's apology was
pretty poor, I thought,
but there's got to be a way
that the internet can be used
for good in reputation
in some ways,
because I was trying to think
of ways that it's gone the other
way, but it's actually
bad that I can't.
JON RONSON: Oh no, no.
There are.
There's lots of good
things that are happening.
I mean, at the
moment, personally,
I think the whole
Oscars so White campaign
is really positive.
That's really good.
It needed to be shaken up.
And there's countless
stories happening
where civil rights
movements are doing well
because of social media.
I mean, I can think
of a million of them.
Black Lives Matter
is really positive.
But as you say,
with that guy, that
was the mainstream media
taking a sliver of this person
and building it into a total
profile of this person,
that he liked poetry.
He taught poetry, and--
AUDIENCE: They
just focused on him
having long, gray hair
and he wore a trench coat.
JON RONSON: He had purple hair,
and he taught them poetry,
and so that obviously meant
he was a kind of sex murderer.
And what's
interesting, actually,
is that-- I can't
remember who said this,
but I think it was Marina Hyde.
I was being shamed
around July of last year,
and Marina Hyde said to
me, the "Guardian" writer,
it's funny, for Twitter
purports to hate tabloids,
but we are constantly
acting like a tabloid.
We are constantly taking
a tiny little sliver
of a bit of information.
And Twitter is the world's worst
information swapping services.
It's constantly
getting things wrong.
I mean, just yesterday,
the day before yesterday,
Kristin Stewart was being
destroyed all over Twitter
for something that
she didn't do,
for something that wasn't true.
Over and over again, people have
been destroyed for something,
and the next day, it was
like, oh, oh, oh, yeah.
That was wrong.
But then nobody learns from it.
We just do it all over again.
MALE SPEAKER: There's some
tough stuff in the book.
A number of people
commit suicide
as a result of the shame--
Ashley Madison leak victims.
"News of the World"
sting victims,
coming back to the press.
We might come back to that.
But probably most
harrowing is there's
a teenage girl who
was raped, and you
detail her cross-examination by
the prosecution lawyer, where
he gives her a
really tough time.
And this is a shaming
and humiliation
in a closed environment,
a court room.
Did you try and talk to the
lawyer about how he felt?
JON RONSON: Yeah,
I wrote to him,
the guy who did the
cross-examination--
MALE SPEAKER: John
Carruthers, to name him.
JON RONSON: Wrote
to him three times.
MALE SPEAKER: And he wouldn't.
JON RONSON: No, he
wouldn't talk to me.
And you know what?
I felt bad about naming him.
Somebody said to me
when the book came out,
why did you name him?
And my thought was,
well, it's public record.
But if I'm writing a book
that's against shaming,
I shouldn't really be
outing the shamists, right?
MALE SPEAKER: Interesting.
So again, when we come back to
that question I asked earlier
about pressing
send, you did think
about that one a little bit?
JON RONSON: Actually,
you know what?
I didn't think about that until
after the book had come out.
MALE SPEAKER: Oh,
after you pressed send.
JON RONSON: I shouldn't
have named him.
And in fact, if I'd
thought about it,
I could have taken his
name out for the paperback,
but I was in the midst of my
own shaming, so I didn't--
MALE SPEAKER: Isn't there
a potential then actually
that it just drives more people
to then find out about it?
And then maybe if
they're online,
they've looked in public record.
It's the classic thing
of X-ing something out,
actually makes it more--
JON RONSON: Like the Google
right to be forgotten.
I mean, when I read that
thing about the couple
having sex on the train
invoking their right
to be forgotten, obviously,
like everybody else,
I thought, oh, I'd
forgotten all about that.
Yeah, I mean luckily
in this book,
very luckily, pretty
much everybody,
almost everybody in the book
is delighted with the way
that they came over.
And in fact, the fact that
Justine's story became huge
as a result of my
book, Justine's
happy about that, because it's
supplanted the old narrative
with a new narrative.
And the same as
Lindsey Stone, she's
very happy that the book's out
there, and people are hearing--
MALE SPEAKER: Her
story, her side.
JON RONSON: Yeah, exactly.
MALE SPEAKER: I was reading the
book on holiday last summer,
and the son of a
couple friends of mine
picked it up, and devoured it.
And I couldn't get
it back for two days.
He's about 15.
And so I talked to
him about it, and he
said that he is very nervous
about publishing anything.
You've got a teenage son.
Do you advise him on his
social media profile?
JON RONSON: He's quite-- my
son is quite unadvisable,
because he's so--
MALE SPEAKER: Well, maybe
let's separate family, then.
If you were talking to--
JON RONSON: Well, no,
actually, my son--
MALE SPEAKER: If
you were talking
to a bunch of teenagers that
weren't blood relatives,
what would you say to them?
JON RONSON: Well, at a talk,
when the book first came out,
a child psychologist came up
to me in the signing queue.
I was about to tell this story
when that guy started heckling,
and so I never got to tell
this story onstage last night.
This child psychologist came
up to me in the signing queue
and said that every single--
she said either every single
or almost every child
who comes to her damaged
now is damaged as a
result of something that
happened on social media.
So my answer to that
question isn't necessarily
the right answer,
But when I think
about the destruction
of Justine Sacco,
and I said this on
Twitter, by the way,
and got a ferocious response.
So I apologize if what I'm
about to say offends anybody.
But when I think about Justine
Sacco and people saying to me,
I'm going to send your book
to my children to show them,
don't be like Justine
Sacco, don't tweet something
that could be misconstrued,
be more careful,
that reminds me of like,
girls at Saturday night,
don't wear short skirts.
It feels to me like
victim blaming.
I think the people
who should be changing
their behavior in the Justine
Sacco incident are the shamers.
I mean, Justine was an idiot,
and my god, she paid the price.
But she was asleep on a plane.
The joke wasn't intended--
et cetera, et cetera.
So I think that's what I
would say to teenagers.
Of course, don't be offensive.
As I said before,
I'm a firm believer
in political correctness.
I remember in the 1970s,
on Saturday night TV,
it was wall-to-wall
racism and sexism.
And political correctness
has solved that.
So I'm not attacking
political correctness.
But I am saying, don't
be like reputation.com
had to be toward Lindsey Stone.
Be audacious.
Be open.
And don't pile on people.
That's the behavior--
MALE SPEAKER: That's
the key message.
And always look for
context and reason.
JON RONSON: Curiosity, context,
nuance, compassion, empathy.
Hello.
Oh, yes.
MALE SPEAKER: Yeah, please.
JON RONSON: I hope
people are enjoying this.
AUDIENCE: Very much.
Yeah, a question
on exactly that,
because if you look at the
anthropological evolution
of humans, right,
everybody used to live
in small communities, small
villages, towns, bigger cities.
And reputation was
something that you
had to keep amongst
your peers, and whenever
somebody tried to
slander you, that
could backfire to that person
some way along the way.
Just give it time
in worst cases.
Now the world is
your small town,
and technology has allowed
us to become global
very fast, which is something
that humans haven't necessarily
evolved that fast to handle.
How do you think it's
possible for the bullies
and just the mentality
and the way that humans
behave to evolve to match that?
JON RONSON: You're right.
We haven't caught up.
What I noticed time
and time again,
when I was writing this book,
was that we haven't caught up
with the new circumstances.
So on Twitter, we like to
see ourselves as powerless,
but we are very, very powerful.
If we tell a corporation that
we want that person fired,
that person will be fired.
I say in the book,
we're like toddlers
crawling towards a gun.
So honestly, because I don't
think you can regulate.
I mean, personally, it's funny,
before I'd written this book,
I would have knee-jerk
against the right
to be forgotten,
because journalists
are supposed to against
the right to be forgotten.
And I don't feel
that way anymore.
I'm all for the
right to be forgotten
for private individuals,
like the couple having
sex on the train.
Because I've gone from
being a prosecution
attorney to a defense
attorney over the years.
And now I feel like
all defense attorneys
do, that people shouldn't
be judged by the worst thing
that they ever did, unless
it's something so terrible
that it deserves to
swallow up their life.
So I'm all for that.
But basically, what I think is
we need to have conversations
like this.
Because every time people
think in a more holistic way
about this kind of situation,
then hopefully when
shamings happen, everything just
gets a little bit more nuanced,
and voices back and forward.
And that's democracy.
MALE SPEAKER: Two at the
back there, and one there.
And whoever gets the mic first.
JON RONSON: Can I just quickly
add something about the right
to be forgotten?
Really, I just thought now
was that reputation.com,
it costs quite a lot of money
to get your reputation scrubbed.
I mean, they told me that
they were giving Lindsey
hundreds of thousands of
dollars in free service.
MALE SPEAKER: Yeah, that's
what it says in the book.
JON RONSON: Whereas even
though social media is
a leveling of the
playing field, it's
still the
multi-millionaires that
could afford to get their
reputations scrubbed.
So the right to be forgotten
is a more egalitarian version
of that.
MALE SPEAKER: More
egalitarian, yes.
Right, good.
Who's got the mic?
AUDIENCE: So it seems to
me there's two directions
that it can go from here.
One is one we've
already discussed,
which is that people
become more bland.
They become more innocuous.
But it's perhaps
the other, and I
was thinking about
this the other day,
is that you're approaching
a generation that
will reach middle age in the
next year 20, 30 years, who
have grown up with this kind
of stuff all around them,
and are used to having all
this information out there
about them, and have to
recognize that everybody has
some dirty, little secret that
is going to be aired in public,
and everybody has an
opportunity to be shamed.
And so it's like mutually
assured destruction,
and everyone decides,
you know what?
It's not worth picking
on that other person,
because I'm sure
I have something
that somebody could
make fun of and shame
in exactly the same way.
JON RONSON: Totally.
AUDIENCE: Do you think there's
a sense of it going that way?
JON RONSON: I totally agree
that that is the ideal.
And it might happen.
Someone said to me about
the Ashley Madison hack.
Though this is slightly a
tangential thing, somebody
who was pro the Ashley
Madison hack basically said,
well all of our secrets
should be out in public.
And my response to
that was, there's
a massive difference
between being out and being
outed, a profound difference.
So what I've noticed
these days is
that sometimes the people who
do the shaming most ferociously
are people who are most afraid
that the same thing's going
to happen to them.
Jonah Lehrer got destroyed
by the journalistic community
I'm sure in part because
everybody thought, there
but for the grace of God
go I. So let's get him,
like a Mayan deity
blood sacrifice.
But I agree with you.
I think it's possible.
It's happening.
Actually, I'm really
thinking on my feet here,
but it's kind of
happening a bit in porn.
I've been spending
some time in the porn
community for this future
project, and a lot of women
have said to me, a
lot of porn women
have said to me, that everybody
wants to be in porn now.
Honestly, the
market is saturated.
One of the big
problems in porn now
is that millions of 18-year-old
girls want to get into porn.
And so everybody's fighting
really hard to build a career,
because there's this
constant influx of new girls.
And that's kind of what
you're talking about, right?
When you grow up in a generation
where everybody is watching
porn for free, it sort
of destigmatizes it
for a lot of young people.
So who knows?
So Maybe it'll be a utopian
world where everyone's in porn.
MALE SPEAKER: Linking
smoothly, Pia?
AUDIENCE: I have a question,
but can you hear me?
JON RONSON: It's quiet.
AUDIENCE: No?
No, sorry.
AUDIENCE: We'll take
the back ways first.
AUDIENCE: OK, yeah.
AUDIENCE: I've got a
question about this book,
but I've also got a
question about another book.
It depends on what you'd prefer.
JON RONSON: Oh, sure.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE: What would you prefer?
MALE SPEAKER: This
book or another book?
Change tack?
JON RONSON: Oh, no, just--
AUDIENCE: So a question
about this book, or "Them"
was the other one I
wanted to ask about?
JON RONSON: "Them," because I'm
doing a "Them" talk tonight.
AUDIENCE: Also, I was trying
to work out which of your books
would make the best porn title.
And I think "The Men Who Stare
at Goats" is probably up there.
MALE SPEAKER: Nicely done.
AUDIENCE: In terms of
"Them," you write brilliantly
about the Tottenham
Ayatollah, who
sounds like a bundle of laughs.
But what I wanted to ask is,
in the light of lot of changes
that have happened
since you wrote
the book, especially the
movement of a lot of people
to Syria from the UK, was there
something darker happening
underneath what was going on?
Because it sounded so calamitous
when you wrote about it,
but it sounds rather
better organized nowadays.
JON RONSON: Yes.
Or chaotic, when
I wrote about it.
Yeah, I mean, I
can't deny the fact
that I spent a year with
Omar Bakri Muhammad,
and really, we treated
him as a humorous--
we were products of our time.
This was pre-9/11, and we
treated him as a humorous
buffoon, I suppose.
Like, oh, what a lovely jihad.
And I spent a year with
him, and I got into scrapes,
and it was all kind
of silly and funny.
I remember he outed me as
a Jew at his jihad training
camp in Crawley.
And it was all silly and funny.
And Yeah, since
then so many people,
including people
who were literally
at that jihad training
camp had gone on
to become suicide
bombers and murderers.
And I was accused of
missing the story.
It's funny.
There was a guy called Mike
Wine from the board of deputies
of British Jews at the time.
This was 1996.
Said to me, the world
has not woken up
to the dangers of
militant Islamism.
And I was thinking, oh, Mike.
There you go.
However, what I would
say in defense of myself
is that everything
I wrote was true.
They weren't putting on a
fake, putting on a persona.
And I remember Terry
Gross from "Fresh Air,"
which is a big American radio
show, asked me that question.
Said, you were
wrong, weren't you?
And I said, that's in my
paranoid imagination, what
she said.
She might have said something
a bit nicer than that.
And I said, though,
you can be a buffoon
and you can still fly a
plane into a building.
So I don't feel that
what he did was wrong.
And you could argue
that it's valuable,
because it was capturing
that moment in time
just before things
started to turn horrific.
Thank you.
MALE SPEAKER: Pia.
AUDIENCE: I have a question
that's not fully formulated,
and it's really more
observations that confused me.
And I was wondering if
you have thoughts on them.
So when I was growing
up, I felt like there
was an understanding of an
elite and then the masses.
And I read books like "1984"
and "Brave New World."
And now you, of
course, are talking
about how there's almost this
move in society towards a more
private society, so where
we're governed by our own laws
and gay people can marry,
and everyone's equal,
and everyone can basically
do whatever they want.
But then we have
social media, which
is introducing this new
public shaming, which, again,
is giving back the power
to the masses to say,
if you're not like
me, you're going down.
And then we have the
daily news feeds,
that our now daily and weekly,
which we didn't have before,
saying celebrities,
they are just like us.
They have cellulite like us.
They cheat like us.
So it's trying to create
a level playing field,
but where everything
is based on the lowest
common denominator rather than
the highest common denominator.
And you have people
like the Kardashians,
who are our new elite.
And like you were
saying, lots of girls
want to go into porn, or
lots of people on Instagram
being extremely narcissistic
about posting 10 selfies a day.
Where do you think we're
heading with this, basically?
And do you think it's time
that we have a new elite?
Or how do we construct an
elite out of the masses?
What is happening, basically?
MALE SPEAKER: I feel reasonably
confident you haven't been
asked that question before.
JON RONSON: I haven't been
asked that question before,
however that question does
speak to something which
I think I'm heading into in
a future project of mine.
And the truth is, I
think it's interesting
that you ask that
question where we
are sitting right now, Google,
because there is a new elite.
I say in the book-- I
asked an internet economist
to try and work out for me
how much money Google made out
of the destruction
of Justine Sacco.
And the figure they
came back with, they
said the conservative
figure they came back with
was $120,000 Google made out
of Justine's annihilation
that night.
And please don't
ask me to say how
they got their calculations,
because I honestly
can't remember, although
it's in the book.
Whereas, of course, those of
us doing the actual shaming,
we got nothing.
We were unpaid shaming interns
for Google and Twitter.
So there is an elite,
and it's Silicon Valley.
That is the elite.
You see it happening with
Apple Music, or Spotify,
with Google, with
Twitter, to a lesser
extent, and other
companies, which
I'm looking at for my
next project, which
I don't want to
name, because I don't
want to give away what it is.
So there is an elite.
We are all drones working
for this new elite.
AUDIENCE: So what you're
saying is that instead
of an elite of intellectuals,
for instance, as we had before,
we now have an elite
that has created tools
of mass distribution,
tools of mass publication,
and that is the
elite, because they've
given the power to the people?
JON RONSON: Yeah, and
people don't care.
Why do people not care?
Because they're
getting everything for
free on the internet.
MALE SPEAKER: Do you think
there's-- because you
approached Twitter when
the spam bot was up.
Do you think there
is more of a role
that the media company
should be taking?
JON RONSON: Oh Jesus, yeah.
Twitter I think have
behaved-- honestly,
I mean, I hate to say this.
I think Twitter have
behaved despicably.
At one point, somebody
set up-- because
of the kind of ferocious
response towards my book
from a very, very
small number of people
who hadn't read
my book, somebody
set up a fake Jon Ronson
account in which I was always
praising the white supremacist
who killed those people
in South Carolina, Dylann Roof.
And so for the first and
only time in my life,
I complained to Twitter, and
I got a letter back saying,
this is not in violation of
our impersonation policy.
And then that was it.
They shut me off.
So I just felt this rage rage.
We are unpaid shaming
interns for a company
that doesn't give a
flying fuck about us.
MALE SPEAKER: Come
here, Rob, I hink.
AUDIENCE: Following on
from the previous point,
in that example, media
companies and in particular tech
companies like Google, do a
lot to distance themselves
from those moral
scenarios, because we just
provide the tools,
and it's up to people
themselves to govern
how they use it.
Do you think that there is
a potential future where
not necessarily tech
companies but just
there is a higher moral arbiter
which needs to be appealed to?
Because in the
previous scenario,
it was the
intellectuals, and you
would appeal to
those people who were
seen as the wizened
elders of the clan.
Now, although the power
has been concentrated
into different hands, it
seems like those companies,
in this case, are less
willing to take that standard.
JON RONSON: Yes,
and they absolutely
should take that standard.
And I'm not really
talking about regulations.
As I said, I happen to think
the right to be forgotten
is a good thing.
And you can, of course,
regular against trolls
who use extreme language.
You can't regulate
against the millions
of people who destroyed
Justine Sacco, because they
were nice people like
us, trying to do good.
It was trying to be
compassionate that
lead so many people to the
profoundly uncompassionate act
of destroying Justine while
she was asleep on a plane.
So I don't think
regulation is the answer,
but I do think responsibility.
Honestly, I think
Twitter is acting
so idiotically in
the way that it's
seeming like this
kind of untouchable,
uncaring elite hiding
behind libertarianism.
Because people's lives
constantly are getting
upended on Twitter.
And for Twitter to take
this detached view-- getting
that letter that I got, I
wrote back and I said, why not?
And they never replied.
AUDIENCE: But we definitely
do the same thing.
On YouTube and
Facebook, they're all
not responsible for the
content that's posted.
So would you say that you would
advocate companies rather than
governments not censoring
but at least providing
stricter guidelines as to
what content is posted?
JON RONSON: Definitely.
I think it's top down.
I really do.
Really unexpected websites
can be really vicious,
like Mumsnet.
I mean, I know it's tough
to have a young kid,
but still, you don't need
to take it out of me.
And I think in a
situation like that,
it's absolutely
incumbent on the people
who run the message boards
to create an ambience that
means that people don't feel
as ready to just destroy.
And the "Guardian" does it.
MALE SPEAKER: They moderate
pretty heavily, don't they.
JON RONSON: Yeah, and good.
My view's changed since I've
A, got older, and B, done
this book about public shaming.
I know it's in the
psychopath book.
I don't believe in just
everybody doing whatever
the hell they want.
The internet is
not the real world.
The internet is the real world,
and so I am all for people
taking a heavy hand like
the "Guardian" does.
MALE SPEAKER: Brilliant.
We've got a question
over here, and then we'll
have maybe two or three more.
AUDIENCE: I've also
got two questions.
One's really easy to answer, and
then one's more of an opinion.
The first one is that "Them"
was a really good book when
it came out, and I found
it really interesting.
And I'd be really interested to
hear some of those stories now,
10, 15 years later,
like Alex Jones
who thinks everything's a
conspiracy, whatever happens
is clearly a conspiracy theory.
JON RONSON: Well, Alex Jones
is friends with Donald Trump.
AUDIENCE: That was
my second question.
And I wondered if
you had any plans
to go back and write a sequel or
a new one to see those people.
And the question was more
about in light of that,
what do you think of [INAUDIBLE]
Trump and more so much
Jeremy Corbyn over here, where
they're not political people.
They're not necessarily
even loved by the press,
but they seem to be hugely
popular and hugely successful,
and are probably going to
win nominations and things,
and that wouldn't have
happened 10, 15 years ago,
whereas it can now.
JON RONSON: Yeah, it all feels
like part of the same thing.
On social media,
it's like a stage
for constant artificial high
dramas, where everybody's
either this magnificent hero
or the sickening villain,
and the nuanced middle ground
has become unfashionable.
Barbara Ellen wrote this
really nice in the "Guardian."
I should say, I've been living
in New York for the last three
or four years, so I'm
really not qualified
to talk about Jeremy Corbyn.
From where I'm standing,
some of the things he'd said
I think seem like
a very good idea.
I don't see the point of
Trident, for instance.
But when Barbara Ellen
left the Labour Party,
she wrote a column in "The
Observer," where she said,
when did being moderate
become such a dirty word?
And so it's bleeding out of
social media into politics,
with Trump and with Corbyn.
And for me, as a moderate
who just wants everything
to be reasonable,
it's nightmarish.
And in terms of
your first question,
I don't think I would go back,
because I've just noticed that
the only way I get to tell
stories is when I don't-- I
like to go into a
world that I don't know
and don't understand, and
try and solve the mystery.
Once I feel like I
understand the world,
I no longer have
any interest in it.
And that's what happened to
me with the conspiracy world
in "Them."
I feel like I get Alex Jones.
Alex Jones is an
interesting case, though,
because suddenly he has power.
It seems like he's influencing
Donald Trump, which
is incredible, that
this guy who we star
spotted 15, 20 years ago, this
crazy conspiracy guy suddenly
seems to actually have power.
But in general, I
wouldn't go back and redo
a story for that reason.
MALE SPEAKER: We've got a
question right over here,
and then I'll come to you.
AUDIENCE: Thanks very much.
I don't know if anyone saw
"Troll Hunters" last night,
presented by Em Ford,
who is one of YouTube's
favorite anti-troll people.
She did the "You
Look Disgusting"
video that got over
17 million views.
And it showed her
putting on her makeup
with responses to
comments she got
that went from very
negative to very positive.
So in this documentary,
she went and interviewed
trolls who had led to
suicide of specific people
by their comments.
And no matter how much she
tried to reason with them,
these people were
never going to change.
They were like, we don't care.
We feel like we win
every time you respond.
So my question is,
for these trolls,
do you want our
silence, which we often
construe as ignoring
something and taking
the moral high ground because we
don't want to feed the trolls?
Is that silence a
moral high ground
from people who
don't engage in this?
Or do you feel like we should
be challenging them and creating
more debate for
people like Justine?
She'll be torn apart more,
because the trolls will
want us to respond.
Is silence a moral
high ground, or is it
being complicit in their
life being torn apart?
So I don't think
there's a good answer.
JON RONSON: No, I
hear what you're
saying, although
what I would say
is that I don't think
that this public shaming
book is a book about trolls.
I think trolls are like a
kind of extreme, ridiculous,
ludicrous minority,
whereas if Justine
had been piled into
just by trolls,
I think her story would
have gone away very quickly.
Because we've got a lot of crazy
trolls, misogynistic idiots.
And there certainly
were a smattering
of misogynistic idiots.
I mean, somebody wrote
somebody HIV positive should
rape this bitch, and
then we'll find out
if her skin color
protects her from AIDS.
That's horrific, but it wasn't
trolls who felled Justine.
It was us.
It was lovely people like us.
So I suppose the
answer to your question
is, as far as I'm concerned,
the dialogue should
be with us, reasonable
compassionate people who
started acting like trolls,
not ridiculous clowns.
MALE SPEAKER: And then
this question over here.
AUDIENCE: I just
wanted to ask if you
think that all of this shaming
is because most of humanity,
deep inside, sadly, feels
safer and easier when somebody
else is in a worse
situation than they are,
and social media is
just enabling it,
whereas in the
past, they were just
able to read it
in the newspapers?
So do you think it's
because of that,
and is there any way to fix it?
JON RONSON: No, you're right.
And I noticed this for
the first time when
I was writing "The Psychopath
Test," which is an earlier
book, where I met this
researcher, who used to work
on the daytime TV
shows where everybody
would scream at each other.
And she told me that
she had a secret trick
that she would utilize
when deciding which guests
to book for the show.
And the secret
trick was that she
would ask them was
medication they were on.
And if they were on a medication
for something scary-sounding,
like lithium, she said I
wouldn't have them on the show,
because you don't want
them to go on the show
and then go off and
kill themselves.
But if it was a medication for
a fun-sounding mental illness,
like Prozac, she said
that's kind of perfect.
And of course, that's
what she's doing.
We're putting people on
television who are a little bit
crazier than we
are, not so crazy
that we feel bad about it.
She said to me, we don't
want real exploitation.
We don't want
overt exploitation.
We want smoke and
mirrors exploitation.
And yes, we want people who are
just a bit crazier than we are
so we feel a bit
happier about ourselves,
a little bit less
crazy, but not so crazy
that we feel bad about it.
MALE SPEAKER: One
last question here.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I thought that was
really interesting what
you were saying
about women getting
shamed get way worse insults.
And then I started
thinking, is it more likely
a woman to shame or a man?
I mean, are women
more into shaming
or are men more into
shaming, or is there
no kind of correlation?
And then I was thinking
about "The Psychopath Test."
And how I recall it,
I remember one woman
who had mental health problems,
who was in the basement,
and smeared shit
on the wall, but I
don't remember you talking
about any female psychopaths.
And then I started
thinking, it is a male thing
to be a psychopath?
Because maybe women have
more empathy or something,
so we're less likely
to be a psychopath.
JON RONSON: Well, I've
got an anecdotal answer
to that second question,
which was there used to be.
There aren't anymore.
There used to be these
treatment centers in Britain
called DSPD units, which were
basically treatment centers
for psychopaths.
DSPD means dangerous and
severe personality disorder.
I'm going back into
my memory here,
but I think there were
five of them in Britain,
and four were for men
and one was for women.
So maybe that's an
anecdotal way to show
the breakdown between male
and female psychopaths.
Why?
I really don't know,
and I should also
add that in my public shaming
book, the problem with people
who are really into psychopathy
diagnoses, sometimes,
is that they're not really that
interested in what happened
to the person as a
child to make them
that way, whereas in this book,
I talk about a psychiatrist
called James Gilligan who
comes to the conclusion
that all violence is an
attempt to replace shame
with self-esteem.
So he believes that
there are some people who
are diagnosed as psychopaths
are actually not.
They're people who are trying to
replace shame with self-esteem.
Oh, and the male
and female thing,
honestly, my guess,
and also a little bit
from personal
experience, because I
had some waves of shaming
over the course of 2015
as a result of this book
from people who haven't read
the book-- I don't know if
I mentioned that-- I didn't
notice any gender differences.
A helluva lot of
women were mean to me.
MALE SPEAKER: We are,
I'm afraid, out of time.
We could clearly go on
for a very long time.
JON RONSON: I just
wanted to say,
I aim to end every talk with
a helluva a lot of women
were mean to me.
MALE SPEAKER: Well, we've
ticked that box, then.
So I would like to thank Rob
and Nick for putting it on,
but most of all, I'd like
to thank Jon for giving up
an hour to come in.
Congratulations on the book.
[APPLAUSE]
JON RONSON: Thanks.
