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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
In the early days of Twitter, it was like a place of radical1 de-shaming. People would admit shameful2 secrets about themselves, and other people would say, "Oh my God, I'm exactly the same." Voiceless people realized that they had a voice, and it was powerful and eloquent3. If a newspaper ran some racist4 or homophobic column, we realized we could do something about it. We could get them. We could hit them with a weapon that we understood but they didn't -- a social media shaming. Advertisers would withdraw their advertising5. When powerful people misused7 their privilege, we were going to get them. This was like the democratization of justice. Hierarchies8 were being leveled out. We were going to do things better.
Soon after that, a disgraced pop science writer called Jonah Lehrer -- he'd been caught plagiarizing9 and faking quotes, and he was drenched10 in shame and regret, he told me. And he had the opportunity to publicly apologize at a foundation lunch. This was going to be the most important speech of his life. Maybe it would win him some salvation11. He knew before he arrived that the foundation was going to be live-streaming his event, but what he didn't know until he turned up, was that they'd erected12 a giant screen Twitter feed right next to his head. (Laughter) Another one in a monitor screen in his eye line.
I don't think the foundation did this because they were monstrous14. I think they were clueless: I think this was a unique moment when the beautiful naivety15 of Twitter was hitting the increasingly horrific reality.
And here were some of the Tweets that were cascading16 into his eye line, as he was trying to apologize:
"Jonah Lehrer, boring us into forgiving him." (Laughter)
And, "Jonah Lehrer has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame."
That one must have been written by the best psychiatrist17 ever, to know that about such a tiny figure behind a lectern.
And, "Jonah Lehrer is just a frigging sociopath."
That last word is a very human thing to do, to dehumanize the people we hurt. It's because we want to destroy people but not feel bad about it. Imagine if this was an actual court, and the accused was in the dark, begging for another chance, and the jury was yelling out, "Bored! Sociopath!" (Laughter)
You know, when we watch courtroom dramas, we tend to identify with the kindhearted defense18 attorney, but give us the power, and we become like hanging judges.
Power shifts fast. We were getting Jonah because he was perceived to have misused his privilege, but Jonah was on the floor then, and we were still kicking, and congratulating ourselves for punching up. And it began to feel weird19 and empty when there wasn't a powerful person who had misused their privilege that we could get. A day without a shaming began to feel like a day picking fingernails and treading water.
Let me tell you a story. It's about a woman called Justine Sacco. She was a PR woman from New York with 170 Twitter followers20, and she'd Tweet little acerbic21 jokes to them, like this one on a plane from New York to London: [Weird German Dude: You're in first class. It's 2014. Get some deodorant22." -Inner monologue23 as inhale24 BO. Thank god for pharmaceuticals26.] So Justine chuckled27 to herself, and pressed send, and got no replies, and felt that sad feeling that we all feel when the Internet doesn't congratulate us for being funny. (Laughter) Black silence when the Internet doesn't talk back. And then she got to Heathrow, and she had a little time to spare before her final leg, so she thought up another funny little acerbic joke:
[Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!]
And she chuckled to herself, pressed send, got on the plane, got no replies, turned off her phone, fell asleep, woke up 11 hours later, turned on her phone while the plane was taxiing on the runway, and straightaway there was a message from somebody that she hadn't spoken to since high school, that said, "I am so sorry to see what's happening to you." And then another message from a best friend, "You need to call me right now. You are the worldwide number one trending topic on Twitter." (Laughter)
What had happened is that one of her 170 followers had sent the Tweet to a Gawker journalist, and he retweeted it to his 15,000 followers: [And now, a funny holiday joke from IAC's PR boss] And then it was like a bolt of lightning. A few weeks later, I talked to the Gawker journalist. I emailed him and asked him how it felt, and he said, "It felt delicious." And then he said, "But I'm sure she's fine."
But she wasn't fine, because while she slept, Twitter took control of her life and dismantled28 it piece by piece. First there were the philanthropists: [If @JustineSacco's unfortunate words ... bother you, join me in supporting @CARE's work in Africa.] [In light of ... disgusting, racist tweet, I'm donating to @care today] Then came the beyond horrified29: [... no words for that horribly disgusting racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond horrified.]
Was anybody on Twitter that night? A few of you. Did Justine's joke overwhelm your Twitter feed the way it did mine? It did mine, and I thought what everybody thought that night, which was, "Wow, somebody's screwed! Somebody's life is about to get terrible!" And I sat up in my bed, and I put the pillow behind my head, and then I thought, I'm not entirely30 sure that joke was intended to be racist. Maybe instead of gleefully flaunting31 her privilege, she was mocking the gleeful flaunting of privilege. There's a comedy tradition of this, like South Park or Colbert or Randy Newman. Maybe Justine Sacco's crime was not being as good at it as Randy Newman. In fact, when I met Justine a couple of weeks later in a bar, she was just crushed, and I asked her to explain the joke, and she said, "Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the Third World. I was making of fun of that bubble."
You know, another woman on Twitter that night, a New Statesman writer Helen Lewis, she reviewed my book on public shaming and wrote that she Tweeted that night, "I'm not sure that her joke was intended to be racist," and she said straightaway she got a fury of Tweets saying, "Well, you're just a privileged bitch, too." And so to her shame, she wrote, she shut up and watched as Justine's life got torn apart.
It started to get darker: [Everyone go report this cunt @JustineSacco] Then came the calls for her to be fired. [Good luck with the job hunt in the new year. #GettingFired] Thousands of people around the world decided32 it was their duty to get her fired. [@JustineSacco last tweet of your career. #SorryNotSorry Corporations got involved, hoping to sell their products on the back of Justine's annihilation: [Next time you plan to tweet something stupid before you take off, make sure you are getting on a @Gogo flight!] (Laughter)
A lot of companies were making good money that night. You know, Justine's name was normally Googled 40 times a month. That month, between December the 20th and the end of December, her name was Googled 1,220,000 times. And one Internet economist33 told me that that meant that Google made somewhere between 120,000 dollars and 468,000 dollars from Justine's annihilation, whereas those of us doing the actual shaming -- we got nothing. (Laughter) We were like unpaid34 shaming interns35 for Google. (Laughter)
And then came the trolls: [I'm actually kind of hoping Justine Sacco gets aids? lol] Somebody else on that wrote, "Somebody HIV-positive should rape36 this bitch and then we'll find out if her skin color protects her from AIDS." And that person got a free pass. Nobody went after that person. We were all so excited about destroying Justine, and our shaming brains are so simple-minded, that we couldn't also handle destroying somebody who was inappropriately destroying Justine. Justine was really uniting a lot of disparate groups that night, from philanthropists to "rape the bitch." [@JustineSacco I hope you get fired! You demented bitch... Just let the world know you're planning to ride bare back while in Africa.]
Women always have it worse than men. When a man gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired." When a woman gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired and raped37 and cut out your uterus."
And then Justine's employers got involved: [IAC on @JustineSacco tweet: This is an outrageous38, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight.] And that's when the anger turned to excitement: [All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco's face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail. #fired] [Oh man, @justinesacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands.] [We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she's getting fired.] What we had was a delightful39 narrative40 arc. We knew something that Justine didn't. Can you think of anything less judicial41 than this? Justine was asleep on a plane and unable to explain herself, and her inability was a huge part of the hilarity42. On Twitter that night, we were like toddlers crawling towards a gun. Somebody worked out exactly which plane she was on, so they linked to a flight tracker website. [British Airways43 Flight 43 On-time - arrives in 1 hour 34 minutes] A hashtag began trending worldwide: # hasJustineLandedYet? [It is kinda wild to see someone self-destruct without them even being aware of it. #hasJustineLandedYet] [Seriously. I just want to go home to go to bed, but everyone at the bar is SO into #HasJustineLandedYet. Can't look away. Can't leave.] [#HasJustineLandedYet may be the best thing to happen to my Friday night.] [Is no one in Cape44 Town going to the airport to tweet her arrival? Come on, twitter! I'd like pictures] And guess what? Yes there was. [@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town international. And if you want to know what it looks like to discover that you've just been torn to shreds45 because of a misconstrued liberal joke, not by trolls, but by nice people like us, this is what it looks like: [... She's decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.]
So why did we do it? I think some people were genuinely upset, but I think for other people, it's because Twitter is basically a mutual46 approval machine. We surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do, and we approve each other, and that's a really good feeling. And if somebody gets in the way, we screen them out. And do you know what that's the opposite of? It's the opposite of democracy. We wanted to show that we cared about people dying of AIDS in Africa. Our desire to be seen to be compassionate47 is what led us to commit this profoundly un-compassionate act. As Meghan O'Gieblyn wrote in the Boston Review, "This isn't social justice. It's a cathartic48 alternative."
For the past three years, I've been going around the world meeting people like Justine Sacco -- and believe me, there's a lot of people like Justine Sacco. There's more every day. And we want to think they're fine, but they're not fine. The people I met were mangled49. They talked to me about depression, and anxiety and insomnia50 and suicidal thoughts. One woman I talked to, who also told a joke that landed badly, she stayed home for a year and a half. Before that, she worked with adults with learning difficulties, and was apparently51 really good at her job.
Justine was fired, of course, because social media demanded it. But it was worse than that. She was losing herself. She was waking up in the middle of the night, forgetting who she was. She was got because she was perceived to have misused her privilege. And of course, that's a much better thing to get people for than the things we used to get people for, like having children out of wedlock52. But the phrase "misuse6 of privilege" is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. It's becoming a devalued term, and it's making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions53.
Justine had 170 Twitter followers, and so to make it work, she had to be fictionalized. Word got around that she was the daughter the mining billionaire Desmond Sacco. [Let us not be fooled by #JustineSacco her father is a SA mining billionaire. She's not sorry. And neither is her father.] I thought that was true about Justine, until I met her at a bar, and I asked her about her billionaire father, and she said, "My father sells carpets."
And I think back on the early days of Twitter, when people would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, "Oh my God, I'm exactly the same." These days, the hunt is on for people's shameful secrets. You can lead a good, ethical54 life, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all, become a clue to your secret inner evil.
Maybe there's two types of people in the world: those people who favor humans over ideology55, and those people who favor ideology over humans. I favor humans over ideology, but right now, the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas where everybody's either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain56, even though we know that's not true about our fellow humans. What's true is that we are clever and stupid; what's true is that we're grey areas. The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people, but we're now creating a surveillance society, where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.
Let's not do that.
Thank you.
Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Jon.
Jon Ronson: Thanks, Bruno.
Bruno Giussani: Don't go away. What strikes me about Justine's story is also the fact that if you Google her name today, this story covers the first 100 pages of Google results -- there is nothing else about her. In your book, you mention another story of another victim who actually got taken on by a reputation management firm, and by creating blogs and posting nice, innocuous stories about her love for cats and holidays and stuff, managed to get the story off the first couple pages of Google results, but it didn't last long. A couple of weeks later, they started creeping back up to the top result. Is this a totally lost battle?
Jon Ronson: You know, I think the very best thing we can do, if you see a kind of unfair or an ambiguous shaming, is to speak up, because I think the worst thing that happened to Justine was that nobody supported her -- like, everyone was against her, and that is profoundly traumatizing, to be told by tens of thousands of people that you need to get out. But if a shaming happens and there's a babble57 of voices, like in a democracy, where people are discussing it, I think that's much less damaging. So I think that's the way forward, but it's hard, because if you do stand up for somebody, it's incredibly unpleasant.
Bruno Giussani: So let's talk about your experience, because you stood up by writing this book. By the way, it's mandatory58 reading for everybody, okay? You stood up because the book actually puts the spotlight59 on shamers. And I assume you didn't only have friendly reactions on Twitter.
Jon Ronson: It didn't go down that well with some people. (Laughter) I mean, you don't want to just concentrate -- because lots of people understood, and were really nice about the book. But yeah, for 30 years I've been writing stories about abuses of power, and when I say the powerful people over there in the military, or in the pharmaceutical25 industry, everybody applauds me. As soon as I say, "We are the powerful people abusing our power now," I get people saying, "Well you must be a racist too."
Bruno Giussani: So the other night -- yesterday -- we were at dinner, and there were two discussions going on. On one side you were talking with people around the table -- and that was a nice, constructive60 discussion. On the other, every time you turned to your phone, there is this deluge61 of insults.
Jon Ronson: Yeah. This happened last night. We had like a TED13 dinner last night. We were chatting and it was lovely and nice, and I decided to check Twitter. Somebody said, "You are a white supremacist." And then I went back and had a nice conversation with somebody, and then I went back to Twitter, somebody said my very existence made the world a worse place. My friend Adam Curtis says that maybe the Internet is like a John Carpenter movie from the 1980s, when eventually everyone will start screaming at each other and shooting each other, and then eventually everybody would flee to somewhere safer, and I'm starting to think of that as a really nice option.
Bruno Giussani: Jon, thank you.
Jon Ronson: Thank you, Bruno.
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1
radical
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| n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的 | |
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shameful
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| adj.可耻的，不道德的 | |
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eloquent
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| adj.雄辩的，口才流利的；明白显示出的 | |
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racist
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| n.种族主义者，种族主义分子 | |
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advertising
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| n.广告业；广告活动 a.广告的；广告业务的 | |
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misuse
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| n.误用，滥用；vt.误用，滥用 | |
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misused
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| v.使用…不当( misuse的过去式和过去分词 )；把…派作不正当的用途；虐待；滥用 | |
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8
hierarchies
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| 等级制度( hierarchy的名词复数 )； 统治集团； 领导层； 层次体系 | |
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plagiarizing
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| v.剽窃，抄袭( plagiarize的现在分词 ) | |
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10
drenched
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| adj.湿透的；充满的v.使湿透( drench的过去式和过去分词 )；在某人（某物）上大量使用（某液体） | |
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salvation
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| n.（尤指基督）救世，超度，拯救，解困 | |
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ERECTED
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| adj. 直立的，竖立的，笔直的 vt. 使 ... 直立，建立 | |
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ted
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| vt.翻晒，撒，撒开 | |
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14
monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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naivety
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| n.天真，纯朴，幼稚 | |
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cascading
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| 流注( cascade的现在分词 )； 大量落下； 大量垂悬； 梯流 | |
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psychiatrist
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| n.精神病专家；精神病医师 | |
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defense
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| n.防御，保卫；[pl.]防务工事；辩护，答辩 | |
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weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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followers
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| 追随者( follower的名词复数 )； 用户； 契据的附面； 从动件 | |
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acerbic
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| adj.酸的，刻薄的 | |
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deodorant
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| adj.除臭的；n.除臭剂 | |
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monologue
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| n.长篇大论，（戏剧等中的）独白 | |
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inhale
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| v.吸入(气体等)，吸(烟) | |
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pharmaceutical
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| adj.药学的，药物的；药用的，药剂师的 | |
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pharmaceuticals
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| n.医药品；药物( pharmaceutical的名词复数 ) | |
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chuckled
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| 轻声地笑( chuckle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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dismantled
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| 拆开( dismantle的过去式和过去分词 )； 拆卸； 废除； 取消 | |
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horrified
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| a.(表现出)恐惧的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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flaunting
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| adj.招摇的，扬扬得意的，夸耀的v.炫耀，夸耀( flaunt的现在分词 )；有什么能耐就施展出来 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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economist
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| n.经济学家，经济专家，节俭的人 | |
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unpaid
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| adj.未付款的，无报酬的 | |
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interns
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| n.住院实习医生( intern的名词复数 )v.拘留，关押( intern的第三人称单数 ) | |
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rape
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| n.抢夺，掠夺，强奸；vt.掠夺，抢夺，强奸 | |
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raped
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| v.以暴力夺取，强夺( rape的过去式和过去分词 )；强奸 | |
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outrageous
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| adj.无理的，令人不能容忍的 | |
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delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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narrative
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| n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的 | |
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judicial
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| adj.司法的，法庭的，审判的，明断的，公正的 | |
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hilarity
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| n.欢乐；热闹 | |
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AIRWAYS
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| 航空公司 | |
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cape
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| n.海角，岬；披肩，短披风 | |
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45
shreds
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| v.撕碎，切碎( shred的第三人称单数 )；用撕毁机撕毁（文件） | |
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46
mutual
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| adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的 | |
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compassionate
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| adj.有同情心的，表示同情的 | |
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cathartic
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| adj.宣泄情绪的；n.泻剂 | |
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49
mangled
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| vt.乱砍（mangle的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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50
insomnia
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| n.失眠，失眠症 | |
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51
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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52
wedlock
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| n.婚姻，已婚状态 | |
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53
transgressions
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| n.违反，违法，罪过( transgression的名词复数 ) | |
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54
ethical
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| adj.伦理的，道德的，合乎道德的 | |
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55
ideology
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| n.意识形态，(政治或社会的)思想意识 | |
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56
villain
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| n.反派演员，反面人物；恶棍；问题的起因 | |
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57
babble
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| v.含糊不清地说，胡言乱语地说，儿语 | |
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58
mandatory
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| adj.命令的；强制的；义务的；n.受托者 | |
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59
spotlight
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| n.公众注意的中心，聚光灯，探照灯，视听，注意，醒目 | |
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60
constructive
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| adj.建设的，建设性的 | |
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deluge
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| n./vt.洪水，暴雨，使泛滥 | |
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