So You've Been Publicly Shamed (24 page)

“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.

Your Speed

W
e 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.

•  •  •

F
rom 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.

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 Twitter 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.

I loved piecing together the history of group madness from Gustave LeBon to Philip Zimbardo. Five people were incredibly generous with their time and expertise—Adam Curtis, Bob Nye, Steve Reicher, Alex Haslam, and, especially, Clifford Stott. Clifford kindly talked me through the perils of deindividuation in two long Skype conversations. I recommend his book
Mad Mobs and Englishmen? Myths and Realities of the 2011 Riots
, cowritten with Steve Reicher and published by Constable & Robinson in 2011.

My research into LeBon's history took me to Bob Nye's book
The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave LeBon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the 3rd Republic
, issued by SAGE Publications in 1975, and to Nye's introduction to the Transaction Publishers' reprint of the Dover edition of Gustave LeBon's
The Crowd
, published in 1995. Some details about LeBon's relationship with the Anthropological Society of Paris came from
Nature and Nurture in French Social Sciences, 1859–1914 and Beyond,
by Martin S. Staum, published by McGill–Queen's University Press in 2011. I learned that LeBon's fans included Goebbels and Mussolini from reading
Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy
, written by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi and published by the University of California Press in 2000, and
The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda
, written by David Welch and published by Routledge in 2002.

My research into Philip Zimbardo took me to “Rethinking the Psychology of Tyranny: The BBC Prison Study,” by Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam, which appeared in the
British Journal of Social Psychology
in 2006, and Dr. Zimbardo's rebuttal, “On Rethinking the Psychology of Tyranny: The BBC Prison Study,” published in the same journal.

Dr. Gary Slutkin's comments about the London riots being like a virus came from his article “Rioting Is a Disease Spread from Person to Person—The Key Is to Stop the Infection,” published in
The Observer/The Guardian
on August 13, 2011. The Jack Levin quotation came from “UK Riots: ‘We Don't Want No Trouble. We Just Want a Job,'” written by Shiv Malik and published in
The Guardian
on August 12, 2011. It was Clifford Stott's book and guidance that took me to both of those stories.

My interview with Malcolm Gladwell was broadcast on BBC's
The Culture Show
on October 2, 2013. My thanks to the director, Colette Camden; the series producer, Emma Cahusac; and the series editor, Janet Lee.

Although this book is full of new stuff, a few lines were self-plagiarized from a column and a feature I wrote for
The Guardian
's
Weekend
magazine. I'm referring to the story of how my son forced me to reenact being thrown into a lake, and to my interviews with Troy and Mercedes Haefer from 4chan. Parts of those interviews appeared in my story “Security Alert,” which was published in
The Guardian
on May 3, 2013. My thanks to Charlotte Northedge, who edited that feature.

My information about Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford came from
The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters
, edited by Charlotte Mosley and published by 4th Estate in 2007, and from
Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars
, written by Martin Pugh and published by Jonathan Cape in 2005. I'd also like to thank Jil Cove of the Cable Street Group, a history project created to commemorate those people who fought back against the British Union of Fascists. Some biographical details about Max Mosley came from his interview with John Humphreys on BBC Radio 4's
On the Ropes
, which was broadcast on March 1, 2011, and from “Max Mosley Fights Back,” by Lucy Kellaway, published in the
Financial Times
on February 4, 2011. I drew as well from Justice David Eady's July 24, 2008, adjudication on
Max Mosley v. News Group Newspapers Ltd
, which can be read on bbc.co.uk.

I learned about the suicide of the Welsh lay preacher Arnold Lewis from three sources:
News of the World? Fake
Sheikhs and Royal Trappings
, written by Peter Burden and published by Eye Books in 2009;
Tickle the Public: One Hundred
Years of the Popular Press
, written by Matthew Engel and published by Phoenix in 1997; and Ian Cutler's self-published memoir
The Camera Assassin III: Confessions of a Gutter Press
Photojournalist
, which is available for free on his website—www.cameraassassin.co.uk.

I first learned about David Buss—the author of
The Murderer Next Door
—from
Radiolab: The Bad Show
, first broadcast on WNYC on January 9, 2012. It was a producer of
Radiolab
—Tim Howard—who put me in touch with a former contributor to the show, Jonah Lehrer. So my thanks to
Radiolab
for that too.
The Murderer Next Door
was published by the Penguin Press in 2005.

Some background information on the Zumba prostitution ring in Kennebunk came from the story “Modern-Day Puritans Wring Hands over Zumba Madam's List of Shame,” by Patrik Jonsson, which appeared in
The Christian Science Monitor
on October 13, 2012.

For more on Larry Page and Sergey Brin's days at Stanford, I recommend “The Birth of Google,” by John Battelle, which appeared in
Wired
in August 2005.

All my information about the Stasi came from Anna Funder's brilliant
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
, published by Granta in 2003 and reprinted by Harper Perennial in 2011.

My research into the terrible story of Lindsay Armstrong took me to “She Couldn't Take Any More,” by Kirsty Scott, published in
The Guardian
on August 1, 2002. My thanks to Kirsty for her article and for her help putting me in touch with Lindsay's mother, Linda.

Biographical information about Jim McGreevey came from his memoir
The Confession
, published by William Morrow Paperbacks in 2007.

For more on Walpole Prison during the 1970s, I recommend
When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement for Prison Abolition
, by Jamie Bissonnette, with Ralph Hamm, Robert Dellelo, and Edward Rodman, published by South End Press in 2008, and James Gilligan's
Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic
, published by Vintage in 1997. In 1981, Massachusetts state senator Jack Backman wrote an open letter to Amnesty International complaining about conditions inside Walpole. I used a few lines from his letter in my description of life inside the prison. My thanks to Backman's former aide S. Brian Wilson for publishing it online.

A huge number of economists and journalists and ad-revenue people offered to help me understand how Google may have profited from the shaming of Justine Sacco. I'm very grateful to them all—Chris Bannon, Aarti Shahani, Jeremy Gin, Ruth Lewy, Solvej Krause, Rebecca Watson, Paul Zak, Darren Filson, Brian Lance, Jonathan Hersh, Alex Blumberg, Steve Henn, and Zoe Chace.

My thanks to Thomas Goetz for his help in tracking down the inventor of Your Speed signs.

My wife, Elaine, was a brilliant early reader, as were my editors, Geoff Kloske at Riverhead, Kris Doyle and Paul Baggaley at Picador, and Natasha Fairweather and Natasha Galloway at AP Watt/United Agents. They helped me think about ways to shape this book when I really needed help. Thanks also to Derek Johns, Sarah Thickett, and Georgina Carrigan at AP Watt/United Agents; Casey Blue James, Laura Perciasepe, and Elizabeth Hohenadel at Riverhead; Ira Glass, Julie Snyder, and Brian Reed at
This American Life
; Jim Nelson and Brendan Vaughan at
GQ
; Ashley Cataldo at the American Antiquarian Society; Toni Massaro at the University of Arizona; Dan Kahan at Yale; and Sarah Vowell, Jonathan Wakeham, Starlee Kine, Fenton Bailey, Geoff Lloyd, Emma-Lee Moss, Mike McCarthy, Marc Maron, Tim Minchin, Daniel and Paula Ronson, Leslie Hobbs, Brian Daniels, Barbara Ehrenreich, Marty Sheehan, and Camilla Elworthy.

My biggest thanks go to my interviewees, especially Jonah Lehrer, Justine Sacco, Lindsey Stone, Hank, Adria Richards, and Raquel. These people had never before spoken to a journalist about what had happened to them. I was asking them to relive for me some of the most traumatic moments of their lives. Some of them took a lot of persuading, and I hope they think it was worthwhile.