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Summary
Summary
From the internationally bestselling author of The Psychopath Test , a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most overlooked forces.
For the past three years, Jon Ronson has been immersing himself in the world of modern-day public shaming--meeting famous shamees, shamers, and bystanders who have been impacted. This is the perfect time for a modern-day Scarlet Letter --a radically empathetic book about public shaming, and about shaming as a form of social control. It has become such a big part of our lives it has begun to feel weird and empty when there isn't anyone to be furious about. Whole careers are being ruined by one mistake. A transgression is revealed. Our collective outrage at it has the force of a hurricane. Then we all quickly forget about it and move on to the next one, and it doesn't cross our minds to wonder if the shamed person is okay or in ruins. What's it doing to them? What's it doing to us?
Ronson's book is a powerful, funny, unique, and very humane dispatch from the frontline, in the escalating war on human nature and its flaws.
Author Notes
Jon Ronson is a writer and documentary film maker. His books include Them: Adventures with Extremists, Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness, What I Do: More True Tales, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, and So You've Been Publicly Shamed. The Men Who Stare at Goats was made into a motion picture starring George Clooney in 2009. He will be delivering the opening address at the Brisbane Writers Festival in September 2015.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestselling author Ronson (The Psychopath Test) ruminates on high-profile shaming in the social-media age in this witty work. He interviews disgraced pop-science author Jonah Lehrer, fresh off a hellish apology tour, and the remorseful journalist who outed Lehrer as a plagiarist. PR executive Justine Sacco reflects on her own life, left in ruins after a single ill-conceived tweet, and elsewhere Ronson recounts how an inappropriate comment at a tech convention devolved into bedlam, with online threats of rape and death. For historical perspective, Ronson goes into 19th-century stockades, public whippings, and the theory of "group madness" popularized by Gustave LeBon, inspiration for the controversial Stanford Prison Experiments, in which ordinary students were transformed into sadistic guards. Ronson's explorations also take him to an S&M sex club, a ridiculous "shame-eradication workshop," and a therapy program for incarcerated women run by former New Jersey governor James McGreevey. Ronson is self-reflective and honest about his own complicity in the cultural piling-on he observes, recalling a spite-fueled campaign he orchestrated via Twitter against a journalist. Clever and thought-provoking, this book has the potential to open an important dialogue about faux moral posturing online and its potentially disastrous consequences. Agent: Natasha Fairweather, United Agents. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Is technology moving humankind forward, or does the powerful reach of social media hearken back to the public floggings of the past? The author of The Men Who Stare at Goats (2005) and The Psychopath Test (2011) takes a hard look at modern-day shaming in his provocative new book. Inspired by an episode where a spambot impersonated him on Twitter, Ronson employs his typical investigatory approach to take the reader on a years-long exploration of humiliation via technology, his curious mind pursuing new avenues of inquiry as they open up. He recounts the real-time Twitter shaming of a disgraced author, which was displayed on a feed the author could see as he was making his apology speech; the race-tinged tweet of a public-relations executive that upended her life; and the story behind a Facebook photo that mightily offended members of the military and their supporters. Beyond that, though, he talks to those involved both the people shamed and those who acted as instruments for their humiliation about their motivations, what the experience did to them, and whether they recovered. With confidence, verve, and empathy, Ronson skillfully informs and engages the reader without excusing those caught up in the shame game. As he stresses, we are the ones wielding this incredible power over others' lives, often with no regard for the lasting consequences of our actions.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE WELSH JOURNALIST and author Jon Ronson joined Twitter on Dec. 10, 2008. He has since published more than 44,000 tweets - almost 20 each day. He has seen some things. Ronson's new book, "So You've Been Publicly Shamed," digs into a strange phenomenon of the participatory Internet. From time to time, it seems as if every user of social media rises up as one to denounce, shame and remove an apparently deserving victim. The first few times Ronson witnessed this, he was intrigued - even exhilarated. "When we deployed shame, we were utilizing an immensely powerful tool," he writes of his initial reaction: "The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratization of justice." Or was it? His view turned gradually darker. Charming Jon Ronson has always made me think of a Kurt Vonnegut character, and not just because his name calls to mind the maddening refrain, from "Slaughterhouse-Five," of "My name is Yon Yonson." Vonnegut ranks among the most moral of male novelists writing in English. His work was a life-or-death struggle to make sense of our stupid, dreadful, hilarious world. It has fallen to Ronson to carry Vonnegut's project from fiction to reality. Ronson's exquisite and Vonnegutian book "Them," published 14 years ago, documented our greatest wing nuts. It is a just barely too whimsical tour through a thick chunk of the extremist universe of conspiracy theorists, from the Klan to the Bilderberg Group jouster Alex Jones to David Icke, who believes giant reptiles rule the world. "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" is populated by a different set of familiar, besmirched names. Justine Sacco (made a joke on Twitter). Lindsey Stone (posted a joke photo on Facebook). Mike Daisey (made stuff up). From the Before Twitter era, Jim McGreevey (really bad governor). Ronson also goes hiking with Jonah Lehrer, the millennial best-selling idea packager who was briefly employed by The New Yorker. Famous now for having two-thirds of his published oeuvre withdrawn, Lehrer had a spectacularly public downfall when his work was found to be riddled with recycling and press-release copying, peppered with plagiarism and inaccuracies and questionably sourced quotations. The Lehrer affair unspooled to unprecedented glee among denizens of the Internet. When Lehrer apologized, poorly - for a $20,000 fee! - they (we?) went extra nuts. Public shamings are often described in this book in terms of physical violence. Tweeters are "a pitchfork mob," according to Michael Moynihan, who unmasked Lehrer; according to Ronson, they are both "the hanging judge" and "the people in the lithographs being ribald at whippings." Enough "stabbing," Moynihan says of the people attacking Lehrer: "HE'S DEAD." It's not just Lehrer, either. Twitter users have "taken a lot of scalps," Ronson writes. "We were soldiers making war on other people's flaws." It so happens that I have been ganged up on online, and I have also been beaten up by actual gangs of men on the street. The actual beating is - surprise! - exponentially worse. Eliding any difference between words and deeds may seem natural to a non-American like Ronson (many European nations have laws against hate speech), but it makes the continuing argument in this country about how to handle offensive language more challenging. Jonah Lehrer isn't actually annihilated, dead or even particularly injured. Not even a year after his alleged digital murder, he sold a book about love and mistakes, and while that one's awaiting publication he has a co-authored book coming out this September. He is still only 33 years old, still represented by Andrew Wylie. Mike Daisey? Just completed a fresh run of evenings at Joe's Pub! Jim McGreevey? Graduated from the General Theological Seminary, doin' great. And Justine Sacco? Eh... What are the actual stakes of shaming? Lurking and somewhat underdocumented in the tales gathered here is the fact that as agonizing as these experiences are, men often survive them just fine. Of the 69 people arrested in a Kennebunk, Maine, prostitution sting, Ronson points out, it was the lone female client who was mocked in town. Along these lines, one of the most captivating stories in the history of the Internet involves an incident that, happily, Ronson covers in depth. At a developer conference, two dudes, "Hank" and Alex, were cracking mildly off-color jokes to each other. Adria Richards, a woman sitting in front of them, photographed them and reported them to organizers. They explained the situation and were released. She tweeted and blogged about it. Hank was fired, then apologized in a public forum. The website of the company where Richards worked was forced down; then she was fired as well. Hank got a new job right away. Richards did not. Instead she spent a year fielding rape and murder threats. But how, Ronson wonders, had Hank's relationship with women developers changed since the incident? "Well," Hank tells him. "We don't have any female developers at the place I'm working at now. So." Ronson is always careful not to overly whittle his conclusions lest they snap under pressure. But he appears to have come to believe two things. One is that people are much kinder in the real world than they are on the Internet. The other is that online, we are "creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland." after this book was finalized but before it was released, the news anchor Brian Williams had to recant a story about being in a downed helicopter. It was a great national opportunity to talk about the role of the news media and about human memory. Kidding! Mostly it was people being total jerks online. At the same time, Adria Richards opened up on Twitter. She had submitted 120 incidents of abuse to Twitter, she wrote - in a single week. They did nothing. After selling her furniture on Craigslist and moving out of her apartment, she found a therapist with experience in PTSD. She was still jobless, nearly two years later, but in February, she announced she had applied for a job - in the user safety and security department at Twitter. She didn't sound as if she'd be holding her breath for an interview. "Be kind, don't hurt" is how Robert Scholes described the whispered message of "Slaughterhouse-Five" in these pages in 1969. Ronson has arrived at this same entirely sane conclusion 46 years later. It's good advice, even if Buddha and a lot of others did get there first. But there's public mockery, and then there's something worse. The experience of women online is the great link between speech and violence, between offense and abuse. For women - and for all gender offenders, from gays to trans people - insult and the threat of murder are issued simultaneously. Like almost every other book, then, "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" would probably have been handled better by a woman. Often we send a married, middle-aged man who makes $250,000 a year (half a million in a good year, apparently) to do the job. It's fine! Ronson is a sweet and particularly talented man. But the actual problem with the Internet isn't us hastily tweeting off about foolish people. The actual problem is that none of the men running those bazillion-dollar Internet companies can think of one single thing to do about all the men who send women death threats. We are 'creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland.' CHOIRE SICHA is the author of "Very Recent History" and a co-founder of The Awl.
Guardian Review
Near the end of last year, the Labour MP Emily Thornberry was sacked from the shadow cabinet after tweeting a picture of a house draped in English flags with the words "Image from #Rochester". Not long afterwards, the Twitter account of Ukip's South Thanet branch berated the BBC for filming a vox pop in front of "a mosque in London". The building in question was actually Westminster Cathedral. No one was ejected from Ukip as a result. So it's OK to say that a cathedral is a mosque, but if you say that a house is in a particular town, you must be fired. This happened too late to be included in Jon Ronson's superb and terrifying new book, but the social media mob fury that greeted Thornberry's tweet is a perfect example of his subject. We are living through what he calls "a great renaissance of public shaming". Thornberry must have wished for more of the melancholy modern feeling Ronson describes as "that black silence when the internet doesn't talk back". As did one of Ronson's interviewees, Justine Sacco, whose life was ruined after she tweeted, before getting on a plane: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get Aids. Just kidding. I'm white!" ("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 fun of that bubble," Sacco explains, entirely persuasively.) Other victims tracked down by the author include a couple of guys who made absurd double entendres during a boring tech-conference talk and were outed on Twitter by a woman sitting in front of them. One was fired from his job. And then the woman who photographed them was fired too. Shaming, this book argues, is bad not just for the shamee but the shamer as well. Michael Moynihan, the journalist who showed that the science writer Jonah Lehrer had simply made up some quotes from Bob Dylan in his book Imagine, tells Ronson that he felt terrible doing it. And, Ronson concludes, when we jump on a shaming bandwagon, we should feel terrible too. "The powerful, crazy, cruel people I usually write about tend to be in far-off places," he writes. "The powerful, crazy, cruel people were now us." So You've Been Publicly Shamed brings together all of Ronson's virtues as a writer, to a more serious purpose than hitherto. For one: as an interviewer, he seems so hesitant and friendly that he is able to stick the knife in much more efficiently. Quite often, Ronson is openly taking the piss, but his interviewee is too self-important to notice. "So it's not as if the goat was psychically fighting back?" he asks a livestock-bothering special forces veteran in The Men Who Stare At Goats (2004). "Goat didn't have a chance," the soldier growls. At other times, Ronson's interviews are thrilling because he talks to unpleasant people as we would love to do so ourselves, not as a journalist condemned to dispassionate "balance". When the ex-spy David Shayler claims it is racist not to believe his theory that the July 2005 London bombings were committed by the security services, Ronson loses all patience and replies: "Oh, fuck off." The reader cheers. Yet when an interviewee is so far-out that disdain would be pointless, Ronson can be heartwarmingly nice - as he is in his celebrated encounter in Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001) with David Icke, the former BBC sports presenter who believes that many people in positions of power are blood-quaffing 12-foot lizards. Ronson knows exactly which of his subjects deserves a kicking. Structurally, his books tend to start with mysteries, quickly introduce a large social question (Is society run by psychopaths?), and then take us on the author's journey from confusion to enlightenment. Sometimes, of course, we're not meant to take seriously the announced motivation for his sleuthing travels. In Them, he claims at one point that he has come to Los Angeles "to try to ascertain if there was any truth to [the] view that Hollywood is a crucial and knowing part of a global conspiracy". He doesn't think it might be true. He has come to LA in the hope of meeting some colourful weirdos. But Ronson is a true virtuoso of the faux-naive style. He is so good at it that it's not irritating. He routinely calls himself "over-anxious", "fey", or "nebbishy", and charms the reader by strategically admitting baser motives. In this new book, he writes to Lehrer that the author's notorious "apology" speech at the Knight Foundation was "fantastic", and then later confesses that he only said so in order to get an interview. (Lehrer does not come out of it well.) Elsewhere, Ronson admits to being happy when gathering "enjoyably nutty quotes" for a story. In his recent short memoir Frank, about his years playing keyboards for Frank Sidebottom, which is published to coincide with the movie that he co-wrote, Ronson shows that he has enjoyed witnessing nuttiness for a long time. As a 20-year-old living in a Highbury squat, he relates: "I'd stand in the kitchen doorway and watch a man called Shep smash all the crockery every time Arsenal lost . . . 'He is SO mentally ill!' I'd think with excitement." At the same time, Ronson is structuring his stories very carefully, withholding information for suspense and pulling the reader along on what it would not be a criticism to suggest is a mildly fictionalised version of his own intellectual progress through the topic. Where other writers would jump into the dialogue of an interview or the facts learned from a book, Ronson lets us know how many emails and voicemails it took for the subject to respond, and where he sat while reading or listening to them. This can have the flavour of Look At Me, I'm Doing A Research. ("I parked my car outside the Massachusetts archive . . .") But it's usually worth it for the jokes: "For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people called Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers." There is in his books a characteristic rhythm of vivid storytelling followed by a single diagnostic thought: "We were creating a world," he writes in So You've Been Publicly Shamed, "where the smartest way to survive is to be bland." (In his winsomely gonzo way, he has attended a course in how not to be ashamed, in which the participants tell each other their most humiliating secrets. He divulges nothing himself.) Ronson's humane view is this: really weird people are not that different from you and me. We're all weird deep down. In the preface to What I Do, one of his three collections of journalism, he recounts how he responded to a man at a reading that he wasn't more neurotic than other people, it's just that other people didn't have columns in the Guardian to recount all the tiny absurdities and passing brain spasms of everyday life. And even psychopathology is on a spectrum. Bob Hare, the titular Psychopath Test's inventor, tells Ronson: "It's dimensional." (A matter of degree.) Ronson replies: "Obviously it's dimensional." And so, he consistently implies, are many other all-too-human flaws. It's all dimensional, isn't it? Nosing around a Bilderberg Group meeting in Portugal for Them, Ronson notices his car is being followed, and in a panic he rings the British embassy. "'I am essentially a humorous journalist,' I explained. 'I am a humorous journalist out of my depth. Do you think it might help if we tell them that?'" Well, it's true that Ronson has beautiful comic-prose skills. Watch how, when talking to Denis Healey about Bilderberg, he suddenly uses Healey's title in order to strengthen the payoff: "Lord Healey looked down at his lap. He thought about my request. He looked up again. 'No,' he said. 'Fuck off.'" Or enjoy the glee with which Ronson, in his new book, makes the obvious joke word-perfectly: "In fact ever since I first learned about confirmation bias I've been seeing it everywhere. Everywhere." But Ronson's self-description as a "humorous journalist" is not the whole story. Comedy is his disguise and also his weapon. He is a moralist. Some of his best lines seem casual but contain fierce social diagnoses. Of competitive reality TV shows, Ronson comments: "TV is just troubled people being booed these days." And when someone hurries to answer the phone in his presence, he thinks: "We, as a people, seem more enticed by mysterious callers than we are by actual people standing in front of us." Towards the end of his new book, someone accuses him of "prurient curiosity". This prompts what may be taken as a statement of the moral approach behind all his work. "I didn't want to write a book that advocated for a less curious world. Prurient curiosity may not be great. But curiosity is. People's flaws need to be written about. The flaws of some people lead to horrors inflicted on to others. And then there are the more human flaws that, when you shine a light on to them, de-demonise people that might otherwise be seen as ogres." At its best, this is exactly what his writing can do. Ronson has to date struck a wily balance between championing and ridiculing outsiders, while presenting himself as basically an outsider too. The only question is how long he can keep this up the more success he has as a widely beloved bestselling author, documentarist and screenwriter. At the beginning of his new book he meets the operators of a Twitterbot that has been set up to impersonate him. The real Ronson is angry. The academics who did this for a laugh suggest that, after all, he uses his own Twitter account for "brand management". "I told Dan that I have never used the term 'brand management' in my life," he recounts indignantly. "'Language like that is alien to me,' I said." The language might be alien to him, but, like it or not, he is now a brand. He has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. Them has been reissued as a Picador Classic with an introduction by Russell Brand. ("I like this book because I do not trust the establishment," muses the comedian.) And Ronson's publishers have found a rather wonderful graphic identity for his backlist: the covers sport a human head with no features except round glasses and short spiky hair. It only works because Ronson is now famous enough for his spectacles and haircut to have become iconic. Who else could it be, after all, but the indefatigable creator of relentlessly entertaining and thought-provoking books, the premium non-fiction brand called "Jon Ronson"? 278pp, Picador, pounds 16.99 To order So You've Been Publicly Shamed for pounds 13.59 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. - Steven Poole Caption: Captions: Faux-naive style . . . Jon Ronson So You've Been Publicly Shamed brings together all of Ronson's virtues as a writer, to a more serious purpose than hitherto. For one: as an interviewer, he seems so hesitant and friendly that he is able to stick the knife in much more efficiently. Quite often, Ronson is openly taking the piss, but his interviewee is too self-important to notice. "So it's not as if the goat was psychically fighting back?" he asks a livestock-bothering special forces veteran in The Men Who Stare At Goats (2004). "Goat didn't have a chance," the soldier growls. At other times, Ronson's interviews are thrilling because he talks to unpleasant people as we would love to do so ourselves, not as a journalist condemned to dispassionate "balance". When the ex-spy David Shayler claims it is racist not to believe his theory that the July 2005 London bombings were committed by the security services, Ronson loses all patience and replies: "Oh, fuck off." The reader cheers. Yet when an interviewee is so far-out that disdain would be pointless, Ronson can be heartwarmingly nice - as he is in his celebrated encounter in Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001) with David Icke, the former BBC sports presenter who believes that many people in positions of power are blood-quaffing 12-foot lizards. Ronson knows exactly which of his subjects deserves a kicking. Ronson is a true virtuoso of the faux-naive style. He is so good at it that it's not irritating. He routinely calls himself "over-anxious", "fey", or "nebbishy", and charms the reader by strategically admitting baser motives. In this new book, he writes to [Jonah Lehrer] that the author's notorious "apology" speech at the Knight Foundation was "fantastic", and then later confesses that he only said so in order to get an interview. (Lehrer does not come out of it well.) Elsewhere, Ronson admits to being happy when gathering "enjoyably nutty quotes" for a story. In his recent short memoir Frank, about his years playing keyboards for Frank Sidebottom, which is published to coincide with the movie that he co-wrote, Ronson shows that he has enjoyed witnessing nuttiness for a long time. As a 20-year-old living in a Highbury squat, he relates: "I'd stand in the kitchen doorway and watch a man called Shep smash all the crockery every time Arsenal lost . . . 'He is SO mentally ill!' I'd think with excitement." Nosing around a Bilderberg Group meeting in Portugal for Them, Ronson notices his car is being followed, and in a panic he rings the British embassy. "'I am essentially a humorous journalist,' I explained. 'I am a humorous journalist out of my depth. Do you think it might help if we tell them that?'" Well, it's true that Ronson has beautiful comic-prose skills. Watch how, when talking to Denis Healey about Bilderberg, he suddenly uses Healey's title in order to strengthen the payoff: "Lord Healey looked down at his lap. He thought about my request. He looked up again. 'No,' he said. 'Fuck off.'" Or enjoy the glee with which Ronson, in his new book, makes the obvious joke word-perfectly: "In fact ever since I first learned about confirmation bias I've been seeing it everywhere. Everywhere." - Steven Poole.
Kirkus Review
The author of works about everyday psychopathologies takes a hard look at the dark side of shaming on social media.This American Life contributor Ronson (Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries, 2012, etc.) believes that via social media, we are creating a contemporary version of Hawthorne's Massachusetts Bay Colony, awarding scarlet letters with gleeful viciousness to people who often are more guilty of silliness and indiscretion than they are of any egregious social (or actual) felony. Ronson begins with an incident in his own life: some computer guys who adopted his name on Twitter and tweeted things that the author despised. Then he examines case studies of specific individuals, most of whom he sought out and interviewed. Among them are plagiarists and fabricators (a Bob Dylan biographer who created quotations), a woman who tweeted an insensitive racial comment, a couple of guys in an audience who said noxious things overheard by a person nearby, and a woman who posted a photograph of herself making an obscene gesture at Arlington National Cemetery. Due to the swarms on social media, virtually all of these people lost their jobs, reputations and privacy. Digging into the backgrounds of these stories, Ronson unearths relevant information about shaming in the courtroom (a principal strategy employed by lawyers on both sides), the "unshaming" process (and how it can be very effective with prison inmates), and psychological experiments that show the extent to which humans will go to shame others. He also writes about computer whizzes who, for a substantial fee, can play with your name on Google search so that your indiscretions appear in a much diminished way (several pages down, where most searchers don't look). Another intriguing journey from Ronson, who notes that our social media dark side grows ever darker when we believe we're superior to othersand anonymous. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
When Ronson discovered a Twitter-bot impersonating him (discussing food he hadn't eaten, social engagements he hadn't attended, and rude dreams he hadn't experienced), the author tracked down those responsible and subjected them to his online fans' wrath. This weird and hilarious experience serves as a jumping-off point for a fascinating discussion of how the net serves as a pillory in the 21st-century village square, sentencing those who commit social transgressions to often severe punishment at the hands of the public. Ronson interviews Justine Sacco, Jonah Lehrer, and less-well-known subjects of Internet shaming, examines theories of mob psychology, attends a radical honesty workshop, and follows one woman through the process of Internet reputation restoration. The book examines how and why society engages in public shaming, what happens to those who've experienced it, and whether they deserved it. The author's narration turns on a dime from deadly serious to deadpan funny and keeps the listener engrossed throughout. VERDICT Recommended for enthusiasts of Internet culture and fans of the author's previous work and of narrative nonfiction.-Jason Puckett, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
One This story begins in early January 2012, when I noticed that another Jon Ronson had started posting on Twitter. His photograph was a photograph of my face. His Twitter name was @Jon_Ronson. His most recent tweet, which appeared as I stared in surprise at his timeline, read: "Going home. Gotta get the recipe for a huge plate of guarana and mussel in a bap with mayonnaise :D #yummy." "Who are you?" I tweeted him. "Watching #Seinfeld. I would love a big plate of celeriac, grouper and sour cream kebab with lemongrass. #foodie," he tweeted. I didn't know what to do. -- The next morning I checked @Jon_Ronson's timeline before I checked my own. In the night he had tweeted, "I'm dreaming something about #time and #cock." He had twenty followers. Some were people I knew from real life, who were probably wondering why I'd suddenly become so passionate about fusion cooking and candid about dreaming about cock. -- I did some digging. I discovered that a young researcher, formerly of Warwick University, called Luke Robert Mason had a few weeks earlier posted a comment on the Guardian site. It was in response to a short video I had made about spambots. "We've built Jon his very own infomorph," he wrote. "You can follow him on Twitter here: @Jon_Ronson." Oh, so it's some kind of spambot, I thought. Okay. This will be fine. Luke Robert Mason must have thought I would like the spambot. When he finds out that I don't, he'll remove it. So I tweeted him: "Hi!! Will you take down your spambot please?" Ten minutes passed. Then he replied, "We prefer the term infomorph ." I frowned. "But it's taken my identity," I wrote. "The infomorph isn't taking your identity," he wrote back. "It is repurposing social media data into an infomorphic esthetic." I felt a tightness in my chest. "#woohoo damn, I'm in the mood for a tidy plate of onion grill with crusty bread. #foodie," @Jon_Ronson tweeted. I was at war with a robot version of myself. -- A month passed. @Jon_Ronson was tweeting twenty times a day about its whirlwind of social engagements, its "soirees," and its wide circle of friends. It now had fifty followers. They were getting a disastrously misrepresentative depiction of my views on soirees and friends. The spambot left me feeling powerless and sullied. My identity had been redefined all wrong by strangers and I had no recourse. -- I tweeted Luke Robert Mason. If he was adamant that he wouldn't take down his spambot, perhaps we could at least meet? I could film the encounter and put it on YouTube. He agreed, writing that he'd be glad to explain the philosophy behind the infomorph. I replied that I'd certainly be interested to learn the philosophy behind the spambot. -- I rented a room in central London. I sat there, nervously waiting. On the dot of our prearranged meeting, Luke arrived with two other men--the team behind the spambot. All three were academics. They had met at Warwick University. Luke was the youngest of the three, handsome, in his twenties, a "researcher in technology and cyberculture and director of the Virtual Futures Conference," according to his online CV. David Bausola looked like a rakish teacher, the sort of person who might speak at a conference on the literature of Aleister Crowley. He was a "creative technologist" and the CEO of the digital agency Philter Phactory. Dan O'Hara had a shaved head, and eyes that were piercing and annoyed-looking. His jaw was clenched. He was in his late thirties, a lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Cologne. Before that, he'd been a lecturer at Oxford. He'd coedited a book about J. G. Ballard, Extreme Metaphors , and another book, Thomas Pynchon: Schizophrenia & Social Control . As far as I understood it, David Bausola had done the actual building of the spambot, while the two other men provided "research and consultancy." I suggested that they sit in a row on the sofa so I could film them all in a single shot. Dan O'Hara gave the others a glance. "Let's play along," he said to them. They all sat, with Dan in the middle. "What do you mean by 'play along'?" I asked him. "It's about psychological control," he said. "Do you think my having you in a row on the sofa is my way of psychologically controlling you?" I asked. "Absolutely," said Dan. "In what way?" I asked. "I do that with students," said Dan. "I put myself in a separate chair and put the students in a row on the sofa." "Why would you want to psychologically control some students?" I asked. Dan looked briefly worried that he'd been caught saying something eerie. "In order to control the learning environment," he said. "Is this making you feel uncomfortable?" I asked him. "No, not really," said Dan. "Are you uncomfortable?" "Yes," I said. "Why?" Dan asked. I spelled out my grievances. "Academics," I began, "don't swoop into a person's life uninvited and use him for some kind of academic exercise, and when I ask you to take it down, you're, ' Oh, it's not a spambot, it's an infomorph .'" Dan nodded. He leaned forward. "There must be lots of Jon Ronsons out there?" he began. "People with your name? Yes?" I looked suspiciously at him. "I'm sure there are people with my name," I replied, carefully. "I've got the same problem," said Dan, with a smile. He gave me an empathetic look. "There's another academic out there with my name." "You don't have exactly the same problem as I do," I said, "because my exact problem is that three strangers have stolen my identity and have created a robot version of me and are refusing to take it down even though they come from respectable universities and give TEDx talks." Dan let out a long-suffering sigh. "You're saying, 'There is only one Jon Ronson,'" he said. "You're proposing yourself as the real McCoy, as it were, and you want to maintain that integrity and authenticity. Yes?" I stared at him. "I think we feel annoyed with you ," Dan continued, "because we're not quite persuaded by that. We think there's already a layer of artifice and it's your online personality--the brand Jon Ronson--you're trying to protect. Yeah?" "NO, IT'S JUST ME TWEETING," I yelled. "The Internet is not the real world," said Dan. "I write my tweets," I replied. "And I press send. So it's me on Twitter." We glared at each other. "That's not academic," I said. "That's not postmodern. That's the fact of it." "This is bizarre," Dan said. "I find it really strange--the way you're approaching this. You must be one of the very few people who have chosen to come on Twitter and use their own name as their Twitter name. Who does that? And that's why I'm a little suspicious of your motives, Jon. That's why I say I think you're using it as brand management." I said nothing, but to this day it kills me that it didn't cross my mind to point out to him that Luke Robert Mason's Twitter name is @LukeRobertMason. Our conversation continued like this for an hour. I told Dan that I have never used the term brand management in my life. "Language like that is alien to me," I said. "And that's the same with your spambot. Its language is different to mine." "Yes," the three men agreed in unison. "And that's what's annoying me so much," I explained. "It's a misrepresentation of me." "You'd like it to be more like you?" Dan said. "I'd like it to not exist," I said. "That's bizarre," said Dan. He let out an incredulous whistle. "I find something psychologically interesting about that." "Why?" I said. "I find that quite aggressive," he said. "You'd like to kill these algorithms? You must feel threatened in some way." He gave me a concerned look. "We don't go around generally trying to kill things we find annoying." "You're a TROLL!" I yelled. -- After the interview was over, I staggered out into the London afternoon. I dreaded uploading the footage onto YouTube because I'd been so screechy. I steeled myself for comments mocking my screechiness and I posted it. I left it up for ten minutes. Then, with apprehension, I had a look. "This is identity theft," read the first comment I saw. "They should respect Jon's personal liberty." Wow, I thought, cautiously. "Somebody should make alternate Twitter accounts of all of those ass clowns and constantly post about their strong desire for child porn," read the next comment. I grinned. "These people are manipulative assholes," read the third. "Fuck them. Sue them, break them, destroy them. If I could see these people face to face I would say they are fucking pricks." I was giddy with joy. I was Braveheart, striding through a field, at first alone, and then it becomes clear that hundreds are marching behind me. "Vile, disturbing idiots playing with someone else's life and then laughing at the victim's hurt and anger," read the next comment. I nodded soberly. "Utter hateful arseholes," read the next. "These fucked up academics deserve to die painfully. The cunt in the middle is a fucking psychopath." I frowned slightly. I hope nobody's going to actually hurt them, I thought. "Gas the cunts. Especially middle cunt. And especially left-side bald cunt. And especially quiet cunt. Then piss on their corpses," read the next comment. -- I won. Within days, the academics took down @Jon_Ronson. They had been shamed into acquiescence. Their public shaming had been like the button that restores factory settings. Something was out of kilter. The community rallied. The balance was redressed. The academics made a very big meal of eradicating their spambot. They wrote a Guardian column explaining that their wider aim was to highlight the tyranny of Wall Street algorithms: "It's not just Ronson who has bots manipulating his life. It's all of us." I still didn't understand why pretending I eat wasabi dumplings might draw the public's attention to the scourge of Wall Street algorithms. -- "I have been asked to retire you--do you understand what that means," tweeted David Bausola to the spambot. And, "You have a few hours left. I hope you enjoy them." "Just press the off switch," I e-mailed him. I tapped my fingers on my desk, impatiently. "Jesus." I was happy to be victorious. It felt wonderful. The wonderful feeling overwhelmed me like a sedative. Strangers all over the world had united to tell me I was right. It was the perfect ending. -- Now I thought back on the other recent social media shamings I'd enjoyed and felt proud of. The first great one happened in October 2009. The Boyzone singer Stephen Gately had been found dead while on holiday with his civil partner, Andrew Cowles. The coroner recorded a verdict of natural causes, but the columnist Jan Moir wrote in the Daily Mail , "Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one . . . it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships." On Twitter we knew what it meant to be the underdog. And here was a member of Britain's elite trying to reshame the gay community and choosing the most callous circumstance to do it. We were not going to tolerate a resurgence of old-time bigotry, and as a result of our collective fury, Marks & Spencer and Nestlé demanded their advertising be removed from the Daily Mail 's website. These were great times. We hurt the Mail with a weapon they didn't understand--a social media shaming. After that, when the powerful transgressed, we were there. When the Daily Mail mocked a food-bank charity for giving a food parcel to their undercover reporter without running an ID check on him, Twitter responded by donating £39,000 to the charity by the end of that same day. "This is the nice thing about social media," one tweeter wrote about that campaign. "The Mail , which relies primarily on lying to people about their neighbors, can't cope with people communicating among themselves, forming their own opinions." When LA Fitness refused to cancel the gym membership of a couple who had lost their jobs and couldn't afford the fees, we rallied. LA Fitness hurriedly backed down. These giants were being brought down by people who used to be powerless--bloggers, anyone with a social media account. And the weapon that was felling them was a new one: online shaming. And then one day it hit me. Something of real consequence was happening. We were at the start of a great renaissance of public shaming. After a lull of almost 180 years (public punishments were phased out in 1837 in the United Kingdom and in 1839 in the United States), it was back in a big way. When we deployed shame, we were utilizing an immensely powerful tool. It was coercive, borderless, and increasing in speed and influence. Hierarchies were being leveled out. The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratization of justice. And so I made a decision. The next time a great modern shaming unfolded against some significant wrongdoer--the next time citizen justice prevailed in a dramatic and righteous way--I would leap into the middle of it. I'd investigate it close up and chronicle how efficient it was in righting wrongs. -- I didn't have to wait long. @Jon_Ronson was put to death on April 2, 2012. Just twelve weeks later, in the middle of the night on July 4, a man lying on his sofa in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, was looking for ideas for his blog when he made a very unexpected discovery. Two In the middle of the night on July 4, 2012, Michael C. Moynihan lay on his sofa. His wife, Joanne, was asleep upstairs with their young daughter. They were broke, as they always were. Everybody seemed to make more money in journalism than Michael did. "I can never turn it into money," he'd later tell me. "I don't know how to do it." These were anxious times. He was thirty-seven and scraping by as a blogger and a freelancer in a walk-up in a not-great part of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. But he'd just had a job offer. The Washington Post had invited him to blog for ten days. Not that the timing was so great: "It was July Fourth. Everyone was on vacation. There were no readers and there wasn't a lot of news." But still, it was a break. And it was stressing Michael out. The stress had just spoiled a vacation in Ireland visiting his wife's family, and now it was stressing him out on his sofa. -- He began hunting around for story ideas. On a whim he downloaded the latest number-one New York Times nonfiction bestseller from the young, handsome, and internationally renowned pop-psychology author Jonah Lehrer. It was a book about the neurology of creativity and was called Imagine: How Creativity Works . The first chapter, "Bob Dylan's Brain," piqued Michael's interest, as he was a keen Dylanologist. Jonah Lehrer was reconstructing a critical moment in Dylan's creative career--the thought process that led him to write "Like a Rolling Stone." -- It was May 1965 and Dylan was bored, weary from a grueling tour, "skinny from insomnia and pills," sick of his music, thinking he had nothing left to say. As Jonah Lehrer writes: The only thing he was sure of was that this life couldn't last. Whenever Dylan read about himself in the newspaper he made the same observation: "God, I'm glad I'm not me," he said. "I'm glad I'm not that ." So Dylan told his manager he was quitting the music business. He moved to a tiny cabin in Woodstock, New York. His plan was to perhaps write a novel. But then, just when Dylan was most determined to stop creating music, he was overcome with a strange feeling. "It's a hard thing to describe," Dylan would later remember. "It's just this sense that you got something to say." It was no wonder Imagine had become such a bestseller. Who wouldn't want to read that if they're creatively blocked and feeling hopeless they're just like Bob Dylan immediately before he wrote "Like a Rolling Stone"? -- Michael Moynihan, I should explain, hadn't downloaded Jonah Lehrer's book because he was blocked and needed inspirational advice about how to write a Washington Post blog. Jonah Lehrer had recently been embroiled in a minor scandal and Michael was considering blogging about it. Some columns he had written for The New Yorker had, it turned out, been recycled from columns he'd published months earlier in The Wall Street Journal . Michael was considering blogging on how "self-plagiarism" was considered less of a crime in Britain than in America and what that said about the two cultures. But now Michael suddenly stopped reading. He went back a sentence. "It's a hard thing to describe," Dylan would later remember. "It's just this sense that you got something to say." Michael narrowed his eyes. When the fuck did Bob Dylan say that ? he thought. "What made you suspicious?" I asked Michael. The two of us were eating lunch at the Cookshop restaurant in Manhattan's Chelsea district. Michael was handsome and fidgety. His eyes were pale and darting like a husky's. "It just didn't sound like Dylan," he said. "In that period, in every interview Dylan did, he was a total asshole to the interviewer. This sounded like a Dylan self-help book." And so, on his sofa, Michael scanned back a few paragraphs. Whenever Dylan read about himself in the newspaper, he made the same observation: "God, I'm glad I'm not me," he said. "I'm glad I'm not that ." In D. A. Pennebaker's documentary Dont Look Back (the missing apostrophe was the director's idea), Dylan reads an article about himself: "Puffing heavily on a cigarette, he smokes 80 a day . . ." Dylan laughs, "God, I'm glad I'm not me." How did Jonah Lehrer know that Dylan said this whenever he read about himself in the paper? Michael thought. Where did "whenever" come from? Plus, "God, I'm glad I'm not me" is verifiable, but "I'm glad I'm not that "? When did he say, "I'm glad I'm not that ?" Where did Jonah Lehrer get "I'm glad I'm not that "? And so Michael Moynihan e-mailed Jonah Lehrer. I picked up your book and as an obsessive Dylan nerd eagerly read the first chapter . . . I'm pretty familiar with the Dylan canon and there were a few quotes I was slightly confused by and couldn't locate. This was Michael's first e-mail to Jonah Lehrer. He was reading it to me back home in his Fort Greene living room. Joanne sat with us. There were toys scattered around. By the time Michael e-mailed Jonah on July 7, he'd pinpointed six suspicious Dylan quotes, including "It's just this sense that you got something to say," "I'm glad I'm not that ," and this angry retort to prying journalists: "I've got nothing to say about these things I write. I just write them. There's no great message. Stop asking me to explain." Dylan did once verifiably say in Dont Look Back , "I've got nothing to say about these things I write. I just write them. There's no great message." But there was no "Stop asking me to explain." Michael mentioned to Jonah his deadline--he was blogging for The Washington Post for ten days--and then he pressed send. -- Jonah e-mailed Michael back twice the next day. His e-mails sounded friendly, professional, businesslike, maybe a little superior. His air was that of a smart young academic understanding Michael's questions and promising to answer them during an appropriate moment in his schedule. Which would be in eleven days. He was on vacation in Northern California for ten days. His files were at his home, a seven-hour drive away. He didn't want to disrupt his vacation by driving fourteen hours to check his files. If Michael could wait ten days, Jonah would send him detailed notes. Michael smiled when he read out that part of Jonah's e-mail to me. Eleven days was quite the convenient vacation length given the duration of Michael's Washington Post contract. Still, Jonah said he'd try to answer Michael's questions off the top of his head. "And this," Michael said, "was where it all began to unravel for him. This is where he makes his first underplayed lie. He's hesitating. 'Do I make this lie?'" Jonah made the lie. "I got a little bit of help," he wrote, "from one of Dylan's managers." This manager had given Jonah access to previously unreleased original transcripts of Dylan interviews. If there were any discrepancies with common references on the Web, that was why. Jonah's e-mails continued in this vein for several paragraphs: Dylan had told a radio interviewer to "stop asking me to explain" in 1995. The interview was transcribed within the pages of a rare multivolume anthology called The Fiddler Now Upspoke: A Collection of Bob Dylan's Interviews, Press Conferences and the Like from Throughout the Master's Career . And so on. Then Jonah thanked Michael for his interest, signed off, and at the bottom of the e-mails were the words "Sent from my iPhone." "Sent from his iPhone," Michael said. "A rather lengthy e-mail to send from an iPhone. Slightly panicky. Sweaty thumbs, you know?" -- Who knew if Jonah Lehrer really was on vacation? But Michael had to take him at his word. So they had a lull. The lull made publication in the Washington Post blog impossible, given the digging Michael would need to do. The Fiddler Now Upspoke was a nightmare source: "Eleven volumes, twelve volumes, fifteen volumes. Individual ones cost a hundred fifty, two hundred dollars." Jonah Lehrer presumably thought Michael hadn't the wherewithal to trace, purchase, and scrutinize an anthology as epic and obscure as The Fiddler Now Upspoke . But he underestimated the nature of Michael's tenacity. There was something about Michael that reminded me of the cyborg in Terminator 2 , the one that was even more dogged than Arnold Schwarzenegger, running faster than the fastest car. As Joanne told me, "Michael is the guarder of social rules." She turned to him. "You're a nice guy as long as everyone else . . ." "When I go out in the world," Michael said, "if someone throws some garbage on the street, it's the most senseless thing to me. I lose my mind. 'Why are you doing this?'" "And it's for hours," Joanne said. "We're out on a nice walk and it's a half-an-hour rant . . ." "I see things collapsing," Michael said. And so Michael tracked down an electronic version of The Fiddler Now Upspoke . Well, it wasn't an actual electronic version, but "a complete archive of all known Dylan interviews called Every Mind-Polluting Word ," Michael told me, "basically a digital version of Fiddler that a fan put together and dumped online." It turned out that Bob Dylan had given only one radio interview in 1995 and at no time during it had he told the interviewer to "stop asking me to explain." -- On July 11, Michael was in the park with his wife and daughter. It was hot. His daughter was running in and out of the fountain. Michael's phone rang. The voice said, "This is Jonah Lehrer." I know Jonah Lehrer's voice now. If you had to describe it in a word, that word would be measured . "We had a really nice talk," Michael said, "about Dylan, about journalism. I told him I wasn't trying to make a name for myself with this. I said I'd been grinding away at this for years and I'm just--you know--I do what I do and I feed my family and everything's okay ." The way Michael said the word okay made it sound like he meant "barely okay." It was the vocal equivalent of a worried head glancing down at the floor. "I told him I'm not one of those young Gawker guys going, 'Find me a target I can burn in the public square and then people will know who I am.' And Jonah said, 'I really appreciate that.'" Michael liked Jonah. "I got along with him. It was really nice. It was a really nice conversation." They said their good-byes. A few minutes later, Jonah e-mailed Michael to thank him once again for being so decent and not like one of those Gawker guys who delight in humiliation. They didn't make them like Michael anymore. After that, Michael went quiet so he could dig around on Jonah some more. -- These were the good days. Michael felt like Hercule Poirot. Jonah's claim that he'd had a little bit of help from one of Dylan's managers had sounded suspiciously vague, Michael had thought. And, indeed, it turned out that Bob Dylan had only one manager. His name was Jeff Rosen. And although Jeff Rosen's e-mail address was hard to come by, Michael came by it. Michael e-mailed him. Had Jeff Rosen ever spoken to Jonah Lehrer? Jeff Rosen replied that he never had. So Michael e-mailed Jonah to say he had some more questions. Jonah replied, sounding surprised. Was Michael still going to write something? He assumed Michael wasn't going to write anything. -- Michael shook his head with incredulity when he recounted this part to me. Jonah had obviously convinced himself that he'd sweet-talked Michael out of investigating him. But no. "Bad liars always think they're good at it," Michael said to me. "They're always confident they're defeating you." -- "I've spoken to Jeff Rosen," Michael told Jonah. And that, Michael said, is when Jonah lost it. "He just lost it. I've never seen anyone like it." • • • Jonah started repeatedly telephoning Michael, pleading with him not to publish. Sometimes Michael would silence his iPhone for a while. Then he'd return to find so many missed calls from Jonah that he would take a screenshot because nobody would otherwise have believed it. I asked Michael at what point it stopped being fun, and he replied, "When your quarry starts panicking." He paused. "It's like being out in the woods hunting and you're, 'This feels great!' And then you shoot the animal and it's lying there twitching and wants its head to be bashed in and you're, 'I don't want to be the person to do this. This is fucking horrible .'" -- Michael got a call from Jonah's agent, Andrew Wylie. He represents not just Jonah but also Bob Dylan and Salman Rushdie and David Bowie and David Byrne and David Rockefeller and V. S. Naipaul and Vanity Fair and Martin Amis and Bill Gates and King Abdullah II of Jordan and Al Gore. Actually, Andrew Wylie didn't phone Michael. "He got in touch with somebody who got in touch with me to tell me to call him," Michael told me. "Which I thought was very Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy . He's thought to be the most powerful literary agent in the United States and I'm a schlub, I'm a nobody. So I called him. I laid out the case. He said, 'If you publish this, you're going to ruin a guy's life. Do you think this is a big enough deal to ruin a guy's life?'" "How did you reply?" I asked. "I said, 'I'll think about it,'" Michael said. "I guess Andrew Wylie is a bazillionaire because he's very perceptive, because I got a call from Jonah, who said, 'So Andrew Wylie says you're going to go ahead and publish.'" -- On the afternoon of Sunday, July 29, Michael was walking down Flatbush Avenue, on the telephone to Jonah, shouting at him, "'I need you to go on the record. You have to do it, Jonah. You have to go on the record.' My arms were going crazy. I was so angry and so frustrated. All the time he was wasting. All his lies. And he was simpering." Finally something in Jonah's voice made Michael know that it was going to happen. "So I ran into Duane Reade, and I bought a fucking Hello Kitty notebook and a pen, and in twenty-five seconds, he said, 'I panicked. And I'm deeply sorry for lying.'" "And there you go," said Michael. "It's done." -- Twenty-six days, and it took Michael forty minutes to write the story. He'd still not worked out how to make money from journalism. He'd agreed to give the scoop to a small Jewish online magazine, Tablet . Knowing how lucky they were, the people at Tablet paid Michael quadruple what they usually pay, but it was quadruple of not much: $2,200 total--which is all he'd ever make from the story. Forty minutes to write it, and what felt to him like nine packs of cigarettes. "If anything, Jonah Lehrer nearly killed me I smoked so many fucking cigarettes out on the fire escape. Smoking, smoking, smoking. When you have the ability to press send on something and really, really affect the outcome of the rest of that person's life. And the phone was ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing. There were twenty-odd missed calls from Jonah that Sunday night. Twenty-four missed calls, twenty-five missed calls." "He kept phoning," Joanne said. "It was so sad. I don't understand why he thought it was a good idea to keep phoning." "It was the worst night of his life," I said. "Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure," Michael said. Finally, Michael picked up the phone. "I said, 'Jonah, you have to stop calling me. This is almost to the point of harassment.' I felt like I was talking him off the ledge. I said, 'Tell me you're not going to do anything stupid.' It was that level of panic. So much so that I thought maybe I should pull back from this. He was, 'Please, please, please,' like a child's toy breaking, droning, running out of batteries, ' Please please, please . . . '" Michael asked me if I'd ever been in that position. Had I ever stumbled on a piece of information that, if published, would destroy someone? Actually destroy them. I thought for a while. "Destroy someone?" I said. I paused. "No. I don't think so. I'm not sure." "Don't ever do it," he said. Michael said he honestly considered not pressing send that night. Jonah had a young daughter the same age as Michael's young daughter. Michael said he couldn't kid himself. He understood what pressing send would mean to Jonah's life: "What we do, when we fuck up, we don't lose our job. We lose our vocation ." -- Michael was thinking of former journalists like The New Republic 's Stephen Glass. Glass was the author of a celebrated 1998 story, "Hack Heaven," about a fifteen-year-old schoolboy hacker who was offered a job with a software company he'd hacked into. Glass wrote about being a fly-on-the-wall in the company's offices--Jukt Micronics--as the boy negotiated his terms: "I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Men comic number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy --and throw in Penthouse . Show me the money! Show me the money!" Across the table, executives . . . are listening and trying ever so delicately to oblige. "Excuse me, sir," one of the suits says tentatively to the pimply teenager. "Excuse me. Pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you." --STEPHEN GLASS, "WASHINGTON SCENE: HACK HEAVEN," The New Republic , MAY 18, 1998 But there was no conference room, no Jukt Micronics, no schoolboy hacker. A Forbes digital journalist, Adam Penenberg, annoyed that The New Republic had scooped him on his own turf, did some digging and discovered that Glass had invented it all. Glass was fired. He later enrolled in law school, earned a degree magna cum laude, applied in 2014 to practice law in California, and was refused. Glass's shaming was following him around wherever he went, like Pigpen's cloud of dirt. In some ways, he and Jonah Lehrer were eerily alike--young, nerdy, Jewish, preternaturally successful journalists on a roll who made things up. But Glass had invented entire scenarios, casts of characters, reams of dialogue. Jonah's "I'm glad I'm not that " at the end of "I'm glad I'm not me" was stupid and wrong, but a world that doled out punishments as merciless as that would be unfathomable to me. I thought Michael was being overly dramatic to believe that pressing send would sentence Jonah to Stephen Glass-level oblivion. -- In the end, it was all academic for Michael. He said he felt as trapped in this story as Jonah was. It was like they were both in a car with failed brakes, hurtling helplessly toward this ending together. How could Michael not press send? What would people think if the story got out? That he'd covered it up for career advancement? "I would have been the spineless so-called journalist who buckled to Andrew Wylie. I never would have worked again." Excerpted from So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
