Jon Ronson

So You've Been Publicly Shamed
by Jon Ronson
Published 9 Mar 2015

Your Speed Bibliography and Acknowledgements 1 BRAVEHEART 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.

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ALSO BY JON RONSON Them: Adventures with Extremists The Men Who Stare at Goats Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness What I Do: More True Tales of Everyday Craziness The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie First published 2015 by Picador This electronic edition published 2015 by Picador an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world www.panmacmillan.com ISBN 978-1-4472-4237-6 Copyright (c) Jon Ronson 2015 Cover design (c) crushed.co.uk The right of Jon Ronson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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‘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 aesthetic.’ I felt 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 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.

Lost at Sea
by Jon Ronson
Published 1 Oct 2012

(Guardian, October 27, 2007); “The Fall of a Pop Impresario” (Guardian, December 1, 2001); “Amber Waves of Green” (US GQ, July 2012); “The Man Who Tried to Split the Atom in His Kitchen” (Guardian, February 3, 2012); “Lost at Sea” (Guardian, November 11, 2011) ISBN 978-1-101-61242-2 To Sarah Vowell Contents Also by Jon Ronson Title Page Copyright Dedication PART ONE THE STRANGE THINGS WE’RE WILLING TO BELIEVE Have You Ever Stood Next to an Elephant, My Friend? Doesn’t Everyone Have a Solar? The Chosen Ones A Message from God PART TWO HIGH-FLYING LIVES The Name’s Ronson, Jon Ronson I Looked into That Camera. And I Just Said It I’m Loving Aliens Instead First Contact Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes PART THREE EVERYDAY DIFFICULTY Santa’s Little Conspirators Phoning a Friend Who Killed Richard Cullen?

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They all loved her. You’d think Disney would give something back. They owe it to her to find out what happened.” ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jon Ronson’s books include the New York Times best seller The Psychopath Test, as well as Them: Adventures with Extremists and The Men Who Stare at Goats—both international best sellers. The Men Who Stare at Goats was adapted as a major motion picture, released in 2009 and starring George Clooney. Ronson lives in London. ALSO BY JON RONSON Them: Adventures with Extremists The Men Who Stare at Goats The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

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ALSO BY JON RONSON Them: Adventures with Extremists The Men Who Stare at Goats The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry RIVERHEAD BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jaiming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2012 by Jon Ronson, Ltd.

Them: Adventures With Extremists
by Jon Ronson
Published 1 Jan 2001

YOU KNOW THE FATHER NOW MEET THE SON. NATO LEADERS CONTROLLED BY BILDERBERG. BILDERBERG SUMMIT CLOSES IN PORTUGAL UNDER MASSIVE SECURITY . . . Reporter Jon Ronson was understandably disturbed by the experience of being trailed by security men in a green Lancia K throughout Wednesday. According to Ronson, the British Embassy had told him not to provoke any incidents and that his fate was in his own hands . . . WHY WAS THE SPOTLIGHT’S JIM TUCKER AND REPORTER JON RONSON CHASED BY BILDERBERG SECURITY IN PORTUGAL? Perhaps the whole reason was just so Tucker could write an outlandish article about it that nobody would believe because of the Spotlight’s racist tendencies.

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‘The strength of Ronson’s book is that it reminds us not only that extremists are weird but also that their fantasies take sustenance from the real world’ Sunday Telegraph ‘This is an investigation where comedy is married to a stomach-churning potential for violence . . . Ronson weaves his tale like a master . . . Jon Ronson has proved, with an often hilarious account that does to world domination what Bill Bryson has done so exhaustively to travel, that Picador is no part of the shadowy New World Order’ Irish Independent ‘Similar in spirit to the adventures of fellow faux naïf Louis Theroux – who cites Ronson as a major inspiration . . . the result takes no prisoners in its droll dissection of fanaticism’ Q Magazine Jon Ronson is an award-winning writer and documentary maker. He is the author of two bestsellers, Them: Adventures with Extremists and The Men Who Stare At Goats, and two collections, Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness and What I Do: More True of Everyday Craziness.

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First published 2001 by Picador First published in paperback by Picador 2002 This electronic edition published 2010 by Picador an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world www.panmacmillan.com ISBN 978-0-330-52505-3 PDF ISBN 978-0-330-52504-6 EPUB Copyright © Jon Ronson 2001 The right of Jon Ronson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
by Jon Ronson
Published 12 May 2011

. - TOTO Chapter 6. - NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD Chapter 7. - THE RIGHT SORT OF MADNESS Chapter 8. - THE MADNESS OF DAVID SHAYLER Chapter 9. - AIMING A BIT HIGH Chapter 10. - THE AVOIDABLE DEATH OF REBECCA RILEY Chapter 11. - GOOD LUCK NOTES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY/ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ALSO BY JON RONSON Them: Adventures with Extremists The Men Who Stare at Goats RIVERHEAD BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2011 by Jon Ronson All rights reserved.

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.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2011 by Jon Ronson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada Photo credits: p. 9: Stephen Alexander / www.temporarytemples.co.uk p. 22: Top © Barney Poole; bottom copyright © Douglas R.

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All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com p. 69: Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images / Ralph Crane p. 140: Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images / Frank Scherschel p. 174: Dittrick Medical History Center, Case Western Reserve University p. 204: © Teri Pengilley p. 272: © Barney Poole Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ronson, Jon, date. The psychopath test : a journey through the madness industry / Jon Ronson. p. cm. eISBN : 978-1-101-51516-7 1. Psychopaths. I. Title. HV33.R66 2011 2011003133 616.85’82—dc22 While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
by Elizabeth Williamson
Published 8 Mar 2022

His family’s move from Rockwall to Austin while he was in high school was likely precipitated after Jones repeatedly slammed and kicked a classmate’s head, fracturing his skull in multiple places, and then received a severe beating himself as retribution. Jones has called most of this story, first reported by Welsh author and filmmaker Jon Ronson, “horse crap.” But the participants confirmed it.[4] Jones did not dispute that his father, David, paid the injured teenager’s hospital and neurologist bills, bargaining unsuccessfully for his son to be left alone. Jones got his start in the early 1990s, with simultaneous shows on Austin radio station KJFK and on Austin public access cable.

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David Jones bankrolled his son’s ventures and, as he had when Jones was in high school, tried—often unsuccessfully—to keep him out of trouble. In 2000, Kelly, nicknamed “Violet,” accompanied Jones and his producer, Mike Hanson, on a trip to infiltrate Bohemian Grove, an annual summer glamping retreat for international business and political leaders, near Monte Rio, California. Author Jon Ronson accompanied Jones to Bohemian Grove, a trip that became a chapter in Ronson’s book Them, about his travels with extremists. In the book Ronson documents how he and Jones and their associates sneaked into the redwood-enshrouded summer camp in Northern California for its “cremation of care,” a pyrotechnic spectacle that symbolized the group’s suspension of worldly cares for the weekend.

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* * * — Tracy was interviewed by Paul Joseph Watson, who was sitting in for Jones. The professor’s willingness to entertain any and all batshit claims about the shooting proved too much even for Infowars. Watson was thirty at the time, and an up-and-comer in conspiracy circles. A native of Sheffield, England, he learned about Jones when he was eighteen, watching Jon Ronson’s miniseries The Secret Rulers of the World. Ronson called Jones out as a huckster in the series. But he inspired Watson to start his own conspiracy website from a computer in his childhood bedroom in Sheffield, where his anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, and misogynist content racked up millions of views.

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

When the seventeen-year-old Chelsea King was raped and murdered in southern Chicago in 2010, King’s father was astounded to be attacked by trolls: ‘I can’t for the life of me understand why somebody would want to hurt somebody that’s so broken and so grieving.’ That brokenness is exactly what the trolls were seeking to punish. ‘We are a mass of vulnerabilities’, Jon Ronson writes in his book on public shaming, ‘and who knows what will trigger them?’5 Trolls know. They are experts on vulnerability. Yet members of the trolling subculture are for the most part not unusual. Academics studying trolling as a form of ‘online deviancy’ have engaged in a sophisticated form of the moral panic that pervades the press.

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Danielle Citron’s study of online hate crime finds that 53 per cent of non-white women, and 45 per cent of white women, have suffered harassment. Everyday sexism is everyday psychological warfare.33 VI. A Talmudic saying has it that to ‘shame another in public’ is a sin ‘akin to murder’. As if shame was something like a death sentence. Jon Ronson mentions the startling finding that 91 per cent of men and 84 per cent of women can recall at least one vivid fantasy of murdering someone.34 Almost all of these fantasies were driven by the experience of humiliation, as if the worst thing you could do to someone is to destroy their idea of themselves.

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Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2015, pp. 28–30; Kenny Rose Bradford, ‘Drowned Teenager’s Family Targeted By Vile Web Trolls’, Huffington Post, 14 August 2013; Gregory Pratt, ‘Cruel online posts known as RIP trolling add to Tinley Park family’s grief’, Chicago Tribune, 12 August 2013. 5. ‘We are a mass of vulnerabilities’ . . . Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Pan Macmillan: London, 2015, p. 273. 6. Whitney Phillips, author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things . . . Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, pp. 27, 35, 115 and 121. 7. Their detached humour was epitomized by . . . Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, p. 117. 8.

Free Speech And Why It Matters
by Andrew Doyle
Published 24 Feb 2021

p.23the ‘crowded theatre’ argument is ‘worse than useless’: Gabe Rottman, ‘A “foreign policy exception” to the First Amendment?’, ACLU (28 September 2012). Cancel Culture p.25‘cancel culture’ … typically driven by social media: In his book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson traces the re-emergence of public shaming as a form of justice brought about by the rise of social media. This was written before the term ‘cancel culture’ became prevalent. Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (London: Picador, 2015). p.25‘gaslighting’: This concept of ‘gaslighting’ takes its name from the 1940 movie Gaslight, in which a husband convinces his wife that she is going insane by, among other things, dimming the lights and then denying that the house is getting darker when she complains.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021

That was evident after the 2013 incident involving the woman who tweeted a bad joke and, over the course of an airplane flight, became the subject of an international shaming campaign. She was an ordinary person, not a prominent CEO, but now ordinary people were in the crosshairs. When the journalist Jon Ronson interviewed people who had been targets of shaming campaigns, he found “everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media.… The people I met were mostly unemployed, fired for their transgressions, and they seemed broken somehow—deeply confused and traumatized.”40 It could happen to anyone, over anything.

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The Boston Tea Party was instigated partly thanks to the Boston Evening Post’s reports that British tea contained a “slow poison” that caused “spasms.” 4. Randall S. Sumpter, Before Journalism Schools: How Gilded Age Reporters Learned the Rules (University of Missouri Press, 2018), p. 94. 5. Ibid., p. 31. 6. Rick Sobey, “Harvard Student Government Sides with Anti-ICE Protesters against Newspaper,” Boston Herald, November 11, 2019. 7. Jon Ronson, “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life,” New York Times, February 12, 2015. 8. Ali Vingiano, “This Is How a Woman’s Offensive Tweet Became the World’s Top Story,” Buzzfeed News, December 21, 2013. 9. Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj, The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility (Oxford, 2014), p. 5. 10.

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Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (Westview, 1993). 39. For a full treatment of the fallacy that suppressing so-called hate speech reduces hatred, see Nadine Strossen’s excellent Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press, 2018). 40. Jon Ronson, “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life,” New York Times Magazine, February 12, 2015. 41. Jonathan Chait, “The Still-Vital Case for Liberalism in a Radical Age,” New York, June 11, 2020. 42. Nancy Rommelmann, A Guide to Surviving Your Fifteen Minutes of Hate, Reason, February 19, 2019; Lizzy Acker, “#MeNeither YouTube Videos Create Backlash for Portland Coffee Company,” OregonLive.com, January 11, 2019. 43.

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation
by Cathy O'Neil
Published 15 Mar 2022

And so we will continue on, living in ever-smaller communities that we feel are looking out for us, focused on our outsize emotions instead of the poorly designed system that provokes them automatically. It’s a perpetual shame machine. Skip Notes * For more examples of viral and international shaming incidents, see Jon Ronson’s excellent book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Chapter 6 HUMILIATION AND DEFIANCE On a sunny Memorial Day in 2020, a forty-year-old financial analyst named Amy Cooper took her cocker spaniel, Henry, for a walk in New York City’s Central Park. She unleashed the dog in a wild part of the park known as the Ramble.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 5: Click on Conflict “I thought nothing of it”: Jennifer Knapp Wilkinson, “ ‘My 15 Minutes of Fame’: What Happened When a Cruel Photo of Me Went Viral,” Today.com, January 30, 2017, https://www.today.com/​health/​my-15-minutes-fame-what-happened-when-cruel-photo-me-t107163. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The reward circuits in the striatum: Molly Crockett, interview by the author, October 16, 2020. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT For more examples of viral and international shaming: Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (New York: Picador, 2015). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?”: Evan Gerstmann, “The Level of Violent Imagery Directed against Covington High Boys Is Dangerous and Wrong,” Forbes, January 24, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/​sites/​evangerstmann/​2019/​01/​24/​the-level-of-violent-imagery-directed-against-covington-high-boys-is-dangerous-and-wrong/.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

The pain that was exhibited in hashtag campaigns like #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen was “not perceived”—at least not yet. Collective grievance was conflated with mob behavior and moral panics online. The many grades and variations of power were brushed aside to condemn internet outrage as an oversize threat. As a classic example of this conflation, Jon Ronson, while promoting his 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, routinely stated that internet users are collectively “worse than the NSA.” Another tipping domino, in 2013, was Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. However, it was the criticism it garnered, rather than the actual text, that made a lasting impact.

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Four years after the Outrage meters, Slate’s then editor in chief Julia Turner indicated a change in vision when she told the Columbia Journalism Review, “Broadly the internet has been good at elevating the voices of people whose voices were not necessarily sufficiently represented in traditional pre-internet news coverage. I think that’s true about gender, I think it’s true about race, I think it’s true about sexuality” (“Slate’s ‘Pivot to Words,’” The Kicker podcast, January 25, 2018). The Sara Ahmed quote comes from a post on her blog, Feministkilljoys, entitled “Pushy Feminists” (November 17, 2014). Jon Ronson made the comment about users being worse than the NSA in interviews with Jon Stewart, Boing Boing, and others. Melissa Gira Grant first wrote about Lean In for The Washington Post (“Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ Campaign Holds Little for Most Women,” February 25, 2013). Anna Holmes confirmed the dinner party in a defense of Sheryl Sandberg for The New Yorker, arguing that “many of the most full-throated defenses of Sandberg came from women who had actually met her.

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives
by Chris Stedman
Published 19 Oct 2020

As a result, there’s often a distance between what we want to say and what we think we can say without putting ourselves at risk. When I’ve spoken out about systemic racism or homophobia online, for example, I’ve been inundated by harassment. That harassment has occasionally made me hesitant to express things important to me, and I don’t want to feel reluctant to speak out about things that matter. In Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, he recounts something monologist Mike Daisey—who was revealed to have fabricated details in a story, for which he received harsh online criticism—once said to him: “I’d never had the opportunity to be the object of hate before. The hard part isn’t the hate. It’s the object.”

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Without restorative justice in our various spheres I fear that, in a time when we know that a careless moment can define us forever, people will hold back their less formed thoughts, keeping them quiet instead of bringing them out into the light where they can be engaged, challenged, or celebrated. There are, of course, positive things about the impulse to keep some half-baked thoughts to yourself. But I also don’t want to live in a world where people only share safe, focus-group-friendly opinions. “Let’s not turn [social media] into a world where the smartest way to survive,” Jon Ronson writes in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, “is to go back to being voiceless.” Of course, it’s essential to ask ourselves who benefits the most from calls for digital nuance—and for whom the calls are typically made. Those who rail most virulently against what is sometimes called “cancel culture”—typically political conservatives or those who like to tell themselves that they’re not—are often more concerned about preserving power than encouraging compassion for people who make mistakes.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

Many Establishment figures are, in person, full of generosity and empathy for others, including for those in far less privileged circumstances than themselves. Personal decency can happily coexist with the most inimical of systems. On the other hand, other figures are selfish, determined to gain wealth and power whatever the cost to others; as journalist Jon Ronson discovered, an estimated 4 per cent of CEOs are psychopaths, a proportion around four times higher than the rest of the population.14 It is the behaviour that a system tends towards and encourages that needs to be understood. This book will explore what today’s Establishment is and how it works: how its ideas became so victorious and unchallenged; what it looks like; how it justifies its behaviour; and why it poses a threat to our democracy.

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Edward Royle, Modern Britain: A Social History 1750–2011, 3rd edn (London, 2012), p. 12. 7. http://www.churchofengland.org/about-us/structure/churchcommissioners/assets/property-investments/rural.aspx. 8. http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/files/files/Reports/Voting%20and%20Values%20in%20Britain%2011%20FINAL%20 (2).pdf. 9. www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN01250.pdf. 10. http://www.runnymedetrust.org/blog/49/15/Record-number-of-BME-MPS.html. 11. http://www.boardsforum.co.uk/boardwatch.html. 12. http://raceforopportunity.bitc.org.uk/about-race-opportunity/campaign-aims. 13. http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/about/resources/monitoring-diversity. 14. Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey through the Madness Industry (London, 2012). 1. THE OUTRIDERS 1. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London, 1944), p. 10. 2. Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–1983 (London, 1995), p. 100. 3. George J.

Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl From Somewhere Else
by Maeve Higgins
Published 6 Aug 2018

She offers fresh and insightful perspectives from a faraway place on all we take for granted.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson “Maeve Higgins is the funniest writer I know. And Maeve in America is just so smart and joyful. I especially like it when she’s unhappy. Because she’s very funny about it. Always be unhappy, Maeve!” —Jon Ronson, author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed ABOUT THE AUTHOR MAEVE HIGGINS is an absolute legend, but she’s modest about it. The host of the hit podcast Maeve in America: Immigration IRL, she is a comedian who has performed all over the world, including in her native Ireland, Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Erbil.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Published 31 Mar 2011

The late Gould referred to them as NOMA, or “nonoverlapping magisteria,” in an article of the same name, Natural History 106 (March 1997): 16–22, available at http://stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html 43 . Quoted in Paulo Moura, “The Time of Killing,” Harper’s Magazine 309, no. 1850 (July 2004): 25. For an extended analysis, see Jon Ronson, Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001; repr., New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003). 44. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961). 45 . Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 46 .

Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side
by Simon McCarthy-Jones
Published 12 Apr 2021

A willingness to act spitefully, to bear a cost to punish the wrong, can be crucial to creating positive change. Counterdominant spite can help us bring down those who need to be brought down. Yet it also threatens to pull down the industrious, the innovative, and the generous. The punishment can exceed the crime. As Jon Ronson, author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, notes in relation to online backlashes, a disconnect has developed “between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment.”2 In our capitalist society, someone is always going to be above us. We have mixed feelings toward such people.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes
by Phillip Brown , Hugh Lauder and David Ashton
Published 3 Nov 2010

Paul Romer, “Beyond the Knowledge Worker,” Worldlink (January/February 1995), 56–60. 29. Simon Head, The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 61. 30. Ibid., 69–70. 31. Ibid., 63. 32. Suresh Gupta, “Financial Services Factory,” Journal of Financial Transformation, (The Capco Institute, 2006): 46. 33. Jon Ronson, “Cold Sweat,” The Guardian Weekend, January 28, 2006. See also Adria Scharf, “‘From ‘Welcome to McDonalds’ to ‘Paper or Plastic?’ Employers Control of Speech of Service Workers,’ Dollars and Sense, The Magazine of Economic Justice (September/October 2003). www.dollarsandsense. org/archives/2003/0903scharf.html.

How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman
Published 9 May 2018

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 9. 51Mark Zuckerberg, ‘Building global community’, Facebook, 16 February 2017, http://bit.ly/2m39az5 52Dave Eggers, The Circle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). 53Mark Zuckerberg, ‘Mark Zuckerberg’, Facebook, 3 January 2017, http://bit.ly/2hXwZIi 54Josh Glancy, ‘Mark Zuckerberg’s “Listening Tour”’, Sunday Times, 23 July 2017, http://bit.ly/2hvF4gm 55Eggers, The Circle, p. 386. 56The fullest account of this story is in Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015). 57Ezra Klein & Alvin Chang, ‘“Political identity is fair game for hatred”: how Republicans and Democrats discriminate’, Vox, 7 December 2015, http://bit.ly/2ja3CQb 58‘Mark Lilla vs identity politics’, The American Conservative, 16 August 2017, http://bit.ly/2uTZYhy 59‘5th Republican debate transcript’, Washington Post, 15 December 2015, http://wapo.st/2mTDrBY 60Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942). 61Joe McGinnis, The Selling of the President 1968 (New York: Trident Press, 1969). 62Robert A.

My Shit Life So Far
by Frankie Boyle
Published 30 Sep 2009

It’s hardly a show of solidarity with those affected by the recession when she’d be eating while wearing a crown and sitting on a throne inside a palace. Hope she enjoyed her swan-flavoured crispy pancakes. Next, people will be suggesting that her having two birthdays a year makes her elitist. The whole Ross/Brand thing just seemed disproportionate anyway. It reminded me of a great article where Jon Ronson described the popularity of David Icke as ‘part of a larger backlash against rational thought’. Manuel was a great character but can you imagine Fawlty Towers being made today? Every episode would just be thirty minutes of a Polish waitress in a bedsit crying. In response to the climate of censorship I have created a computer program called ‘The Daily Mail Random Headline Generator’.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro
Published 26 Jul 2021

“Yann LeCun Quits Twitter Amid Acrimonious Exchanges on AI Bias,” SyncedReview.com, June 30, 2020, https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter-amid-acrimonious-exchanges-on-ai-bias/. 50. Dan Levin, “A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning,” NYTimes.com, December 26, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/us/mimi-groves-jimmy-galligan-racial-slurs.html. 51. Jon Ronson, “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life,” NYTimes.com, February 12, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html. 52. Ari Levy, “Trump fans are flocking to the social media app Parler—its CEO is begging liberals to join them,” CNBC.com, June 27, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/27/parler-ceo-wants-liberal-to-join-the-pro-trump-crowd-on-the-app.html. 53.

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality
by Laurence Scott
Published 11 Jul 2018

Online shaming is often metonymic in nature, especially when the identities of those shamed are overwhelmed by a single event: a thin string of 280 characters coming to indict one’s entire character, or a humiliating night at a party caught on camera. Those entering the job market worry that one wrong ‘like’ on their Facebook page could cost them employment. Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed exposes the after-shocks of what he calls ‘mega-shamings’, people whose lives have been ruined because of an overheard aside, a terribly misjudged joke or one moment of stupid irreverence. Some citizen-judges are happy to let such metonyms stand, arguing that wickedness can be deduced from one sentence, which is certainly possible.

Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict
by Max Brooks , John Amble , M. L. Cavanaugh and Jaym Gates
Published 14 May 2018

In 1971 she and the scientist in charge of her experiments abruptly disappeared.2 Determined not to be outmatched in a psychic arms race, the United States spent another twenty years and around $20 million researching remote viewing, automatic writing, and other forms of paranormal activity.3 The results were at best inconclusive. What was worse (much worse in the eyes of the Department of Defense, which funded most of the research), they were laughable. After all, The Men Who Stare at Goats, the Jon Ronson book that inspired the George Clooney movie, was a nonfiction account of the U.S. Army’s adventures into parapsychology. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to dismiss the notion of Jedi mind tricks and the mental discipline that makes them possible out of hand. Some of those so-called tricks are things people do every day.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

Take as an example Trump’s targeting of the FBI as some kind of radical left institution: ‘Trump Is Going After One of the Most Conservative Institutions in the U.S. Government’, www.nytimes.com, 18 August 2018. 7. ‘Janet Ossebaard’, www.coasttocoastam.com/guest/ossebaard-janet-105140. 8. Ossebaard’s videos were removed from YouTube alongside most QAnon content, but remain online here: https://rumble.com. I do not recommend watching them. 9. Jon Ronson, ‘Beset by Lizards’, www.theguardian.com, 17 March 2001. 10. There’s still some controversy around this, but here’s the consensus: Eric Hardin, ‘Myth: Subliminal Messages Can Change Your Behavior’, www.psychologicalscience.org, 29 March 2019. 11. Angelique Chrisafis, ‘Who are the gilets jaunes and what do they want?’

Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts
by Will Storr
Published 4 Sep 2006

Acknowledgements FIRST AND FOREMOST I’d like to thank everybody who appears in this book, especially Maurice Grosse, Dr Mark Salter, Dr James Garvey, Lance Railton, Trevor and Debbie, Philip Hutchinson, David Vee, Charles Walker, Jacqueline Adair, Father Gabriele Amorth and, of course, the brilliant, brilliant Lou Gentile. I’d also like to give a full royal bow to my editor Andrew Goodfellow and Paul Moreton for always knowing what’s best for me, even when I don’t, and for putting up with my constant obsessive worrying. Thanks also to Alex Hazle, Sarah Bennie and everyone at Ebury, Jon Ronson, Chloe Makin, Paul Merrill, Duncan Hayes, Francis Storr, Richard Purvis, Guy Lyon Playfair, Peter Johnson at the SPR, Andrew Sumner and Simon Hills. I’d also like to thank Jill Schwartzman and all at Harper Perennial in New York, Antony Medley, Simon Trewin and Danny Wallace. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
by Jia Tolentino
Published 5 Aug 2019

At times it seems that Weiss’s main strategy is to make an argument that’s bad enough to attract criticism, and then to cherry-pick the worst of that criticism into the foundation for another bad argument. Her worldview requires the specter of a vast, angry, inferior mob. It’s of course true that there are vast, angry mobs on the internet. Jon Ronson wrote the book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed about this in 2015. “We became keenly watchful for transgressions,” he writes, describing the state of Twitter around 2012. “After a while it wasn’t just transgressions we were keenly watchful for. It was misspeakings. Fury at the terribleness of other people had started to consume us a lot….In fact, it felt weird and empty when there wasn’t anyone to be furious about.

Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds
by Kevin Dutton
Published 3 Feb 2011

If I’ve missed anybody out, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to face it – you weren’t that important: Dominic Abrams, Denis Alexander, Mike Anderson, Sue Armstrong, Phil Barnard, Michael Brooks, Peter Chadwick, Alex Christofi, Robert Cialdini, Max Coltheart, Keith Crosby, Jules Davidoff, Richard Dawkins, Roger Deeble, George Ellis, Ben Elton, Dan Fagin, Dan Gilbert, Andy Green, Cathy Grossman, Greg Heinimann, Paula Hertel, Rodney Holder, Emily Holmes, John Horgan, Stephen Joseph, Herb Kelman, Deborah Kent, Linda Lantieri, Colin MacLeod, Bundy Mackintosh, Andrew Mathews, Ray Meddis, Ravi Mirchandani, Harry Newman, Pippa Newman, Richard Newman, Stephen Pinker, Martin Redfern, Russell Re-Manning, Gill Rhodes, V. S. Ramachandran, Jon Ronson, Jason Smith, Polly Stanton, John Timpane, Geoff Ward, Bob White, and Mark Williams. Special thanks also go to my editors at William Heinemann, Drummond Moir and Jason Arthur – two of the coolest, funniest and nicest guys you could ever wish to work with – as well as to the equally wonderful Andrea Schulz and Tom Boughman at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the US.

Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight
by Margaret Lazarus Dean
Published 18 May 2015

He leans toward me in his excitement; I can see myself reflected in his sunglasses. Next to him, his wife fiddles with her iPhone, trying to get NASA TV to come in. “Obama’s under orders by the Bilderberg Group.” The man pauses, waiting to see whether I know what the Bilderberg Group is. I do, from reading Jon Ronson’s Them: it’s a group of global leaders and captains of industry that holds mysterious meetings, a cabal popular with conspiracy theorists. “He’s under orders to destroy as many sources of national pride as possible. I mean, think about it. If the American people aren’t proud of their country anymore, the One World Order can take over and we won’t rise up in defense of our country.”

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

* Or, apparently, if the customer is trying to cancel a dead relative’s plan. * Hey—how much of that nine-digit number can you remember? * Bentham suggested that each cell be equipped with a sort of hamster wheel or treadmill so prisoners could walk on them all day, thus powering industrial looms or other equipment. * It’s interesting to read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015) after reading Foucault. * Only two of my male classmates are still around; by the time I leave, they’ll all be gone. * FMLA refers to the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, a federal law that lets employees of companies with more than fifty employees take up to twelve workweeks of unpaid leave a year without getting fired or getting kicked off health insurance, as long as it’s to have a baby, adopt a child, care for a sick immediate family member, deal with a spouse’s military deployment, or handle a serious health condition that interferes with their jobs

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science
by Will Storr
Published 1 Jan 2013

Very valuable, and a great read to boot, this is investigative journalism of the highest order.” —INDEPENDENT, BOOK OF THE WEEK “Funny, serious, and richly vivid … Read this book.” —DAILY TELEGRAPH “Storr can open chapters like a stage conjurer, and his prose has an easy, laconic style, embracing Jon Ronson’s taste for the fabulously weird and Louis Theroux’s ability to put his subjects at ease. He is a funny and companionable guide … [who] confounds expectations.” —GUARDIAN “[Storr] seeks not to mock strange convictions but to get inside the minds of those who hold them. The result is an entertaining journey dotted with some fascinating reportage.”

The Happiness Effect: How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost
by Donna Freitas
Published 13 Jan 2017

O’Connell notes that in the twelve hours she spent en route to Cape Town, Sacco became the unknowing subject of “a kind of ruinous flash-fame” as her tweet went viral, drawing anger and derision from thousands, which ultimately ended in her swift and public firing from her job. See also nonfiction author Jon Ronson’s article about Justine Sacco, “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, February 12, 2015. This article was excerpted from Ronson’s book on the same subject: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (New York: Riverhead, 2015). 2.In her article “Beware: Potential Employers See the Dumb Thing You Do Online: The Spread of Social Media Has Given Hiring Companies a Whole New List of Gaffes to Look For,” Wall Street Journal, Eastern Edition, October 29, 2012, B8, Leslie Kwoh details how employers are increasingly scouring social media to vet potential employees.

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Published 12 Sep 2006

It is useful for our brains to construct notions like solidity and impenetrability, because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through a world in which objects – which we call solid – cannot occupy the same space as each other. A little comic relief at this point – from The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson: This is a true story. It is the summer of 1983. Major General Albert Stubblebine III is sitting behind his desk in Arlington, Virginia, and he is staring at his wall, upon which hang his numerous military awards. They detail a long and distinguished career. He is the United States Army’s chief of intelligence, with sixteen thousand soldiers under his command…He looks past his awards to the wall itself.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

See also Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (2013), by Paul Bloom, a co-author on the Hamlin studies. 17 Sentimentalism says it is actually motivated: Haidt, 2007. 18 Neurological research supports this: “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Jonathan Haidt, Psychological Review, October 2001. 19 A software developer named Adria Richards: “A Dongle Joke That Spiraled Way Out of Control,” Kim Mai-Cutler, TechCrunch, March 21, 2013. 20 “Low cost, anonymous, instant”: “Re-Shaming the Debate: Social Norms, Shame, and Regulation in an Internet Age,” Kate Klonick, Maryland Law Review 76, no. 4, 2016. 21 tended to be “over-determined”: Ibid. 22 “as if shamings were now happening”: “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life,” Jon Ronson, New York Times Magazine, February 12, 2015. 23 A small-town Wisconsin class photo: “The Nazi Salute Picture That Divided an American Town,” Chris McGreal, The Guardian, January 10, 2019. 24 A rookie reporter from Des Moines: “Twitter Hates Me. The Des Moines Register Fired Me. Here’s What Really Happened,” Aaron Calvin, Columbia Journalism Review, November 4, 2019. 25 “You think it’s easy for me”: “The CEO of Holy Land Hummus I Know Doesn’t Match the Social Media Monster,” Rob Eshman, The Forward, June 8, 2020. 26 “It’s perplexing that people who”: “Bogus Social Media Outrage Is Making Authors Change Lines in Their Books Now,” Laura Miller, Slate, June 8, 2021. 27 A Black student at Smith College: “Inside a Battle Over Race, Class, and Power at Smith College,” Michael Powell, New York Times, February 24, 2021. 28 A 2013 study of the Chinese platform Weibo: “Anger Is More Influential than Joy: Sentiment Correlation in Weibo,” Rui Fan et al., PLOS One 9, no. 10, October 2014. 29 Studies of Twitter and Facebook: “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks,” Adam D.I.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

Alexandra Ma, “China has started ranking citizens with a creepy ‘social credit’ system”, Business Insider, October 29th 2018, http://uk.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018–4/#1-banning-you-from-flying-or-getting-the-train-1 31. Emily Stewart, “Christopher Robin, denied Chinese release, is the latest victim in China’s war on Winnie the Pooh”, August 4th 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/8/4/17651630/christopher-robin-banned-in-china-pooh 32. Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed 33. “The top three things that employers want to see in your social media profile”, https://careers.workopolis.com/advice/the-three-things-that-employers-want-to-find-out-about-you-online/ 34. “How digital devices challenge the nature of ownership”, The Economist, September 30th 2017 35.

The Disappearing Act
by Florence de Changy
Published 24 Dec 2020

McEwen pointed out that the author of the study confused milliseconds with microseconds8 … I passed his message on to Ghyslain Wattrelos, for whom this was just one more bitter disappointment. How many false leads would have to be eliminated before the truth came to light and the families could finally find closure? 1 Joshua Wong, when only 15, had led a huge protest about education and social issues in 2012. 2 Jon Ronson, ‘Nobody cares any more’, Guardian, 28 February 2015. 3 Malaysian passport holders are prohibited from travelling to Israel, and Israelis are not allowed into Malaysia without special permission from the Interior Ministry. 4 Among the passengers, there were also two children (aged two and four) who had Chinese parents but were US passport holders. 5 Jindalee Operational Radar Network, an over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) network. 6 ‘Nobody cares any more’, Guardian, op. cit. 7 Factual Information: Safety Investigation for MH370 dated 8 March 2015, op. cit., p. 60. 8 1 millisecond = 1,000 microseconds. 7 Counter-investigation in the Maldives Sunday, 3 May 2015.

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece
by Michael Benson
Published 2 Apr 2018

“I guess it’s an English thing” . . . “No, Stanley” . . . Later, she remembered the falling-out: Christiane Kubrick, interview by author, June 5, 2016. It caused humans to be impervious to the cold: information on Shadow on the Sun gleaned from the BBC’s Radio Times, no. 1979, October 12, 1961; Jon Ronson, “Citizen Kubrick,” The Guardian, March 27, 2004. good books make bad films: Frewin, “Chairman Stanley.” “a weird, hydra-headed”: Dr. Strangelove script dated March 31, 1963, Kubrick Archive, UAL. “I was disgusted”: Christiane Kubrick, interview by author, September 22, 2016. it emerged that Shaw was also a science fiction fan . . .