Olivia: Alright Jackson, I'm a 17th-century Puritan judge. You've just been caught whistling on a Sunday. What's your punishment? Jackson: Oh, easy. You make me listen to the 'Friday' song by Rebecca Black on a loop. Public humiliation, but with a beat. Olivia: Perfect. You've just captured the essence of modern punishment, which is exactly what we're talking about today. We're diving into So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson. Jackson: Ah, Jon Ronson. I love his style. He’s not just a reporter; he kind of stumbles into the story himself, right? Like a detective who’s slightly confused about being at the crime scene. Olivia: Exactly. He's a master of that gonzo-style journalism, where he becomes a character in his own investigation. And in this book, he turns his lens on one of the most terrifying and defining features of our digital lives: the public pile-on. Jackson: The digital mob with digital pitchforks. I feel like I see one forming every single day on social media. But did Ronson ever actually participate in one? Or was he just an observer? Olivia: That’s the perfect question, because he starts the book by confessing that he did. And at first, it felt fantastic.

Jackson: Okay, you can't just leave it there. Who did he shame and why did it feel so good? Olivia: It’s a bizarrely modern story. In 2012, he discovered a Twitter account, a spambot, that had stolen his name, his photo, and was tweeting complete nonsense about things like fusion cooking. It was a fake Jon Ronson. Jackson: A digital twin spouting gibberish. That’s both creepy and a little insulting. Olivia: Right? So he tracks down the creators. They turn out to be a group of academics who are incredibly dismissive. They call the bot an "infomorph" and an "academic exercise." They basically tell him he's overreacting and that the internet isn't the real world. Jackson: Oh, that's infuriating. The classic "it's just a prank, bro" defense, but with a PhD. I would have lost it. Olivia: He did. After a totally fruitless meeting with them, which he filmed, he felt powerless. So he did what any of us might do: he uploaded the footage to YouTube. And the internet descended. Jackson: Let me guess. The academics got flamed. Olivia: Instantly. There was a wave of outrage. People called them trolls, bullies, frauds. The pressure was so intense that within days, the academics buckled and took the spambot down. Jackson: I have to admit, that feels like a win. He used the power of the people to fight back against these arrogant guys who stole his identity. It’s David versus Goliath, but with Wi-Fi. Olivia: That’s exactly how Ronson felt. He describes this initial era of social media justice in almost utopian terms. He says, "Hierarchies were being levelled out. The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratization of justice." For the first time, ordinary people could hold powerful entities accountable, whether it was a corporation with bad policies or a newspaper printing a homophobic article. Jackson: Yeah, I remember that feeling. It felt like a new superpower. We could finally punch up. So when did this good feeling go bad? Because we all know it goes bad. Olivia: It goes bad when the punishment wildly outweighs the crime. It goes bad when the mob loses all sense of proportion and context. And there's no better, or more terrifying, example of this than the story of a woman named Justine Sacco.

Jackson: I think I remember that name, but the details are fuzzy, which is probably part of the point. Olivia: It is. In 2013, Justine Sacco was a PR executive with about 170 followers on Twitter. She was on her way to South Africa for the holidays and, as she often did, she posted an acerbic, edgy joke before boarding her 11-hour flight from London. Jackson: Okay, what was the tweet? Olivia: The tweet read: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!" Jackson: Oof. Okay. That is a cringey, terribly constructed joke. It's playing on the stereotype of privileged, clueless white people, but it's easy to see how it would be taken at face value. Olivia: Exactly. It was a bad joke. But here’s what happened. She pressed send, got on the plane, and had no internet for the next 11 hours. While she was in the air, a journalist from a popular media site saw the tweet and shared it with his thousands of followers. And it exploded. Jackson: So she was completely offline while the world was deciding she was a monster. Olivia: Completely. The hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet started trending globally. People weren't just criticizing the joke; they were gleefully anticipating the moment she’d turn on her phone and see that her life was over. They tracked her flight. Her employer, IAC, issued a statement condemning her while she was still in the air. Jackson: That's chilling. The glee is the worst part. It’s not about justice at that point; it’s about entertainment. It's a public execution as a spectator sport. Olivia: And the scale is just impossible to comprehend. Ronson points out the Google search data. In the month before her tweet, her name was searched 30 times. In the ten days after, it was searched 1.2 million times. Jackson: One point two million. For a dumb, sarcastic joke? She lost her job, her reputation… everything? Olivia: Everything. And when Ronson interviewed her, she was just broken. She said, "I cried out my bodyweight in the first twenty-four hours. It was incredibly traumatic." And the journalist who first amplified it? He later said, "The fact that she was a PR chief made it delicious... I'd do it again." Jackson: Delicious. Wow. It's like the mob needed to believe she was this cartoon villain to justify the sheer scale of the pile-on. It’s a total dehumanization. Olivia: Ronson argues that's a key part of the psychology. The shamers often cast themselves as righteous crusaders for social good. They're not bullies; they're activists. It allows them to feel powerful and virtuous while participating in an act of collective cruelty. It’s a performance of righteousness. Jackson: A performance that ruins a real person's life. So what happens after the mob moves on to the next main character of the day? Can you ever come back from that?

Olivia: That’s the million-dollar question the book wrestles with. And the answer is complicated and, frankly, a little bleak. Ronson looks back at historical public shaming—think of the stocks or the pillory in Colonial America. Those punishments were brutal, but they were eventually abolished. People decided they were too cruel, that they lacked compassion. And crucially, they ended. The person could, in theory, move to a new town and start over. Jackson: But on the internet, there's no new town. Your shame is archived and searchable forever. Olivia: Forever. Which has given rise to this bizarre and controversial industry of online reputation management. Ronson tells another story, about a woman named Lindsey Stone. She was a caregiver who took a jokey photo at Arlington National Cemetery, pretending to yell at a sign that said "Silence and Respect." It was part of a running gag she had of taking silly photos with signs. Jackson: I can already see where this is going. Olivia: It went viral. She was branded as anti-military, a monster. She lost her job, became deeply depressed, and couldn't leave her house for a year. So, this company, Reputation.com, steps in to help her. Jackson: And how do they do that? Do they post apologies or explanations? Olivia: No, that doesn't work. Apologies are just seen as more ammunition. Instead, their strategy is to bury the bad stuff. They create dozens of new, positive online profiles for Lindsey. A new blog, a new Pinterest, a new Instagram. But the content has to be completely inoffensive. Jackson: What kind of content? Olivia: Ronson titles the chapter "Cats and Ice Cream and Music." They create a new online persona for her that is deliberately, strategically bland. It’s a version of Lindsey Stone who loves pop music, posts pictures of her cat, and talks about her favorite ice cream flavors. The goal is to flood Google with so much of this harmless content that the shaming incident gets pushed down to page two or three of the search results, where almost no one looks. Jackson: Wait a minute. So the only way to be forgiven is to become a fake, boring person online? That’s not redemption, that’s erasure. That feels incredibly dystopian. Olivia: It is. And Ronson is deeply troubled by it. He argues that we're creating a culture of conformity, where people are terrified to be their authentic, quirky, mistake-prone selves for fear of the mob. He quotes a journalist who told him that using social media now feels like "tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment." Jackson: That is a perfect description of Twitter. So we’ve created this system where the punishment is disproportionate, the context is irrelevant, and the only escape is to hide your true self. That’s a pretty damning portrait of the internet.

Olivia: It is. And the ultimate insight Ronson lands on is about responsibility. When we're part of an online mob, we feel individually blameless. He uses a powerful metaphor: "The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche." Each angry tweet or comment feels small, but together they create this overwhelming, destructive force. Jackson: And we forget there's a human being buried under it all. Someone who might have just made a stupid joke or had a momentary lapse in judgment. The book was written a while ago, but it feels more relevant than ever with the term 'cancel culture' being so prominent. It makes you wonder, have we learned anything, or has the avalanche just gotten bigger? Olivia: That's the critical question. We gained this incredible power for what Ronson called the "democratization of justice," but we often wield it like a blunt instrument, without nuance, empathy, or a path to forgiveness. The book is a powerful call to pause before we cast that first digital stone. Jackson: It really makes you think about your own role in all of this. It’s easy to point fingers, but it’s much harder to cultivate curiosity and compassion. Olivia: Absolutely. And that's a challenge for all of us. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Find us on our socials and share one time you resisted joining a pile-on. What made you pause? What was the thought that stopped you? Jackson: It's a conversation we need to keep having. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.