Shame *clang* Shame *clang* - So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

When I recently reviewed Jon Ronson’s Podcasts, The Butterfly Effect and The Last Days of August, I commented that Ronson tended to feel on the side of the called out, having sympathy for the victim of the pile but not those damaged by their words and actions. I specifically pointed at this book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed as being guilty of that. However, it struck me afterwards that it had been a good while since I’d read it and could very well be wrong. This is a review of the re-read.

Spoiler Alert: I was not wrong.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is about the way Twitter and the internet has become a tool for holding people to account. Ronson speaks to various people who’ve had their lives “ruined” by online justice mobs, for serious transgressions or simply for poor attempts at humour.

First up is Jonah Lehrer, who was exposed for fabricating quotes and recycling much of his own work in an act of self-plagiarism. Ronson talks to the journalist who made the connection and it’s a fascinating section, the torturous responsibility of this knowledge, the reluctance to bring Lehrer down. But at no point does the idea that Jonah Lehrer is responsible for his own choices and his disgrace was a consequence of them raise its head. This very simple idea that if he, oh, I don’t know, didn’t make things up wholesale then there wouldn’t be an issue, never occurs. Instead, the media reaction is extreme, overdone.

And so it goes on.

A story which I remember being superbly narked by the first time I read the book, as well as when it was actually it the news, is that of Adria Richards who overheard two men making inappropriate jokes during a conference lecture about how to get more women into tech. She tweeted about it, the men were identified and after a public outcry, fired. Cue a counter outrage leading to her own firing. Unlike the men involved, by the end of the book she is still unemployed, yet that angle feels under examined.

Look. I write code. What do you think every stupid joke about big dongles, or “I’d fork that repo” or that girls writing code meme does? Or last weeks’ “men posing with booth babes” fest on twitter? A clue: it does not make this easier. It quietly takes a spoon and when I am out of spoons I will just… stop. And then you’ll wonder why your app doesn’t work for women, or why your soap dispenser is racist. Ronson actively makes this choice not to criticise the actions of any of the people he profiles but when they are part of a systemic problem with an industry, I find it really difficult to go along. In not saying anything, it’s hard not to draw a moral equivalence between making those jokes and pointing out they’re not okay.

But really, the whole thing feels artificial. Like The Butterfly Effect, the journey feels pre-ordained, as though he had all his candidates ready when the book was pitched to the publisher. There’s no organic sense of discovery or investigation. Instead of digging a little deeper, it’s just on to the next. There are plenty of branches which could have been taken - why do companies cave to public pressure instead of styling it out? Why are men allowed to be rehabilitated where women are not? Is this a natural evolution of the Dark Arts of spin? What role do news organisations play in framing the narrative? Instead of that, here’s another story about somebody who made a poor decision.

A book like this is always going to have a limited shelf life - the world moves on quickly and this was published in 2015. Attitudes change, technology changes. This holds up fairly well although one must wonder about the wisdom of attempting to rehabilitate one’s online reputation while agreeing to have an incident documented in a prominent journalist’s book.

Ronson is a very enjoyable writer who tells a good tale and I appreciated the self-examination he brought to the early chapters. I like his work, but I’d like it more if it felt like he was doing journalism instead of recounting an entertaining story.

3.5 stars

For summer's parting sighs... - The Last Days of August by Jon Ronson

Having listened to and been utterly gripped by Jon Ronson’s The Butterfly Effect, his investigations into the repercussions of Free Porn, it should surprise nobody that I immediately picked up this second podcast. Like The Butterfly Effect, it’s available for free for those with an Audible subscription. I believe it’s also available elsewhere at a price of gratis, but I have a cold and cannot be bothered to find out.

August Ames was one of the biggest porn stars in the business. Then she made a comment on Twitter which was deemed to be homophobic and, following the “social media pile on”, killed herself. Her husband, Kevin, took to the stage at an industry award ceremony to call out those he held responsible, as well as posting a screed on her still active Twitter account naming and shaming them for killing her.

So, obviously, trigger warning on this for the hows and the circumstances surrounding it. It’s factual, but it’s also graphic due to a discussion of whether she could have taken such an action unaided.

The Last Days of August is just as gripping as Ronson’s previous podcast, but unfortunately has many of the same problems as The Butterfly Effect, and his other works.

Initially it’s really quite difficult to get on board with this. August’s tweet concerned a shoot she had pulled out of. In it, she “warned” whoever had taken on the job that the male actor involved also did M/M scenes. She then went on to defend herself against criticism by saying she was worried about catching something. In my view, these tweets are most certainly in need of criticism. The concern that your gloveless partner may pass something on to you should not be limited to those who have partaken in hot boy action.

But Ronson is not a journalist who pushes back and there is no comment passed on what August actually said, only the very clear idea that the criticism and “pile-on” of her was wrong.

It is a difficult line to tread. Ronson enters the story soon after August’s death. He’s invited to the Adult Awards to see her husband make his stand. It would take a greater jerk than I to point out to the freshly grieving Kevin that August’s critics had a point, or that Kevin’s speech reframes the narrative as a “my body, my choice” situation (which it sounds like it was - she didn’t want to do the scene, she pulled out of the job), but I do feel it was remiss and damaging of Ronson to take the line in his narrative that the “pile-on” was the crime. He has a history with this, in his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed? for instance, and he often remains a defender of the called out and does not acknowledge those who lives are damaged by the actions of those who have been.

Really though, especially in those first couple of episode, I wonder should Ronson have been there at all. The Kevin we meet initially is angry and grieving and striking out in a very public way. The Kevin interviewed at the end - a year later for Ronson’s recording - is a very different person indeed. Obviously Kevin did not merely agree to be featured, he was eager to have Ronson be part of his quest to bring the people he held responsible to justice - he initiated contact. Before the big speech, to his credit Ronson raises his misgivings, despite not knowing what will be said, only having been reassured that it will be explosive.

Ronson’s story leads away from Kevin’s targets of vengeance, delving into Ames’ life before and after she came into the industry, and it is a sad one. It is one, I suspect, could be told about many of the industry performers.

Although I found the whole thing fascinating, I feel there are ethical questions to be raised of Ronson and his producer. A man who contacts you a month after his wife’s suicide asking you to do a story on the cyber-bullying which caused her death is a man who may not be in the best mind to make such a decision. And although the quest ends up not being the story of cyber-bullying Ronson expected to investigate, he follows it, sometimes to the distress of those involved. It is a gossipy, addictive account which I could not stop listening to, but at the same time I wonder if it was a humanitarian thing to do. I feel sad for Kevin, for a lot of complicated reasons, but mostly I feel sad for August.

I’m left feeling that there are more stories to be told about this industry and Ronson is somebody whose telling I would listen to, despite my misgivings. He does not ask questions, or provide answers, but he puts facts together in a way that is addictive and compelling.

4 stars

A Butterfly Faps in New York... -The Butterfly Effect by Jon Ronson

Technically, this isn’t a book, it’s a podcast, but it’s available for free for those with an Audible subscription, so it counts. Sort of.

In the 1990s, a Belgian lad called Fabian had a wonderful idea: Free Pr0n. He belonged to an internet group which would share passwords to porn sites enabling those unable or unwilling to use a credit card to pay themselves the joy of fapping merrily along to the onscreen antics. Years later he would realise his dream, becoming the owner of sites like Pornhub, RedTube and others, as well as becoming the kind of multi-millionaire who has an underground aquarium and employs a diver to scrub the inside of it.

I, too, was a teenager in the 90’s and remember the dark days in which Fabian’s dream grew. Those lucky few who had Sky TV installed would immediately be asked if they received the German sex channels and a mental note subsequently made about whether one should begin being nicer to them. My first job was as the Saturday girl in a paper shop where every week a man who lived with his mother and looked like Michael Gove after 20 years of pie would buy a wank mag and smoothly stick it in his copy of The Telegraph for his walk back up the hill.

The Butterfly Effect is Ronson’s investigation into the consequences of Fabian’s Free Porn empire, from the performers and their shrinking paychecks to the thousand percent increase in erectile dysfunction in young men. It is a fascinating journey which has been intelligently put together. His first trip is to the computer programmers - a subject I would have been enthusiastic about anyway - where he learns about the breakdown of data and how this is used to design website, how they get people connected with the things they want to see. This leads him to the porn director, who tells him about how he now has to create his pornography for the website keywords, for a particular niche, Cheerleader Step-Daughter Gang Bang volume 2 etc. This leads him somewhere else, and so on.

I’ve listened to few of Audible’s free shows but I’ve never been very impressed (I like audible, but their original content is not great) so I had few hopes for this, despite enjoying Jon Ronson’s books and journalism. I was wrong. As I got to the end of each episode I was fastforwarding through the credits to get to the next. It is fascinating.

Ronson is a British journalist, not a thousand light years from Louis Theroux, whose previous work has included Them: Adventures with Extremists, and The Men Who Stare At Goats (made into a film with George Clooney). He’s a pretty good host for this journey and comes across as somebody who finds it all as fascinating as I do. He’s affable and has Theroux’s gift for taking anything anybody tells him with equanimity.

But Ronson is a listener. Unlike Theroux, he doesn’t push back, merely asks people for their stories. When his questions are included in the recording, they tend to be seeking an expansion of information rather than challenging their view or finding out more about why they hold it. This is sometimes frustrating, especially when there is something blindingly obvious to be asked, and sometimes problematic, because Ronson does have an agenda. You just don’t know about it until the final episode when he takes all he has found out and “confronts” Fabian, the man who dreamed of free porn, with everything his dream has “caused”. I am especially troubled by the implied connection between a man’s suicide, the Ashley Madison hack, and Fabian’s websites. It was not the only thing.

In the most frustrating part, Ronson challenges Fabian about the copyrighted work which is on his website. Fabian rejects the idea he is a thief - he has not uploaded it, users have, and if the makers want it removed then here is how you do that. It’s totally not Fabian’s fault that the site users don’t care about copyright. Except it is. The site owner is responsible for what is on the site. And Ronson doesn’t point this out, he doesn’t bring up comparable issues, like The Pirate Bay’s legal battles - it’s just… welp.

Then in an attempt to show it’s not all bad, Ronson presents something good he found in the industry. A group of people who act with incredible humanity and compassion to try and help somebody they don’t know and will never meet without asking for payment or even knowing if it will be received or do any good. Which, you know, is gives-me-hope-for-humanity levels of kindness, but hardly unique to the industry. It feels very much as though Ronson knew before he started what he thought about this and didn’t bother to go over it much making the investigation feel like an exercise in fulfilling a contract. Which is coincidentally the same problem I had with his book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed”.

There are plenty of other niggles, such as a man Ronson describes as being “harassed” into speaking with them (srsly, don’t do that), the focus on the involvement of porn in a story when it’s really more of an accessory to a problem, such as the young man who sent a girl 50 explicit messages in an attempt to impress her, and the focus on straight heterosexual porn aimed at young men.

The first 6 episodes are mainly terrific, interesting and massively educational. Then we have to have that final episode. Ronson attempts to paint Fabian as a villain but I respect him very much for his refusal to have any of it, especially as he is not responsible. Porn can be damaging in lots of ways, but it has as much to do with us as a society as with the product itself, and Ronson never seems to consider this as a factor.

4.5 stars for the first 6 episodes, I’ll pretend that final one doesn’t exist.