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On Dec. 20, 2013, Justine Sacco, a PR rep for Tinder parent company IAC, tweeted a very poorly received joke: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!"
By the time she disembarked a transatlantic plane, she was both fired from her job and the most Twitter-hated human in the world. In 2012, another woman posed for a photo raising her middle finger next to a sign at Arlington National Cemetery, and she—like seemingly all women in the eye of the Internet—was threatened with rape. And also fired.
But once their momentary scandal subsides, these people seemingly disappear. Except they don't, really. They walk around undead and unhirable, saddlebagged with Googleable shame.
In his new book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Riverhead Books, 306 pages, $27.95), Jon Ronson (The Men Who Stare at Goats) meets with the Saccos of the world after they've been publicly obliterated. Ronson has empathy for all of them, not only the ruined but those who ruined them—like Michael Moynihan, who feels guilty about exposing The New Yorker's onetime squishy pop scientist and serial fabricator Jonah Lehrer.
Ronson's book could have been morally necessary, not only to humanize the dehumanized but also as a cracked mirror on journalism. A newspaper's only power against corruption is to reveal shameful facts about the powerful. It's the same mechanism, though more policed, as that of the million-strong haters of Sacco. But Ronson is uninterested in tricky ethical gray areas.
Rather, Ronson's greatest sympathy seems to lie with people like Lehrer and Sacco, questionable elites who've fallen to mere million-dollar lives after wrongdoing, whose mix of self-martyrdom and narcissism comes off as excruciating. Never mind that Lehrer has shown he probably shouldn't be in journalism, and Sacco's tweet shows remarkably bad PR acumen. The book eventually descends into an attempted how-to manual on rising again like a post-call-girl Eliot Spitzer.
The book's eventual thesis is that the mass Web enforces conformity and punishes deviance, just like small-town Kansas—shame on you all—never mind that the Web has many corners with many different ideals. Shamed flits around from Radical Honesty proponents to identity management experts to Zumba prostitution rings with all the active intelligence of a trending keywords search. It's a shame, really.
Meanwhile, Sacco has been publicly rehabbed by her original tormenter, Gawker's Sam Biddle. And Lehrer has another book deal. It's about how true love conquers everything, even the Internet. As proven by squishy science.
GO: Jon Ronson speaks at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323, on Wednesday, April 8. 7:30 pm. Free.
WWeek 2015