The Shame Game: Jon Ronson on his divisive new book

Jon Ronson, wildly successful British author, reporter and presenter, is sat in his Upper East Side apartment in New York, two dogs restlessly playing at his feet. As affable, curious and friendly in digital person as he is throughout his best selling back catalogue - ranging from the template classic Them: Adventures with Extremists to 2012’s inescapable The Psychopath Test - Ronson’s buoyant demeanour is especially notable given that he’s spent the past few days on the receiving end of the sort of online abuse that might buckle the nerves of those of less certain character.

“The book is a call for people to be kind to each other, to forgive each other for our flaws and weaknesses”, Ronson remarks. “But then other people took it as an excuse to publicly shame me. For writing a book about public shaming.”

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed had its first taste of public approval (and otherwise) as a result of a New York Times extract just two days before our conversation, offering a glimpse at the tumultuous events surrounding Justine Sacco, a 30 year old communications director at a large American firm. Travelling to South Africa and killing time on Twitter, an ill-advised and poor taste joke of misguided satirical intent landed Sacco a spot as one of the internet’s most controversial figures. Between London’s Heathrow and Johannesburg, she had quickly and quietly become Twitter’s most searched term. While gaining many more than her initial 170 followers, Sacco lost a job. Years have passed, but Sacco’s story has re-entered the public sphere with Ronson himself attached and his position questioned: well meaning empath, or deluded apologist? (The overall Twitter consensus leans towards the former, it must be said).

“I remember Graham Linehan saying that Twitter, in the first years, was like white magic whereas the internet was black magic”, recalls Ronson, an avid and very amusing Twitter user. “It was a nice place, where people were nice to each other, and it’s funny to think back to those days. I’ve definitely found that when bad things have happened in my real life in the past six years, I would sometimes go on Twitter and find like-minded people being sharp and funny, and it would make me feel better. It’s still a good place to me, and that’s why I felt so sorry for people like Justine Sacco when it turned on them like it did.”

The book opens with Ronson at war with a spambot impersonating and interpreting his personal content to its own eerie and bizarre means, resulting in a rare spasm of anger from the author towards its creators. “I can never really enjoy things going big”, he admits. “I think, 'fuck, is this the start of something terrible?' My anxiety only manifests itself in two ways currently. Will something bad happen to my family, and will I make a big mistake in my work? It’s just those two that keep me awake at night at the moment.”

---

""I wasn’t going to start bringing in people like Bill Cosby or Ched Evans. I wanted it to be a book about people who had been shamed for comparatively minor transgressions” – Jon Ronson

---

Ronson, always a champion of the underdog, wants more than ever simply to understand. “I strive for empathy more and more”, he’s shameless to admit, without fear of personal grandstanding. “I don’t ever want to write about anybody that I don’t feel great empathy for anymore. I definitely don’t want to do that with my career, it feels like a necessity to me now.” Ronson is also doggedly determined to access the most important subjects at the centre of even the most delicate topics. His search for “the absolute truth”, coupled, you suspect, with his inherent warmth, allows Ronson closer than most. In So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, he befriends the American science writer Jonah Lehrer, whose career collapsed when he was revealed to have fabricated several Bob Dylan quotes, and whose personal plight gets even knottier as he gut-wrenchingly apologises in front of a live-Tweet stream personally insulting his character. Elsewhere, Ronson and F1 boss Max Mosley delve into the amusing and misunderstood specifics of his notorious ‘Nazi BDSM orgies’ with remarkable and refreshing candour. “A lot of people on the New York media scene are very hardline about Jonah (Lehrer)”, notes Ronson in regards to his local peers. “But fortunately, it’s not me that has to defend him. However, I wasn’t going to start bringing in people like Bill Cosby or Ched Evans. I wanted it to be a book about people who had been shamed for comparatively minor transgressions.”

Ronson’s gonzo style brought him to public attention in the 90s, alongside similarly-minded contemporaries like Louis Theroux, and both were revered and critiqued for their approach, occasionally accused of giving their oddball subjects, as Ronson recalls, “the rope to hang themselves”. Fifteen to twenty years later, and he’d still not put it that way. “I’m happy to highlight people’s absurd characters, but never see it as a cruel trick”, he explains. “I like to see it as us all just sharing our absurdities in an un-self conscious way.”

In his 2008 documentary film, Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, Ronson gains unprecedented permission to rifle through the legendary director’s vast catalogue of physical memories, all extensively hoarded while the director ‘found the next story’. Ronson’s own back catalogue is similarly eclectic, and so, following on from military mind control (The Men Who Stare at Goats) and domestic psychosis (The Psychopath Test), he eventually landed on the admittedly hot-button topic of public shaming in a typically roundabout way involving a poorly stomach, an afternoon Googling ex-girlfriends and an eventual, unexpected arrival at the courts system.

“The most ubiquitous thing done in any court is to shame somebody, and I’ve seen people getting destroyed by the prosecution at the Old Bailey” observes Ronson, having spent more time in the company of murderers and paedophiles than most among us. “And that was the real moment. But then a friend pointed out that courts are very niche, nobody can relate, and then that’s when I settled for the internet.” Given the rapid progression of technology and social interaction, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed perhaps runs the risk of dating faster than Ronson’s back catalogue, although he carefully ties it in with the ancient, human taste for public justice. In Ronson’s view, his latest work is as relevant as any of his others.

“All my life I’ve written stories about systems going crazy, and this is the first time that the system going crazy is happening because of us”, Ronson surmises. “We’re creating a cold, conformist and conservative world where people are afraid to be personal, and is that the world we want?”

---

More from The Skinny:

Can We Be Frank? Jon Ronson on Searching for Frank Sidebottom

---