Jon Ronson - The Real Jon Ronson

 

 

This story starts like a lot of great stories do, with me accidentally typing my name into Google [audience laughter] and inadvertently pressing search. [audience chuckles] And I discovered that there was another Jon Ronson on Twitter, and his Twitter name was Jon_Ronson and his picture was a picture of my face. [audience chuckle] And as I looked in surprise at his timeline, he tweeted, "Going home. Got to get the recipe for a huge plate of mussel and guarana in a bap with mayonnaise. #yummy." [audience chuckles] "Who are you?" I tweeted him. "Watching Seinfeld, would love a delicious plate of lemongrass stew. #foodie," he wrote. [audience chuckles] I didn't know what to do. The next morning, I checked the other Jon Ronson's Twitter feed before I checked my own. In the night, he tweeted, "I'm dreaming something about time and [beep sound]." [audience chuckles]

 

He had 20 followers. Some of them were people that I knew from real life [audience laughter] who were presumably wondering why I'd suddenly become so passionate about fusion cooking [audience laughter] and also candid about dreaming about [beep sound]. [audience laughter] So, I did some digging and I discovered that it was a spam bot created by an academic from the University of Warwick called Luke Robert Mason. And I thought, "Oh, well, this is fine. I'll email him and I'll tell him that I don't like the spam bot and he'll take it down." So, I emailed him and I said, "I'm sorry, can you take down your spam bot, please?" And he emailed back, "We prefer the term infomorph to spam bot." [audience chuckles] So, I wrote, "But it's taken my identity." And he replied, "The infomorph isn't taking your identity. It is repurposing social media data into an infomorphic aesthetic." I felt a tightness in my chest. [laughter] I was at war with a robot version of myself. [audience chuckle]

 

A month passed, and the other Jon Ronson was tweeting about 30 times a day about his soirees. [audience chuckles] The other Jon Ronson, I should say, was having a much better life than I was having in the entire period. I was only invited to one thing that would be called a soiree. And as I turned up, the host said to me, "Would you like some potato chips?" And I said, "No, thank you. I'm going to have cereal when I get home." [audience chuckles] So, I saw out the corner of my eye, my wife was glaring at me and mouthing something. And I said, "What?" And she mouthed, "Be more general. [audience chuckles] Your small talk. Make it more general." [audience laughter] It was just basic small talk as far as I understand the concept.

 

Anyway, I emailed Luke Robert Mason, and I said, "Well, if you won't take down your spam bot, maybe we can meet and I can film the encounter and put it onto YouTube and you can explain your reasons for creating the spam bot, and I can explain why I don't like the spam bot." And he wrote me back to say, "We would very much like to meet you to explain our reasons behind the infomorph." And I said, "That's great. I'm very much looking forward to hearing your reasons behind the spam bot." [audience chuckles] So, I rented a room in central London, and three of them turned up, and they were all academics, and I asked them all to sit in a row on a sofa so I could film them all in a single shot.

 

One of them said, "Okay, we'll play along, but we know what you're doing. It's a form of psychological control." [audience chuckles] And I said, "Is it?" And he said, "I do it to my students. I sit them in a row and I sit in a chair separately." And I said, "Why would you want to psychologically control your students?" And he looked briefly worried that I'd caught him saying something eerie. And he said, "It's about controlling the learning environment." And I said, "Well, I'm not trying to psychologically control you." But actually, I think back on it, I think I kind of was. Anyway, so he said, "Do you want to go through the London phone book and tell everybody in the phone book called Jon Ronson that they're not allowed to be called Jon Ronson?" And I said, "No, because those people aren't called Jon Ronson because of me, whereas you're calling this spam bot Jon Ronson because of me." And he said, "Well, you're proposing yourself as the real Jon Ronson, [audience chuckles] and we feel annoyed with you [audience laughter] because we feel that what you're really doing is brand management." And I said, "It's just me tweeting." And I said, "My problem is that, you know, if it was like porn or fraud, it would be okay, but this, it's plausible and it's an idiot, [audience laughter] and it's like a misrepresentation of me." And he said, "Would you like it to be more like you?" And I said, "No, I'd like it to not exist." And he said, "Well, I find that disturbing because you want to kill these algorithms. You must feel threatened in some way." So, I said, "You're a troll."

 

And then I staggered out into the London afternoon, and I dreaded uploading the footage because I'd been so screechy [audience chuckles] and I didn't want YouTube comments mocking my screechiness. [audience chuckles] But I posted it and I left it 10 minutes. And then, with some apprehension, I had a look. And the first comment said, "These people should respect Jon's personal liberty." And I thought, "Wow." And then the second comment said, "Vile, disturbing idiots. Playing with the man's hurt and anger and then laughing at his pain." And I nodded soberly. [audience laughter] And then the third comment said, "Break them. [beep sound] them, destroy them." And I was giddy with joy. I was like Braveheart wandering through a field, at first alone, and then I realized that hundreds are marching behind me.

 

And then the next comment said, "If I could see these people face to face, I would say that they are [beep sound].  The [beep sound] in the middle is a [beep sound] psychopath." And I thought, "I hope nobody's going to actually hurt them." [audience chuckle] And then the next message said, "Gas them." And I won. The academics were shamed into acquiescence, and it was like their public shaming had set a factory restore button and everything went back to normal. And it was a wonderful feeling, the feeling of victory. I felt like I felt overwhelmed with this good feeling, like a sedative. And they shut down the spam bot, and they made a big deal out of it. They tweeted it and said, “I'm afraid that we're going to have to close you down now. Do you know what that means?" And then they said, "You only have a few hours left. I hope you choose how to spend them wisely. I hope you had a happy life." And I said, "Just turn it off. Jesus." [audience chuckles]

 

And it felt great to be victorious. But as I stood over the corpse of the spambot, I suddenly thought to myself, “Were we doing to them what they were doing to me? Were we turning them into something that wasn't quite human? And then I thought, were we the people in the lithographs, being ribald at whippings?" And then I thought, “Maybe what's going on here is that there's an escalation in the war on human flaws, and we're soldiers in that war because we just don't like it when somebody's not normal." And then I was thinking, “Well, maybe what we're saying here is that we are normal and this is the average. Maybe what we're doing is defining the boundaries of normality by becoming furious and tearing apart the people outside of it." Thank you.