Anyway, this story starts like a lot of great stories do
with me accidentally typing my name into Google
and inadvertently pressing search.
And I discovered that there was another Jon Ronson
on Twitter
and his Twitter name was Jon underscore Ronson.
And his picture was a picture of my face.
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
hashtag yummy."
"Who are you?" I tweeted him.
"Watching Seinfeld,
would love a delicious plate of lemongrass stew
hashtag foodie." He wrote.
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 thyme and cock."
He had 20 followers.
Some of them were people that I knew from real life
who were presumably wondering why I'd suddenly become so
passionate about fusion cooking.
And also candid about dreaming about cock.
So I did some digging and I discovered that it was a spam
bot created by an academic from the University of Warrick
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
info morph to spam bot."
So I wrote, "But it's taken my identity."
And he replied,
"The info morph isn't taking your identity.
It is repurposing social media data
into an infomorphic aesthetic."
I felt a tightness in my chest.
I was at war with a robot version of myself.
A month passed,
and the other Jon Ronson was tweeting about
30 times a day about his soirees.
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."
So,
I saw out the corner of my eye,
my wife was glaring at me mouthing something.
And I said "What?"
And she mouthed, "Be more general.
Your small talk, make it more general."
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 info morph."
And I said, "That's great. I'm very much looking forward
to hearing your reasons behind the spam bot."
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
with them all in a single shot. And one of them
said, "Okay, we'll play along, but we know
what you're doing. It's a form of psychological control."
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, you know, I think back now,
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 the
spam bot Jon Ronson because of me."
And he said, "Well, you're proposing yourself
as the real Jon Ronson,
and we feel annoyed with you
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.
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 the troll."
And then, I stuck it out into the London afternoon
and I dreaded uploading the footage
because I'd been so screechy
and I didn't want YouTube comments mocking
my screechiness.
So, 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 a man's hurt and anger,
and then laughing at his pain."
And I nodded soberly.
And then
the third comment said, "Break them, fuck 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 pricks. The cunt in the middle
is a fucking psychopath."
And I thought, "I hope nobody's going to
actually hurt them."
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, you know,
"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 muttered, "Just turn it off, Jesus."
It felt great to be victorious,
but as I stood over the corpse of the spam bot,
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 ribled 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.