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6c44b7a
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But with social media, we've created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain.
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Jon Ronson |
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7766956
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People who are normal (i.e., sane, sensible) don't try to open lines of communication with total strangers by writing them a series of disjointed, weird, cryptic messages.
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Jon Ronson |
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b8d9680
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I couldn't see where the collection of Burger King figurines fit in, but I supposed there was no reason why psychopaths shouldn't have unrelated hobbies.
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Jon Ronson |
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ad6d65e
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I closed the manual. "I wonder if I've got any of the 374 mental disorders," I thought. I opened the manual again. And I instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones."
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Jon Ronson |
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13fd79a
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If anyone should change their behaviour, I thought, it ought to be those doing the shaming.
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Jon Ronson |
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c108406
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It is slightly chilling to realize there are rational, functional people up there employed to spot, nurture, and exploit those down here among us who are irrational and can barely cope. If you want to know how stupid you're perceived to be by the people up there, count the unsolicited junk mail you receive. If you get a lot, you're perceived to be alluringly stupid.
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Jon Ronson |
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544f2ae
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We were much more frightening than Judge Ted Poe. The powerful, crazy, cruel people I usually write about tend to be in far-off places. The powerful, crazy, cruel people were now us. It felt like we were soldiers making war on other people's flaws, and there had suddenly been an escalation in hostilities.
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Jon Ronson |
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7db88d8
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Practically every prime-time program is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear we're becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren't as anxious as they are. We might be paranoid but we aren't as paranoid as they are. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we're not as mad as they are.
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page-210
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Jon Ronson |
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759f2c6
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A crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. Exaggerate, affirm, resort to repetition, and never attempt to prove anything by reasoning.
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Jon Ronson |
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1d46501
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The Americans have always been better than the Iraqis at the leaflets. Early on in the first Gulf War, Iraqi PsyOps dropped a batch of their own leaflets on US troops, designed to be psychologically devastating. They read, 'Your wives are back at home having sex with Bart Simpson and Burt Reynolds.
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Jon Ronson |
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72f1861
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Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.
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madness
institution
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Jon Ronson |
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b8f566a
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What Jim had seen tallied with studies conducted after the Second World War by the military historian General S.L.A. Marshall. He interviewed thousands of American infantrymen and concluded that only 15-20 per cent of them had actually shot to kill. The rest had fired high or not fired at all, busying themselves however else they could. And 98 per cent of the soldiers who did shoot to kill were later found to have been deeply traumatized by..
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Jon Ronson |
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36a7162
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But surely stock-market psychopaths can't be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,' I said. 'Serial killers ruin families,' shrugged Bob. 'Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.
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Jon Ronson |
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fc020cf
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An apology is supposed to be a communion--a coming together. For someone to make an apology, someone has to be listening. They listen and you speak and there's an exchange. That's why we have a thing about accepting apologies.
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Jon Ronson |
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18d0408
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For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers.
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Jon Ronson |
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abafd0a
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She paused. "But 4chan aims to degrade the target, right? And one of the highest degradations for women in our culture is rape. We don't talk about rape of men, so I think it doesn't occur to most people as a male degradation. With men, they talk about getting them fired. In our society men are supposed to be employed. If they're fired, they lose masculinity points. With Donglegate she pointlessly robbed that man of his employment. She degr..
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Jon Ronson |
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4d2eb24
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I suspect it was probably unusual to suffer from both Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Malingering, unproductiveness tending to make me feel anxious, but there it was. I had both.
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Jon Ronson |
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fe5caa8
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Shame internalized can lead to agony.
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Jon Ronson |
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36ab9f4
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The days that followed passed slowly. I lay in my hotel room and watched the kind of strange European TV that would probably make perfect sense if I understood the language, but because I didn't, the programs just seemed dreamlike and baffling. In one studio show a group of Scandinavian academics watched as one of them poured liquid plastic into a bucket of cold water. It solidified, they pulled it out, handed it around the circle, and, as ..
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Jon Ronson |
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b8cbd25
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I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we've created a stage for constant artificial high drama.
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social-media
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Jon Ronson |
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ac26d5d
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The killer's name was Michael Stone and he was a known psychopath. He had previous convictions. But the law stated that only patients whose mental disorders were considered treatable could be detained beyond their prison sentences. Psychopaths were considered untreatable and so Michael Stone had to be free.
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Jon Ronson |
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ee1b8a9
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I just want you to know that it makes me feel like shit to do this." "And Jonah paused," Michael told me. "And then he said to me, no joke, he said, 'You know, I really don't care how you feel.'" Michael shook his head. "It was icy."
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Jon Ronson |
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76618d4
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I'd been beguiled by the new technology--a toddler crawling toward a gun.
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Jon Ronson |
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8c88584
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But with social media, we've created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It's all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people.
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Jon Ronson |
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78dde85
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What a brilliant cover story. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what's the best rock to hide something under? It's the rock called failure.
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success
society-problem
society-denial
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Jon Ronson |
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d656fda
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in our line of work the more humiliated a person is, the more viral the story tends to go. Shame can factor large in the life of a journalist--the personal avoidance of it and the professional bestowing of it onto others.
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Jon Ronson |
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38fd751
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In 1983 Colonel Burns wrote a poem in which he envisioned how his fledgling communications network might one day influence the world. Imagine the emergence of a new meta-culture. Imagine all kinds of people everywhere getting committed to human excellence, getting committed to closing the gap between the human condition and the human potential... And imagine all of us hooked up with a common high tech communications system. That's a vision ..
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Jon Ronson |
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a0f3b2f
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We don't want obvious exploitation. We want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.
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Jon Ronson |
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7b20b1e
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I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read DSM-IV when you're not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.
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mental-disorders
labeling
label
mental-disorder
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Jon Ronson |
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92728f7
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This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world's first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths. Elliott's raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven day stretches. The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better. There were no distractions--no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least one hundred ..
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psychopath
nudity
lsd
experimental
psychotherapy
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Jon Ronson |
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91654be
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TV is just troubled people being booed these days.
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Jon Ronson |
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b7faa6d
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Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death . . . It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth up on any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error. --BENJAMIN RUSH, "AN ENQUIRY INTO THE EFFECTS OF PUBLIC PUNISHMENTS UPON CRIMINALS, AND UPON SOCIETY," MARCH 9, 1787"
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Jon Ronson |
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f3be45e
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The common assumption is that public punishments died out in the new great metropolises because they'd been judged useless. Everyone was too busy being industrious to bother to trail some transgressor through the city crowds like some volunteer scarlet letter. But according to the documents I found, that wasn't it at all. They didn't fizzle out because they were ineffective. They were stopped because they were far too brutal.
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Jon Ronson |
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239730d
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If you couldn't kill your adversaries, or keep them imprisoned for ever, there was surely only one option left in the Colonel Alexander canon: you change their minds.
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war
us-military
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Jon Ronson |
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61e81a5
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It felt as if the people on Twitter had been invited to be characters in a courtroom drama, and had been allowed to choose their roles, and had all gone for the part of the hanging judge. Or it was even worse than that. They all had gone for the part of the people in the lithographs being ribald at whippings.
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Jon Ronson |
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eaaf6d9
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This place is packed with beautiful hipsters. While the Coney Island bombast radiated sincerity, everything here seems more ironic. When someone in the crowd ironically chants, 'USA!' someone else ironically chants back, 'Mother Russia.
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irony
mother-russia
the-hunger-games
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Jon Ronson |
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22bd36a
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I kept remembering something Michael Fertik had said to me at the Village Pub in Woodside. 'The biggest lie,' he said, 'is "The Internet is about you." We like to think of ourselves as people who have choice and taste and personalized content. But the Internet isn't about us. It's about the companies that dominate the data flows of the Internet."
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individuals
internet
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Jon Ronson |
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d0d7c93
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They can't shit on us," said Alex. "That's really what I'm saying. You can't shit on us anymore." There was a silence. "I just want them to stop shitting on us," said Alex. "OK," I said. "Sorry."
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Jon Ronson |
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47cab83
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The powerful, crazy, cruel people were now us. It felt like we were soldiers making war on other people's flaws, and there had suddenly been an escalation in hostilities.
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Jon Ronson |
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8a53d43
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Remember that the crazy people are not always to be found on the outside. Sometimes the crazy people are deeply embedded on the inside. Not even the most imaginative conspiracy theorist has ever thought to invent a scenario in which a crack team of Special Forces soldiers and major generals secretly try to walk through their walls and stare goats to death.
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Jon Ronson |
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44f1192
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Let's face it," my Deep Throat had said to me, "nobody rules the world anymore. The markets rule the world. Maybe that's why your conspiracy theorists make up all those crazy things. Because the truth is so much more frightening. Nobody rules the world. Nobody controls anything."
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Jon Ronson |
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4e245c8
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Given all of this, you'd think LeBon's work might have at some point stopped being influential. But it never did. I suppose one reason for his enduring success is that we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane.
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Jon Ronson |
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568b0f7
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I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body perfectly, everything smooth and sleek and luxurious, and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of torture- like she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy.
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Jon Ronson |
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49bd12b
|
It may very well be that the frotteurist is a helpless victim in the clutches of his obsession, but it's equally possible that he's simply a bored creep looking for a cheap thrill.
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Jon Ronson |