Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 149 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is journalist John Ronson, author of such books as The Psychopath Test and

Them, Adventures with Extremists. He's also created many television documentaries, including

secret rulers of the world, and two of his books, The Men Who Stare at Goats and Frank, have been adapted

into feature films.

His new book, So You've been publicly Shamed, explores the lives of ordinary people who

accidentally become infamous online.

And now here's our interview with John Ronson.

All right, so we're here with John Ronson.

Welcome to the show.

Hello.

Hi.

Okay, and so your new book is called So You've been Publicly Shamed.

So just tell us a bit about what that's about.

Okay, I you know over the years over like my 20 years of writing it's I often write about how organizations for their own benefit tend to turn

human beings into one-dimensional kind of demons or define people by that their

outermost aspect. So anyway, what I started to notice was that we started doing this kind of stuff on social media.

Somebody would make a joke that landed badly.

And then the Twitter approval machine would take over and just ruin somebody's life in a flash of an eye and then just the one would just

happily carry on with their day.

Right, and so you mentioned that these kind of internet

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