When Troubled People Become Our Playthings: Jon Ronson on Shame and Forgiveness

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2022

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you're a fan of The Unspeakable, you're almost certainly a fan of Jon Ronson. When it comes to the subject of ruinous humiliation via mobs (online or otherwise) Jon's 2015 bestselling book So You've Been Publicly Shamed is both a field guide and a sacred text. His 2017 podcast The Butterfly Effect, looked at the downstream effects of the pornogrpahy industry. It also circled around a theme that arises frequently in his work; the way a single moment or seemingly random choice by just one person can result in a massive cultural or political shift. Last year, in collaboration with the BBC, Jon created the podcast Things Fell Apart, an eight-part series telling the origin stories of some of our most contentious cultural battles, including the right to abortion, book banning in schools, and the mania known as the satantic pre-school panic. In this interview, Jon talks with Meghan about that podcast as well as his thoughts about "cancel culture" seven years since the release of So You've Been Publicly Shamed. He reveals what parts of the culture wars he's still afraid to take on, why the Rachel Dolezal story felt like a missed opportunity for a meaningful examination of race, and why he got so burnt out on the whole subject a few years ago and had to take a break.

Paid subscribers to The Unsepakable's new Substack page can hear a bonus version of this episode containing lots of extra content. Visit https://meghandaum.substack.com/ to get in on it!

Guest Bio:

Jon Ronson is the author of several bestselling nonfiction books, including So You've Been Publicly Shamed, The Psychopath Test, Lost At Sea, and The Men Who Stare At Goats. Most recently, Jon released the BBC podcast Things Fell Apart, named by The Observer as the number one audio show of 201. Before that came two Audible Original audio series, The Butterfly Effect (2017) and The Last Days of August (2019). Both went straight to number one in the U.S. and U.K. audiobook charts and were named by multiple critics as two of the best podcasts of recent years.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm sick of us constantly making troubled people, our playthings.
0:08.9	When we're on Twitter, if somebody's spiraling on Twitter, you're making mistakes or whatever,
0:14.9	you know, it's quite often because there's something else going on in that person's life.
0:18.6	We don't want to think that.
0:19.6	We're amateur sleuths, you know, defining somebody by a few words and a tweet, by the tiniest
0:26.4	fragment of their life.
0:27.8	And yeah, we don't want to think that that's what we're doing, making troubled people,
0:31.3	I play things, but that's what we do all the time.
0:42.3	Well, the time. Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dau. This is our second episode of season three. We are back
0:50.4	from summer hiatus. And I am delighted that my guest is the inimitable journalist, author,
0:58.5	podcaster, filmmaker, guy with Welsh accent, John Ronson. Because there have been some recent
1:05.9	changes to the podcast, I need to take a few minutes here to tell you all about that, as well as announce a few
1:13.6	other things. If you've heard all this before, you can skip ahead about three and a half
1:19.9	minutes, but for now, this is what I want you to know. If you haven't noticed already,
1:24.9	the listener support piece of the unspeakable podcast is now on Substack.
1:30.0	That is where you're going to go to hear bonus content, participate in comment threads,
1:35.9	get discounts on merchandise, come to Hangouts.
1:39.0	You're going to find that at Megan Dowm.com.
1:43.7	So that's M-E-G-H-A-N-D-A-U-M-Substack.com. And you can find out about the different
1:51.8	support tiers. You can subscribe for free, of course, but you can also become a paying subscriber
1:58.3	at a very reasonable rate, I should say, and get a lot of very cool
2:03.1	extra stuff. And that stuff is going to include writing. This is pretty big. Believe it or not,
	...

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