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Jon Ronson

So You've Been Publicly Shamed

One. Braveheart

“Who are you?” I tweeted him.

“Watching #Seinfeld. I would love a big plate of celeriac, grouper and sour cream kebab with lemongrass. #foodie,” he tweeted.

I didn’t know what to do.

—

He had twenty followers. Some were people I knew from real life, who were probably wondering why I’d suddenly become so passionate about fusion cooking and candid about dreaming about cock.

—

Oh, so it’s some kind of spambot, I thought. Okay. This will be fine. Luke Robert Mason must have thought I would like the spambot. When he finds out that I don’t, he’ll remove it.

So I tweeted him: “Hi!! Will you take down your spambot please?”

Ten minutes passed. Then he replied, “We prefer the term infomorph. ”

I frowned. “But it’s taken my identity,” I wrote.

“The infomorph isn’t taking your identity,” he wrote back. “It is repurposing social media data into an infomorphic esthetic. ”

I felt a tightness in my chest.

I was at war with a robot version of myself.

—

The spambot left me feeling powerless and sullied. My identity had been redefined all wrong by strangers and I had no recourse.

—

I tweeted Luke Robert Mason. If he was adamant that he wouldn’t take down his spambot, perhaps we could at least meet? I could film the encounter and put it on YouTube. He agreed, writing that he’d be glad to explain the philosophy behind the infomorph. I replied that I’d certainly be interested to learn the philosophy behind the spambot.

—

I rented a room in central London. I sat there, nervously waiting. On the dot of our prearranged meeting, Luke arrived with two other men — the team behind the spambot. All three were academics. They had met at Warwick University. Luke was the youngest of the three, handsome, in his twenties, a “researcher in technology and cyberculture and director of the Virtual Futures Conference,” according to his online CV. David Bausola looked like a rakish teacher, the sort of person who might speak at a conference on the literature of Aleister Crowley. He was a “creative technologist” and the CEO of the digital agency Philter Phactory. Dan O’Hara had a shaved head, and eyes that were piercing and annoyed-looking. His jaw was clenched. He was in his late thirties, a lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Cologne. Before that, he’d been a lecturer at Oxford. He’d coedited a book about J. G. Ballard, Extreme Metaphors, and another book, Thomas Pynchon: Schizophrenia & Social Control. As far as I understood it, David Bausola had done the actual building of the spambot, while the two other men provided “research and consultancy. ”