So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Fifteen. Your Speed

We have always had some influence over the justice system, but for the first time in 180 years — since the stocks and the pillory were outlawed — we have the power to determine the severity of some punishments. And so we have to think about what level of mercilessness we feel comfortable with. I, personally, no longer take part in the ecstatic public condemnation of people unless they’ve committed a transgression that has an actual victim, and even then not as much as I probably should. I miss the fun a little. But it feels like when I became a vegetarian. I missed the steak, although not as much as I’d anticipated, but I could no longer ignore the slaughterhouse.

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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.”

Now I suddenly wondered. Did Google make money from the destruction of Justine Sacco? Could a figure be calculated? And so I joined forces with a number-crunching researcher, Solvej Krause, and began writing to economists and analysts and online-ad-revenue people.

Some things were known. In December 2013, the month of Justine’s annihilation, 12.2 billion Google searches took place — a figure that made me feel less worried about the possibility that people were sitting inside Google headquarters personally judging me. Google’s ad revenue for that month was $4.69 billion. Which meant they made an average of thirty-eight cents for every search query. Every time we typed anything into Google: thirty-eight cents to Google. Of those 12.2 billion searches that December, 1.2 million were people searching the name Justine Sacco. And so, if you average it out, Justine’s catastrophe instantaneously made Google $456,000.

But it wouldn’t be accurate to simply multiply 1.2 million by thirty-eight cents. Some searches are worth far more to Google than others. Advertisers bid on “high-yield” search terms like “Coldplay” and “jewelry” and “Kenya vacations.” It’s quite possible that no advertiser ever linked its product to Justine’s name. But that wouldn’t mean Google made no money from her. Justine was the worldwide number-one trending topic on Twitter. Her story engrossed social media users more than any other that night. I think people who wouldn’t otherwise have gone onto Google did specifically to hunt for her. She drew people in. And once they were there, I’m sure at least a few of them decided to book a Kenya vacation or download a Coldplay album.

I got an e-mail from the economics researcher Jonathan Hersh. He’d come recommended by the people who make Freakonomics Radio on WNYC. Jonathan’s e-mail said the same thing: “Something about this story resonated with them, so much so that they felt compelled to google her name. That means they’re engaged. If interest in Justine were sufficient to encourage users to stay online for more time than they would otherwise, this would have directly resulted in Google making more advertising revenue. Google has the informal corporate motto of ‘Don’t be evil,’ but they make money when anything happens online, even the bad stuff.”

In the absence of any better data from Google, he wrote, he could only offer a “back of the envelope” calculation. But he thought it would be appropriately conservative — maybe a little too conservative — to estimate Justine’s worth, being a “low-value query,” at a quarter of the average. Which, if true, means Google made $120,000 from the destruction of Justine Sacco.

Maybe that’s an accurate figure. Or maybe Google made more. But one thing’s certain. Those of us who did the actual annihilating? We got nothing.

• • •

From the beginning, I’d been trying to understand why — once you discount Gustave LeBon and Philip Zimbardo’s theories of viruses and contagion and evil — online shaming is so pitiless. And now I think I have the answer. I found it in, of all places, an article about a radical traffic-calming scheme tested in California in the early 2000s. The story — by the journalist Thomas Goetz — is a fantastically esoteric one. Goetz writes about how in the school zones of Garden Grove, California, cars were ignoring speed signs and hitting “bicyclists and pedestrians with depressing regularity.” And so they tried something experimental. They tried Your Speed signs.

© Richard Drdul

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After I read Thomas Goetz’s article about Your Speed signs, I spent a long time trying to track down their inventor. He turned out to be an Oregon road-sign manufacturer named Scott Kelley.

“I remember exactly where I was when I thought of them,” he told me over the telephone. “It was the mid-1990s. I was over by my girlfriend’s house. I was driving through a school zone. And my mind just pictured one of the signs up on a pole.”

“What made you think they’d work?” I asked him. “There was nothing about them to suggest they’d work.”

“Right,” said Scott. “And that’s where it gets interesting.”

They really, logically, shouldn’t have worked. As Thomas Goetz writes:

The signs were curious in a few ways. For one thing, they didn’t tell drivers anything they didn’t already know — there is, after all, a speedometer in every car. If a motorist wanted to know their speed, a glance at the dashboard would do it… And the Your Speed signs came with no punitive follow-up — no police officer standing by ready to write a ticket. This defied decades of law-enforcement dogma, which held that most people obey speed limits only if they face some clear negative consequence for exceeding them.

In other words, officials in Garden Grove were betting that giving speeders redundant information with no consequence would somehow compel them to do something few of us are inclined to do: slow down.

Scott Kelley’s idea, being so counterintuitive, proved a marketing nightmare. No town official anywhere in America was placing orders. So he did the only thing he could — he sent out free samples for testing. One ended up in his own neighborhood.

“I remember driving by it,” he said. “And I slowed down. I knew there was no camera in it taking my picture. Yet I slowed down. I just went, ‘Wow! This really does work!’”

In test after test the results came back the same. People did slow down — by an average of 14 percent. And they stayed slowed down for miles down the road.

“So why do they work?” I asked Scott.

His reply surprised me. “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know. I… Yeah. I don’t know.”

Scott explained that, being a tech person, he was more interested in the radar and the casing and the lightbulbs than in the psychology. But during the past decade, the mystery has galvanized social psychologists. And their conclusion: feedback loops.

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Feedback loops. You exhibit some type of behavior (you drive at twenty-seven miles per hour in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone). You get instant real-time feedback for it (the sign tells you you’re driving at twenty-seven miles per hour). You decide whether or not to change your behavior as a result of the feedback (you lower your speed to twenty-five miles per hour). You get instant feedback for that decision too (the sign tells you you’re driving at twenty-five miles per hour now, and some signs flash up a smiley-face emoticon to congratulate you). And it all happens in the flash of an eye — in the few moments it takes you to drive past the Your Speed sign.

In Goetz’s Wired magazine story—“Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops”—he calls them “a profoundly effective tool for changing behavior.” And I’m all for people slowing down in school zones. But maybe in other ways feedback loops are leading to a world we only think we want. Maybe — as my friend the documentary maker Adam Curtis e-mailed me — they’re turning social media into “a giant echo chamber where what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing.”

We express our opinion that Justine Sacco is a monster. We are instantly congratulated for this — for basically being Rosa Parks. We make the on-the-spot decision to carry on believing it.

“The tech-utopians like the people in Wired present this as a new kind of democracy,” Adam’s e-mail continued. “It isn’t. It’s the opposite. It locks people off in the world they started with and prevents them from finding out anything different. They got trapped in the system of feedback reinforcement. The idea that there is another world of other people who have other ideas is marginalized in our lives.”

I was becoming one of those other people with other ideas. I was expressing the unpopular belief that Justine Sacco isn’t a monster. I wonder if I will receive a tidal wave of negative feedback for this and, if so, will it frighten me back again, to a place where I’m congratulated and welcomed?

“Feedback is an engineering principle,” Adam’s e-mail to me ended. “And all engineering is devoted to trying to keep the thing you are building stable.”

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Soon after Justine Sacco’s shaming, I was talking with a friend, a journalist, who told me he had so many jokes, little observations, potentially risqué thoughts, that he wouldn’t dare to post online anymore.

“I suddenly feel with social media like I’m tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment,” he said. “It’s horrible.”

He didn’t want me to name him, he said, in case it sparked something off.

We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age.

“Look!” we’re saying. “WE’RE normal! THIS is the average!”

We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it.