We live in fear of the online mobs

Internet shaming spreads everywhere and lives forever. We need a way to fight it

James Damore, the author of the notorious Google memo, has had his 15 minutes of fame. In six months, few of us will be able to remember his name. But Google will remember — not the company, but the search engine. For the rest of his life, every time he meets someone new or applies for a job, the first thing they will learn about him, and probably the only thing, is that he wrote a document that caused an internet uproar.
 
The internet did not invent the public relations disaster, or the summary firing to make said disaster go away. What the internet changed is the scale of the disasters, and the number of people who are vulnerable to them and the cold implacable permanence of the wreckage they leave behind.
 
Try to imagine the Damore story happening 20 years ago. It’s nearly impossible, isn’t it? Take a company of similar scope and power to Google — Microsoft, say. Would any reporter in 1997 have cared that some Microsoft engineer she’d never heard of had written a memo his co-workers considered sexist? Probably not. It was more likely a problem for Microsoft HR, or just angry water-cooler conversations.
 
Even if the reporter had cared, what editor would have run the story? On an executive, absolutely — but a random engineer who had no power over corporate policy? No one would have wasted precious, expensive column inches reporting it. And if for some reason they had, no other papers would have picked it up. Maybe the engineer would have been fired, maybe not, but he’d have gotten another job, having probably learned to be a little more careful about what he said to co-workers.
 
Compare to what has happened in this internet era: The memo became public and the internet erupted against the author, quite publicly executing his economic and social prospects. I doubt Damore will ever again be employable at anything resembling his old salary and status. (Unless maybe a supporter hires him to make a political statement.)
 
This kind of private coercion is not entirely new, of course. Community outrage cost plenty of people their jobs or their businesses in the old days. But those were local scandals. Rarely would someone’s notoriety follow them if they moved to another city.
 
Over time more and more people have suffered national stigma that outlasts their 15 minutes of fame. Cable news accelerated this: Think of Monica Lewinsky in 1998. The internet transformed the degree of scrutiny, the extent of its reach, and the shelf life of the scandal, so much as to make it different not just in degree, but in kind.
 
Whenever a new form of power arises, we need to think about how to safeguard individual liberty against it.
 
In the early days of Twitter, I used to say that it was a bit like I imagined living in a forager band to be: You were immersed in a constant stream of conversation from the people you knew.
 
Ten years later, I still think that’s the right metaphor, but not in the way that I meant it then.
 
Back then I saw Twitter as a tool for building social bonds. These days, I see it as a tool for social coercion.
 
Forager bands do not have or need police. They have social coercion so powerful that it is just as effective as a gun to the head.

© Bloomberg