YouSaid · the spoken record

Jon Ronson

lines on the record: 53
first: 2022-03-11
most recent: 2022-03-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, I mean, I don't think we're ever going to see an end to it. But what I really hope, but I think people have matured, there's a line in, say, you've been publicly shamed, which came out in 2015, where I said we're like on Twitter, we're like toddlers crawling towards the gun. And I don't think we're toddlers crawling towards a gun anymore. I think we're maybe adolescents or teenagers holding, maybe holding a gun. When there's an ambiguous or unfair shaming, there's much more of a democratic back and forward. There's many more voices. And that didn't happen the night of Justin Sacco, for instance. It was 100,000 people screaming at one person who was oblivious because she was asleep on a plane and that was hilarious to people. That doesn't happen. So I think there has been, there's a majority on social media and hopefully we will continue to mature.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And going back to that earlier question, a lot of it's the fault of the tech gurus who created the platforms, but also a lot of it is the fault of the journalists who then just thought, oh, you know, we can feed off of this, we can feed off of this and write some easy stories. So yeah, the journalists are very much to blame too.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, like massively, like we've lived through a time of seismic positive change these last few years, so absolutely. I think there was a little bit of confusion when the book first came out. I remember I was onward Namie Klein, me and Namie Klein did something together in Australia. And I think the sort of vibe was that she would be the person who would write about social media shaming as being a force for good. You know, these were the days before Me Too.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know it's funny because it is an old fashioned idea, but as a consequence, if I've got an idea which I really love, but I'm not sure Ubrook is a book, thank God, the six or eight part podcast exists. And it's still the wild west of narrative storytelling, of non-fiction storytelling. I'd love the fact that you can really do whatever you want in terms of narrative as long as it works, as long as it keeps people listening. There's no, in movies, there's a lot of rules, there's a lot of structural rules in podcasting, there's none.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I still think a nonfiction book is the best way of doing it. And I think a six or eight podcast series is the second best way of doing it. The reason why I've got an, I think I have an overly high standard about book writing. I think that I can't bear the idea of writing not a good book and then going on stage and trying to be enthusiastic about a book that you don't think is the greatest book that you've ever written. And that's why often many years go by between my books. I have an unrealistically high standard, I think.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I agree with you about that. I think curiosity patience is good. Twitter is the world's worst information swapping service and very frequently two days after we've told someone to shreds, we've discovered that the information was wrong. I could give you countless examples of that. The person hadn't done the thing that we thought they did. So if I could set one rule for Twitter, I'd say wait two days before piling in on someone because very frequently you'll find other information that makes it more nuanced.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot of shit going on in that person's life, and that's why they're spiraling, and that's why, so, you know, rather than, you know, this guy was saying like, my point is, is that when we tear somebody to shreds on social media, Often there's a lot of other shit going on in that person's life.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you. And the day she took her life, there'd been an internet pylon, she'd been bowed in on the internet. So everybody just assumed that it was the pylon that caused her to take her life. And I discovered a bunch of other things that were happening in her life which clearly contributed as well. But I did note when the documentary came out, this guy interviewed me, this Canadian guy, and he said, well, now that you've shown that August Ames died because of all this other stuff that was happening in her life, do you want to take back everything that you said? And so you've been publicly shamed? Like, have you changed your mind about? And I'm like, no. It's terrible. And what I said to him was when somebody is behaving poorly on social media, when somebody tells a joke that comes out badly or says something that could get them into trouble, often.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the fact that somebody journalists on Twitter would then write about what's happening on Twitter in the paper is not only shitty journalism, but yeah, it is spreading in anger. But we did, you know, we had a Twitter president. And he was like human Twitter. And so one of the very first talks I did once say he'd been publicly shamed came out, this woman in the Q&A said, well, if you play with the Twitter toy, it's your fault if you get hurt. And her implication was that it's a bubble that doesn't have any impact. And around that time, people would say all the time, the internet isn't the real world. The fact is, I don't think anybody feels that anymore.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the relationship between journalists and Twitter is often the nerdy kid sucking up to the school bully because they can get something out of it and also don't want to be hurt. I found journalists to be more often more spineless on Twitter than I would have anticipated when it comes to seeing something unfair happening and not wanting to speak out about it. Yeah, at first journalists we thought we could control Twitter by having those listicles that we pretty quickly realized that no, we can't we just have to comply.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe things will loosen up a little bit. And loosen up, I'm only saying loosen up in terms of the disproportionate punishment of people who have committed small transgressions. I'm not saying loosen up in terms of everybody's just going to become offensive again.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, yeah, I've got something positive to say about that. I tend to, when I'm having meetings with people or social things where they've got like 12-year-old kids, I've started asking people the same question, which is, okay, your 12-year-old kids, how do they feel about all the fighting on the internet, about everybody feeling like they're Princess Diana in a minefield, and if they put a step wrong, they're going to just blow up. And the vibe I get is that the younger siblings, the kids of like 12, 13, are a little bit sick of it, a little bit sick of having to live under a set of rules imposed by their older siblings. And the vibe I get.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said in the series, like he told me the joke and my live in the moment reaction was that, you know, I've heard a lot worse anti-Semitic jokes than that. Personally, I just found it a kind of mare joke. I think my words were, it has all the, it has the combination of words that approximate a joke, I think was what I said when I first hit it. Personally speaking, I wasn't offended, but then I immediately said, but of course I can't speak for all Jews, which of course I can't.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know anything about what's happening in Brazil, so anything I say would be idiotic. I would say that tech companies realized, I think they began as utopians. They began as ideologues, libertarian utopian ideologues, but then realized that that would make them a lot of money because obviously people stay on longer when they're outraged. And so it became a business. I think it began as an ideology, a utopian ideology, and turned into a business model.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Divides factor in because you spend your generation writing the wrongs of your parents' generation and then a new generation comes along to write your wrongs. So that makes people dizzy with rage.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, lately it seems like everything is pretty much everything you can think of as becoming a cultural war and takes off. I mean, I would never have expected mask wearing or vaccinations to become such hot button culture war topics for people to define themselves politically along those lines whenever we've anticipated that. I think generational culture wars tend to take off a lot more than ones that aren't generational. There's a lot of social science has shown that Well, two things we behave more violently when we're serving a moral cause or when we think we're serving a moral cause. People who believe they're behaving morally behave more violently. And also, and I guess it stands to reason, but people get most upset, some social scientists say, when they perceive that something has been taken away from them, that they spent their lives building. So that's why I think generally...”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When public shaming, and I think we must go to questions, but when public shaming becomes so ubiquitous, yeah, when public shaming becomes so ubiquitous, humans become like bugs, hospital bugs mutating into superbugs like impervious to shame. When shame becomes overused as a weapon, what you're doing is creating an almost in a Darwinian way a generation of annoyingly unashamed people who think they can just get away with anything.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what school did that partisan media in America does make me miss the adversarial British media slightly more than I thought I would.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And of course, you know, who knows what's about, you know, had Ukraine had this not happened, I think I would have been feeling very optimistic and feeling that there is an appetite for change. And I'm not saying let's get sappy. And let's not never be adversarial again. And in fact, when you go the opposite, one of the biggest surprises about moving to America, actually, is there's very little adversarial journalism in America. But what there is instead is highly partisan curated media where if you watch CNN every day for the entire Trump presidency as I did, you get a very curated view of the Trump presidency where basically it's a terrible mistake. He's only an idiot. But don't worry when the election comes, it'll be a landslide victory, which clearly didn't happen.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's been a change in British media. You know, I left London 10 years ago when Paxman was King of the News. And I guess a little bit earlier than that. But basically, you know, when I left Britain, British journalism was very adversarial, knee-jerk adversarial, adversarial when it was suitable to be adversarial, like Emily Matthews interviewing Prince Andrew, but also adversarial when it wasn't appropriate, when a comedian was going on the Today program to talk about his tour. And I have noticed a shift. I've noticed I was thinking the other day about, do you remember when Martin Lewis said there should be more good news and everybody just mocked the hell out of him? Well, I think there's been a little bit of a shift. I think people started to feel a little bit too baffled weary and it's bleeding in. When you listen to the Today program now, for instance, it's a lot less adversarial. It's more”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I would have finished it, but we decided to kind of keep it pretty chronological and end it today. That's why we kept it when we did.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I actually spent, I read pretty much every, well, I read every book, Tamifay, wrote, and I read like, yeah, there was a big iceberg below that tip, I'd say. I did want to do a very big project, actually, about Tammy, but then the movie came out, and then that kind of scuppered that.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's because it's a miracle on top of a miracle. The first miracle was the conversation between them doing so much good and healing so much of the rage that Christian evangelists felt towards the gay community and vice versa. And the second miracle is that not only is Steve still alive, but he's the most bullyant, delightful, charming person I've met in years.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so she found this guy, Steve Peters, who had full blown aides. He was a pastor 1985 this was. And the conversation between the two of them was just so extraordinary. It's awkward. It's funny. It's unintentionally funny. But ultimately, it just grows and grows and grows and becomes exceptionally moving by the end of it. This 20 minute conversation becomes exceptionally moving, knowing for one reason knowing that Steve was going to die. And he was so sweet. And Steve didn't die. He is...”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I actually knew this. I've known this story for about three or four years, and I've always wanted to tell it. And so when I started doing this show, I just thought, perfect, I can tell this story. It's about a televangelist named Tammy Faye Baker, her peer group were horrendously homophobic. This was in the early 80s when AIDS was just becoming a thing. And Jerry Formwell, part of her peer group, headed to the Mole majority, the story goes single-handedly convinced President Reagan to not say the word AIDS for four years, hence all the silence equals death stuff that was going on at the time. And Reagan didn't say the word AIDS till, I think, 1985. But in the midst of this, you had this televangelist called Tambifay Baker, who had an afternoon chat show on televangelist TV called Tamby's House Party. And she was getting more and more alienated from her peer group. So she invited on a gay pastor with AIDS to talk about having AIDS.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I tell you, let me just get to let me very quickly get to the last thought, though, which is that as well as those people with bad intent, there was a lot of people that night who were genuinely upset and genuinely offended. And this was an occasion when marginalized voices were getting a chance to speak for the first time on social media. And so there was something else going on that night, which was like, you know, if public shaming is one of the few weapons of the dispossessed, if you start attacking public shaming as a weapon, then are you, by proxy, attacking the dispossessed?”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, and also because people on Twitter who were screaming at Justin Saku that night, for instance, many different types of people, there was misogynists that I hope somebody with HIV rapes you. And then you'll see if your skin color protects you for AIDS. That was one tweet I remember from that night. There was an awful lot of hipsters because a hashtag started trending worldwide. Hashtag has Justine landed yet because the comedy that night was we knew and she didn't. And people were tweeting about how they can't wait to go home and go to bed, but they have to wait because everybody in this bar is just can't wait for Justin Sacco to land.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are supposed to be fearless and to speak truth to power stayed silent that night because they were afraid that people would come after them instead. And that makes me think that curiosity that night was considered a weakness on text, nuance, curiosity were all considered weaknesses because waiting because the vibe was if you wait until the plain lands, that means you aren't enlightened enough to understand why this is a terrible thing.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and the problem that while I completely understand and appreciate being encouraged to think more about impact, stuff comes with it, which is the problem. So I'm thinking about in my public shaming book, I guess the most famous story is the Justin Sacco story, the woman who was on the plane just before she gets on a plane, she tweets what she thinks is a self-reflexive joke mocking her own privilege, but it comes out very badly and while she's asleep on the plane, Twitter takes control of her. And one of the things that was happening that night was the very, very tiny number of people who poked their heads above the parapet to say, can we not just wait until her plane lands to give her an opportunity to explain what she meant by that joke? Those people, and I watched it happen, were really attacked too. They were like, well, you're just a privileged bitch too. That's what somebody said to Helen Lewis that night. You're just a privileged bitch too. So journalists...”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, which obviously it's wrong to think that and move on the left to having more consideration for impact is very, very important, of course. But I think then things like that happen too, the dean being forced to resign for giving this wonderful book. I should say, by the way, other than my episode about Tammy Fay Baker, the messages I get more than any others, and I've had quite a lot of messages and people saying that they bought Dick Gregory's book on the back of that episode, Unreally Loved It. So that's something I'm very pleased about. It's a wonderful book. Yeah, he was a standard comedian. He was on the Tonight Show 23 times, I think. He was on the Tonight Show. And then he gave it all up to become a Civil Rights Activist because he just felt too guilty sitting in hotel rooms after doing a show.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And Dick Gregory got involved. He was still alive. He died in the last couple of years. But he got involved. His son got involved. Everyone obviously on the dean's side. And it didn't work. This isn't to say, by the way, I think there's people in the center who think it's ridiculous that we should think that intention is the only thing that matters.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which they certainly did. I mean, they went on TV and read out that poem. And as a result, school buses were shot at, and her school was blown up. I mean, bombs were planted in schools. Yeah. Incredible, however, except for the shooting and the bombs this last year the school board wars are being fought more than ever in America. And over pretty much the same thing, funnily enough, in the 70s it was called diversity of thought in school textbooks and today it's called critical race theory in a strange way the same battle is being fought in school boards today.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out on buses, but Alice Moore had no interest whatsoever in that. She was only interested in the impact. And of course the irony of all of this is that the intention versus impact debate has moved from the Christian right to the left now. And today it's much more the left who are talking about impact being more important than intention.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right for the Christian right, for the evangelical right in the 70s intention didn't matter anywhere as much as impact. So I think for the Christian right Roder McOff's intention, you know, that's just for the privileged. Dention's just for the privileged. The only thing that really matters is the impact this poem would have on the children who might have misinterpreted the poem. Because, of course, the poem, Rotter McOff's a moral person. The poem was about a spontaneous orgy that breaks out on a bus at lunchtime because the world is about to end in nuclear war. It'd be interesting to see actually in the coming months whether spontaneous orgies will start to break out on buses. But clearly the poem, the last line of the poem is the world didn't end, but in a way it has. So very clearly Roger McGoff was saying that he wasn't in favor of spontaneous orgies brick.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And Peter Teal, and actually very tellingly, Peter Thial recently left Silicon Valley to move to Los Angeles because he said it's no longer the libertarian paradise that it had been in the 80s. And now it's been taken over by social justice people. So there's been a very big reversal, I'd say, but that reversal is very recent.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's true, but I think I would argue, and I'm slightly out of my depth here, and I could be wrong about this, but I think the libertarians affect basically one. And that was just the world. No, entail, I'm not saying now, I'm saying one until around 2012, 2013. And that's when people began to fight back. But that means that for 87, 97, 2000, that for like 25, 30 years.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's central to the internet because they never got the opportunity to come up with a third way. Like, is there something we can do? Is there some set of rules we could implement? They never just didn't do. It's like, no, you don't mess with the computer. Computers do what computers can do. We don't just allow a computer to flourish the way that it does. And that's that tech utopian libertarianism is the world that we've been living in.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And face first and early investor in Facebook. And so Peter Teal got involved with his right wing student newspaper, the Stanford Review. And more importantly, actually, because Peter Teal wasn't well known at that point, this guy called John McCarthy got involved, who was one of the creators of AI and was a very hardened, strong world libertarian. And he basically just used in a sort of Paxman-like way. He just destroyed everybody and won and the joke was allowed to flow unencumbered. And what history shows is that the decision over allowing this joke to just go everywhere on the internet without any encumbrance was the test case that the internet became.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so this was happening at different universities because using it only really existed in universities and computer places. And it got to Stanford. The joke ended up being... Yeah, on a message board on the computer. Yeah. And all hell broke loose because there were some people at Stanford who were like, you know, we can't allow this offensive joke to stand. And then the libertarians, the people who are kind of in charge of Stanford, as far as I can tell, the Peter Teals, Peter Teal was an undergraduate at Stanford at the time.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Takes ages for you to get it. It's so convoluted. It was a Scotsman and a Jew having dinner. At the end of the dinner, the Scotsman is heard to say, I will pay. The next day, the headlines read Jewish ventriloquist found dead in Alley. Now you and me who are attuned to Jewish jokes, we'll kind of get that quite quickly. Yeah, but a lot of people just didn't get it. You had to like, a lot of people like to think for ages. So it wasn't a good joke for that reason, amongst any other reasons. Obviously, the joke is Scots and Jews don't want to go to it.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a Jewish joke. This is the very first. I think I can confidently say we found the very first person ever to be publicly shamed because of something they did online. And his name was Brad Templeton. And he was had a successful life. He does a lot of work with the EFF, which is a great civil rights group on the internet. Anyway, he ran this site on Usenet, which was a joke a day, rec.humor.funny. His computer would automatically each day post a joke. And it was probably, it was like the seventh most popular site on the internet, I think, with, you know, 20,000 subscribers or whatever. Anyway, on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, unfortunately, the computer spat out a joke that was a terrible, I mean, it's a terrible joke because...”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For you to talk about what you had for breakfast because I just thought this is like this is like this Robert Altman movie, one of those Robert Altman movies where all these different characters' lives intersect. Some people are talking about really serious shit. There's people with mental health problems who are kind of talking about that in a place where they couldn't talk about that kind of stuff before. There was the beginnings of social justice stuff was happening on social media. And you just had this mix of these different lives coming up on your screen. I thought this is wonderful, but talking about what you had for breakfast was very quickly considered not something that people wanted to happen on Twitter when everything became more performative.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a place to be unself conscious. And I think I know what happened. In fact, I saw it happen. What happened was the guardian, for instance, first thought, okay, this thing Twitter, don't worry, we'll ignore it. It will go away. And then it didn't go away. So then papers like The Guardian thought, well, we'll control it. We'll run these articles called Who Are the 100 Best Tweeters? The 10 Best Tweeters in Media. And I'd see, you know, David Padill or Catla Muran was like one of the best tweeters. And that felt like Eve in the Garden of Eden eating the apple. Like no longer could we be unself conscious. Now we had to be performative because we wanted to be on the list of the best tweeters in the Guardian. So that's, I think that's how the rot began. A lot of stuff happened after that, but that's how the rot began. Twitter becoming performative. I should say I'm such a minority about this because I felt Twitter in 2009 was a play.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. And as I wrote and say you've been public, it's funny, that was all over the internet in the 80s and the 90s. You know, message boards, I remember going on, you know, boards like Mumsnet in the early 2000s, which were just, you know, everyone was so tense and so angry. But Twitter in about 2009, 2010, weirdly felt like an exception. It felt like the place where people weren't angry. It felt like the place where people could be unself conscious. Yeah. Well, actually, I would say for about my, I joined Twitter about 2008, 2009. And actually, I think it lasted for like maybe two years of, and it was this kind of extraordinary, I'm being a bit rose-tinted, but my memory of Twitter then was people would confess shameful secrets about themselves and other people would say, oh my God, I'm just the same.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is golden for the media companies because the more oppositional people are, the more money the media companies make, it's no surprise that this all started with the New York Post. It was the New York Post who got everybody angry. And Frank Schaefer wanting to have a good show to show Hollywood producers, I think, shows, much like the New York Post getting involved, shows that our thought leaders, the people who are kind of manipulating us into behavior, often have agendas that we don't even realize. Often they're doing it just for money-making reasons, and extrapolate that, I would say, to the people who created the internet, the libertarians, which is, you know, we've been living inside a libertarian utopia these past 30 years where we scream at each other on the internet. This is because libertarians created the internet, which I think is just...”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the whole battle, the whole radicalization of the Christian right happened as a result of this father and son, the Schaefers, making this documentary series, and then eventually the New York Post. Everybody ignored the series, by the way, the mainstream media ignored the series. The mainstream media doesn't care what Christians do inside Madison Square Garden. It's like, oh, it's a Christian thing. Maybe Springsteen tomorrow, but it's some Christian thing. Who cares? But the New York Post ran an article about this weird avant-garde anti-abortion film that was being shown at Patterson Square Garden, which was half, you know, which is like empty. And so Planned Parent had started to pick it. And then the women of Christian evangelism were like, great, Planned Parenthood haters. So they got involved.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, and it's what a story. It's all because of this 19 year old boy called Frank Schaefer, who was growing up in a commune in the Swiss Alps called LeBrie. His father was a kind of Christian Kenneth Clark. He was an artist with a little goatee, looked like a hippie. He looked a bit like sort of Willy Wonka. People like Eric Clapton would come to his father's commune to listen to Francis Schaefer talk.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it is, although that was never the, it was never like, oh my God, I've got to do something about abortion. That was never, you know, what we're doing is we've got to find the best stories. We've got to find the most extraordinary unfold.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do a series about the history of the culture wars, but their human stories. Let's just, you know, there's this landscape of noise. Let's just like hone in on a tiny human story. Just an unfolding story about a person who for some reason got caught up in this. And then that quickly became origin stories. So each story we found was about the very beginning of culture war. And what we found was just kind of extraordinary. Culture wars were starting for reasons that you would never anticipate.”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and also sometimes you have to decide, for instance, one of the culture wars that I cover in the show was diversity of thought in school textbooks. That's not something that you can really both sides, I don't think, because until school books got more diverse in the early 1970s, it was all like Dick and Jane stories about all white families where nothing bad ever happens. So there's certain things that you can't both sides. But yeah, but that was my challenge. And it was at the forefront of my mind. I didn't want to do it for personal reasons. I hate the noise and I didn't want to do it for storytelling reasons either because when you have the noise, you lose the nuanced human story. So then I thought, well, I want to tell human stories. So the very first conversation I had with Sarah Shebier at the BBC was, okay,”
2022-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Ronson and David Baddiel on Conspiracies, Culture Wars and How Things Fell Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT