Declaring Other People Insane | Jon Ronson | TEDxMarthasVineyard

This story begins when I accidentally tagged my name on Google and inadvertently Preston searched and discovered that an

other

Jon Ronson had started tweeting on Twitter and his name was John underscore Ronson and his avatar was a photo of my face and as I looked with surprise his timeline he tweeted going home I have to get the recipe for a huge bowl of guarana and muscle in a bun with delicious mayonnaise hashtag who are you? I tweeted him watching Seinfeld I would love a big plate of grouper celery and sour cream kebab with enthusiastic lemongrass hashtag he tweeted I didn't know what to do the next morning I looked at the

other

Jon Ronson's timeline before looking at mine and in the evening he tweeted I'm thinking about time and he had 20 followers and some of them were

people

.

I knew from real life that they were probably wondering why I had suddenly become so passionate about fusion cooking and so sincere about dreams, so I did a little research and discovered it was a spambot created by a university academic. of Warwick named Luke Robert Mason. I thought okay, I will send him an email and tell him that I don't like his spambot and he will delete it, so I said, how can you delete his spambot? Please email me and I will tell you. we prefer the term info wharf to spam bot so I said but it took my identity and he replied that the info moth is not taking your identity it is repurposing social media data in an infomorphic aesthetic so I felt an oppression on the chest.

I was at war with a robot version of myself, so a month went by and John points out that Ronson was tweeting about 20 times a day about his evenings he was having. I must say a better life that I was suffering from throughout the entire period. The Ionian word was invited to one. something you could call an evening and when I arrived the host said do you want some fries and I said no thanks, I'm going to have cereal when I get home and out of the corner of my eye I saw my wife Elaine. I was telling me something urgently unless it was like that and she said, "Be more general.

I'm not good at parties. There was a fantastic party at Justin's house a couple of nights ago, but if someone like that was just wonderful, but I got a yes, but I felt overwhelmed, it was a beautiful house, Chappaquiddick and I just got over it I got too stimulated and I had to leave at 9 o'clock and I left my sixteen year old son there and I thought okay, I never know. It seems like nothing goes wrong when

people

try to leave parties later at night, there is a lot of traffic in Witek, so I emailed Luke Robert Mason and told him to see if he could remove the spam, but maybe we can at least get together and be able to film the meeting and post it on YouTube but you can describe, you know your feelings, I can describe Matt and he said yes, we would love to talk to you about information transformation and I told him that's great, I would really love to know about the spambot and then he showed up with two other academics and I have a short clip of my meeting with the three spambots and I am going to call the London telephone directory and insist to the older people that they have to say name change and then their listings - you know, there are some vanilla ones because they didn't choose to be called Jon Ronson because of me, you know you are too thin to call him Johnson because of me, you seem to say that there is only one Jon Ronson and that I am the real one Jon Ronson, yes, you.

You're putting yourself forward as the real McCoy, so to speak, and you want to maintain that authenticity and I think we feel upset with you because that doesn't quite convince us, we get the feeling that you're not saying "I want." In order to maintain my integrity and authenticity as the real Jon Ronson, we believe that there is already a layer of artifice there and that what you are saying is that it is your online personality, the Jon Ronson brand that you are trying to protect, do you know if I am I? man we know you know it's you, we've met you now, today we meet face to face, person to person, the internet is not the real world, yeah, but I write my tweets and then I press send, so it's Me on Twitter, That's not academic.

I plan to take him back to where he houses Norden. The fact of this is strange. I thought. I find it really very strange the way you approach it and you must be one of the few people. I have ever met someone who chose to go on Twitter and use that own name as his Twitter name. I don't really know anyone who does that and that's why I'm a little suspicious of your motives here, John, because that's why I say I think you're using it as brand management, that's why you're using your own name, you know what I've never used, I've never used the term brand management in my life, maybe I'll lose that phrase in my life, but I guess I'm. so different why would you use your own name like you fill in the gaps gifts own language to me these words that use a completely different line and that's the same thing about this Sun bar their language is completely different from mine yes yes definitely yes and that's it which is it bothers me so much it's like a misrepresentation like you wish it was more like you know I wish it didn't exist that's that weird so I wish it didn't exist yeah why because I don't know , I find something quite.

Psychologically interesting about that, why, you know, there's a kind of strange, interesting feeling of I don't know, I find it quite aggressive, almost like you'd like to kill these algorithms, so you must feel threatened in someone. I had to stop him. there because right after that I jumped out from behind the closet I stabbed him in the face after the interview was over I staggered out into the London afternoon and I was afraid to upload the pictures because I had been shouting a lot in other parts of But I imagined comments mocking me Screech eNOS, so I posted it and then I left within ten minutes and then apprehensively took a look at the YouTube comments and the first one who read this is identity theft, they should respect John's personal freedom.

Wow, I thought. Cautiously, someone should create alternative Twitter accounts for all those clowns and constantly post about their strong desire for child pornography. I smiled, these people are manipulative, let the third party sue them, break them, destroy them, if I could see these people face to face I would. They say they are idiots I was dizzy with joy I was brave wounded walking through a field at first alone and then suddenly hundreds of people marching behind me vile disturbing idiots playing with someone else's life and then laughing at the victims wounded with anger read the next comment I nodded soberly with absolute hatred.

Read the following. These academics deserve to die painfully. The one in the middle is a psychopath. I frowned slightly. I hope no one hurts them. I thought panting. I won at the same time. He was at a friend's house and I saw. I had on a shelf a copy of the DSM which I'm sure many of you know is the manual of mental disorders it used to be very thin in the 50's it was just a pamphlet in the 50's there were some disorders but then and then it grew and grew and It is now 886 pages long and lists all known mental disorders;

There are currently 374 mental disorders so I was flipping through the book wondering if I only had mental disorders and it turns out I have 12. I have generalized anxiety disorder which frankly I needed a book to tell me I have a nightmare disorder which is classified as yes. you have recurring dreams of being persecuted or declared a failure and all my dreams involve people I have parents with. childhood relationship or problems for which I blame my parents much later, by the way, in my book, the psychopathy test, I met the man who turned the DSM from the pamphlet into a brick, probably the most important psychiatrist in the history of the United States United after Freud, his name was Robert Spitzer, oh. he is a Princeton and his theory, so he grew up hating Freud, his mother was very unhappy, he lived happily, he died and was happy and he couldn't, there was nothing that fourteen psychoanalysts could do, so we grew up with this intense hatred towards Freud when he took over the DSM and decided that his job would be to remove Freud from psychiatry and replace him with more scientific sounding checklists, so what he did was bring together the entire cycle of like-minded psychiatrists and psychologists in a room and I don't have Princeton and he was like "ugh, lovely" actually and he says "anyone out there for new disorders and British." I forgot a leimia and he said what's the court of him, the excessive features of him, a gland that could have been written on a typewriter.

That's how bulimia was invented, that's how ADHD ended up in the DSM, so when I met him I asked him if there was any proposed mental disorder that you rejected and he said yes, there was an eight in the so-called boy and girl syndrome. The problem was when I asked the group what characteristics they shared, the man said, well that's very hard to say because children are atypical, so I completely understand why Spitzer died because all that fraud he had investigated allowed the unconscious, you know, it seemed pseudoscientific to him, but the result of the change and as Brian said before, there are a lot of very positive things about the diagnosis, but the negative feature is the fact that people are being labeled all over the place and since dsm-5 arrived Over 50% of Americans have now been diagnosed or diagnosed with a mental disorder, so not being normal is the new normal and really the worst thing that has ever happened.

Furness actually happened here in Massachusetts, in Boston, there was a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts that created a new disorder called childhood bipolar disorder in which children as young as four years old, who were obviously too young to even participate in their own diagnosis, were labeled as bipolar and were given antipsychotic medication when in reality they were just throwing tantrums and a little girl named Rebecca Riley overdosed on her and her psychotic medication and died when she was four years old and that's really what happens when the checklists and the diagnosis that allowed it to flourish get out of control and the reason I say that crazy talk like the spam man because I think my response and my followers' response to the spambot is something similar and I wanted to end with "I'm finishing the conference" so I wanted end it with something I wanted to do well, so I wrote it.

This is like a retro teleprompter card. I said the real problem with our response to the three spam men was that we became like the people in the lithographs being ironic scourges of Balder because we seem to love nothing more than

declaring

other people we love crazy. reduce people to their most external aspects to the aspects of their personalities that could be labeled as mental disorders or this is creating a more conservative conformist era where we reduce people to the worst tweet they ever wrote or we reduce them to their floors . It feels like an escalation in the war against human nature and its flaws.

Look, we're saying we're normal. This is the average. We are defining the limits of normality by labeling those who are outside of it, but the truth is that there is no evidence. That we have been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal and, in fact, it is our unhappiness and our anxieties and compulsions, there are less elegant aspects of our personality that often lead us to do some pretty interesting things.