Declaring Other People Insane | Jon Ronson | TEDxMarthasVineyard

this story starts with me accidentally tagging my name into Google and inadvertently Preston search and discovering that another Jon Ronson had started tweeting on Twitter and his handle was John underscore Ronson and his avatar was a photograph of my face and as I stared in surprise at his timeline he tweeted going home got to get the recipe for a huge plate of guarana and muscle in a bap with mayonnaise hashtag yummy who are you I tweeted him watching Seinfeld I would love a big plate of celeriac grouper and sour cream kebab with lemongrass hashtag foodie he tweeted I didn't know what to do the next morning I looked at the other Jon Ronson's timeline before I looked at my own and in the night he tweeted I'm thinking about time and [ __ ] he had 20 followers and some of them 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 [ __ ] so I did some digging and I discovered that it was a spambot created by an academic from Warwick University called Luke Robert Mason so I thought okay this is fine I'll email him and I'll tell him that I don't like his spam bot and he'll take her down so I said how can he take down your spam bot please an email back and said we prefer the term info Wharf to spam bot so I said but it's taken my identity and he wrote back the info moth isn't taking your identity it is repurposing social media data into an info morphic aesthetic so I felt a tightness in my chest I was at war with a robot version of myself so a month passed and John underscore Ronson was tweeting about 20 times a day about his soirees he was having I should say a better life that I was hurting in the entire period ionian word got invited to one thing that could be called a soiree and as I turned up the host said to me would you like some crisps and I said no thank you I'm going to have cereal when I get home and from the corner of my eye saw my wife Elaine was mouthing something urgently at me unless it what and she said be more general I'm not great with parties there was a fantastic party at Justin's house a couple of nights ago but if anyone who is that was just wonderful but I got yes but I got overwhelmed it was it was a beautiful household Chappaquiddick and I just got over I got over stimulated and I had to leave at 9 o'clock and I left my sixteen-year-old son there and I thought it's fine it's not like anything ever goes wrong when people try and leave parties later night long traffic Witek so I emailed Luke Robert Mason and I said to look if you won't take down your spam but maybe we can at least meet and I can film the encounter and put on YouTube but you can describe you know your feelings I can describe Matt and he said yes we'd love to talk to you about the info morph and I said that's great I'd really love to hear about the spam bot and so he turned up with two other academics and I've got a short clip of my meeting with the three spam bot men and I'm going to ring up the London phonebook and insist the old people who have to say name change then their listings - you know there's some vanilla because they didn't choose to call themselves Jon Ronson because of me you know you're too thin to call this Johnson because of me you seem to say there is only one Jon Ronson and I'm the real Jon Ronson yeah you're kind of proposing yourself as the real McCoy as it were and you want to maintain that authenticity and I think we feel annoyed with you because we're not quite persuaded by that we get the feeling that you're not so much saying I want to maintain my integrity and authenticity as the real Jon Ronson we think there's already a layer of artifice there and that what you're saying is that it's your online personality the the brand Jon Ronson that you're trying to protect ya know if it's me man we know you know you're you we've met you now today we're meeting 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 that's like I think to take it back to where it hosts Norden the fact about this is bizarre I thought I find it really really strange the way you're approaching it and you must be one of the very few people I've ever come across who's chosen to come on Twitter and use that own name as their 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 have never I have never used the term brand management in my life maybe lose that phrase in my life but I just guess I'm so different why would you use your own name you kind of fill the hollows gifts own language to me these words that use a completely different line and that's the same about this Sun bar its language is completely different to mine yeah yeah definitely yeah and that's what's annoying me so much it's like a misrepresentation as you'd like it to be more like you know I'd like it's not exist that's that bizarre then I'd like it's not exist yeah why because I don't know I find something quite psychologically interesting about that why um you know there's a kind of interesting kind of uncanny sense of I don't know I find that quite aggressive almost that you'd like to kill these algorithms then you must feel threatened in someone I had to stop it there because just after that I jumped out from behind the cupboard I stabbed it in the face after the interview was over I staggered out into the London afternoon and I dreaded uploading the footage because I've been so screeching I was very screeching other parts of it but I I imagined comments mocking my screech eNOS so I posted it and then I I left at ten minutes and then with apprehension I I had a look at the YouTube comments and the first one read this is identity theft they should respect John's personal liberty Wow I thought cautiously somebody should make alternate Twitter accounts of all of those ass clowns and constantly post about their strong desire for child porn I grinned these people are manipulative [ __ ] let the third [ __ ] them sue them break them destroy them if I could see these people face to face I would say they are [ __ ] pricks I was giddy with joy I was brave hurt striding through a field at first alone and then suddenly hundreds of marching behind me vile disturbing idiots playing with someone else's life and then laughing at the victims hurt of anger read the next comment I nodded soberly utter hateful [ __ ] read the next these [ __ ] up academics deserve to die painfully the [ __ ] in the middle is a [ __ ] psychopath i frowned slightly I hope nobody's gonna actually hurt them I thought gasps the [ __ ] I won at the same time I was um at friend's house and I saw that she had on a shelf a copy of the DSM which I'm sure a lot of you know is the manual of mental disorders it used to be very slim back in the 1950s was just a pamphlet in the 50s there was a few disorders but then and then it grew and grew and now it's 886 pages long at lists every known mental disorder there's currently 374 mental disorders so I was leafing through the book wondering if I had only mental disorders and it turns out that I've got 12 I've got a generalized anxiety disorder which frankly I did need a book to tell me I've got nightmared disorder which is categorized if you have recurrent dreams of being pursued or declared a failure and all my dreams involved people they I've got parent-child relation or problems which I blame my parents much later by the way from my book the psychopathy test I met the man who turned the DSM from the pamphlet into a brick probably the most important psychiatrists in American history after Freud his name was Robert Spitzer oh he's a Princeton and his theory so he grew up hating Freud his mother was very unhappy lived on happy died and happy and he couldn't there was nothing that any fourteen psychoanalysts could do and so we grew up with this intense hatred of Freud when he took over the DSM he decided that it would be his his job to eliminate Freud from Psychiatry and replace Freud with something more scientific sounding checklists so what he did was he got all the like-minded cycle of psychiatrists and psychologists into a room and he don't have Princeton and he'd say ugh lovely actually and he says anybody out there for new disorders and British I forgot one leimia and he go what's what's his cut was his over characteristics a gland it could have typed it into a into a typewriter that's how bulimia came to be invented that's how ADHD ended up in the DSM and so when I met him I asked him were there any proposed mental disorders that you rejected and he said yeah there was one eight hit the called child syndrome and he said the problem was when I asked the the group what they shared characteristics were the man said well that's very hard to say because the children of a atypical so I I completely understand why Spitzer did body dead because all that fraud he had sleuthing allowed the unconscious you know seemed pseudo-scientific to him but the upshot of turning and as Brian said before there's a there's an awful lot of very very positive things about diagnosis but the negative characteristic is the fact that people are getting labeled all over the place and since dsm-5 came out more than 50% of Americans now have been diagnosed or diagnosable the mental disorder so being not normal is the new normal and really the worst thing that's come Furness actually happened here in Massachusetts in Boston there was a psychiatrist Ospital in Massachusetts who created a new disorder called childhood bipolar disorder where children as young as four who obviously too young to even take part in their own diagnosis were being labeled as bipolar and were given anti-psychotic medication when in fact they were just presenting with temper tantrums and one little girl called Rebecca Riley was given an overdose of her and his psychotic medication and died she was four years old and so really that's what happens when checklists and diagnosis that allowed her to flourish uncontrolled and the reason why I say that insane talk as the spambot man because I think that my response and and my supporters response to the spambot known kind of a similar thing and I wanted to end on I'm ending the conference and so I wanted to end it with something that I wanted to get right so I wrote it down this is like a card of retro teleprompter I said the the problem really with our response to the three spambot men was that we became the people in the lithographs being wry Balder whippings because we seem to love nothing more than to declare other people insane we love to reduce people to their outermost aspects to the aspects of their personalities that might be labeled mental disorders or this is creating a more conservative conformist age when we reduce people to to the to the worst tweet that they ever wrote or we reduce them to their floors it feels like an escalation in the war on human nature and its flaws look we're saying we're normal this is the average we are defining the boundaries of normality by labeling those on the outside of it but the truth is there is no evidence that we have been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal and in fact it's our unhappiness --is and our anxieties and compulsions there's least fashionable aspects of our personalities that quite often lead us to do rather interesting things you

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Keywords: ted talk, English, ted talks, TEDxTalks, Philosophy, Entertainment, ted x, Film, tedx, Health, tedx talk, United States, ted, Journalism, Psychology, tedx talks

Id: gnGAjiALurI

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 01 2014