You may not even be aware of the Internet outrage machine until its jaws start grinding you up.
Yet this machine springs to life regularly: A person makes a possibly offensive comment on the Internet, the comment goes “viral,” online mobs become outraged, then they start tearing apart the person’s life.
They target the person’s employer, they hit the person’s home, they publicize the school where the person’s children go.
It all happened to Tucsonan Adam Smith and his family. After 2 1/2 years trying to escape the Internet’s shaming wrath, he’s written a book, is doing interviews and is confronting it head-on. We ought to learn from his experience.
You may remember Smith. He videotaped himself in the drive-through lane at the El Con Mall Chick-fil-A, 3605 E. Broadway, on a day of fiery culture-war passion — Aug. 1, 2012. Supporters of the company had declared Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day in response to protests of the company by gay-rights supporters.
Smith, now 37, weighed in as part of a broader YouTube protest against the company. He was a jerk. He videotaped himself ordering a cup of water and lecturing the drive-through server about Chick-fil-A’s donations to anti-gay groups.
He uploaded the video to his YouTube page, expecting a short clip from his 2-minute, 20-second video to be pieced into a montage of similar protests from around the country. But his treatment of the employee was so rude, and the issue so hot, that the clip quickly “went viral,” posted and re-posted even after he tried to remove it.
I heard about it the next morning and was shocked because I knew Smith, whose children attended my son’s school. Although we weren’t close, I viewed him as a good person who, with his wife Amy, raised four good children, two of whom they’d adopted.
I remembered the day the previous school year when my son, Benjamin, had been sick for four days. On the day he went back to school, Adam’s son Sterling ran up to him and said something to the effect of, “It’s good to see you, Ben. How are you doing?”
It was such a genuine, kind response, and it reflected well on his parents. That was no accident, teacher Ann Isenberg told me.
“I very much, absolutely admired both of them as parents,” Isenberg said. “They’re really dedicated parents.”
So how could Sterling’s dad act like such a jerk? That was a relevant question for a short while. But as events cascaded, it quickly became irrelevant.
The next morning, Smith went to apologize to the Chick-fil-A employee he’d filmed. She didn’t want to see him. Then he went to work.
Smith was the chief financial officer at Vante, a Tucson-based medical-device company. But not for long. The company started getting bomb threats and nasty comments from the Internet mob.
Because of the threats, the company sent everyone home for the next two days. Around midday, CEO Roger Vogel called to ask for Smith’s resignation. When he refused, Vogel fired him, then the company put out a press release
“Vante regrets the unfortunate events that transpired yesterday in Tucson between our former CFO/Treasurer Adam Smith and an employee at Chick-fil-A. Effective immediately, Mr. Smith is no longer an employee of our company.”
It cost Smith $1 million in stock options, he said. Hence the name of his book: “Million Dollar Cup of Water.”
Smith had also been a lecturer at the UA Eller College of Management’s Finance Department and had been hired to teach a course in the coming semester, he said. That changed, too. Here’s the UA’s announcement:
Adam Smith held an appointment as an Adjunct Lecturer, Finance (non-tenure eligible) in the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona from January 2, 2012, to May 20, 2012. He presently holds no appointment with the University.
The University of Arizona is committed to being a community in which all members support the free and respectful exchange of varied ideas and perspectives. We strive to have a workforce that is diverse and respectful of different viewpoints.
Over the next few days, Smith videorecorded an apology to the Chick-fil-A employee, who forgave him when interviewed on Fox News. That should have been the end of the story, but the country was not so forgiving. That’s part of our problem.
Smith’s family sold everything, packed up a used RV and moved to Portland, Oregon, for a fresh start. But the episode hounded him. He was in one job for two weeks before the company found out about the video. He was fired.
He began disclosing the video incident up front, to avoid surprises, but twice he was either hired or had verbal agreements that were then rescinded. Two other times, jobs he had started disintegrated from within his hands.
“I guarantee you they’re thinking, ‘Why would we invite that into our company?’ ” Smith told me last week.
That’s the other part of our problem. Adam Smith made a mistake, paid dearly — disproportionately, I’d say — through the loss of his jobs, apologized and was forgiven. Now this highly skilled professional can’t get a job in his field, and the family of six is living on his wife’s $14-an-hour job along with food stamps.
They’d like to come home to Tucson but can’t see how.
Only a society overflowing with fear of the Internet mob, or a perversely punitive mentality, would allow that to happen.
It’s become such a frequent problem that a Welsh writer, Jon Ronson, has published a book on it, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.” Among his subjects was a public relations executive, Justine Sacco, who tweeted a sarcastic joke about white people not getting AIDS in Africa just before taking a flight from London to Cape Town. Her life was torn apart by the Internet outrage machine before she landed.
In a 2013 lecture, Ronson said public shaming “was abolished as a punishment in 1837. The stocks, the pillory, the scarlet letter, the whipping post, the lot. Now it’s back, delivered like remotely administered drone strikes.”
The tool — the Internet — that was so useful in leveling the playing field between the powerful and the general public has allowed that same public to administer wildly excessive punishment on people who commit mild transgressions, Ronson said. But it’s only because we let them. It’s only because of fear of the bullies.
I wondered if Vogel, the former Vante CEO, regretted firing Smith, but he would only go so far as confirming that he’d written a reference letter recommending Smith despite the Chick-fil-A episode.
“That was a very painful episode for all involved and I prefer not to revisit it, “ he said via email.
A more courageous, less punitive populace would not carry out abrupt firings and require indefinite exile for mild offenses. We would look at the offender’s behavior in context, consider it and move on.
We would stand up to the mob.
