15 Minutes of Shame

- I love it when you pretentious types get it.

It shows how much of a fuckin' asshole that you really are.

- Now you have no friends on our side either,

because you're a stupid fuckin' cunt.

So I hope you kill yourself.

- I wonder what her blood looks like.

I'd take her blood on the streets,

then having to go to jail for a few years.

- I never heard that term cancel culture

until after I'd been cancelled.

- Hey bud, just want to give you a heads up

and warn you that your behavior

is probably going to end

in someone killing you and your wife and child.

You are scum.

Fuck you.

Fuck your wife.

Fuck that baby in the New York Times.

Fuck off forever.

Eat shit and die.

- Imagine waking up one morning

with the whole world,

suddenly knowing your name, and talking about you.

Not because you cured a disease,

or saved your neighbor's house from burning down.

Everyone knows who you are,

because your mistake,

your secret, has now been made public.

- Monica, look over here!

- Trust me, I know a little something about this.

Monica, Monica!

Say something, Monica!

- In 1998, I lost my reputation,

and my dignity,

and I almost lost my life.

- If you are hazy on the Monica Lewinsky story, at 22,

she and President Clinton began a relationship

that very long story short ended

up with graphic details being made public.

I was branded as a tramp,

tart,

slut,

whore,

bimbo.

Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure

to a publicly humiliated one worldwide.

- Monica said at one point today,

she is seeing a therapist over her addiction to sex,

and she's seeing a dietician

to overcome her addiction to food.

You know she could have solved both of these problems

just by keeping her mouth shut.

I was patient zero

of having a reputation completely destroyed

worldwide because of the internet.

And I would not be the last.

As the internet grew and changed.

- You make a profile, by answering some questions.

- I saw it become a breeding ground for outrage.

- We live in an outrage culture.

And ridicule.

Shit.

- Threat from a woman who sparked a Twitter backlash.

- Whether it was pile-ons.

- Judge and juries on social media

began weighing in.

Hateful troll mobs.

- The video sparking outrage on Twitter.

So mean.

Or cyber harassment.

- Men going after women in really hostile, aggressive ways.

- Cyber bullying has tripled in the past year.

- Our culture was drowning in something.

Shame.

Shame,

shame,

shame.

- And I wanted to understand why.

- So I teamed up with filmmaker, Max Joseph,

who knows a thing or two

about documenting internet phenomena.

And together,

we decided to get to the bottom

of this Renaissance of public shaming.

Okay, today is the day

I am finally leaving to go film this documentary.

- We talked to the thought leaders.

- I'm here because I wrote a book about public shaming.

- I'm asked about cancel culture probably every day.

- We talked to the experts.

- There's something about social media

that you can get a flash mob of outrage

against somebody in seconds.

- There is a self-censoring effect, a chilling effect.

Even if you're witnessing somebody else become the target.

The outrage, the bullying.

We are operating at our lowest level

as a species right now.

Shaming culture.

- I think we've gone way too far.

- So what are the consequences?

How did we get here?

- Celebrities sex taping...

Where is it leading us?

- You hit one of those trip wires,

the whole world is gonna blow up.

- And where the fuck are we going?

- Well, let me show you where we're gonna do this.

Wow, look at this.

Yeah.

We pulled out all the stops for you, Jon.

Are you ready to talk all about shame?

- Sure, we could do that.

- Jon Ronson is an author, a journalist,

a podcaster, a screenwriter.

- And I'm here because I wrote a book about public shaming,

called, So You've Been Publicly Shamed.

- The book was released in 2015

and received a fair amount of attention.

- For a little while I became like Mister Shame,

like people would call on me

to adjudicate shaming situations

like does this person deserve their shame?

I didn't want to be that person for a bunch of reasons.

One reason is that if I've learned anything from this,

I've learned that each individual story

is very nuanced.

There's severities of transgression.

There's the type of world that the transgressor comes from.

They tend to be people who have been deemed

representative of something that's wrong with society.

And the fact is sometimes they are,

and sometimes they're not.

I think it's just,

it's really important to differentiate between, you know,

who is the person being shamed and what have they done?

Hi, my name is Matt Colvin.

I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee,

and I'm known for

my article in the New York Times about having

17,000 bottles of hand sanitizer.

- It's a story that has gone viral.

A Hixson man purchased 18,000 bottles of hand sanitizer.

- It's a story that is dominating national headlines,

after the New York Times wrote about Matt Colvin,

stockpiling goods amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Matt Colvin.

Matt Colvin.

- Matt Colvin experienced

one of the biggest shamings of 2020.

- If you are selling hand sanitizer for $200,

shame on you. - Who is doing that?

Shame on you.

- Pretty much the world over felt justified

in calling him an asshole.

Hey Max, how's it going?

Whatever he was,

how did this guy working out of his garage in Chattanooga?

- This is where the New York Times

photos were done and everything.

- Become a magnet for worldwide shame?

In early 2020,

I was the owner of a thriving E-commerce business,

selling things on Amazon.

A lot of times it's a third-party seller

who Amazon is allowing to use their platform.

I sold everything from bird seed to toys, dolls,

going to stores like Ross and Walmart

and finding things that were discontinued

or in short supply,

that people were willing to pay

a little bit more for on Amazon

and making my living off of that.

This patch here is from the time

that I spent in the military.

It's got Iraq and Afghanistan.

I joined the military after 9/11.

It almost felt like a civic duty.

I saw a lot of death, doom, and destruction,

and for my mental and personal safety,

I needed to get out of that environment.

Being able to work around

some of the physical and mental issues

that come and go.

Selling on Amazon with Amazon handling

the fulfillment for things gave me that flexibility.

- And how did you start getting into hand sanitizer?

- To talk about the hand sanitizer,

you want to go back to February.

- We only have about a dozen cases

that have been diagnosed in the United States.

Most of those in travelers from China and the flow...

- I had heard about the coronavirus.

It seemed like something that was remote

and happening in China.

And I didn't see it gaining a foothold here.

I tracked things that were trending

and hand sanitizer was starting to be a thing.

I bought several thousand bottles from Dollar Tree.

And then from driving around.