{"id":76903,"date":"2022-10-01T05:00:48","date_gmt":"2022-10-01T09:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=76903"},"modified":"2022-09-30T16:30:45","modified_gmt":"2022-09-30T20:30:45","slug":"johann-haris-unlikely-career-resurrection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/10\/01\/johann-haris-unlikely-career-resurrection\/","title":{"rendered":"Johann Hari&#8217;s unlikely career resurrection"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have to admit that Johann Hari was pretty much just a British media personality I had a vague awareness of, but I hadn&#8217;t paid much attention to him (his Wikipedia sockpuppeting came to my attention in <a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/09\/15\/johann-hari-sockpuppet-master\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">2011<\/a>, and I quoted from an article he wrote for the <em>Los Angeles Times<\/em> in <a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/07\/17\/qotd-the-united-states-government-became-the-greatest-and-most-potent-maker-of-criminals-in-any-recent-century\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">2019<\/a>). As this post by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sorryisaidthat.biz\/p\/johann-hari-incest-erotica-wikipedia\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Ben at <em>Ben&#8217;s Comedy News<\/em><\/a> outlines, I&#8217;d largely missed the rest of his fall and rise:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Nowadays, Johann Hari is known as a pop psychology expert. He does TED talks and writes books with simplistic messages like:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>your smartphone is ruining your attention span! (<em>Stolen Focus<\/em>)<\/li>\n<li>you should cure your depression by throwing away your medication and joining a book club! (<em>Lost Connections<\/em>)<\/li>\n<li>the war on drugs is bad! (<em>Chasing the Scream<\/em>)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>His books get positive blurbs from distinguished thinkers, such as the comedian and twink admirer Stephen Fry, the listicle entrepreneur Arianna Huffington, the feminist and sex offender&#8217;s wife Hillary Clinton, the comedian and fake revolutionary Russell Brand, and the TV doctor Doctor Rangan Chatterjee.<\/p>\n<p>But when you look at how actual experts assess his work, it&#8217;s not so positive. The neuroscientist Dean Burnett responded to an extract of <em>Lost Connections<\/em> in his <em>Guardian<\/em> column, under the title <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/science\/brain-flapping\/2018\/jan\/08\/is-everything-johann-hari-knows-about-depression-wrong-lost-connections\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Is everything Johann Hari knows about depression wrong?<\/a> Burnett points out that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>despite Hari&#8217;s prose suggesting he&#8217;s uncovered numerous revelations, pretty much everything he &#8220;reveals&#8221; is well known already<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Hari, in pursuit of an anti-anti-depressant narrative, makes the claim that you can be diagnosed with depression and put on medication immediately after a traumatic event like losing a child, which Burnett (who teaches psychiatry) describes as:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>at best a staggering exaggeration, at worst an active fabrication to support a narrative.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But this article isn&#8217;t about what Johann Hari has been doing recently. It&#8217;s about what Hari was up to before he reinvented himself as some kind of expert, back when he was a journalist who ended up being disgraced.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s about how Hari has somehow rounded allegations of serious fabrication down to a record of minor plagiarism. It&#8217;s about how in trying to attack his critics, he seems to have inadvertently revealed his penchant for little brother incest fantasies with a troubling racial dimension. It&#8217;s about how I tried to fix the record on Wikipedia, and ran into trouble as Wikipedia&#8217;s policies collided with the sorry state of British journalism.<\/p>\n<p>Back in 2010, Johann Hari was a star newspaper columnist (if you&#8217;re a millennial that means he wrote hot takes that got lots of clicks; if you&#8217;re Gen Z, think of him as a viral TikTok star but with words on paper).<\/p>\n<p>In 2011 he was disgraced and kicked out of the profession.<\/p>\n<p>Now if you look at the articles that were written about his comeback, like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/culture\/observations\/2018\/01\/johann-hari-man-who-fell-earth-and-took-depression\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">this <em>New Statesman<\/em> piece<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/media\/2015\/jan\/02\/johann-hari-interview-drugs-book-independent\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">this <em>Guardian<\/em> piece<\/a> you&#8217;d conclude that he was disgraced for two things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>plagiarism &#8211; specifically, taking quotes from text someone had written in a book or article, and pretending that the person had said it directly to him<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>abuse of Wikipedia &#8211; in particular, using a fake identity to edit the pages of professional rivals with false allegations<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I followed the whole Hari affair pretty closely at the time (I didn&#8217;t like him because he had been a cheerleader for the Iraq War, so I enjoyed watching his career go down in flames).<\/p>\n<p>When his latest book came out a month ago, I looked at his Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia saves the history of all the different versions of each page, so <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/w\/index.php?title=Johann_Hari&#038;oldid=1064473646\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">here is a link to what I saw when I did that<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>And here&#8217;s part of the summary and the table of contents:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Screenshot-2022-10-01-at-16-18-39-Johann-Hari-incest-erotica-Wikipedia-and-the-social-construction-of-truth.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Screenshot-2022-10-01-at-16-18-39-Johann-Hari-incest-erotica-Wikipedia-and-the-social-construction-of-truth.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"470\" height=\"467\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-76904\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Screenshot-2022-10-01-at-16-18-39-Johann-Hari-incest-erotica-Wikipedia-and-the-social-construction-of-truth.png 470w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Screenshot-2022-10-01-at-16-18-39-Johann-Hari-incest-erotica-Wikipedia-and-the-social-construction-of-truth-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Screenshot-2022-10-01-at-16-18-39-Johann-Hari-incest-erotica-Wikipedia-and-the-social-construction-of-truth-120x120.png 120w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Screenshot-2022-10-01-at-16-18-39-Johann-Hari-incest-erotica-Wikipedia-and-the-social-construction-of-truth-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 470px) 100vw, 470px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The whole article struck me as weird because it didn&#8217;t mention two things I clearly remembered:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Hari got in trouble, not just for minor plagiarism, but for allegedly making things up completely.<\/li>\n<li>Even more memorably, the fake identity he used to edit Wikipedia, &#8220;David Rose&#8221;, was also used to author an incest kink porn story with a hilarious title.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>You can see why Hari (and whatever reputation management consultants he has working for him) would want to focus on the &#8220;plagiarism&#8221; angle. It&#8217;s not good to pass off a quote you got from someone&#8217;s book as something they told you directly, but it&#8217;s not as serious as completely inventing something. I suppose <em>technically<\/em> it&#8217;s plagiarism because you&#8217;re pretending you elicited the quote in an interview and you&#8217;re not citing the original book; but it&#8217;s a lot better than the typical case of plagiarism that involves <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sorryisaidthat.biz\/p\/punching-up-punching-down-bullying\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">passing off someone else&#8217;s work as your own<\/a>. Hari&#8217;s defence is that he was &#8220;cutting corners&#8221; because he was under so much pressure due to his meteoric success at young age, etc. etc.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have to admit that Johann Hari was pretty much just a British media personality I had a vague awareness of, but I hadn&#8217;t paid much attention to him (his Wikipedia sockpuppeting came to my attention in 2011, and I quoted from an article he wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2019). As this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,4,28,15],"tags":[86,213,139,444],"class_list":["post-76903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-britain","category-media","category-technology","tag-criticism","tag-newspapers","tag-psychology","tag-wikipedia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-k0n","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76903"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76906,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76903\/revisions\/76906"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}