I’ve made clear before that I absolutely despise the law-school message board Xoxohth (a.k.a. AutoAdmit). As I wrote then, “the cretins who inhabit that message board are a bunch of dishonest, pretentious, snobby, racist a**holes who delight in anonymous character assassination and tearing down their fellow human beings.” I stand by those words. But even so, to be perfectly honest, I take no joy in this:
[Law firm] Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge rescinded its job offer to Anthony Ciolli, the 3L at Penn Law who resigned as “Chief Education Director” of AutoAdmit last month. He resigned in the wake of a WaPo exposé on how the site in part served as a platform for attacks and defamatory remarks about female law students, among others. …
Charles DeWitt (pictured, left), managing partner at Edwards Angell’s Boston office, where Ciolli was slated to be a litigation associate, told the Law Blog: “He worked for us last summer. He’s not going to work for us in the fall.”
Ciolli took time from working on final exams to talk to the Law Blog. “Three years of legal education has been wasted because of an unmoderated message board,” he said, adding, “The timing is absolutely horrible.” The 23-year-old…added that “I don’t know what I’m going to do next.”
To be honest, I feel bad for the kid. As much as I hate the product he helped create, I wouldn’t wish his fate on any fellow law student. That doesn’t necessarily mean I think he doesn’t deserve what happened to him; there is some factual dispute over how much control he had over the content of the message board, but certainly, through his role in creating a disgusting site widely known for character assassination, he set himself up for this fall. As a commenter on Above the Law put it:
Dude had it coming. He decided to get involved with a free speech experiment in which he helped run an unmoderated message board. People posted insidious lies in the forum he hosted, and those lies have caused harm to the career prospects of innocent people. Now his career has been affected, too, because of what he allowed to happen to the careers of others. In what world is this not justice?
True… and yet, and yet. However much of a scumbag he might be, I can’t bring myself to be happy about what’s happened to him. It sucks, it just really sucks, to be 23 years old and have your career s***canned because you made a mistake, even a big one. I honestly feel for him. And this is precisely why I find the behavior of the a**holes on AutoAdmit (and, cough cough, ND Nation at times, among other places on the wild, wild ‘Net) so baffling: they don’t think twice about tearing down their fellow human beings over nothing, and they frequently take immense joy in their peers’ failures and foibles… while I, on the other hand, don’t even feel the slightest twinge of schadenfreude over something like this (even where the punishment arguably fits the crime quite nicely). And I don’t consider myself an unusually noble or magnanimous person. I’d like to think I’m pretty normal in terms of my tendency not to celebrate other people’s misfortunes. But maybe I’m wrong about that? I dunno. Perhaps I’m naive, but I think most people are good at heart, and at worst are thoughtless rather than spiteful. Once faced with the humanity of another person, I think most people feel empathy. The problem with the Internet, sometimes, is that you don’t have to face the other person’s humanity, you can just treat them like a series of pixels or a string of binary code. That leads to dehumanization and a lack of empathy. And I think we need to strive to fight that.
In this particular case, given all the circumstances, I don’t blame others if they do feel a bit of joy over Mr. Ciolli’s pain. I can understand the viewpoint of the commenter who wrote, “I hope this is only the first for the assholes at AutoAdmit.com. They are truly the worst this world has to offer, and I hope all of them are ruined.” I agree that they are, if their online behavior is any indication of their true character, “truly the worst this world has to offer,” but as for hoping that they’re “ruined”? No, I don’t hope that. I hope they see the error of their ways and reform themselves. I hope they make amends with the people they’ve hurt. But I don’t hope they’re “ruined,” and I’m not glad Ciolli is jobless. It was probably the right decision, and he probably deserves it, but I’m not glad about it. All I can think about his situation is, “man, that sucks for him.” Again, I don’t mean to make myself sound noble or anything, that’s just honestly how I feel. And that’s why it truly confuses me that some other people, especially when surrounded by the cloak of Internet anonymity, can become so strikingly mean and nasty and hurtful, for no reason. Do they not understand these are real people they’re hurting, just as I understand that Anthony Ciolli, whatever his flaws, is a real person? I don’t get it. I really don’t.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:26:54 am
Brendan, you are much more noble than most people. Most people who have as much loathing as you have shown for AutoAdmit would be glad to see him ruined over it. People need to see the guilty suffer, and all the more so in a case like this. There’s a reason why Schadenfreude is a well known word, and it’s not that people like the sound of German.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:31:50 am
Maybe so. And don’t get me wrong, it isn’t that I don’t have a sense of justice. But even where justice is served, I usually feel something more akin to a vague sense that what needed to be done was done, rather than actual joy in seeing someone’s life (or career, or a significant portion thereof) ruined. I suppose there are exceptions, and it may be less that I’m “noble” and more that I tend to empathize strongly with people who are my peers or who I’ve shared some life experience with. Obviously, a third-year law student entering the legal workforce is someone I can identify with very closely. :)
May 4th, 2007 at 3:31:22 am
but…but…free speech
May 4th, 2007 at 8:05:07 am
Another reason not to use your real identity online.
May 4th, 2007 at 8:45:35 am
It sucks, it just really sucks, to be 23 years old and have your career s***canned because you made a mistake, even a big one. I honestly feel for him.
Don Imus is on line 1.
May 4th, 2007 at 9:05:47 am
Minor technical point– Ciolli was not a “co-founder” of xoxohth. It had been in existence for at least a few months before he became associated with it.
That said, I find incredibly disingenuous and bordering on assinine his self-serving disclaimers about not having any control at all over what takes place on the message board side.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:35:53 pm
I am sure he can still find work. Yes, he will make less money, but at 23 I think he can rebuild his life. I think it is unfortunate and I feel sympathy, but I do not think too many tears need to be shed.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:37:49 pm
The bottom line is that free speech doesn’t fly in the professional world. If you want to land a 6 figure gig at a big firm, you’ve got to fall in line. Say whatever you want… and you might not get arrested… but that doesn’t mean anyone should hire you.
If you go to law school to get a firm job–you’ve got to know that firms are businesses with reputatations that they have to uphold. Would it be fair to this firm’s other associates, partners, & clients if they hired this kid? Nope. He comes in with a reputation that nobody else wants to be associated with. It’s why he’s not getting a job w/this firm–and it’s why he’s probably not going to find a great job anywhere.
It’s just business. If you want to cry about free speech… go be a journalism professor… don’t go to law school.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:39:08 pm
“but…but…free speech”
Ha, yeah I guess that did not help him too much. It is understandable that a large firm would not want to be associated with someone who would bring them some bad press. He simply needs to look for other options.
May 4th, 2007 at 2:12:30 pm
This guy’s career suicide might even be deserving of a Darwin award.
May 4th, 2007 at 3:01:52 pm
Theaetetus (I know he’s reading this) should take note.
May 4th, 2007 at 3:08:09 pm
If you want to cry about free speech… go be a journalism professor… don’t go to law school.
I assume this comment was directed at USC 1L, not at me, since my post manifestly had nothing to do with free speech.
Who the hell is Theaetetus?
May 4th, 2007 at 3:21:48 pm
Sorry, Brendan, I’m not in the business of outting people. Search it on xo.
May 4th, 2007 at 3:25:35 pm
Oh, I get it… it’s an XO poster. Okay.
I wasn’t asking you to “out” anyone, I just didn’t even get the reference. :)
May 4th, 2007 at 3:43:11 pm
why should theatetus take note? what are you suggesting, if not an outting of him (or anyone else)?
May 4th, 2007 at 4:30:36 pm
Since when is this even vaguely a “free speech” issue … ?
As far as I understand the Constitutional implications, Ciolli was completely free to express himself - and the law firm are equally free to choose not to offer him employment …
Unless I am mistaken “Free speech” and “No-consequences speech” are in no way identical …
May 6th, 2007 at 3:26:34 am
So there’s only one law firm hiring, nobody else hires lawyers, and a law degree is useless for anything else?
May 6th, 2007 at 10:24:56 am
“I assume this comment was directed at USC 1L”
I assume it was directed at Anthony Ciolli, who seems to think the First Amendment means there should be no consequqnces for his decisions to associate with and defend the site.
“So there’s only one law firm hiring, nobody else hires lawyers, and a law degree is useless for anything else?”
No. No. No.
But — no other law firm is likely to touch him after this, so the first question misses the point. As for the other two, he’s still got some ’splainin’ to do in any event, which will be a difficult burden to bear until he establishes a track record to offset the predicament he’s gotten himself into.
More directly: lawyers themselves are a largely risk-averse bunch, and non-lawyers hiring lawyers are doing so in orer to solve (or avoid) problems, so the last thing they want is a whole new set of headaches that come along with the lawyer they hire. Ciolli, at this point in his career, is the type of employee who would require his employer to have daily shipments of Advil by the case. He’s radioactive at the moment. It will fade, eventually. But until then, he’s in a bit of a bind. The only real surprising thing is that he didn’t realize it was going to happen months ago (if not years).