Sassy Teen From Queens Meets Match In Asshole Banker

The Setting: Somewhere in Manhattan.

The Players: Evan, who "works on Wall Street" and his friend Ivanna, who probably works in PR or something; Sasha, a teenager from Queens with a smart mouth.

The Conflict: Ivanna has left her Sidekick (...) in a cab. She and Evan find out it was picked up by Sasha, now using it to "take photographs of herself and her friends." Upon emailing Sasha and asking for the phone back, Evan is informed that his “white ass didn’t deserve to have it back," which, true or not, is something no one had ever dared say to Evan's cracker ass. He was prepared to neither let the diss nor the theft of the Sidekick slide.

The Resolution:

Miffed, Evan set up a Web page with her picture and a description of what had happened. He forwarded the link to his friends, and they forwarded it to their friends. Someone found the MySpace page of Sasha’s boyfriend, and a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her address online and took a video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the video on the site. The story was picked up by the news filter Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a minute. He created a bulletin board for his readers to share their stories, but it crashed under the weight of responses. Evan and Ivanna went to the police, but the police filed the report under “lost,” rather than “stolen,” which essentially closed the case. “By this point millions of readers were watching,” Shirky writes, “and dozens of mainstream news outlets had covered the story.” Bowing to the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassified the item as “stolen.” Sasha was arrested, and Evan got his friend’s Sidekick back.

Twitter, Facebook and Social Activism [New Yorker via Heidi Moore]