#how quickly we (general) forget about gamergate and the like

[commiegoth]

I think we (general) gotta figure out how to distinguish between "transmisogynistic trans mascs are only an online phenomenon and anyone who talks about it is a terminally online complainer who needs to log off and touch grass" and "there are internet spaces dedicated to radicalizing trans mascs into transmisogyny much in the same way the internet has been used to radicalize cis men into misogyny, and as in that case it is never restricted to just the internet for very long" because one of these actually provides a tangible path to addressing the issue and it's not the "stop complaining" one.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“The longest-running measure of alienation in American life is the Harris Poll’s Alienation Index, which has been calculated annually for more than 50 years. It’s a simple survey that asks whether respondents agree with these five statements:

What you think doesn’t count very much anymore.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Most people with power try to take advantage of people like yourself.

The people running the country don’t really care what happens to you.

You’re left out of things going on around you.

Harris then averages the rates of agreement to reach an index, which is a rough proxy for how included Americans feel in their country and their communities. In 1998, a year after the “Birth of a Digital Nation,” was published, the score was 56%. In 2008, as the platforms became dominant, it was 58%. Last year, it was 69%, the highest it’s ever been. (The lowest level, 29%, came in the Alienation Index’s first year, 1966, the same year HP began selling the 2116A — its first computer.) It’s easy to speculate about the reasons for this increase: a financial crisis that awakened Americans to the widening gaps between rich and poor; an opioid epidemic caused by corporate greed; entrenched racism and sexism; bitterly divided partisan politics; and, of course, technological change — the prism through which Americans view all of these things, and the vector that brings Americans’ feelings about all of these things together into the same few spaces.

I’ve spent six years reporting on deeply alienated people on the internet, during which time I’ve come to see conditions of disconnection and frustration everywhere the Digital Nation touches: on social media, in search algorithms, in the digital economy. In myself. The feelings of powerlessness, estrangement, loneliness, and anger created or exacerbated by the information age are so general it can be easy to think they are just a state of nature, like an ache that persists until you forget it’s there. But then sometimes it suddenly gets much worse.

Much worse: The Americans who marked this decade most visibly with their anger and impotence are, of course, young white men. In the summer of 2014, I first reported on the jilted 24-year-old who started an unlikely social movement with a seething blog post about the behavior of his ex-girlfriend, an obscure game developer. Gamergate! It was so stupid and about nothing and quickly became so scary and about everything. An entire culture of alienated posters and clever scammers cohered around it, around the impulse that something needed to be protected and some people needed to be attacked. What you think doesn’t count very much anymore. Some of these young men were trolls, others neo-Nazis. Some got TV shows. Some got paid out by billionaires. Some made it to the White House. Many wanted media careers. A few stewed for so long in their own resentment and the deeply sad world they created that they broke with reality. Several killed. One committed one of the most horrifying crimes of the 2010s.

Many more made threats, one of the defining features of life online in the 2010s. All things considered, we barely heard from the people who received them — a failure I was a part of. Try to imagine every woman and every nonwhite, non-Christian and LGBTQ human who has been threatened with death, torture, rape, or worse, on a major social platform. Add up all of those feelings of anger and powerlessness, against the backdrop of a $24 billion company that wouldn’t take it seriously for the longest time. There is no legal recourse — only participation in a public system that abuses its users. What you think doesn’t count very much anymore. People say: “Ignore it. No one dies from internet harassment.” Or else: “I’m so sorry for what you’re going through,” like it’s a divorce or a death in the family. Both are alienating, and I write from experience. Sometimes, for reporting, I received messages over Twitter and Facebook containing images of my father, who is dead, superimposed in a gas chamber. The joke is that he was Jewish.

The truth is we don’t have the right language yet to talk about an entirely new constellation of alarming and negative interactions, from threats to dogpiles to friend requests that go unanswered for a bit too long to yes, sorry, cancellations. They’re both more and less serious than we can manage to express with words, and the gap between that and what they feel like is an alienation.

Experts might call the pictures of my father pollution in my information ecosystem. This is the best metaphor available as of 2019 for media that is bad for us. What, then, is a pristine information ecosystem? What is an information Superfund site? How do you do toxic information cleanup on, say, a town that has been poisoned by the internet? For that matter, how do we even agree on what’s toxic? Every attempt to name the problem with bad information on the internet runs into the “fake news” dilemma: Anyone can use this metaphor at scale, including and especially people who have a vested interest in keeping things extremely toxic. The sense that shared language is impossible: an alienation.

Even when we get “good” information online, we can’t always be sure where it’s coming from and why we’re seeing it when we’re seeing it. A profit-driven information apparatus uses a huge and growing fake user base to juice the statistics it shows to advertisers. The incentive is not to show you true things, but to be able to claim as many people as possible are seeing something, anything. To be no different to the men with the money than a bot, that’s an alienation. To not know where the things you read and see come from, nor that they’re real, that’s an alienation. To labor to pick out true from false, and know that many Americans don’t bother to do the same, that’s an alienation.

There are people who thrive in this world, of course: certain kinds of strivers, grifters, presidents. People who are very tendentious and very persistent. I reported a story this year about two young scammers who’d spent their whole lives online, honing their skills. They fabricated an entire world on social media with nothing more than time and used it to lead a young woman to her death. Were they the exception or the example? I couldn’t tell. Seeing people like this get their way over, and over, and over: That’s an alienation.

The big social media platforms are trying very hard to address the problem of toxic information, they tell us. But the algorithms that they tweak — I personally always imagine an old Swiss watchmaker squinting through a loupe — are top secret stuff. Secret corporate formulas encourage conspiratorial thinking. You’re left out of things going on around you.

Creators, who depend on these algorithms for money, are thus alienated, as are the people who consume their creations, which are frequently conspiratorial. And the creators are the (relatively) privileged ones! Each major social network is a brutal hierarchy. The people who ascend tend to be teeth-grindingly obsessed with what works and what doesn’t. The people who don’t suspect the risen have achieved their status through a series of inauthentic poses. Or they feel grossly inadequate. Either response is alienating. What you think doesn’t count very much anymore.

These dynamics play out in a desperate theater of social media optimization that my colleague Anne Helen Peterson so memorably described in her viral story about millennial burnout. It’s almost always unpaid work, the product of which doesn’t belong to the person who makes it. To be alienated from one’s labor — that rings a bell!

Which brings us to the new economy of freelancers and gig workers, precarious, unprotected, and connected. Hourly workers fry their brains with images no one should ever see — information detoxification — working to meet bizarre and inconsistent standards handed down from a distant authority, and then melt down in filthy bathrooms. Harried subcontracted delivery drivers feel so desperate to meet overnight shipping deadlines they get in deadly crashes. Uber drivers, some of whom sleep in parking lots, have separate bathrooms than Uber corporate staff. These people, it stands to reason, might be alienated. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Meanwhile, the median home price is San Francisco is $1.4 million. This is where the Digital Nation mostly lives, in the most beautiful place in the country, profiting directly or indirectly off our participation in the alienating world they’ve built. Many of these people don’t want their children using the products and networks they build and sell. The people running the country don’t really care what happens to you.

Still, they’ll listen to you and spy on you for law enforcement. They’ll use that data, which they may or may not protect, to get richer. They’ll build special privacy schemesfor themselves. Most people with power try to take advantage of people like yourself.Disempowered and unsure how to express it, you may take a strange comfort in the fact that there is another alienated human on the other end of your device. You’ll never meet them, but at least they will hear you.” - Joseph Bernstein, “Alienated, Alone And Angry: What The Digital Revolution Really Did To Us.” Buzzfeed News [!!!!], December 17, 2019.