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scripttorture · 5 years

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How much do you know about torture apologia at a government level? Like people who are actually paid to torture terrorist? I feel like that is a government-approved thing unless I’m mistaken. How can they not see they’re getting no information or just plain wrong information? And these ‘professionals’ are hiding their mental health problems? Or is the FBI torturing terrorists for information not as real as we are lead to believe? I’ve got a story idea about a victim mistakenly accused.

Thisis a pretty broad question. And it also sounds like it’s trying tostart a debate over getting writing advice. I’m going to give itthe benefit of the doubt and take it at face value as a writingquestion.

Ithink the short answer is essentially: read Rejali. He covers this inconsiderable depth, it’s the last third of his book. I’ll do mybest to summarise his points but I can’t produce 300+ pages ofevidence plus sources on a blog like this.

O’Maraalso talks about it a fair bit and Cobain’s entire book is aboutthe links between torture and the British government. Granted Cobaindoesn’t know a thing about torture but the pattern of legalwrangling and political apathy he records is incredibly valuable.

Thereare a couple of points I think are important going forward.

Thefirst is that although information is often the justification givenfor torture it’s rarely the point.

Somethingcan be justified, ignored or tolerated in someparts of a government and stringently punished in other areas.

Inlarge enough organisations leaders can be genuinely unaware what somemembers are doing.

Sogiven those points let’s start with the second question becauseit’s easiest.

Inmodern democracies people are notpaid to torture. That is not their official role. They are hired asguards, soldiers, teachers, care takers, nurses, doctors, police anda handful of other professions.

Thatis they are being paid for.And it’s not what they’re doing.

Whetherwhat they’re actually doing (torture) is condoned by anyone furtherup the chain of command then their immediate superiors is reallydependant on the circumstances. And very difficult to prove.

Governmentapproval of torture in modern states rarelylooks like top officials saying ‘We torture people!’

Here’sthe kind of phrasing it looks like instead:

‘These particular set of abuses are not torture because-’

‘This isn’t really painful’

False equivalence such as ‘Well I diet voluntarily so starving someone can’t be harmful’

Outright denial ‘Our troops could never do that!’

Ouright denial Part 2 ‘Well no one told us that was happening!’

Shifting the blame ‘Those people are lying to get into the country/get money/get attention etc-’

Shifting the blame Part 2 ‘Those people deserve it because they’re mentally ill/an ethnic minority/poor/violent/look like trouble etc-’

‘Obviously we don’t torture people but we should because it would work!’

‘We need strong measures in these desperate times!’

The sort of political/cultural outlook that links efficiency to ‘toughness’ and sees kindness and compromise as weak

Tortureapologia on the government level thrives on plausible deniability andredefining terms until they’re unrecognisable.

Forthe purposes of your story I think you’d probably be better offstepping back from the FBI.

WhatI mean by that is- if you’ve been looking for sources specificto the FBI that’s why you’re so confused. Those sources arepoorly collated, poorly studied and (personal opinion) deliberatelyconfusing.

Awellstudiedwell recorded example of torture as unofficial-government-policywould be the Franco-Algerian war. And this is alsobeset by confusion because a lotof the sources from the French side were written by torturers tojustify their actions after the event.

Onceagain I’d recommend reading Rejali and for greater context on whathe says Alleg’s TheQuestionand Fanon’s appendices to TheWretched of the Earth.

Yestorture continues because of governmental positions. But that doesn’tnecessarily mean outright orders to torture.

Itcan mean a lack of political will to eradicate torture, ie no one islooking for it. It can mean officials being aware of torture andchoosing to ignore it.

Myimpression is that apathyrather than malice at the top levels is the key. In the worst cases,yes there was outright malice from some individuals within a largergovernment. But it’s the apathy of the majority that allowed forabuse.

Governmentapproval doesn’tlook like a high level official ordering troops to torture.

Itlooks like the state Governor seeing that most of the police in theirstate probably use torture and sitting down to do this calculation:‘Am I more electable next year if I try to tackle this or if Iignore it?’

Italso looks like a Commissioner seeing that a person arrested for anemotive crime like terrorism has been complaining of ill-treatmentand doing this calculation: ‘Do I look better in the public eye ifI seem like I’m standing up for a person from a hated minority whois accused of doing something awful?’

WhatI’m driving at here is that- the reality is a lot more nebulousthen what you seem to be thinking of. Tacit acceptance, differentpriorities, cowardice- are all much more likely then the kind ofscenario where the elites explicitly order abuse.

Ithink I should move on to the third question which is just as tricky,before I get bogged down in labouring the point.

Howdo organisations not realise the information they get from torture iswrong?

Theshort answer is that by using torture they destroy the systems thatallow them to double check information. Because they can’t doublecheck anything they don’t realise that they’re working withincorrect information.

Iwilltell you how that happens but let’s have an analogy first to giveyou an idea of how skewed this makes the base information.

Imagineyou’re looking for information on the internet about something youhaven’t seen but you can’t use wikipedia, any popular searchengines or any official sites. You are going entirelyby searching tumblr. And you can only access the first piece ofinformation that comes up with any tag you search.

Picka popular fandom and imagine the kind of screwed up view you’d getof a character if you tried to find information about them like this.I am picturing the Flash fandom and Captain Cold and imagining justhow easy it would be to walk away with the impression that thecharacter was a main character not a bit part.

Nowlet me show you how including torture in an investigation is theequivalent of blocking yourself from everything but a hellsite with abroken search algorithm.

Sothe first thing to appreciate is that torture breakstrustwith the public. If torture is common place then no matter how‘secret’ an organisation tries to keep it the groups who areeffected find out.

Wenotice when people around us go missing. We pay attention when thereare stories of people ‘like us’ being hurt.

Andwe lose trust in authority. We stop reporting crimes. We stopvolunteering information.

Whichcuts an organisation off from the mainsource of accurate information they can get: voluntary reporting bymembers of the public.

Wedon’t report strange things our family or friends have done if wethink it might get them tortured. We don’t mention that we saw atall ginger man leave a back pack on that street near where the bombwent off.

Frompersonal experience- sometimes you stop reporting things even whenyou’re completely outside the context that taught you organisationscan’t be trusted. I’ve been assaulted in the UK and genuinely didnot consider calling the police. Because I learnt young that policeexist to ‘make people disappear’ and the habit is hard to break.

Thesecond point is that torture produces a lotof lies and human beings generally are terrible at telling whensomeone is lying.

Sotorturers don’t have access to the biggest source of accurateinformation but they dohear a lot of lies.

Thethird point is that when torture becomes part of an organisation thenpeople spend lesstimeconducting genuine investigations and fact checking.

Torturerstend to be pretty arrogant and they usually report looking down onpeople in their organisation who don’ttorture. Basically they seeing doing the hard work of a genuineinvestigation as boring and beneath them.

Thisworks togetherwith the first two factors to make it almost impossible to fact checkthings.

Imaginea group of 50 people tasked with investigating a particular incident.Five of them are torturers, so they’re not actually investigatinganything. This takes our number down to 45.

Thenwe remember that the torturers are generating information, even ifit’s false. Which the other members are investigating.

Let’sgo with low estimates. Let’s suggest each torturer has one victim aday (this is unlikely, real numbers are probably much higher) and outof those they get an average of two ‘possible leads’ each day(this would vary a lot, some victims would say nothing, some mightthrow out as many as twenty names in a day). Let’s also pretendthat a potential lead can be investigated by one person (this isinaccurate, I’d generally expect at least 2-3 people for each new‘lead’.).

We’vejust got rid of ten more people on the first day.

Let’spretend that it takes three days to investigate a lead. This is alsoa very low estimate, properly following up a lead can take weeks.

Withour low-estimate fictional organisation we’ve reduced the amount ofpeople doing useful work to 15 in the first three days.

Fifteenpeople trying to do the work of 50, while the torturers keepgenerating lies that are wasting the time of everyone else.

Thiscripples the organisation’s ability to work as all the time andenergy is going into investigating lies.

Andwhilethis is going on the torturers are still torturing. And they’reassumingthat their information is correct.

Sothey’re generating morelies that supportthe previous lies.

Letme give an example of what I mean.

Saya torturer takes in a random person. This first victim knows nothingabout the terrorist group but if they don’t give a name thenthey’re going to keep being tortured.

Sothey tell the torturer Wednesday Adams is definitely the leader ofthe terrorists in this area.

Nowa genuine investigator is wasting time looking for Wednesday Adams.May be they come back in a week and say that no such person exists.

Bythat point the torturer has been asking a lot of people aboutWednesday Adams. And some of them will have sworn they saw WednesdayAdams, that Wednesday Adams was behind that attack and that she haslinks to this other organisation and also that thing I saw on thenews once and- So on.

Itspirals.

Maybe it gets to the point where the torturer finally accepts there’sno ‘Wednesday Adams’ on the census. But by that point they’vestacked a lot of their personal reputation on the existence of thisshadowy leader.

Sorather than admit they’re just wrong, they assume ‘WednesdayAdams’ is a pseudonym and now they’re asking everyone what herreal name is. Now they have six different possible ‘realidentities’ for Wednesday Adams.

Andthis is how organisations can fail to notice that torture doesn’twork.

Becausethe scale of misinformation is just so huge. Because the amount oftime it takes to provethe information is wrong gives the torturers more time to embellishthe lie.

Becausesuperiors who are genuinely unaware torture is going on in theirorganisations might well look at this torturer, who keeps coming upwith new information, and these ten genuine investigators who comeback with nothing but dead ends, and decide that the tortureris the only one ‘getting things done’.

Itdoesn’t matter that they’re wrong. Because it takes months,years, to prove that they areand everyone in these organisations is under huge pressure to haveanswers now.

OKlet’s move on to question four; mental health problems intorturers.

Firstoff, I have yet to meet a mentally ill person who hasn’ttried to hide their mental health problems at some point. The worldis not very accepting of mental health problems whatever the context.The pressure to hide them is immense. In some places people are atreal risk of violence and abuse if their mental health problems arenoticed as mental health problems.

Inthat context- it isn’t surprising that torturers do try to hidetheir symptoms.

Thetoxic sub-culture torturers tend to produce is- It’s incrediblymacho. It tends to rely on ideas about how the torturers are ‘toughand strong’. It equates violence and lack of mercy with strength.

Itviews mental illness as weak.

Andbecause the people within these groups are violent, because they havea tendency to turn on each other, there’s a huge pressure to hidemental health problems. That’s way before you bring the widerorganisation into the picture.

Manyof the organisations torturers are typically part of actively try toscreen out mentally ill people. Being obviously mentally ill can meanlosing the job.

SoI don’tthink it’s particularly unusual that torturers try to hide mentalhealth problems.

Howsuccessfulthey are at hiding them is a different question and it’s difficultto answer.

Becausea lot of people are moved or dismissed on mental health grounds andthis does notmean they were involved in anything abusive.

Tortureis difficult to prove. Most torturers are not charged. Their crimesare not recorded as part of their record. They are not hired astorturers.

Accordingto the WHO around 10% of the global population has a mental health problem.

Howdo you tell the difference between the people who are just mentallyill, the people who developed mental illnesses because of ‘ordinary’job stress and the people who developed mental illnesses because theyabused others?

Withoutaccurate, fair recording of torture accusations itis impossible to tell.

Personally?I think it’s highly likely that a lot of torturers can’t hidetheir mental health problems well. That they reach a point and have abreakdown on the job. Then they lose their job.

Butall of that can happen with no record of abuse.

Weneed more research on torturers. Desperately.

Andanswering these questions about the circumstances around how peoplestop is incredibly important. It can help us spot them, it can helpus spot people who might be targeted for recruitment by torturers. Itcan help us stop torture.

Andright now there are frustratingly few answers.

Whichleaves the final question- Are the FBI torturers?

Honestly-I have no idea. I am not particularly interested in America orAmerican history. I am not American. I do not go out of my way toread things about the FBI and could tell you very little about whatthey do.

WhatI can tell you is that organisations likethe FBI have usually tortured at some point in their history. Thatglobally the United States has developed a reputation for doublestandards.

ButI can not make a definitive statement on a group I know next tonothing about.

Inorganisations likethe FBI iftorture is going on it’s often not in the entire organisation. Itis often particular branches, particular units, particular areasrather than the whole country-wide organisation.

It’seasy to make broad statements like ‘the Chicago police torturedpeople in 70s’. And that’s not untrue.

Butif we’re being specificit would be more accurate to say ‘there was a cell of torturersoperating within the Chicago police force in the 70s and the widergroup failed to stop them.’

Wasthe entire Chicago police force responsible for the abuses? I wouldsay yesbecause it was literally their job to stop these abuses and they didnot. However they were notall torturers. They were not all actively engaged in torture and Ithink it’s extremely likely that many people at the time simplydidn’t realise what was going on.

Incompetence,not necessarily active abuse.

I’vewritten an awful lot. It should be a start at answering some of yourquestions. But all of these questions are complex and difficult.

Idon’t think, in this case, you can take my answer as a substitutefor wider reading.

Onceagain, Rejali.O’Maraas well.

Allegfor the survivor’s perspective on what both describe.

Cobain,to be taken with a pinch of salt and read afterRejali because Cobain is not a scientist and falls for apologia quitea lot.

You’vechosen to tackle a story that’s going to be a lot of work. Try notto be discouraged by that.

Theseare important stories. And they deserve to be told properly.

Ihope that helps. :)

Edited for typos

Edit 2: @dude1818 That is really not funny and I don’t appreciate you trying to turn discussion of a serious crime into a joke.

I’m aware of the formatting problem and I’ve been trying to fix it for some time. I’m going to try another fix this week but I can’t actually test whether any of my attempts work because I don’t have a mobile phone.

Availableon Wordpress.

Disclaimer

#tw torture #behaviour of torturers #writing torturers #torture does not work #torture as interrogation #torture apologia #torture apologists #effect of torture on organisations #tw police brutality #Anonymous

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meeedeee · 5 years

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Cancel Culture: The Internet Eating Itself RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

As social media platforms enter their collective adolescence – Facebook is fifteen, YouTube fourteen, Twitter thirteen, tumblr twelve – I find myself thinking about how little we really understand their cultural implications, both ongoing and for the future. At this point, the idea that being online is completely optional in modern world ought to be absurd, and yet multiple friends, having spoken to their therapists about the impact of digital abuse on their mental health, were told straight up to just stop using the internet. Even if this was a viable option for some, the idea that we can neatly sidestep the problem of bad behaviour in any non-utilitarian sphere by telling those impacted to simply quit is baffling at best and a tacit form of victim-blaming at worst. The internet might be a liminal space, but object permanence still applies to what happens here: the trolls don’t vanish if we close our eyes, and if we vanquish one digital hydra-domain for Toxicity Crimes without caring to fathom the whys and hows of what went wrong, we merely ensure that three more will spring up in its place.

Is the internet a private space, a government space or a public space? Yes.

Is it corporate, communal or unaffiliated? Yes.

Is it truly global or bound by local legal jurisdictions? Yes.

Does the internet reflect our culture or create it? Yes.

Is what people say on the internet reflective of their true beliefs, or is it a constant shell-game of digital personas, marketing ploys, intrusive thoughts, growth-in-progress, personal speculation and fictional exploration? Yes.

The problem with the internet is that takes up all three areas on a Venn diagram depicting the overlap between speech and action, and while this has always been the case, we’re only now admitting that it’s a bug as well as a feature. Human interaction cannot be usefully monitored using an algorithm, but our current conception of What The Internet Is has been engineered specifically to shortcut existing forms of human oversight, the better to maximise both accessibility (good to neutral) and profits (neutral to bad). Uber and Lyft are cheaper, frequently more convenient alternatives to a traditional taxi service, for instance, but that’s because the apps themselves are functionally predicated on the removal of meaningful customer service and worker protections that were hard-won elsewhere. Sites like tumblr are free to use, but the lack of revenue generated by those users means that, past a certain point, profits can only hope to outstrip expenses by selling access to those users and/or their account data, which means in turn that paying to effectively monitor their content creation becomes vastly less important than monetising it.

Small wonder, then, that individual users of social media platforms have learned to place a high premium on their ability to curate what they see, how they see it, and who sees them in turn. When I first started blogging, the largely unwritten rule of the blogsphere was that, while particular webforums dedicated to specific topics could have rules about content and conduct, blogs and their comment pages should be kept Free. Monitoring comments was viewed as a sign of narrow-minded fearfulness: even if a participant was aggressive or abusive, the enlightened path was to let them speak, because anything else was Censorship. This position held out for a good long while, until the collective frustration of everyone who’d been graphically threatened with rape, torture and death, bombarded with slurs, exhausted by sealioning or simply fed up with nitpicking and bad faith arguments finally boiled over.

Particularly in progressive circles, the relief people felt at being told that actually, we were under no moral obligation to let assholes grandstand in the comments or repeatedly explain basic concepts to only theoretically invested strangers was overwhelming. Instead, you could simply delete them, or block them, or maybe even mock them, if the offence or initial point of ignorance seemed silly enough. But as with the previous system, this one-size-fits-all approach soon developed a downside. Thanks to the burnout so many of us felt after literal years of trying to treat patiently with trolls playing Devil’s Advocate, liberal internet culture shifted sharply towards immediate shows of anger, derision and flippancy to anyone who asked a 101 question, or who didn’t use the right language, or who did anything other than immediately agree with whatever position was explained to them, however simply.

I don’t exempt myself from this criticism, but knowing why I was so goddamn tired doesn’t change my conviction that, cumulatively, the end result did more harm than good. Without wanting to sidetrack into a lengthy dissertation on digital activism in the post-aughties decade, it seems evident in hindsight that the then-fledgling alliance between trolls, MRAs, PUAs, Redditors and 4channers to deliberately exhaust left-wing goodwill via sealioning and bad faith arguments was only the first part of a two-pronged attack. The second part, when the left had lost all patience with explaining its own beliefs and was snappily telling anyone who asked about feminism, racism or anything else to just fucking Google it, was to swoop in and persuade the rebuffed party that we were all irrational, screeching harridans who didn’t want to answer because we knew our answers were bad, and why not consider reading Roosh V instead?

The fallout of this period, I would argue, is still ongoing. In an ideal world, drawing a link between online culture wars about ownership of SFF and geekdom and the rise of far-right fascist, xenophobic extremism should be a bow so long that not even Odysseus himself could draw it. But this world, as we’ve all had frequent cause to notice, is far from ideal at the best of times – which these are not – and yet another featurebug of the internet is the fluid interpermeability of its various spaces. We talk, for instance – as I am talking here – about social media as a discreet concept, as though platforms like Twitter or Facebook are functionally separate from the other sites to which their users link; as though there is no relationship between or bleed-through from the viral Facebook post screencapped and shared on BuzzFeed, which is then linked and commented upon on Reddit, which thread is then linked to on Twitter, where an entirely new conversation emerges and subsequently spawns an article in The Huffington Post, which is shared again on Facebook and the replies to that shared on tumblr, and so on like some grizzly perpetual mention machine.

But I digress. The point here is that internet culture is best understood as a pattern of ripples, each new iteration a reaction to the previous one, spreading out until it dissipates and a new shape takes its place. Having learned that slamming the virtual door in everyone’s face was a bad idea, the online left tried establishing a better, calmer means of communication; the flipside was a sudden increase in tone-policing, conversations in which presentation was vaunted over substance and where, once again, particular groups were singled out as needing to conform to the comfort-levels of others. Overlapping with this was the move towards discussing things as being problematic, rather than using more fixed and strident language to decry particular faults – an attempt to acknowledge the inherent fallibility of human works while still allowing for criticism. A sensible goal, surely, but once again, attempting to apply the dictum universally proved a double-edged sword: if everything is problematic, then how to distinguish grave offences from trifling ones? How can anyone enjoy anything if we’re always expected to thumb the rosary of its failings first?

When everything is problematic and everyone has the right to say so, being online as any sort of creator or celebrity is like being nibbled to death by ducks. The well-meaning promise of various organisations, public figures or storytellers to take criticism on board – to listen to the fanbase and do right by their desires – was always going to stumble over the problem of differing tastes. No group is a hivemind: what one person considers bad representation or in poor taste, another might find enlightening, while yet a third party is more concerned with something else entirely. Even in cases with a clear majority opinion, it’s physically impossible to please everyone and a type of folly to try, but that has yet to stop the collective internet from demanding it be so. Out of this comes a new type of ironic frustration: having once rejoiced in being allowed to simply block trolls or timewasters, we now cast judgement on those who block us in turn, viewing them, as we once were viewed, as being fearful of criticism.

Are we creating echo chambers by curating what we see online, or are we acting in pragmatic acknowledgement of the fact that we neither have time to read everything nor an obligation to see all perspectives as equally valid? Yes.

Even if we did have the time and ability to wade through everything, is the signal-to-noise ratio of truth to lies on the internet beyond our individual ability to successfully measure, such that outsourcing some of our judgement to trusted sources is fundamentally necessary, or should we be expected to think critically about everything we encounter, even if it’s only intended as entertainment? Yes.

If something or someone online acts in a way that’s antithetical to our values, are we allowed to tune them out thereafter, knowing full well that there’s a nearly infinite supply of as-yet undisappointing content and content-creators waiting to take their place, or are we obliged to acknowledge that Doing A Bad doesn’t necessarily ruin a person forever? Yes.

And thus we come to cancel culture, the current – but by no means final – culmination of previous internet discourse waves. In this iteration, burnout at critical engagement dovetails with a new emphasis on collective content curation courtesies (try saying that six times fast), but ends up hamstrung once again by differences in taste. Or, to put it another way: someone fucks up and it’s the last straw for us personally, so we try to remove them from our timelines altogether – but unless our friends and mutuals, who we still want to engage with, are convinced to do likewise, then we haven’t really removed them at all, such that we’re now potentially willing to make failure to cancel on demand itself a cancellable offence.

Which brings us right back around to the problem of how the modern internet is fundamentally structured – which is to say, the way in which it’s overwhelmingly meant to rely on individual curation instead of collective moderation. Because the one thing each successive mode of social media discourse has in common with its predecessors is a central, and currently unanswerable question: what universal code of conduct exists that I, an individual on the internet, can adhere to – and expect others to adhere to – while we communicate across multiple different platforms?

In the real world, we understand about social behavioural norms: even if we don’t talk about them in those terms, we broadly recognise them when we see them. Of course, we also understand that those norms can vary from place to place and context to context, but as we can only ever be in one physical place at a time, it’s comparatively easy to adjust as appropriate.

But the internet, as stated, is a liminal space: it’s real and virtual, myriad and singular, private and public all at once. It confuses our sense of which rules might apply under which circumstances, jumbles the normal behavioural cues by obscuring the identity of our interlocutors, and even though we don’t acknowledge it nearly as often as we should, written communication – like spoken communication – is a skill that not everyone has, just as tone, whether spoken or written, isn’t always received (or executed, for that matter) in the way it was intended. And when it comes to politics, in which the internet and its doings now plays no small role, there’s the continual frustration that comes from observing, with more and more frequency, how many literal, real-world crimes and abuses go without punishment, and how that lack of consequences contributes in turn to the fostering of abuse and hostility towards vulnerable groups online.

This is what comes of occupying a transitional period in history: one in which laws are changed and proposed to reflect our changing awareness of the world, but where habit, custom, ignorance, bias and malice still routinely combine, both institutionally and more generally, to see those laws enacted only in part, or tokenistically, or not at all. To take one of the most egregious and well-publicised instances that ultimately presaged the #MeToo movement, the laughably meagre sentence handed down to Brock Turner, who was caught in the act of raping an unconscious woman, combined with the emphasis placed by both the judge and much of the media coverage on his swimming talents and family standing as a means of exonerating him, made it very clear that sexual violence against women is frequently held to be less important than the perceived ‘bright futures’ of its perpetrators.

Knowing this, then – knowing that the story was spread, discussed and argued about on social media, along with thousands of other, similar accounts; knowing that, even in this context, some people still freely spoke up in defence of rapists and issued misogynistic threats against their female interlocutors – is it any wonder that, in the absence of consistent legal justice in such cases, the internet tried, and is still trying, to fill the gap? Is it any wonder, when instances of racist police brutality are constantly filmed and posted online, only for the perpetrators to receive no discipline, that we lose patience for anyone who wants to debate the semantics of when, exactly, extrajudicial murder is “acceptable”?

We cannot control the brutality of the world from the safety of our keyboards, but when it exhausts or threatens us, we can at least click a button to mute its seeming adherents. We don’t always have the energy to decry the same person we’ve already argued against a thousand times before, but when a friend unthinkingly puts them back on our timeline for some new reason, we can tell them that person is cancelled and hope they take the hint not to do it again. Never mind that there is far too often no subtlety, no sense of scale or proportion to how the collective, viral internet reacts in each instance, until all outrage is rendered flat and the outside observer could be forgiven for worrying what’s gone wrong with us all, that using a homophobic trope in a TV show is thought to merit the same online response as an actual hate crime. So long as the war is waged with words alone, there’s only a finite number of outcomes that boycotting, blocking, blacklisting, cancelling, complaining and critiquing can achieve, and while some of those outcomes in particular are well worth fighting for, so many words are poured towards so many attempts that it’s easy to feel numbed to the process; or, conversely, easy to think that one response fits all contexts.

I’m tired of cancel culture, just as I was dully tired of everything that preceded it and will doubtless grow tired of everything that comes after it in turn, until our fundamental sense of what the internet is and how it should be managed finally changes. Like it or not, the internet both is and is of the world, and that is too much for any one person to sensibly try and curate at an individual level. Where nothing is moderated for us, everything must be moderated by us; and wherever people form communities, those communities will grow cultures, which will develop rules and customs that spill over into neighbouring communities, both digitally and offline, with mixed and ever-changing results. Cancel culture is particularly tricky in this regard, as the ease with which we block someone online can seldom be replicated offline, which makes it all the more intoxicating a power to wield when possible: we can’t do anything about the awful coworker who rants at us in the breakroom, but by God, we can block every person who reminds us of them on Twitter.

The thing about participating in internet discourse is, it’s like playing Civilisation in real-time, only it’s not a game and the world keeps progressing even when you log off. Things change so fast on the internet – memes, etiquette, slang, dominant opinions – and yet the changes spread so organically and so fast that we frequently adapt without keeping conscious track of when and why they shifted. Social media is like the Hotel California: we can check out any time we like, but we can never meaningfully leave – not when world leaders are still threatening nuclear war on Twitter, or when Facebook is using friendly memes to test facial recognition software, or when corporate accounts are creating multi-staffed humansonas to engage with artists on tumblr, or when YouTube algorithms are accidentally-on-purpose steering kids towards white nationalist propaganda because it makes them more money.

Of course we try and curate our time online into something finite, comprehensible, familiar, safe: the alternative is to embrace the near-infinite, incomprehensible, alien, dangerous gallimaufry of our fractured global mindscape. Of course we want to try and be critical, rational, moral in our convictions and choices; it’s just that we’re also tired and scared and everyone who wants to argue with us about anything can, even if they’re wrong and angry and also our relative, or else a complete stranger, and sometimes you just want to turn off your brain and enjoy a thing without thinking about it, or give yourself some respite, or exercise a tiny bit of autonomy in the only way you can.

It’s human nature to want to be the most amount of right for the least amount of effort, but unthinkingly taking our moral cues from internet culture the same way we’re accustomed to doing in offline contexts doesn’t work: digital culture shifts too fast and too asymmetrically to be relied on moment to moment as anything like a universal touchstone. Either you end up preaching to the choir, or you run a high risk of aggravation, not necessarily due to any fundamental ideological divide, but because your interlocutor is leaning on a different, false-universal jargon overlying alternate 101 and 201 concepts to the ones you’re using, and modern social media platforms – in what is perhaps the greatest irony of all – are uniquely poorly suited to coherent debate.

Purity wars in fandom, arguments about diversity in narrative and whether its proponents have crossed the line from criticism into bullying: these types of arguments are cyclical now, dying out and rekindling with each new wave of discourse. We might not yet be in a position to stop it, but I have some hope that being aware of it can mitigate the worst of the damage, if only because I’m loathe to watch yet another fandom steadily talk itself into hating its own core media for the sake of literal argument.

For all its flaws – and with all its potential – the internet is here to stay. Here’s hoping we figure out how to fix it before its ugliest aspects make us give up on ourselves.

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ericainchoate · 6 years

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on tumblr’s death an elegy

Tumblr, I’m sad.

You’re really the only social networking platform I had much any following on anymore. I’ve been shoved into situations of needing to delete about everything else at least 2-3 times, whereas Tumblr it only happened once.

That has led to less, you know, loss. Loss has been the theme for 2018; I’ve lost friendships, hope, all that other shit. I’ve learned that there is no place other than the shitshow support group for trans women who aren’t “cuties”, and had that repeated over and over again. I’ve been accused of being a terrible person for having a 13 year age gap between me and a friend. Not a romantic partner, a friend. And, well, I’ve learned that I have no fucking idea what I’m doing.

Therapy has been great, but it’s also made me a lot more mindful of that I have to work harder not to hurt people by accident because of the nature of queer community: no second chances unless someone wants to fuck you, and even then it’s always conditional.

And this is why it’s loss. Tumblr was that magic place where one has enough characters to throw things out into the world. I hate trying to do this on FB because it involves filters, I never know who wants to be on that filter (and also had a relationship blow the fuck apart over *that*) and ya can’t do it on Twitter because...well, 280 characters is, as I’m learning, both too long for a tweet but not long enough for a deep thought. So you can chain your tweets, but I don’t really want to be that HUGE WALL OF TEXT.

ps: on twitter, I’m http://www.twitter.com/inchoaterica ...drop me a note if I’m not following you and you want me to be; I have to be mindful about follows because of The Algorithm, etc. I don’t want to be trashed as a spammer.

Tumblr was, you know, the spiritual successor to Livejournal. You could brain-dump here, and you could further follow people without it being seen as a major imposition or expectation. Sending a FB friend request, even what with the contact ban largely mooted, is still terrifying, because all it takes is one “spam” marking and you’re fucked. There’s no light-duty FB “friend” thing; it’s in or out, even with the filters. Taking chances is really risky, and potentially something that a person could use to claim monstrosity.

Twitter, ugh, Twitter is so overrun with MRAssholes/T**Fs and Nazis (yes, I know, redundant) that it’s not really a good way to connect with people. I don’t feel like I could say “hey you wanna get coffee or something” to a Twitter mutual since people believe that to be inappropriate, and unfortunately, the older I get, the more I realize I have to follow the w y t suburban idea of “appropriate” or “inappropriate” lest one be determined to be a monster, and unfortunately...I didn’t grow up with that sort of reinforcement, so I have to guess, or try to cling to a w y t person who can explain the issue to me. That becomes very emotionally draining for people, so I have had to stop that.

Tumblr was hope for, you know, an expanding world. The idea that there might be others out there like me, without the constant life-or-death pressure of FB, where two people report your damn name and your account’s gone, a very easy way to keep a trans woman “in line.” The informalness is comforting, and I think maybe one could make friends from this kind of place without being thought of as somehow evil or underhanded for trying. There was a sufficient number of people here, so I don’t feel like an asshole yapping at 12 people, which is why I couldn’t with Dreamwidth. I’m not that fucking important, and I am really not sure how to engage appropriately because while I love all of those 12 people...it’s really egotistical on my part, perhaps unforgivably so, to expect that.

Tumblr was the low-regret option. You could actually form bonds with people here; FB is for people you already have bonds with, not new friends. Twitter, well, again, that’s Not Appropriate, so it’s talking at a bunch of people you already know or for whom you are just a curiosity. You could put things out into the world here, and sometimes they were deep and sometimes they were shallow, but sometimes they were meaningful. And sometimes they were silly. And sometimes they were both silly and meaningful.

But...based on yet another platform refusing to stand up to SESTA/FOSTA, Tumblr has shot itself in the foot. And, well, Tumblr...you were good enough and diverse enough to fight this, but instead, knuckling under seemed to be a better choice.

Tumblr, you’ve been great. But...there is no path forward when you just shoved 50% of your users of the platform. I feel like this wasn’t necessary, just like Six Apart throwing Livejournal to the wolves, because it’s just going to be good for short-term profit which will rise a little with all that “”””dirty”””” content gone, but...much as I use aviation metaphors too much, both 6A’s trashing of LJ and Yahoo!Oath!AOL!Whatever! stabbing Tumblr in the throat...it’ll pull up for a while, but a plane with the nose up and lacking propulsion is going to stall. And, well, LiveJournal and Tumblr are not like the other planes, they’re T-tails. And when a T-tail stalls...you fall the f**k out of the sky.

Tumblr, I don’t know what the painful death of this platform is gonna look like. I kind of am sad because this feels like an elegy that is truly unnecessary, and is choking off possibly the only platform where I can just go on. And sometimes shitpost. And maybe even lower-risk exposure to others.

But, you know, everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt. I think that’s the one bit of Vonnegut I know. Maybe they’ll sell the code and we can come back here again. Or maybe this is just another bridge that really ends 80 feet above San Francisco Bay.

Everything was beautiful, but this hurts like hell. That Vonnegut fucker lied to you.

#farewell tumblr #all i've ever wanted was to not be a monster to my peers #another door closes

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