We Live in Fear of the Online Mobs
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This is the result of a PC culture. It has made it impossible to have an open and honest discussion about anything. It is easier to just label someone a racist, sexist, or other "buzzwords", than to strengthen your argument. Where are the times when we fought ideas, not people?
From my observation the kind of people doing things like this are the ones losing the intellectual argument. If you KNOW someone is wrong, why not debate them? Why go after them personally?
I wrote this in a rush, I apologize for any mistakes or inconsistencies.
So you're saying that, in your opinion, the KKK and those guys with the swastika face-tattoos are winning the "intellectual argument"?
Because that's literally what you're saying. Unless you're trying to say that this has been a learning experience; And that maybe there are instances where after, say, fighting a World War over the topic, it no longer needs further intellectual debate?
They, and the violent parts of anti-fa, are not the only groups.
I don't think people appreciate just how much communicating in a specific format begins to change the way you think and perceive the world. If you talk frequently in a medium limited to 140 characters, that will affect the way you think and set up communication. Same goes with pictures, or only video. The means by which we interact and shape the world also shape us at the same time. Are we that surprised then that an outrage and drama driven culture emerge from tools that are driven by instant emotional reactions?
Another thing to think about. With everyone having access to the ability to mass produce and distribute content to the world, what you consume begins to matter more and more. If all you want to eat is mental junk food, then you have all the mental junk food you could ever want for eternity. No one is going to stop you. No one at the internet companies want to stop you. People have never had to watch for this sort of thing before. Are we surprised that people binge on content that strengthens their world view and neglect views that challenge their own? There is no way a balanced view of the world can survive when people don't think about what they spend their time consuming and adjust.
There is a lot more going on. It's a multi-system problem that feeds into itself and other systems at the same time.
Are we going to sacrifice the teachings of the enlightenment at the alter of political correctness? Are we going to remain silent just because reality is uncomfortable?
It is my belief that these people are a minority. They are just very loud.
Opinions, and speech, have power. Otherwise there wouldn't be a point in engaging in it. "Having power" is synonymous with the ability to cause harm. Therefore, some speech is harmful.
When someone spreads opinions that someone else considers dangerous, a deeply human mechanism kicks in: criticising/shaming/isolating.
These aren't new mechanisms. Beginning with the first species that formed groups of cooperation, i.e. societies, there was a need to establish and defend group norms. Today, the harshest mechanisms to correct people who behave in ways that are considered harmful are criminal laws. But long before we get to the level of crime, each one of us uses a repertoire of behaviours meant to inform you of your transgressions, and to put the perceived cost of them on you.
This starts with your father's raised eyebrow when you're interrupting your sister (again!). It's the teacher calling you out for being lazy. And it's the teammates not talking to you after you lost them the match.
These mechanisms escalate along with the perceived harm. It starts with subtle hints that you should work more diligently, and only when such attempts fail, it escalates to direct appeals, or even the loss of your job.
Political opinions aren't somehow exempt from the judgement by others. If there's a real danger that a reasonable employer will fire you for you political opinion, don't ask "who will be targeted next?". Ask just how far from the pack have you strayed?
>Political opinions aren't somehow exempt from the judgement by others. If there's a real danger that a reasonable employer will fire you for you political opinion, don't ask "who will be targeted next?". Ask just how far from the pack have you strayed?
Are you suggesting that the majority is always correct in what it deems is worthy of punishment?
But I'll freely admit that this ideal isn't true in practice, where we see elements of a wisdom-of-the-elders system of justice mixed in, because we don't fully trust the majority to understand that democracy isn't two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
I agree. Nothing and no one is exempt from judgement or criticism. This is exactly what some people seem to refuse to understand.
> Opinions, and speech, have power Nonsense. People have power.
> Therefore, some speech is harmful
We are past the inquisition. Word's don't hurt, they don't kill, they don't destroy lives. People do that. There is the argument that they can encourage you to do all these things, but does it really happen outside an "echo chamber"? Throughout history this happened only when conflicting opinions weren't allowed.
In the free market of ideas the bad ideas will lose and the good ones will win. It is inevitable that the best "product" wins. These people know it, that is why they don't allow others to voice conflicting opinions. They will lose. The only sane and healthy way to fight what you called "harmful speech" (i.e. the kind that encourages violence and/or discrimination) is through debate. If we silence people and destroy their lives are we really better?
If that were so, then pharma companies wouldn't spend more on advertising than R&D. And fat32 isn't ubiquitous because it's 'best'. There are many, many ways to beat your competition, and having the better product is just one.
I do otherwise agree that people shouldn't be silenced.
Do you have proof of this? Seems that a lot of bad ideas win. Or are we defining good and bad ideas circularly; the ones that win are the good ones?
Where do words come from?
How? By what mechanism? An opinion isn't a product.
Take ISIS as an example that's less controversial (here): do you believe that people willing to act as suicide bombers can be convinced, by rational argument alone, to change their views?
And considering there are still extreme right-wing extremists, adopting the symbols of their predecessors from 70 years+ ago: how long does this market take to do its magic?
Yes, I'm using the most extreme example, because obviously people shouldn't lose their livelihood for, say, complaining about the weather. But note that there's a fail-safe in this mechanism: to have a reasonable expectation that doxxing someone will get them fired, the speech in question must be outside the Overton-window of what society deems acceptable.
> If we silence people and destroy their lives are we really better?
For that memo: it would seem extreme, yes–and I believe the reason for the firing wasn't meant to penalise his opinion, but an attempt to quell the damage created inside and outside of Google by his ham-fisted treatment of a sensible topic.
But for neo-nazis: yes, we are better. Because they are motivated by hate, and seek to harm innocent people ("Jews will not replace us"). Whereas their opponents only seek to stop them. I, for example, frequently attend counterprotests when neonazis try to march through the streets of my city. But I'm not Antifa or a communist or Stalinist. When they stop, I will not attend some other rally calling for the death of bankers, or people with glasses.
Also:
> Word's don't hurt, they don't kill, they don't destroy lives.
Is somewhat in conflict with "but if you tell their employer, you're destroying their lifes!"
Of course words can harm. Otherwise they're either completely useless, or have only positive impacts. In that case we should connect a source of randomness with a text-to-speech synthesiser, and watch the world magically improve.
Yes. But it's not the way to resolve interpersonal issues in a progressive society.
Do you personally condone this mechanism? (By the way, this bothers me. I sometimes hear an argument in the form: "be careful saying that, otherwise <unspecified people> will come after you, because it's human nature". Often it feels like a subtle warning, where <unspecified people> include the speaker, but without him saying it directly. For example, someone says "we should prevent immigrants coming to the country, because it will stir up racist sentiment"; without explicitly rejecting or affirming their racist beliefs.)
The way to do it properly is to have a rational discussion about why are the opinions in question considered dangerous by someone. Stop and think, where is the danger? And together, look into the merits of that claim. And maybe decide democratically about the best way to proceed.
A main reason is that it actually allows a much more gradual reaction than otherwise possible: if your spouse never does the dishes, and you're not allowed to disapprove of it in any way that puts emotional pressure on them (i. e. getting angry), do you believe you can convince them with only rational arguments?
And if you can't convince them with rational arguments, what's next? You'd basically have to leave them to protect yourself from the growing anger, right? So, without the gradual instruments of social coercion, all that's left will be those usually reserved as the ultima ratio.
(yes–you could hire someone, or buy a machine to do the dishes. but this was an allegory)
So, are you saying that it's acceptable that someone is shamed and isolated by the society to the point where he cannot, for example, find a job? That's within the current laws, but I am sorry, I find this idea very morally unacceptable.
I think a relationship is a different situation. But to return to the original matter - if I cannot convince someone with rational argument, why should I take their emotions seriously (that they feel threatened by something)? They need to learn to handle their emotions first, and then we can talk.
Maybe I just don't understand what you're saying, you have confused it somehow. You started talking about somebody feeling threatened, and now you're talking about them being angry. If they cannot control their anger about things that are not really threatening to the point we cannot even have rational discussion about what they perceive as a threat, they are mentally ill and they need to learn to cope with it.
If it was broadly unacceptable to advocate that women should be socially equal, we'd have online mobs chasing down people who dared to suggest that. The current flavour of acceptable thought may change over time; the problem isn't the flavour, it's the mobs.
Political correctness is just a fancy way of saying: "You can't say that because <I> find it offensive!".
The mob isn't the problem, letting them run free is.
/pəˈlidəkəl kəˈrek(t)nəs/
noun
the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes,
of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude,
marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially
disadvantaged or discriminated against.
Every culture has things that must not be said (whether true or not), and they certainly don't have to be offensive. To say them is not politically correct. PC is part of culture.
Alternatively, just let them be wrong.
It's neither good nor bad; it just is, and we must collectively learn to navigate these new waters. Parts will suck, parts will leave us better off as a society. I think it's an inevitable consequence of our exponentially increased global connectivity. You can't really stop it.
Personally, I've found that the best way to deal with difficult topics is to just not discuss them online. Those kinds of conversations don't really work when you can't have interruptions or interludes, can't react to your companions' body language, can't experience genuine empathy and pain -- can't even sense that there's a living, breathing creature on the other end of the line. On the internet, everything is a manifesto. In the real world, ideas are ephemeral and flexible.
"If you KNOW someone is wrong, why not debate them?"
To answer your question, you can read Kathy Sierra's article[1] on her interaction with gamergate. Basically, it's because there's no right answer and the questions never ever end. It's railing against a tidal wave of identical ideas, and the only apparent solution is to join an equally powerful wave heading in the opposite direction.
The scary bit is employment. If a bunch of Twitter users wrote me mean emails, I'd spend about a minute creating a filter to drop them all and then go back to my life. If those emails went to my employer, on the other hand, there is a very real chance that they would determine that I'm more trouble than I'm worth.
This is a new and unique security hole in our social fabric, and it's one that didn't exist 20 years ago. I don't have a good solution, but this will keep getting worse until we find one.
You do. You're already using it (on HN at least). Pseudo-anonymity. The chances of someone doxxing you over a small-scale Twitter dispute is slim.
The problem with this is the 'sort of behavior' you are referring to is posting any statements that disagree with the worldview of the majority of the people in your circles.
Without anonymity you will also lack civil discourse when all of the sane people on the minority side know not to speak up because they fear retribution.
Anyone who publicly considered voting for Trump was accused of being a sexist, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobe. So instead of any sane discourse, there was just a surprise upset when Trump won because everyone was convinced the strategy of accusing all Trump supporters of 'isms' until they shut up was working.
While generally I'd agree that self censorship is a bad thing, I'd also agree that an ability to control one's impulsiveness is just the opposite. Impulse control is what I was referring to above as my general reasoning for why I default to using my real identity online, not self censorship.
We might lose some civility but we also gain a lot of honesty which is absent everywhere else now due to PC culture. So the question is whether we prefer sometimes uncivilized but honest discussion or a civil veneer of what people really think.
Also I really hope I didn't give the idea that I think all discourse must be kept PC, or even civil. That'd be a rather sad world to live in.
Doxxing has become the weapon of first resort, by all sides.
I've always tended to travel ahead of or away from the herds, but socially it's become pretty costly in the last few years.
This has been growing over a long time and is honestly pretty scary when I consider what this could turn into down the road. I'm doing my best to combat this by sticking up for what I believe in out in the open and I hope others do too.
I'll let you figure this one out. I don't really think it's okay to punch _anyone_.
Given that Spencer's position is seriously indefensible, it's much more effective to attack his arguments directly.
I doubt you lost the friends for that. You lost friends likely because of the beliefs that you supported with this. While people can be pretty unreasonable, I would be cautious to paint them even more so. It's only going to strengthen any divide on issues that likely caused you to lose the friends.
Another part is the context of the argument. I'm pretty against punching people too. I'm not going to bring up that argument for Richard Spencer because I don't think people punching actual Nazi's is a big problem compared to the many others I support. What issues you choose to be outspoken about is a statement in itself.
Edit: This is all context based. See OP's thread below for specifics.
I'm required to commit a serious misdemeanor or possible felony to disagree with their views?
Also, the comments about Richard Spencer weren't mine, I was just responding to them in this thread. You're painting with some pretty broad brushes here.
It depends on the context. To use the context of Richard Spencer, if you spend more time arguing for not punching him than with other larger injustices, it speaks to moral priorities, which is what your friends likely judged you on.
I can't imagine this being anything else, but if it's a different context do add it. Again, it's all based on that. I'm simply pointing out that you didn't lose friends for believing you shouldn't punch people.
Me, not coming from much privilege, and being a bit of a troll, questioned their priorities and why they hadn't previously been doing much of anything to fight very obvious injustices all around them that they were already aware of.
See, while they're out there following the mob, my job had me meet and talk to Ben Crump today. I'd much rather spend my time with positive people doing the right thing for _everyone_ in this country and not just for certain groups.
We cannot just have everyone randomly going off Robbin-Hooding around based on their own morals and half(at best) understanding of complex issues.
Pretty active, I'd say.
There's no such thing as "due process, sometimes". Fair treatment is only fair when it's a guarantee.
If someone is the victim of a crime that goes unpunished (and in many cases uninvestigated), then due process failed to serve them too. I say unpunished for lack of a better word -- it's a case where society allowed them to be victimized/targeted of a crime.
Fuck, can we figure out how to resurrect Bill Kunstler somehow? We need him now more than ever.
It takes a really warped brand of morality to say things like this.
Please guide us on the issues that matter, as free speech is not on your list.
there it is, the whole problem with the current hate epidemic in the USA. "if you're not against them you're one of them" and critical thinking be damned, coupled it "everyone in the other side is [x]" where x is anything but decent human with differing opinions, which is a well known tactic to wear empathy and cause conflict to erupt.
the moment either side will gain critical mass such as to be impossible to be policed you'll lose your democracy, so beware of people thinking it's fair to go above the law to crush an idea, because while there are people with despicable ideas like Spencer, the mob won't actually stop judging case be case and will leash to anyone that's not "one of us". it's already happening, with people actively trying to scare voters of a party to hide in fear, and if you think that's good for democracy, well, let's hope you're in the minority.
People wearing swastikas are not decent humans. People calling for the subjugation of other races or minorities are not decent humans. There is no nuance here.
> despicable ideas
we can all agree that most of their ideas are from outrageous to sheer folly (racial superiority, eugenics, blood and soil, you name it).
However, here's the thing: calling Nazis Nazis is fine and punching Nazis is, let's say, in a moral grey area subject to personal interpretation, being at least outside of law. but my own gripe is not with the whole "punching a Nazi" thing, it's whom decide someone classify as a Nazi. Some groups are self evident, being self proclaimed; fine, fair targets. Some group share most of the ideas publicly, so no escaping there from the label. Some person share some of the ideas, maybe not even the most outrageous, say, supports closing borders or just support legal immigration. Some person are guilt by association.
Where do you draw the line? Person are quite rational and I expect somewhere between the spectrum there's a 'too much of a Nazi' at which you get into this sort of 'punchable' level of naziness, or something. But where would an angry mob draw the line? An antifa death squad fueled by all these 'they're subhumans' 'punch a nazi' slogans? You're basically merging extra-judiciary executive power with rage fueled irrationality, and that's bad, and that's growing.
remember, there's a constant stream on most media that 'everyone supporting X is a Nazi', where X changes quite fast and X can often be 'being a white male' and calls for actions against these groups. diluting the term to include the privileged group of the day coupled with fueling violence is very dangerous.
I'd pretty much prefer to see Nazis removed from the public view via the use of the existing hate speech laws, the judiciary system and fines/sentences, so there's that.
Well, your argument was fine until you brought up this strawman nonsense.
> X can often be 'being a white male'
I haven't seen a single person called a Nazi for supporting "being a white male". Can you cite some sources there?
> I'd pretty much prefer to see Nazis removed from the public view via the use of the existing hate speech laws, the judiciary system and fines/sentences, so there's that.
Let's have a quick check on how that's working out now there's white supremacists in charge of the justice system: Oh, apparently quite badly. I know I'm shocked to hear this.
this was in my inbox straight from medium staff pick, so I'm using this one I know having had a lot exposure:
https://extranewsfeed.com/to-our-fellow-jews-in-the-united-s...
"Any Jew, anywhere, who does not act to oppose President Donald Trump and his administration acts in favor of anti-Semitism"
There ya go, this guy just associated non vocal Jews to Nazis, even if with a convoluted wording that avoided the label directly, but called them anti-semite, and I'm not gonna repeat the point of the Nazi 'spectrum' again, but you know where it's gonna go: once the real Nazi's have all been punched, the bar will lower and lower until you can scream racist at someone and have it ostracized, mediatically or otherwise.
(ok this fall shorts of "all white man" but I guess you're smart enough to draw the parallels)
I don't think "anti-Semitism" <=> "Nazism" by a long shot.
> the bar will lower and lower
You can do better than a slippery slope, surely.
Let's restart from the article: "We Live in Fear of the Online Mobs"
Say for the sake of argument me and you agree on 3 fundamental aspect of nazism, and that we also agree that if one express an ideology that matches 2 out of 3 of these aspects it's a fair target for online lynching (whether he self defines as a nazi or not, because of course we hate cryptonazis too, they're just nazis with extra steps).
Here's the crux of the matter: tomorrow another guy can come and disagree with our definition, and claim there are 6 aspect of nazism. or this guy can be more sensitive, and claim that 1 out of 3 is well enough for starting a media crusade against the perpetrator and try to ruin is life forever.
See where I'm going? It's not as easy as "this guy openly claim to support the nazi party" - and live/online mobs aren't exactly known for their rationality and measured response.
The 1935 Japanese novel Musashi, set in the seventeenth century, depicts the protagonist losing a job offer because of a one-woman public smear campaign consisting entirely of lies.
This may be more of a problem now than it was then, but it's certainly not new or unique.
McCarthy is seriously annoyed that after being vilified, he's now being forgotten :)
(Note that there is a difference, because McCarthy was acting in his capacity as an elected Senator; And that it wasn't even the blacklisting of communists that people objected to, but the frequently fraudulent prosecution he initiated)
In future, the future will be less predictable.
Maybe in a hundred years we will have sorted out how to maintain free speech but limit the bloodthirsty mob. But in the meantime, we all need to survive through this period while as a culture we figure out the answer.
The only answer I can think of is to opt-out of social media, ignore trolls online and cultivate more meaningful in-person connections.
I strongly concur with your assessment.
See, that's the sort of thing that must be terribly difficult to write, knowing that thousands were tortured, maimed, and killed by small-town mobs in the US: http://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/
The problem with that is that all of these arguments are clearly colored by what moral side the author is on. The author focused on Damore, but didn't mention the dozens of Google employees harassed and sent death threats online for being against his memo. The article is clearly coming from the perspective of conservative thoughts being reprimanded online, but lightly tries to hide behind the guise of generality. The "fear" is not felt on all sides really.
The level of inconsistency is another source of the divide on both sides. I think people need to be more willing to follow logic they use for their own beliefs and apply it to other issues and perspectives.
Edit: Not just follow the logic, but speak out about the issues in the same way. When someone uses logic X for issue Y and speaks out about it, but fails to speak out against issue Z when X is also applicable is a huge problem. It's usually one of the easiest ways to see through someone's beliefs when they try to be "objective". It's often even more obvious when Y is a much smaller issue in scope than Z. If you believe in logic X, how much you advocate/support each issue should be in proportion to the size of their scopes when X applies to both.
I think you might be doing what you're criticizing here. Damore and his supporters are likely getting just as many death threats and harassment, the "progressives" generally dish out just as much, it even get's tolerated at by the likes of twitter. The "conservative" side just doesn't make a big deal out of it.
Let me re-iterate that: Actually encouraging actual violence against a named individual.
Funnily enough Google and twitter had zero issues with that. Unlike what Damore did, that was not against their code of conduct.
This really is PC culture, it's intolerance, and the terrible things it drives fully and perfectly exemplified.
It’s not enough to simply be a good person, win an argument, or see your personal political beliefs become widely adopted - you also have to point out how bad others are, how badly your opponent lost the argument, or how anyone holding a different political beliefe to you is a Nazi. There is value to social media in general and Twitter in particular, but it does appear to me to be increasingly toxic.
Which I found disturbing, but I don't see how it makes him a Nazi.
The police seems to have effected a policy that all but necessitated a violent confrontation, by forcing the alt-right protestors to move through a large hostile crowd of Antifa protestors on the way to their new location, and the police not protecting the alt-right protesters.
There's more strange things that happened that day, but was there any official explanation why the police officers were ordered to use these unusual and harmful tactics?
This is why people call Trump a Nazi.
Portraying the whole alt-right (or the whole right) as Nazi's is inaccurate, offensive and divisive. It just helps them, and it leads to everyone reasonable getting stuck between angry fascist communists and angry fascist Nazi's.
As an aside, white supremacy != Nazism. Nazism includes white supremacy, but adds some other factors like fascism. White supremacy is not all that different from the popular Jewish supremacy movement in Israel. Most peoples want to preserve their cultures and not let themselves be replaced, but it seems like only European welfare states and the U.S. are ever attacked for it.
When did you last hear about the "Islamic supremacy" that is the dominant culture in the Middle East?
That kind of nuclear option rhetoric wise allows them to feel empowered both by denouncing an enemy and creating a call to arms within themselves and others. Furthermore, even if it antagonizes you, it draws you into their struggle, which legitimizes their world view. It creates a threat for them to fight against. If their rhetoric causes someone to radicalize to the other side, even better. It just strengthens the immediacy of their cause.
This is how Antifa and Neo-Nazis can have a weird kind of symbiotic relationship. Even if their methods don't recruit someone to their cause, forcing that person to become a part of the overall struggle legitimizes their world view, strengthening both parties at the same time.
I wonder if the health upsides of having simpler and easier to follow moral principles, would outweigh the downsides of being offended and angry all the time.
I sure hope I won't have to find out. It's a privilege to be a non-partisan, although perhaps I can't quite say I am, because I despise communism even more than I despise fascism. The intellectual dishonesty with which mainstream (which is to say, leftist) media praise communism and attack Nazism is revolting.
A minor dust-up between a few hundred people with weapons and 6000 people yelling and holding signs/shields has become major coverage, like it's the most demanding thing of our attention. It's not like these groups just suddenly appeared...but now because of the attention, we have to do something.
You can barely fill 15% of a minor sports team's stadium with the count (and public influence) of the people involved here. You're not even close to having to pick a side.
I feel the pull and it sucks. How does one immunize themselves to this?
And could it be done to one or more percent points of the population, or even to the point that herd immunity takes over? How could advocating "mass redpilling" be portrayed as "domestic terrorism" to those deeply immersed in the mainstream narrative?
You can avoid the conflict completely and actually reach people bring out their reasonable side if you go out there and treat everyone with love and respect.
https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/08/16/recalibrating-your-site...
That one action alone dramatically changed the tone of social media and made it obvious that I'm very much a part of several distinct communities with distinct ideas. Highly recommend.
(http://www.newsweek.com/charlottesville-police-refused-prote...)
I don't understand your contention here. You seem to complain that people do not spend more time discussing obvious thing (mob justice offline) rather than non-obvious thing (mob justice online). I think the reason for that is obvious. Or maybe you just want a "collective outrage" instead of discussion?
So, yes, I do believe that these people would probably deserve a bit of the support that some programmer at google receives after being fired for being slightly stupid.
I wouldn't even doubt that almost everyone would declare their support if asked (Presidents excepted). It just seems as if nobody particularly cares enough about it, emotionally, to go out of their way to show their disapproval in the same way they do on other issues.
Considering the accusations against the police, such support would also help to actually determine what, if anything, went wrong, and could possibly prevent a repetition, or escalation.
If everyone just shrugs their shoulders and says "yeah, I guess that's bad. Obviously", there's no pressure to do anything that could potentially harm the careers of those involved.
To be honest, though, I don't see complaining about it here changing that. I think it's better to focus your own attention at problems that require it, in your opinion.
For example, if you feel the people were wronged and HN crowd should hear about, why don't you submit the article?
This stuff is dangerous.
The fact this is consider acceptable is the whole problem.
We should not be using cop outs of 'where the mob gets it wrong'.
The only reason you should get someone fired is they are bad at their job and they have been given a chance to improve.
So people are turning to alternative means. It worries me, but at the same time I want to see justice. I feel conflicted about it.
Politically, on the one side you have people screaming about the rule of law. I think that would be ideologically consistent if they also supported increased law enforcement pressure on these kinds of crimes. But they generally don't.
On the other side, you have people arguing we need to take the law into our own hands and fight back against "fascism", white supremacy, all of these things. But those same people don't generally want to take responsibility for the crimes they are complicit in (war crimes, theft of indigenous land, soft racism, etc).
I don't see a clear resolution, although I think the whole situation is a reaction to the internet forcing increased self-awareness on us, and us not being able to deal with the possibility that we're genuinely bad people. The internet showed us how much violence we're complicit in, and we're reacting by getting real mad at whoever is far enough away for us to dissociate from.
> So people are turning to alternative means. It worries me, but at the same time I want to see justice. I feel conflicted about it."
Well said. In some ways this seems a bit like transferring the moral questions of vigilante justice in comics to the individual person. If you see an injustice that will not be corrected, do you have the power/obligation to correct it?
The main failing is the lack of certainty, which should be one of the main focuses here.
There's a reason "the system" seems incapable of dealing with the crime of 'holding an opinion I disagree with'.
Hint: it's not a crime.
The crimes that were listed are very good examples of how we have lost the rule of law. The internet is allowing the average person to realize the two-tier nature of the justice system and extent of systemic corruption. After suffering through decades of abuse from systems that were theoretically "of the people", how do you expect people to react?
Hint: Sticking your head in the sand and pretending these problems don't exist isn't a good long-term survival strategy.
Did you actually read the memo? If he's a nazi, then so is 95% of the world's population.
I don't think he's necessarily a Nazi though, just a spoiled biggot who hasn't walked a mile in anyone's shoes, not even his own.
What was disgusting about saying 'hey maybe the reason that women aren't in software is that they don't want to be in software and there's nothing wrong with that as long as the women that are in software are treated well'?
I agree that online mobs have changed the game as far as speech consequences go, and I agree that most of those changes are for the worse. I do not see a way out, however, except to delete your social media and do not post things to the Internet that could possibly be linked back to you.
I don't really like the Web anymore.
I'm inclined to put most of the blame on the rise of clickbait journalism. Explaining all sides of an issue takes effort, but feeding people enough information to make them angry while allowing them to fill in the details according to their own imagination is easy and cheap.
Or, alternatively, you just happen to be among the people in the manosphere that pretend the last 20 years didn't happen. Because otherwise there would have been a minimum of engagement with the actual argument, namely that some (alleged) statistical difference between the genders just isn't relevant, it's only confusing what is with what ought to be.
The goal of political correctness, adopting Daniel Dennett's intentional stance, is to control thinking. Individuals who are able to resist are in some ways more isolated now than the old communist dissidents. They at least got moral support from each other in prison.
http://www.beyondeasy.net/2015/09/mcluhan-new-tribalism-equi... https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/intentional-stance
See Zuck's own words: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100933624710391
Theres really two sides to this, one where the positive is that information is no longer closed and flows freely and the other is that negative information about other people flows so fast and wide that it cannot be fathomed.
Its an interesting feeling because its really similar to dystopian notions such as the Giver where too much of a good thing easily turns bad.
It's the same tactic that needs to be employed against terrorists. The more seriously you take them, the bigger threat they are.
The people who fired Damore are the problem. They escalated the conflict. They are the ones who should have known better and not get involved in mob justice.
I think that sentence is missing a word that turns it into a point you wanted to make.
> because it's a PR nightmare if they don't
Why it should be a PR nightmare? Why cannot his bosses say, we are not doing vigilante justice here, and refuse to yield to "angry mob"? It seems to me like a morally better position to take.
Compare this to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_carto...
So I'm guessing that in their profit/loss charts, avoiding a PR scandal is higher than resisting the will of the mob.
The growing result is that we're seeing more and more news organizations gravitating towards providing a specific kind of narrative tailored to their target audience. People in general don't want to have their views challenged. That approach is tiring as you have to fight through your own cognitive dissonance each time. Rather, they want to hear what they believe to be already true. This is why Twitter and other social media companies drive us towards echo chambers. It's how they keep people coming back, and thus make themselves more appealing to advertisers.
It's easy to talk about the duty of the fourth estate, but writing a well balanced narrative does not pay the bills these days.
The court of public opinion needs a counterpart for the social media age.
Proof-of-work juries might be a neat way to orchestrate fair voting in anonymous spaces
Or proof-of-research?
Proof-of-rationality?
I wouldn't hold my breath for proof of rationality. Humans are rationalizing animals, not rational animals.
What are the critical nodes (influencers) to disseminate the mob message?
This would be an interesting big data social science experiment to see how mob fire propagates.
And the data sets? https://thenewinquiry.com/taxonomy-of-humans-according-to-tw...
Disclaimer: I am not part of the Dalai Lama clique.
This happens on twitter where someone says something and then it gets signal boosted such that an online mob harasses, threatens and in some cases ruins livelihoods (the prototypical case is Justine Sacco)[1]
[1] http://www.salon.com/2013/12/23/justine_saccos_aftermath_the...
But perhaps more sinister than the mob responding to something said online is that as the moral landscape continues to shift (as it has since... forever) what you have said online a long time ago can ALSO come back to haunt you, even if at the time you said it was considered perfectly acceptable or normal or whatever.
This is why, I think, that social media in general is not really something I find very enjoyable to participate in. As they say, the internet never forgets.
"Hated in the Nation." Online mobs lead to death in real life because of a scifi twist involving artificial swarms/hives of bees. I won't get into details so as not to spoil the ending, but it deals rather directly with the issues raised in the article.
"Nosedive." Less directly related, but hits the nail on the head with respect to the employment concerns raised by the article.
What if Damore circulated his memo anonymously an untraceably? He would still be at Google's. Just wait until anyone gets the hint. You can't really just shut people up :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine
From the description, this might encompass phenomena that we would call both coordinated harassment and public shaming, and maybe the original article by Megan McArdle also means to encompass both, though it seems to have more focus on public shaming.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07...
I think the biggest change is that it's pretty low effort to send harassing tweets, relative to (say) figuring out someone's address and sending them threats via snail mail or phone call.
1) The Cultural Revolution (China) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
Several hundred thousand to maybe a few million people were killed, often at the hands of angry mobs, for not being the right kind of communist, for not being communist enough or for just not being friends with the right people. A person could be accused by someone who didn't like them with zero evidence of any wrongdoing and still the victim would lose their home, all of the belongings and potentially their life. This lasted from the mid 60 until the mid 70s.
2) Something current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Saudi_Arabia
>Religious minorities do not have the right to practice their religion. Non-Muslim propagation is banned, and conversion from Islam to another religion is punishable by death
http://www.economist.com/node/21541719
After Martin Luther printed his Ninty-Five Theses, Europe promptly lost its collective shit across the board. My European History is a bit rusty but a cursory glance at the Wikipedia topic should give a good idea of how much chaos the ability to spread ideas quickly and widely created.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation
We're talking years and years of civil war and strife. All because people who were once separated and thought they were alone found out they were not. If we use this as a barometer, we're in for some stormy seas.
Do some searches on Korea about the escalating fight between Feminist and Anti-Feminist groups. Megalia is probably the most well known and infamous organization. It's difficult to comment on due to the sheer . . . well. I'll give some links as an example:
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/07/29/487...
https://www.10mag.com/megalia-south-koreas-radical-feminism-...
https://www.koreabang.com/2016/features/the-rise-of-radical-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/4vb3lb/megalia_south...
http://i.imgur.com/1uePL0H.png
I've given more than several different links for a reason. The difference in perspectives is really jarring and it's difficult to reconcile the two perspectives. Depending on who you talk to, Megalia is anything from a beleaguered feminist organization under attack from a misogynistic society, to a radical feminist group that is deeply hateful towards men of all kinds (straight/gay). If you dig deep enough, you'll see that a lot of important details in accounts on both sides get shaved away to create a compelling narrative. The end result is a real online bloodbath that has touched a lot of different aspects of Korean society.
I'm just grateful that so far, Korea seems an outlier of this, at the present moment --not that it doesn't happen elsewhere or that it could not happen in places where it's rather tame. I hope as a species we find ways out of this kind of unfettered rancor.
To be fair, not unlike a few other countries out there, S.K historically has been pretty patriarchal, so given this new outlet, this vehemence is not all that surprising as they learn to navigate these waters (who other might have to learn as well).
That being said, Korea might be at the forefront, but other countries have it simmering underneath as well. Take this article on China for example:
https://www.economist.com/news/china/21704853-online-mobs-ge...
One of the reasons I've heard that the Communist Party heavily censors their web is to keep the nationalist elements of their populace under control. The article makes it sound fairly tame, but I've read around and seen some pretty ugly stuff. Obviously harder to find sources due to the nature of the Chinese web. You can see it in their media as well with how deeply patriotic many of their productions are.
How they happen now: Speaking as a [member in X class], I believe [idea].
We've started to tie up our identities into our arguments, and when you do that you can't get around attacking who someone is as a person when they link their membership in a group to the epistemology of why they think something. This is my working theory for why people have started to equate speech with "literally violence". Disagreeing has become an attack on their identity, so it's only natural to interpret that in an extreme form.
The definition of hyperbole is "exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally."
My statement is not hyperbole, it was not at all exaggerated is meant to be taken literally. People have gone to war over this shit.
Most of us would be better off if we went back to those days, I expect a lot of HN users already don't have social media profiles.
It's because there's an asymmetry - students neither have jobs to be fired from nor the life experience to understand why it's such a serious matter to do it to someone. The accountability will come when the record of having been arrested for rioting/vandalism shows up in background checks when they do eventually enter the workforce. That's not much comfort I know to their victims. The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they do grind exceedingly fine.
Looking at photos of the recent rallies in Boston as well as Charlottesville, I think any reasonable observer would conclude that those opposing the nazis tend to have better jobs than those they are opposing. I'm drawing this conclusion for the distinct difference in the amount of face tattoos between these two groups.
I think you are projecting your own fantasies onto what I wrote, such as everyone you disagree with is "a nazi". I am talking about indiscretions of youth coming back to bite people, and online spats that we used to call flamewars spilling over into the real world.
For me, the line is crossed when an act of physical violence is performed, and we already have laws to deal with it. We don't need online mob justice too.
So many of the arguments surrounding Damore talk as if this is in a vacuum, when frankly, it isn't. Much of the message it carried(and did little to discourage) came off as insulting to a group of people who commonly spend every day harassed just for what they are, anytime they have gone online.
The article talks a lot about the fear of an online mob shaming people for doing something, yet completely ignores that many of those in said mob are harassed daily based on their mere existence, and often their "shaming" comes from a place of just not wanting to be hurt again.
Is it necessarily the most effective means of accomplishing this? Certainly not, and I'm not about to claim to support what it becomes, but to call question to that and speak from such a "Nice problem to have" place to people suffering a much worse version of what you're talking about reeks of "Let them eat cake".
That would, presumably, be women in software? Because as far as I can tell, the only people being regularly harassed on Twitter are people that don't think women should get special rights...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-...
I hope you don't consider this online disagreement "harassment". If so: recurse, see above.