Quinn Norton: The New York Times Fired My Doppelgänger

tl;dr: "The public is too stupid to understand my complex stances on neo-Nazis and bigotry"

I don't know Norton personally and have never completely agreed with her essays, but I had always been impressed with her eloquence ever since I saw her give Aaron Swartz's eulogy at his NYC service. When the NYT fired her, I felt it was a huge shame that people who didn't know her work beforehand now thought of her as basically no different than the neo-Nazis she was vocal about befriending. I do think her stance is extremely problematic, but I never doubted where she stood on the topic of social justice, and I thought she would've been a good voice for the NYT editorial page.

However, this Atlantic piece removed any desire I had to see her regularly in the NYT (I mean, in an alternate universe in which she wasn't fired), because it demonstrates such a lack of intellectual coherence and honesty. This was an essay that needed a few more weeks of contemplation and research, nevermind tighter editing. Instead, we got the pinnacle of self-aggrandizement, one so arrogant that it uses a metaphor that puts her in the worst light possible ("It wasn't me, it's my doppelganger!").

A lot of mockery has (justifiably) been thrown her way for such lines as "In my pacifism, I can't reject a friendship, even when a friend has taken such a horrifying path", and, "I was called a Nazi because of my friendship with the infamous neo-Nazi known on the internet as weev". But despite all of her words, there isn't much beyond feel-good pablum. What's worse is that she makes an appeal to science -- "You must learn to investigate with a scientific and loving mind not only what is true, but what is effective in the world" -- but she isn't bringing any scientific method toward her friendship approach.

Her friendship with weev is unconditional, and she has set no conditions or benchmarks on it, and she herself has admitted that in the time that she's been friends with him -- which was before he made his big jump into Nazism -- that he's only gotten worse. It's not a problem that she's adopting a framework of faith -- but it's intellectually dishonest the way she insists that science propels her motives, as she does in this accompanying essay:

https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/02/26/we-have-to-build-the-f...

> I have no need or desire to bring more hate and anger into this world. What’s more, I have science that can help me develop techniques to diminish the anger and hate that’s here now. Science, like all forms of truth, is a form of love.

That said, I was originally annoyed at how the main impetus for her firing was the slurs she used in past tweets. It was clear (to me) that her uses of the N-word weren't malicious (one of them was a retweet, the other was as an example of how labels like "terrorist" were meaningless). And I gave her the benefit of the doubt about using anti-gay slurs, which she chalked up to "context collapse" -- i.e. the general public not understanding how she and her fellow "anon" talk to each other.

But after this Atlantic piece, it becomes clear how that explanation too is pseudo-intellectual bullshit. Not just because she, as a self-professed leading Internet researcher should know that it's on her not to expect 4chan norms on public Twitter. But then I read the essay (written in 2013) she has been linking to to explain and justify her use of bigoted slur [0].

Long story short, she uses "context collapse" to justify any kind of fuckup in public. Not just her use of a bigoted slur to rip on one of her "anon" friends, but to also justify how this anon friend -- who she tells us that she knows (in her heart, or whatever) to be a male feminist ally -- decided to tweet angry rape jokes/threats to a feminist activist who at the time was facing massive abuse (this incident was so egregious that it is what finally compelled Twitter to create a Report Abuse function [1]).

In Norton's own words, both the feminist and her troll friend were to blame:

> From my perspective, it was all facepalm. Both sides didn’t know they weren’t in the same conversation. They weren’t able to talk to or hear each other, and it descended into a disaster.

My problem is not that she chooses to remain friends with weev because she believes in his redemption, it's that she seems to give zero thought to those who actively suffer from his abuse. This anecdote (on top of her other conflicting and empty arguments) about this other troll friend, and how she thinks he was as wronged as his victim, convinced me that Norton, despite best of intentions, has no ability to assess the second-order effects (such as the appearance of normalization) of her behavior, and may not be very empathetic at all towards her victims. I used to think that the "Twitter mob" that got her fired for her ugly out-of-context-tweets had obviously had not read any of her past work. But maybe they have.

(The other essay she refers to in her Atlantic piece [2], about how she's-sorry-but-not-really-that-sorry about misinterpreting the #blackgirlsaremagic hashtag, is even more cringeworthy, but this comment is already too long so I'll just link to this succinct critique [2])

[0] https://medium.com/message/context-collapse-architecture-and...

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23477130

[2] https://twitter.com/BLMcKean/status/968606112479170560

edit: fixed footnote

Why is this flagged?

A perfect example of someone trying to do what they think is right, making a simple mistake, and the internet crucifying them without any chance for rehab or apology. Just a mob that demands punishment, not justice.

This has been a growing trend. If anyone does something wrong, banish them from the Earth. Make them unhireable, boycott their product.

In reality, as her post notes, compassion is a lot more effective. Why would anyone change if there's no future benefit to that change? If you're marked for life and can never shake off that mistake, why try?

I've yet to meet the person that didn't believe something wrongly. Racist, sexist, age-ist and many more, there are tons of ways to think about other people as a group and get it wrong.

Most people can change. They can realize that racism isn't correct and work to be better people, and to treat others better.

But if every attempt to be better is met with as much vitriol as not-changing, there's not only no reason to change, but there's plenty of reason to believe your original thinking was correct.

Sadly, I don't really see a solution for this. The people who throw stones aren't reasonable people. You can't talk to them and show them that they are handling things wrong. If you're in the out-group, they'll simply say you can't possibly understand them and ignore you. If you're in the in-group, they'll say you are a traitor to their kind, and ignore you.

The only thing you can do to them is what they do to others: Throw stones until they stop their behavior. But if you were that kind of person in the first place, you'd have just joined them.

It's impossible.