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In the domain of man, there are many laws.
Mostly, we consciously interact with the ones constructed,
maintained, and, when we are very lucky,
revised to uphold this fragile thing that we call not
complete and total chaos.
Laws provide, or at the very least,
provide the promise of a safe and equal framework
for our collective experience of day-to-day life.
They describe ideal behaviors.
The problem is that different things
are ideal for different people.
And depending upon where you live,
the people making the laws might have some pretty messed
up ideas about ideality.
Laws are sometimes descriptive, describing what we generally
understand one should or shouldn't do.
But sometimes, they are prescriptive,
telling people what they should or shouldn't do.
This relationship between laws stating what is the case
or describing what it should be exists in other, maybe
unexpected, places as well.
Like in the sciences, whose laws describe events or processes
that appear to necessarily occur based upon a significant amount
of empirical observation.
Like you probably know about the law of conservation of mass.
It describes the fact that the mass and energy
of closed systems remains constant regardless
of whatever processes occur.
We've watched lots of processes.
Mass is always conserved.
This law describes what appears to be true.
Science.
Personally, I prefer the law of conservation
of jazz, which states that in a closed club, regardless
of how much you want to go home, the amount of jazz
will remain constant.
Just kidding.
I love jazz.
Anyway, regardless of their possible contingency,
laws have some power.
Some of those written civil laws might not be right,
but that doesn't mean that they're not enforced.
And after figuring out what's going on,
we use scientific laws as ciphers
for descriptions of what must happen because it always has.
The second law of thermodynamics necessitates that and so on.
Which is to say that laws provide authority
not certainty.
This is true in scientific law, legal systems,
and even on the internet, which is
what we're going to spend the rest of this video talking
about.
The internet has its own set of laws.
No, not those.
Those are rules not laws.
I'm talking about the laws which have unveiled themselves
as people from all walks of life converged onto technologically
accessed public feeds of any kind
to have cool, calm, and collected conversations
where everyone is civil and respectful.
I'm just kidding.
I mean where people are terrible and want to argue.
The following laws predict the behaviors
of people using the world's greatest
technological achievement to bicker.
But each also has a purpose, an authority, if you will.
And probably the most well-known law in the set is Godwin's Law.
Godwin's Law states that the longer an argument goes on,
the more likely it is that one side will call the other a Nazi
or compare them to Hitler.
And there's a corollary, too, that person
who has perpetrated the comparison automatically
loses the argument and the conversation should cease.
The corollary is rarely respected.
Mike Godwin coined his law in a 1993 piece for "Wired"
call "Meme, Counter-meme," which incidentally, is also
one of if not the earliest popular public usages
of the word "meme" to describe behaviors on the internet.
Godwin, coincidentally or not, is a lawyer
and wanted to call attention to Usenet people
throwing around "Nazi" like some two-cent epithet.
"So I set out to conduct an experiment,"
he write, "to build a counter-meme designed
to make discussion participants see how they are acting
as the vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme
and, perhaps, to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons.
I developed Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies."
End quote.
Weirdly, Godwin's Law wants to reverse
the existence of the very thing that it claims
is certain, Nazi analogies.
If Godwin's Law is true, and the instantiation of it as a law
works as intended, then Godwin's Law
will become increasingly less true
as it becomes more effective-- not certain,
but certainly possessing authority.
People will realize they've been infected by the Nazi analogy
meme and curtail their usage, which,
Godwin writes, is exactly what happened in his Usenet
community.
This led him to ask another question,
specifically if or how one might create memes which counter,
deconstruct, discourage, disincentive, other memes.
Meme, counter-meme.
Arguably, that's the point of something like rare Pepes,
where people make endless variations of Pepe
the frog memes in an effort to quote
"flood the market and depreciate their value,"
the value of Pepe images that is.
Their value.
What?
But, I mean, in the flippant, contrarian present
of popular memetizing, it's a good bet
that memes made to counter-meme will only ever
do the opposite-- incur a meme.
Heck, maybe it's even a law.
Telling people to do or not do something
on internet is a guarantee that the opposite will happen,
which, I guess, actually is kind of already a law, at least as
far as conversations about feminism are concerned.
Lewis's Law, coined by journalist, Helen Lewis,
states that the comments left on anything about feminism
will quote "justify" feminism, which
is important and necessary because women are not
equal citizens.
And I know about egalitarianism.
At its best, egalitarianism is another word for feminism.
But at its worst, it is a diversion responding to fears
that by giving women more power, that
means men will have less, which is not the case.
The only way that we reach equality for men and women
is by elevating the status of all women, women
of all races, sexual, orientations, and genders.
Egalitarianism is a men's rights project.
Feminism is a human project.
There.
Now this video will provide examples of Lewis's Law--
and probably also, eventually, Godwin's Law.
Lewis Law comments justify feminism
in ways particular to each individual situation.
But the paradigmatic example is outlined
in Alice Marwick's "Wired" opinion piece "Donglegate--
Why the Tech Community Hates Feminists."
The inciting incident here is the internet conversation
surrounding complaints about sexist jokes told
at PyCon 2013.
Lots of people felt these jokes illustrate the rampant sexism
of the tech industry, while others thought
that it was just ladies are trying
to suppress the rights of men to their frozen peaches.
"When we read such comments," Marwick
writes, "we see lots of people arguing
but not really engaging.
While feminists believe it's important to call out
people for sexist remarks and address structural gender
inequality, another group believes
calling out sexist remarks is just another example of women
exaggerating harm, censoring reasonable behavior,
or demanding special rights beyond what men have."
End quote.
Lewis Law comments justify feminism
in that they illustrate the very discourse and attitudes
that feminism hopes to address, but also
because of their one-sidedness.
People should be able to say what they like,
and women shouldn't get all bent out of shape.
Feminist just haven't done their research,
but egalitarians and men's rights activists have.
Feminists don't want to fix anything.
They just want to kill all men.
And furthermore, if we could politely
inquire as to the sources you've used
for determining that the wage gap is real, madam.
Lewis Law comments justify feminism by virtue of the fact
that they illustrate an inability to meet feminism
on its own actual terms, which now, someone will comment,
is exactly the problem with feminism's
relationship to its counterarguments, thus
proving my point.
Unlike Godwin, though, Lewis is not a counter-meme, at least
not explicitly.
Lewis's Law doesn't highlight the vectorization
of the supremely disappointing misunderstanding of feminism
meme in order to address it.
It it's more like, hey, writers, brace yourself.
Jerk bags are coming.
Even if anti-feminist commenters aren't a perfect certainty,
Lewis's Law is a helpful, authoritative reminder
that it's best to assume that they
are en route, an assumption which
is useful in another way for those writing at,
say, "The Onion."
Poe's Law, our last law for today,
states that on the internet, unless the author's intent is
very clearly communicated, parodies of extremism
will be mistaken for earnest extremism and vice versa.
"Idea Channel" experienced this a couple years back
when we made that short episode about Vine
being the future of cinema.
We thought that an April 1 upload
date was a clear enough communication of our intent,
and we were very wrong.
Our extremism seemed earnest to a lot of people.
Poe's Law is named after Nathan Poe, who coined it
in 2005 in response to a debate about creationism
on a Christian message board.
He wrote that quote, "without a winking smiley
or other blatant display of humor,
it is utterly impossible to parody a creationist
in such a way that someone won't mistake it
for the genuine article."
This, incidentally, is almost exactly why
Scott Fahlman proposed the smiley in 1982
as a quote, "joke marker."
And it's why the percontation/irony mark exists,
which I really do think that I would use a lot if it
were actually on my keyboard.
Anyway, you might think that a headline
by "The Onion," or "Click Hole," or "The Daily Current"
would be sign enough.
Can't stop here.
Parodic extremism country.
But, you know, it's the internet, so no.
The most interesting cases are the ones
where Poe's Law and Lewis's Law collide,
where people mistake extreme feminism or women's rights
parody as sincere and then leave comments
which justify actual feminism.
This happened when the Louisiana Congressman John Fleming
mistook an "Onion" article about a Planned Parenthood
"abortion-plex" as earnest or on this "Onion"
article about a woman deciding not to support feminism if it
means killing all men.
Importantly, Poe's Law doesn't say,
people believe what they read, but rather, people
believe the parodies of extremism are earnest.
Sort of like the case with Lewis's Law, Poe's Law
is an effect of the way people tend
to engage with the things they don't like.
Our impressions of extreme positions
tend towards caricature because by virtue of our relationship
to them, we don't possess nuanced understanding.
Poe's Law works because, in our minds,
extreme positions are always already like parodies.
So when an actual parody comes along,
our natural response is to be like, pfft, of course,
look at these clowns.
Or when we're confronted with actual extremism,
one gut reaction is to think, ugh,
you have got to be kidding me.
This must be a joke.
The authority Poe's Law has is not
to curtail behavior or to reminder writers--
people writing for "Click Hole" know exactly what they're
doing-- but to highlight the extreme positions, which
are easy and maybe even a little dangerous
to take less than seriously.
The laws of the internet, like the laws of science,
are not ones that you must follow,
but rather, ones that will be followed anyway it seems.
Sort of like Rugnetta's Law, which states that no matter
how long and thorough a YouTube video is, there will always
be at least one person who is quote,
"really disappointed" that I didn't
mention their favorite thing, which I have somehow
never heard of.
What do you guys think?
What are other laws of the internet,
either ones that are documented or that you
have observed yourself?
Let us know in the comments, and I will respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
In this week's comment response video,
we talked about what you had to say
about when play becomes work.
So if you want to check that out,
you can just click here or the link in the dooblydoo.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these law-abiding individuals.
And the tweet of the week comes from Fir3Sparkle,
who points us towards a "Verge" piece about the padding
problem that exists in massive open world games.
They have different feelings about The Witcher than I do,
but it's still a really good and very interesting read.
Check it out.
And in case you missed it, I have a short cameo
in this week's "It's OK to Be Smart" that
was shot while we were at the Grand Canyon,
so you should watch that.
And we are gearing up to go to VidCon, so if you are going
to VidCon, come and hang out.
I'm going to be moderating the education and entertainment
panel, and I will be running a workshop with some pals
about podcasting.
So we'll also post a link to my schedule in the place
where the links go.
You know what it's called.
Hope to see you there.
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