Here's an idea.
The distinction between being a troll and being a bigot
is eroding.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
For pretty much as long as there has been internet,
there have been people who make it their business
to get in other people's business on it, whose
activities range in severity from easily ignored mates
posting great bait in comment threads
to perpetrators of actual unignorable life-upending
harassment.
We did a video a while back on the complications
that arise when you confuse those two groups.
This video is about that same confusion
from a different perspective.
Of course, there have been trolls since long
before the internet.
We just didn't call them trolls.
We called them what they were-- jerks, racists, scoundrels,
other things I can't say, because Idea Channel is
shown in a lot of classrooms.
As Letters of Note has demonstrated,
though, harassing people using communication technology
isn't new.
And of course, neither is being a rabble-rouser.
Trolls of yore were jesters, troublemakers, or tricksters
if their capers were harmless, entertaining, or desirable.
Puck symbolizes the classic shrewd rapscallion,
who may cause trouble, but, aw, hey, it's all in good fun,
right?
Often this brand of literature-inspired mischief
is equated with cleverness and therefore value.
An effective troublemaker teaches
us something about the world, though they may also
get your head a bit hot.
Oh, you.
At one point this was the self-styled battle cry
of the internet troll.
Prefiguring and eventually explicitly channeling
Heath ledger's Joker, they'd rally around
the concept of "why so serious?
You mad, bro?
It's the internet.
Log off whenever you want" lulz production.
Trolls would post inane nonsense, but never seriously.
They don't mean what they argue.
They only want to get a reaction.
Or so the defense of them went.
And so if you met that deception with earnestness,
you'd lose a conversational game you
didn't know you were playing.
The trolls' defense was that they keep stupid people busy
so they don't ruin the internet for everyone else.
They spotlight hypocrisy and distract irksome internet folk
by being disingenuous rhetorical sparring partners.
The subtext being that it's beneficial to assume
all contrarians aren't earnest.
Dismissing rejoinders as bait saves
the potential embarrassment of having fed the trolls.
You can't lose a game if you don't play it.
This suggests that the ideal mode of internet interaction
is a kind of idle ironic detachment.
Trolls, along with their adherents,
fancy themselves a public service
for heralding this suggestion.
They'd function as a ubiquitous reminder
that it's a bad idea to take the internet, and people on it,
seriously.
Except, the internet is serious.
It isn't some separate not real-life place,
but an integral technological process
intertwined with most parts of our real lives.
Ironic detachment would have to be a lifestyle, not
a mode of interaction, If one were
to treat the internet in aggregate and always as LOL,
not serious.
Many people don't have that inclination or that privilege.
Add to this the fact that the troll horde found
under the internet bridge has diversified,
mostly thanks to how internet troublemakers are popularly
described.
At one point, the perception amongst, let's be honest,
probably largely homogeneous internet
communities, ones that fancy themselves people who
get the internet, was that trolls were troublemakers
in jest only.
Trolls were regarded by this "meme-rati"
as altruistic transgressors of social norms,
reminding everyone that nothing is serious.
That propriety is a construct.
And we shouldn't be so sure of consensus.
And the "meme-rati" was in a position to suggest, oh, oh,
no, that's just how the internet is.
[MUSIC - BRUCE HORNSBY, "THE WAY IT IS"]
This ceded the damaging idea that certain forms of argument
and even harassment are an unavoidable part
of the internet ecosystem.
And now the people who drive Leslie Jones off Twitter,
who encourage bullying, who make it their mandate to tirelessly
harass and stalk bloggers, artists, celebrities,
and other public figures, they are also
called trolls by journalists, media figures, tech companies.
In popular terms, there's a waning distinction
between troll and hateful person with an internet connection.
And maybe there never was a distinction.
Recently, I've seen people sharing Kurt Vonnegut's
sentiment from "Mother Night" that "we
are what we pretend to be.
So we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
This aligns with the Sartre and Merleau Ponty that
we've discussed in the past, that one cannot escape being
how they are viewed by others.
In this view, separation between some troll's fake racism,
for instance, and their actual beliefs
is nothing more than a tool of self-preservation,
allowing a kind of psychic distance
and therefore permission to be awful.
From the outside, the difference between a racist and a troll
who says racist things has only ever been informed by the fact
that trolls have claimed there is a difference,
because lulz for some reason.
The common sense response to the classic troll,
that they aren't serious, that you shouldn't feed them.
Just ignore them.
That's bad advice to begin with-- source--
but also increasingly deployed as a tactic for dealing
not with individuals but masses of people who are not,
or at least not so clearly, the type of troll that advice
addresses-- people who gang up to harass
private and public figures for their politics,
who deal in neo-Nazi rhetoric, are virulently Islamophobic,
among countless other afflictions,
and who consistently brigade against not only
those with whom they disagree, but also those people's
friends, family, coworkers, and bosses.
Whether any single member of the horde
truly believes the vile nonsense they spew or individually means
whatever outcome their rat king of reprobates causes
is beside the point when the result
of their collective action is so material,
when they threaten people's jobs, safety, or family,
drive them off social media, and inspire actual talking points
delivered or spread by four real candidates for the United
States presidency I'm not advocating for a return
to the halcyon days where trolls were allegedly pretend bigots
acting individually.
But I am advocating for something,
that those in a position to guide
widespread public understanding of the internet
and its communities say what they mean and mean what they
say when discussing what was recently dubbed
"the culture of hate" online.
Racists, misogynists, and xenophobes who use the internet
aren't just trolls.
They're racists, misogynists, and xenophobes
who use the internet.
And where the distinction is unclear,
I would ask that we judge what exactly
is gained by giving hateful speech a pass under the overly
broad banner of trickster-ism?
And if they haven't already at this point,
some internet tough guys who are quick to judge others
for overreacting are revving up their free speech engines
or getting upset because they think
I told them they can't say things they don't believe,
even if it's just a joke.
So allow me to take this moment to direct them
to two videos with my thoughts on those very matters, videos
I am sure they will watch and whose points they
will faithfully engage with.
Calling rampant hatefulness trolling
suggests it's a quaint internet problem
solvable by focusing on your real life instead
of your online one, a division which is only
ever-increasingly false.
It separates toxic ideas into two categories--
internet and real-- and assists awful people
in distancing themselves from the result
of their harmful actions because they
happen to be using technology.
It takes responsibility for dealing with those people out
of the hands of websites, apps, technology products, and law
enforcement and gives it to the people being harassed,
the very people who shouldn't have to have it.
Whitney Phillips, a personal friend of mine and someone
who literally wrote the book on trolling,
describes the trolling frame, liberally applied,
as "an ethical escape hatch, looping one back
to the rationale that if someone takes offense
to an offensive statement, that's on them."
To dismiss online harassment unilaterally
as just trolling normalizes hate and encourages
an unlikely social dystopia defined
by an idle ironic detachment arrived
at on the terms of harassers.
It eschews earnestness, compassion, and a humanity
that even the most strident free speech internet zones
would benefit from.
That is, of course, unless they're
express purpose is to generate hate
and harassment specifically.
But I'm sure that that is not the case.
What position trolls once popularly occupied
in the internet rhetoric food chain has popularly,
I think, been overtaken by exactly what trolls
pretended to be-- jerks and worse, actual abusers.
And whether that position has been
overtaken in actuality or simply in effect is immaterial.
For much of the internet, a troll is a hateful person,
and a hateful person is a troll.
There is no distinction.
And perhaps there shouldn't be.
Some among us may mourn the demise of the shrewd internet
rapscallion, the service provided
by a disingenuous rhetorical sparring partner,
or the nuance of how their presence is appraised.
But in that, we may also learn that Vonnegut had a point,
that one becomes what one pretends,
if not themselves, then maybe in the eyes of others.
And that transformation is not without consequence.
What do you all think?
I'm not going to ask whether or not
the classic troll still exists.
It definitely does.
I'm curious about the relationship between trolls,
bigots, and bigots who are popularly called and understood
as trolls, which is a thing that happens.
You can't argue that it doesn't.
I'm also curious how this conversation relates
to the United States government calling armies of people
in the employ of intelligence agencies of other countries
spreading misinformation about the United States trolls.
How does that fit into this conversation?
Let us know, respectfully, in the comments,
and I will respond to some of them,
probably respectfully in next week's comment response video.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding Facebook trending
news and the bias of algorithms if you want to watch that one,
you can click here, or find a link
in the doobly doo If you happen to be in or around New York
City tomorrow night, on Thursday night at the YouTube space,
we're doing a PBS Digital Studios Nerd Night,
where you can come and see me, Joe
from "It's OK to Be Smart," Vanessa from "Brain
Craft," Anna from "Gross Science,"
and a bunch of other people talk about some nerdy things.
We'll put a link to that in the doobly doo
That is a free event.
It is also 18-plus.
And also, we're going to be taking next week off.
So the next Idea Channel upload you will see
will be on the week of October 3rd.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit link
in the doobly doo as well.
And this week's tweet of the week
comes from Sam Cook, who points us
towards a "New Yorker" article about a woman who has amassed
an impressive collection of what you could
I guess call photographic portraits
of her taken by scores of world famous photographers.
She approaches them and asks them to take photos of her.
It's super interesting.
I know it doesn't sound like it is,
but it's a really great read that
gets into all of this territory about what it means
to be a subject and creativity, and yes, it's
really good, highly recommended.
By the way, just in case you're reading it
at work or on your phone at school, there's some nudity.
It's artful though.
And last, but certainly not least,
this week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the very hard work of these shrewd rapscallions.