You can’t avoid every human’s traumas, but I think the dickwolves thing has devolved into a situation where nothing can be said that won’t serve to support the total asshattery of some raging douchebag. So I will comment no more about that.
It’s up to me to manage my trigger issues. It’s up to you to not be a dick about it. Right?
Personally, I think the dickwolves comic was OK-- it makes sense to think of dickwolves as some unimaginable horror; but reducing that to an image, much less a T-shirt that someone could proudly wear, devalues the original comic.
My working theory on the Penny Arcade Dickwolves thing is that the problem is not the cartoon – it doesn’t survive even a cursory analysis – but their response to the controversy, which was borderline rude and escalatory.
Of course one of the PA guys is a problem, he seems to be the source of most of their tone-deaf handling of conflicts, and he basically just needs to Shut The Fuck Up. Exhibit A:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/06/21/well-that-escalated-quickly
You know, just being quiet and saying nothing is never a bad choice. Just throwing that out there, Gabe.
I think what seems to happen with Mike Krahulik (Gabe) is he’ll say something on Twitter or the comic will have something that offends someone. Like this.
This brought back another twitter argument from a week or so ago in which I defended a game about female masturbation. This game only included vaginas which I thought was reasonable given the point of the game was to teach women how to masturbate. It was pointed out to me that not all women have vaginas and I will admit right here in front of everyone that this came as a big shock to me.
Even on a community like Boing Boing, which is very transgender-friendly, there are plenty of people who would react the same way. Hell, even if you know about all that stuff, it’s pretty damned pedantic to expect a game about female masturbation to include tips for women with penises. I think that might be another example of concern driving trollies actually.
I found the email exchange he posted between him and one of the people at Penny Arcade Report much more interesting than the actual twitter exchange.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/06/19/twiiter-sucks-sometimes
Concern trolls are exercising their ConTroll (geddit?) abilities over a conversation. They tend to need to control it for one reason or another, voluntarily or otherwise. If you’re not wise to it, they gently pull you off topic. It can be their anxieties, it can be their paid duty, whatever.
Edit: I’ve found most government sponsored / affiliated / connected in some distant way media enterprises are concern trolls, to keep the population in a revolving kaleidescope of anxiety.
It also helps sell newspapers.
I feel like that is something different. Something like a rant state that communities get into where correcting a long standing slight takes on an aura of certitude that makes it imperative to mention it when ever it comes up. I have lived through this now a couple of times and have come to understand it is in fact an important technique to achieve change.
I am not sure it removes it from the universe of concern trolling, but it does soften the annoyance.
There’s a good illustration of trolling over in the discussion of http://boingboing.net/2013/09/09/replica-enterprise-br.html – someone made a gratuitous and at-best-tangentially-related reference to child porn, and some folks have been baited into diving down that rathole.
I don’t know that this was a deliberate trolling, but it has the earmarks thereof and illustrates the problem nicely. And I’m undecided whether it counts as “concern trolling” when the concern is so completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. But I think it’s a good illustration of how the process works.
As the concern troll in question, I can tell you that the whole, “which is worse: kiddie porn or the NSA?” question wasn’t really in my mind as much as finding it kind of weird that within about two days I’d seen headlines saying that one guy had made a replica Enterprise and used it for watching kiddie porn, while another guy had made a replica Enterprise and used it to expand the surveillance state. No real concern involved or intention of comparing the relative evils of the two, although I suppose I should have amended it to “That’s… the second creepiest creepy thing I’ve heard of someone doing in a replica of the Enterprise this week.” I thought of changing it but the damage was already done by that point.
One of the difficulties of defining concern trolling is that people have their areas that they are particularly sensitive to. Someone calling another person transphobic for hosting a game about vaginal masturbation would seem like concern trolling to many people - derailing the conversation by focusing on an extreme minority that could be offended. After all, it really has very little to do with the game itself. For other people, it’s an important time to highlight the ignorance that many people have about transsexuals. There was recently another discussion on BB about a girl who set off a drano bomb on school premises. What about kids who could have thought it was a terrorist attack? Maybe there were ex-military teachers for which it could have been a trigger? If another student had come around the corner at the wrong time, they could have been injured! They really only reacted strongly because she’s black! Most of these are pretty ridiculous, but you’ll probably find someone who will honestly argue for these points, because they feel that this is the elephant in the room that is key to the whole story.
In some cases, concerns can be legitimate and you have to step back and think about whether you should support a position or even continue the discussion without addressing the issue first. In others, they just distract you from what you should really be discussing. It’s often up to people’s opinion which one it is. Even using the term concern troll itself can even be a form of trolling, by trying to dismiss someone’s argument by giving the person a label (this isn’t what you were doing; I agree that the conversation got pretty ridiculous).
I think my definition of concern trolling would be trying to derail the conversation or otherwise suggest unreasonable changes to people’s lives based on a disproportionately small chance of negative consequences. Extra points if no proof of the existence of the person being offended or harmed is ever produced.
This brings up the existence of another variety of pest; the stereotype attacker. This scenario goes thusly; one attempts to make a nuanced point skirting some sore spot in the culture. The first reply is from somebody who did not bother to read carefully and attacks the original post for the violation that the post was addressing. The conversation proceeds down a rabbit hole of attempted clarifications and accusations of back-pedaling.
This may be the super class of concern trolling. Intent is not present. Negligence is a form of abuse.
I think it’s best to define trolling primarily by its intent, because I think trolling is often used as a sort of political tactic, and so should be distinguished from other sorts of annoying behavior. The intent of trolling is to disrupt a discussion, not to participate in it honestly.
Concern trolling is a particular form of trolling, in which someone brings up something, claiming it’s a tangentially related issue, in order to draw the participants away from the original subject of discussion. It’s often entirely reasonable to bring up a tangential issue and insist on its importance, so this form of trolling is a subtle one; we have to distinguish between an honest and a dishonest intervention in a discussion, based upon our belief about the intent of the person intervening. The key thing is, the concern troll doesn’t actually care about the tangential issue they’re bringing up, and may reveal themselves through this.
I think part of the issue with Penny Arcade and the “dickwolf” controversy is that the authors have a very cynical, pessimistic view of human nature. There’s their somewhat famous Greater Internet Dickwad Theory, which posits that normal people act abusively, given the anonymity of the Internet. If I recall correctly, there was once some controversy about Microsoft trying to enforce some policy against homophobic slurs in Xbox chatrooms, and one of the authors of Penny Arcade argued that, while he was personally opposed to homophobic slurs, he thought it was completely pointless to try to stop it – citing the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory – and that Microsoft would simply be imposing censorship without in any way reducing homophobia.
You do realize that the suspiciously low incidence of the letter “K” in your writing is a pretty clear indication that you are a lettrist. It really brings into question everything you say since the lack of objectivity is so glaringly obvious. I, myself, don’t even really notice the different letters as I write them, but, clearly, something is wrong and some analysis reveals the problem soon enough.
Your preference for even mixtures of C, M, and Y is the final give away. It is true to the horror of history that something so bland hides something so awful. Shame on you. Shame for perpetrating the same horrible crimes as your unforgivable ancestors with the merest slip of the alphabet. I am aghast at the valley that has opened between us so suddenly and I blame you and your negligent dis-regard for everything good.
So after reading a few more comments I have it now: ‘concern troll’ is a term invented to call someone out on overzealously and/or vexatiously playing ‘my PC-ness is bigger than yours’ without sounding like a conservative.
There is an element of showing off to it. Yes. My cultural sensitivity is bigger than yours.
Tell it to the hand:hand:
This is the essence of concern trolling to me: someone who spends a lot of time assuring others that their own interests are aligned with the community consensus, while only presenting arguments opposed to that consensus, because of what hypothetical others might think.
The definition that some others are using, just trolling using concern or political correctness as a tool, is not what I would call “concern trolling” if it leaves out that continual vibe of “Trust me, I’m one of you, but…” The worminess is essential, because by presenting their opinions as not their own, but those of the ignorant masses, they become totally immune to argument. “Sure, you and I know that, but…”
“OMG your health, you’re going to die, you’re never going to see your kids grow up, you’re costing the rest of us money, you’re giving people permission to be 700 pounds” etc. concern driving trollies any time a fat person dares to be fat in public and not apologize for it - fails to meet this definition, but is most definitely concern driving trollies.
Going back over this thread, I can’t deny that there’s a strong case being made for the existence of an alternate definition of “trolling” based on consistent patterns of usage. And the case you cite is a clear example of objectionable behavior on the Internet.
I don’t want to be pedantic. What I do want is to be able to identify a pattern of behavior that I see as a real threat to the existence of Internet forums I participate in. Intentionally disrupting discussions by violating social norms of discourse is a problem that has to be guarded against.
Interestingly, Mike just brought up the Dickwolves thing again recently, where he basically says the exact same thing: http://penny-arcade.com/2013/09/04/some-clarification
I really like the PA guys, Jerry in particular but Mike too, but Mike really has an issue keeping his mouth shut when he thinks something is stupid. Which for a normal person isn’t generally a big deal, but when you’ve got a platform as big as the Penny Arcade platform, can certainly get you into trouble.
One of the most recent comments (not linking to it for semi-obvious reasons) that had me (maybe misusing) the term ‘concern troll’ was on the Dave Chapelle story, where someone went off on a tangent about people like Beyonce Knowles and Halle Berry being successful because they’re pretty by white standards, all very couched in the PC language of privilege. It was the sort of thing that a person might nod their head at now, but if they thought about it for a few minutes they might think, “Now, wait just a damn minute…” Within my lifetime, someone like Beyonce or Halle would have been called a “zebra” and worse. Not that there isn’t a kernel of truth to it, but…well…I see a lot of stuff on here that’s couched in the language of privilege that ends up being problematic imho. :-}
I’m honestly not trying to stir the pot, just raising a concern. If anyone wants to argue about it, maybe we can argue it elsewhere.
Now that I think about it, my responses to that could have been seen as concern trolling as well, because I pointed out that within the past 50 years, some white-passing celebs were treated like they were fully African, and not in a good way.
