How imageboard culture shaped Gamergate

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The concentration having a disproportionate impact on nonlocal conversations is akin to gerrymandering in US politics cementing electoral victories while losing the popular vote. So much of this looks like raw versions of political strategies, and the exhausted despair that results from having to constantly refight the same battles eliminates honest dialog over time and leaves only those who use relentless toxic bad faith arguments as a strategy.

Creationists, Racists, Climate Change Skeptics, Red Pillers, Anti-vaccine stooges, and now Gamer-gaters… exploiting the tendency to assume good faith to boost indefensible positions and drain optimism and energy out of as many platforms as possible, decade after decade.

Happy New Year.

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S’okay, I didn’t bother to read past that point in any of your posts, since you admitted up front that you’re a complete dumbass.

Consider yourself silenced.

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There is something deeper to be said here… the assumption that everyone is operating on the same level on this stuff. I think you’re right… lots of times, they aren’t. I think the middle of the road democrats have bent over backwards in their attempt to act in good faith and to bring everyone to the table. And where did that get Obama? We have a shitty fix to our shitty health care system, because he thought standing up for single payer would mean an instant loss (or maybe he thinks it’s the wrong decision). But frankly, I’m really sick of the middle of the road solutions.

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This is a very good point. The “winning” idea in that “marketplace” isn’t even the most popular idea, it is the idea that has the most vehement proponent. Even an apparently consensus could just be one or two people agreeing with themselves when everyone else has run out of steam. That explains why the angriest political positions would tend to win out - anger is the currency of the debate.

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It’s so easy for even individual paid or obsessive trolls to poison the dialog on hundreds of sites using simple keyword alerts and sockpuppet management platforms. It’s very difficult to see solutions that don’t involve persistent identities, trustworthiness metrics gleaned from long-term account usage, shared mute-lists, shadowbans, and other mechanisms Glenn F and CodingHorror have discussed here before.

The worse it gets the less concerned I am about epistemic closure, and more I’m inclined to abandon forums that don’t rapidly take steps to minimize the impact of trolls on discussions.

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The US government works on the principle of consensus. Like it or not, America is further to the right than most Western nations. That means you get a right-of-center consensus. The problem isn’t so much that Democrats are prone to accepting middle-of-the-road solutions but that neither they nor the American public are willing to embrace radical ones.

Of course, it doesn’t help that the Republican party, as a whole, is so utterly resistant to progressive change that it would rather disenfranchise entire voter demographics than try to appeal to them.

I’m not terribly sure why trollies or people who make bad faith arguments pose some kind of major/insurmountable problem. Shouting at strangers on the internet is inherently counterproductive. At best, it’s cathartic, but it’s pretty useless as a form of agitation. If it’s also draining/dispiriting, then why not focus on more effective activism?

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One of the things that this has impressed upon me is that there’s a tremendous difference between pseudonymity and anonymity.

I’d been following a heated argument between Tor developers and supporters on the one hand, and a group of leftists who were critical of Tor, loosely clustered around journalists from PandoDaily. Most of the criticism has focused on Tor’s funding model, particularly on how it’s problematic that Tor gets the bulk of its funding from agencies of the US federal government, and most of the rest of its funding from agencies of other national governments. There’s been conspiracy-theory mongering, and a nasty fight over one critic of Tor who was harassing a Tor developer and who eventually got doxxed; so it’s been ugly.

Anyway, just before this article on 8chan and Gamergate was posted, I was reading some discussion which was questioning the social value of anonymity tools, since a study came out that suggests they’re mostly used for criminal activity.

It crossed my mind that much discussion of anonymity assumes, implicitly or explicitly, that these tools are needed for political resistance against oppressive governments. But, when I think about the history of liberatory political movements, I can think of many examples of the use of pseudonymity, but I can’t think of any examples of anonymity. And the other most commonly cited example of a use for anonymizing technology is a woman seeking assistance in escaping an abusive relationship – and I’ve seen women do this through the use of pseudonyms.

Pseudonyms allow creating an alternate identity, with the option of it being either temporary or permanent. What does anonymity get you that pseudonymity doesn’t? Freedom from accountability. At least apparently.

It’s pretty easy to see one downside of freedom from accountability when you look at 8chan’s /pol/ board, which looks like a festival of sociopathology. It’s probably just the worst available example, and there are better examples of what’s possible elsewhere. But the best I’ve heard of being done with anonymity is some of Anonymous’s collective actions. But I don’t see why anonymity was actually necessary for those actions, and there are a fair number of collective actions by Anonymous that were awful.

I wonder, though, if there’s another problem worth considering. The concept of leadership is relatively unpopular among leftist radicals these days. But there’s an argument that it’s important to have an accountable leadership, formally selected and subject to criticism and recall, as in the classic essay by Jo Freeman, The Tyranny of Structurelessness. An important point articulated in that essay is that, if you don’t have an accountable leadership, you’ll still have a leadership, but one that’s unaccountable, and whose existence is denied. Pseudonymity allows for the possibility of an accountable leadership, but anonymity does not allow for accountability.

Judging from the discussions I saw on 8chan, the idea they hold seems to be that lack of accountability allows for greater freedom of discussion and the pure exchange of ideas. But I suspect it just means that they’re denying how power operates in their group.

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But does pseudonymity make people more vulnerable to surveillance, stalking, and doxxing than anonymity?

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Can we please not do this? If Boingboing will print “shit” in place of “the S-word” it should just use the word. I hate it when television news does this, but at least they’re beholden to the FCC. I think everyone will understand that reference to the word is not the same as condoning the use of the word. I’m all for not needlessly offending people, and I’m not in the crowd of people who go, “well if they can say it why can’t we?” But, I question whether mere referential usage is ever mistaken for something more hostile. Moreover, it can muddy the waters as to what exactly you mean. I remember reading an article a long time ago, by a Japanese-American no less, who did this when talking about prejudice against Asians in America. His euphemism was so skillful that it took me the better part of five minutes to realize that one of the slurs he was referring to was “Jap,” at least I guess. To this day, I’m unsure. I seriously doubt he’d have caused even the faintest ripple of offense or condemnation had he just printed the word in the context of that article.

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I don’t think a temporary pseudonym would. For many uses, it would be functionally equivalent to anonymity.

I was most concerned with the uses of Tor, on the one hand, and with the cultural practice of anonymity associated with channers, on the other. They’re related, but separable.

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I think it does, particularly nowadays. Ten or twenty years ago, a pseudonym would be close to as good as anonymity for that (the one big difference is that if your pseudonymity is blown on one angle, it’s blown on multiple… let’s say hypothetically that Banksy branched out into guerrilla warfare against an oppressive militaristic government that took over his country Red Dawn style. If somebody revealed Banksy the clever artist was Joe Schmoe because they saw some preliminary designs for a Banksy work in Joe’s office, they’re also revealing that Banksy the freedom fighter is Joe Schmoe)… but today, with data mining, powerful forces like the government (most easily) and even determined individuals can put lots of unrelated data together, and a pseudonym gives them the means to do that, whereas anonymity… well, it’s a lot harder at least.

Example, Joe Schmoe uses the pseudonym Beeficide. He posts various things that get various people upset with him or maybe he has an obsessed ex stalking him and he had to change his name, or just somebody disturbed who took something he said extremely personally and views him as a stain on humanity that needs to be wiped out. At the same time, in several completely unrelated threads, he mentions various facts like that he has a Labrador retriever (in some thread about the dog training styles), that he lives a few minutes from the beach (in some thread about rich people closing beaches), that he’s got a brother in Wisconsin (in a thread about different union laws).

All of that goes into the file labelled Beeficide, and sooner or later, there’ll be enough data that can link Beeficide to Joe Schmoe.

Now let’s say that instead of calling himself Beeficide, he was on an anonymous forum: now, all people know is that somebody has a Labrador, somebody else has a brother in Wisconsin, somebody lives a few minutes from the beach, but they don’t necessarily know it’s the same person. If you have access to IP logs (and Joe wasn’t careful about using anonymity tools) you might be able to put all this together, but if you’re an average person who’s just reading the posts, it’s much harder.

And of course, Joe Schmoe could just as easily be Joanna who gets an extra dose of unwelcome attention from overly-entitled people because they’re a woman.

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Anonymity is like encryption: if you do it too well you will stand out. Particular flavors of anonymity (or pseudo anonymity) are generally more effective. Let people doxx your fully fleshed out, long term anonymous creations (aka alternate personas) and not you.

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It’s 2015 and you’re still talking about GG?

Maybe you can look around to find another color palate that is offensive to someone. That’d make a great story.

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It’s 2015 and it’s still a good bad example, isn’t it?

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It’s 2015 and you’re still butthurt that people are talking about GG?

Maybe you can look around to find something else that people are still talking about and rail against that?

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Oooh! You sure burned me!

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An important point articulated in that essay is that, if you don’t have an accountable leadership, you’ll still have a leadership, but one that’s unaccountable, and whose existence is denied.

Such a critical point! The use of doxing as a weapon seems in that context to be a way to prevent accountable voices from participating in the conversations.

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Actually, that points to one use for anonymity: harassment. And doxxing someone exposes them to harassment.

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One thing anonymity gets you is relief from the pervasive philosophy of having an identity in the first place. What if I am not interested in having or being a “self”, or a “personality”? What about one personality which is embodied in several organisms? Or several personalities within one organism? The concept of identity seems very much a product of western philosophy, and anonymity can be a way of avoiding this for some.

I prefer existing leadership to be accountable, but the existance of leadership is a more fundamental problem. To consider society without leaddership “structureless” is disingenuous, it’s really not difficult to devise and implement non-hierarchal structures.

One sticky problem of traditional accountability is - accountability to whom? As a free person, doesn’t one get to choose with whom one associates? It’s rather easy when obligations are formed explicitly rather than assumed.

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This is a tangent, but: on the subjective experience of the self, I often recommend the book, The Ego Tunnel. For a long time, I’ve understood the self to be a construction – and, I believe, a vulnerable one. The few times I’ve looked into Buddhism, I’ve found it bizarre that overcoming the self is a goal, which can only be achieved with profound and subtle effort, since my subjective experience is that the self is perpetually on the verge of disintegrating or being torn apart by conflicting forces. That’s both a material and a psychological fear, and is pretty much the anxiety that existentialists talk about.

(Lately, I’ve been toying with the idea of mapping out some ethical principles, in which the basic function of a society is to maintain the material and social prerequisites for human dignity – a robust state in which the self is reasonably secure, and in which a person can work towards eudaimonea, a state in which they are a fully realized human being living a good life – part of a community, part of the world, creative, dynamic, and no longer anxious.)

More to the point that I was making earlier, I’ve heard of the Buddhist concept of false satori, a state in which a person believes they have become enlightened, have overcome the limitations of the self, but they really haven’t. That seems somewhat like what some of the channers were describing when they talked about how anonymity lets them abandon ego for pure id – except, they’re obviously some of the most egotistical fuckwits in the world. They’re fooling themselves.

And this is one of the things that brought Tyranny of Structurelessness to mind. The idea was that these groups that Freeman participated in claimed not only that it was a worthy goal to be structureless and leaderless, but that they had achieved this goal. But, Freeman argues, they were not structureless or leaderless at all, and she questions whether it would be possible, or after all desirable, to have a structureless and leaderless group. In practice, these groups had structure, had hierarchy, had leaders, but since they denied these things were the case, there was no mechanism for challenging the leadership and the structure of the group save splitting the group or leaving it.

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