I think we just have different definitions of what “take it seriously” means. ↑
You can also do both of these things, of course, and that’s fine, though I would argue at some length that if you don’t systematically deplatform bigotry, racism, etc then whatever else you choose to do doesn’t matter very much in terms of being… effective.
No. Clearly, we have different definitions of history.
Following Wednesday’s assault, Pan’s spokesperson, Shannan Velayas, told the times that anti-vaccination advocacy is “moving from a peculiar fringe curiosity to a violent extremist movement.”
I wonder why the anti-vaccination movement, which has certainly existed for a very long time, would suddenly be moving from a peculiar fringe curiosity to a violent extremist movement. Can anyone think of anything that has changed in the last 10 years which would precipitate this outcome?
Part of the problem is that online harassment is deeply gamified. It’s not that jerks dislike women; it’s that these jerks have organized their petty prejudice into a an abuse hobby, whereby chasing people off platforms, getting them fired, getting them SWATed is a massive, thrilling live action roleplay where these man-babies roleplay righteous victimhood and self organize into raids on actual humans. Social media feedback mechanisms, which are brainlessly tuned towards “engagement” above all else, provide infrastructure, notifications and various sticky UX to keep the abuse hobbyists playing the game.
So who is most susceptible to recruitment into this abuse hobby? People who have rewired their brains to love the incremental reward loops and esprit de corps found in our favorite games. Meanwhile MMO games themselves serve as evergreen networking platforms to recruit new abusers into the ranks.
Yeah that’s fair. I’m also totally down with
being a hothouse for this stuff. But I also think
would help immensely as industry norms.
Flat Earth? That’s your big bogeyman?
People don’t need games to be violently and systemically toxic, that’s just the flavor of the age.
Books spread both the Enlightenment and the creed of every murderous and bigoted religious sect that thrived over centuries. If you don’t see the structural similarities between early pamphleteering and a toxic Reddit screed, I’ll help you out. The only real difference is that those early toxic pamphlets had more influence on the laws we live under today.
Women writers were attacked for being women writers, for centuries. Any genre deemed to be too girly was shunned by critics as not being “real” writing, for centuries, except if the critic thought the writer was a man, at which point it was taken more seriously.
Books (as a single example of where the same fecund toxicity can be found, as in all forms of general human communication) caused and fostered evangelical fundamentalism, the KKK, and any other atrocity you care to mention since they started coming off the press.
Technological communication amplifies, reinforces, and re-engenders pre-existing bigotries. This has happened and will happen in any mass communication network, as long as the base bigotries are allowed to be re-created and unchallenged in the minds of people.
People are hearing an echo of an inhumane idea, and repeating it in whatever communications device that’s handy, and the people who hear it are repeating it in turn. It’s not more toxic now, you’re just hearing your preferred communication device louder right now.
I like that one because it is so insane that it tracks the high water mark of what people can believe in. If infinitely connected humans could rally around anything, how crazy could it get? As you can see: very.
The actual research does not support these statements. While yes, it is true that humans have hated each other since the dawn of time, we have new and terrifyingly powerful weapons to express this hate, weapons every living human carries on their person 24/7 and can whip out of their pocket at any moment these days.
To argue that “it’s all the same old hate, but different year, therefore history” is like arguing that “it’s all the same old wars, but with nuclear weapons instead of swords and arrows”. Uh, no.
The period that the authors tracked included some major events that altered the white supremacist networks. Most prominent among these is Facebook banning the KKK. That led to a wholesale migration of US-based KKK groups to VKontakte; in many cases, these were simply mirrors of the sites the groups had set up on Facebook. But things became complicated on VKontakte, as well, as Ukraine chose to ban the entire network in that country.
At that point, some of the original Facebook groups surreptitiously made their way back to the new platform, but they did so with some new skills. Hoping to avoid Facebook’s algorithms, the re-formed KKK groups often hid their identity by using Cyrillic characters.
Another notable event that reshaped the networks was the Parkland school shooting, after which it was discovered that the shooter had an interest in the KKK and its symbols. In the wake of the shooting, many of the small clusters of KKK supporters started forming links with larger, more established hate groups. “This adaptive evolutionary response helps the decentralized KKK ideological organism to protect itself by bringing together previously unconnected supporters,” the authors argue. They also note that a similar growth in clustering took place among ISIS supporters in the wake of the news that its leader had been injured in combat.
The authors recommend a one-two punch of systemic deplatforming (gosh where have I heard that before), as well as encouraging the growth of anti-hate groups on platforms.
No you like it because it helpfully ignores every other equally crazy thing that people believed in without the help of “video game communities”. It’s not crazier than any other of top 150 craziest (and generally held) religious beliefs.
The “actual research”? And you point to the KKK?
I don’t think you’re going to convince someone that the KKK of the past was less toxic in its beliefs than the KKK of today. It may be easier to express racism on Twitter at 2am, but that doesn’t mean 1950 was a time of less toxic
and widely supported daily racism.
You’re the one who seems to be arguing that the conditions that supported the push for literal nuclear weapons, and slavery, and every other historical example of systemic toxicity, are still somehow less toxic than “videogame communities” of the immediate present.
It might feel that way to you, but I think you’re seeing everything through a proximity error.
The KKK of the 1920s was far more wide spread and powerful than the KKK of today. They had legitimate national organization, and in several states (Indiana, Oregon, esp), essentially RAN those states. This was before the national highway system and even before cars were widespread in the same way they were in the post-war world. It was an organization at the height of it’s power, all without the internet.
(This is the exact kind of a comment where a little differentiation between what a “like” means would be super-helpful. I can’t like any of those facts, but I like that there’s historians in the world.)
Well yeah I don’t know where “the earth is flat” lies exactly on a barometer of crazy ideas, but it’s clearly way up there, at least in the last 50 years.
That’s not what is being discussed. What is being discussed is how small groups of really fringe belief sets TODAY are being radically empowered – to a historically unprecedented degree – by the modern “smartphone in every pocket” internet.
I’d argue that these infinitely connected, always on social networks are akin to the nuclear weapons which forever changed the nature of war – and even today we are still grappling with dealing with the fallout of this change as a society.
I don’t “seem” to be arguing this, because I’m not. I’m arguing that the videogame communities are on the nasty and brutish leading edge of this modern trend because …
… but as other groups get more “internet savvy”, we’ll see the same effects, hence the KKK article. There’s also a LOT of cross-pollination between the (predominantly) angry white dudes of videogaming and other hate groups:
Many people come to the politically incorrect boards of 4chan and 8chan from video game communities, where players looking to laugh at an abasing joke or chat about violent games without offending anyone can find friends
Thus, the deplatforming and basic enforcement I think should be standard in videogame communities needs to be standard everywhere, and will provide knock-on benefits to further reducing downstream hate communities.
But:
Why are videogame communities so consistently toxic?
You’re going to need a historian to find out where all your goalposts were.
Historians are of less use when we have historically unprecedented changes. It’d be like asking historians “so what does history tell us about the future of the atomic bomb?” in 1950.
Time to build “worldwide Christianity”: 1000+ years.
Time to build “Facebook”: 10 years.
The rate of change is also speeding up as time goes on.
A historian of 1950 could have told you that when there’s a new “historically unprecedented and world-changing” technology and there’s an attempt to hold it as a monopoly to subjugate all other players, that someone else is eventually going to get control of it and challenge that monopoly. Historians of the time were asked about what effect atomic bombs would have to change political alliances, because you need to know what happened to understand what is more possible after old alliances and frameworks fall apart.
If FaceBook had asked and listened to more historians as they built their platform, a lot of them would have said “The neo-nazi-types are going to game any free speech protections you put in, because they’ve done that in every other media for years and years, since DW Griffith , and here’s a hundred other examples”.
Your KKK example totally rests on “How was anyone to know that racists would adapt to new technology?” Here’s some free advice from history: If they don’t moderate the injectable global neural-net of 2087, assholes will use it to recruit other assholes.
How do you know that’s how long it took?
Not exactly; as I said earlier, what we can learn from videogame communities is that they adapt to this much faster, and are bellwethers for what you will see all communities doing, soon enough. It just took them longer.
Which is why it’s discouraging that so little is being done.
If your point is that humans have always hated each other using whatever tools they have at hand, I mean… do we really need a “historian” to tell us that? Thanks for the piercing insight, I guess?
More like if Facebook had listened to anyone as they built their platform, other than the ‘grow like a cancer’ VC crowd. Move fast and break things! Oops! Democracy got broken, totes our bad!
Can you do me a favor and please ask “the historians” exactly what it is that’s going to challenge the supremacy of Facebook? Because I have to say, I’ve been working in this industry since I was 13 years old, and I’m not seeing a damn thing on the horizon that can realistically challenge them.
Then you’re old enough to remember Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, MySpace, etc. Probably even old enough to remember 8-track cartridges and when Ma Bell had a literal monopoly.
Corporate giants have been toppled before, and the same will happen again.
In my opinion this is the only viable route. The “hundreds of different automobile companies” era of the internet is long gone, and it’s not coming back.
Even if that does happen… check this out:
When is a breakup not a breakup, but a 30 year delay on the inevitable?
But feel free to contact The Historians and let me know what their take is @tuhu.
You don’t need me. You’re doing a fine job showing you can’t make any argument about the future without directly relying on the work of historians, all by yourself.
