Comment by mjburgess
4 months ago
Is it a thing?
I mean we had the holocaust, Rwandan genocide and the transatlantic slave trade without the internet.
The discovery, by the governing classes, that people are often less-than-moral is just as absurd as it sounds. More malign and insidious is that these governors think it is their job to manage and reform the people -- that people, oppressed in their thinking and association enough -- will be easy to govern.
A riot, from time to time -- a mob -- a bully -- are far less dangerous than a government which thinks it can perfect its people and eliminate these.
It is hard to say that this has ever ended well. It is certainly a very stupid thing in a democracy, when all the people you're censoring will unite, vote you out, and take revenge.
It is a thing for sure. How often it happens, I don't know.
I read a number of stories about school children being cyber-bullied on some kind of semi-closed forum. Some of these ended in suicide. Hell, it uses to happen a lot on Facebook in the early days.
I totally understand a desire to make it illegal, past a certain threshold. I can see how you start off legislating with this in mind, then 20 committees later you end up with some kind of death star legislation requiring every online participant to have a public key and court-attested age certificate, renewed annually. Clearly that's nonsense, but I do understand the underlying desire.
Because without it, you have no recourse if you find something like this online. For action to be even available, there has to be a law that says it's illegal.
> Clearly that's nonsense, but I do understand the underlying desire.
I wanna eat hamburgers like Peter Griffin in the stroke episode. But I don't because I'm an adult with logical thinking abilities and I know that there are consequences to my actions even if they are not immediate.
I have less, much less, than zero sympathy for people who advocate for doing things with law and government that the history textbooks are stuffed full of the horrific and nearly inevitable eventual consequences of.
Having benign motives doesn't absolve people for being stupid.
Not that any of this is in disagreement with your points.
Of course hatred, bullying, etc. is real -- what I was referring to is some special amount or abundance of it as caused by free discussion on the internet (rather than, say, revealed by it; or even, minimised by it).
We're not running the counter-factual where the internet does not exist, or was censored from the start, and where free expression and discussion has reduced such things.
The salem witch trials are hardly a rare example of a vicious mob exploiting a moral panic to advance their own material interests -- this is something like the common case. It's hard to imagine running a genocide on social media -- more likely it would be banned as "propganda" so that a genocide could take place.
We turned against the internet out of disgust at what? Was is the internet it itself, or just a unvarinished look at people? And if the latter, are we sure the internet didnt improve most of them, and hasnt prevented more than its caused?
I see in this moral panic the same old childish desire to see our dark impulses as alien, imposed by a system, to destroy the system so that we can return to a self-imposed ignorance of what people are really thinking and saying. It's just victorian moralism and hypocricy all over again. Polite society is scandalised by the portrait of dorian gray, and we better throw the author in jail .
I think these views are not necessarily contradictory. You can't wipe out Bad Things by making them illegal online. But I think not proliferating them certainly helps, and for sure I don't see why they should be tolerated online.
IMO there's benefit in making easy Bad Things hard, even if you can't stop them. Like gun ownership in Europe. How you do that while respecting internet freedom - my original question - I don't know. But I disagree with simply stating there is no conflict.
I mean, is it impossible that the commodified web is a sufficient but not necessary condition for atrocities? "But we had the Holocaust without it!" Okay, nobody said the internet was THE cause of ALL atrocities, just that it's actively contributing to today's atrocities. I think your logic is a bit... wrong.
That's not quite my argument. A little more formally:
There's a base rate of human malevolence running in each society. We do not know this base rate, and we can only sample malevolence via mass media (, police reports, etc.). If the mass media (including internet) were a neutral measurement device then we could say for sure that what we're seeing is just the background conditions of society leading to eg., riots, etc.
Because our measuring device isnt neutral we have a problem: are the things we see caused by our measuring? Do we cause more malevolence by participating in social media, which also makes us aware of it?
My argument is that we are presently significantly over-estimating the effect of our participation in the internet as a cause. My view is that its effects at reducing bad-stuff are likely more potent than its effects at causing it, and the vast majority of what we see isn't caused by the internet at all.
One argument for this is that it seems baseline malevolence (violence, etc.) is significantly decreasing, is historically very high, and that nothing we see via the internet is suprisingly above this historical case.