Some thoughts on Russell Brand, the Internet, and public spaces

[Note: This entry originally started out as an answer on Quora.]

So apparently there’s a dude named Russell Brand. I will admit, Gentle Readers, that I don’t know who he is, except that apparently he does standup comedy and such, and apparently his YouTube videos have been demonetized after he was accused of sexual assault.

Now, I will freely confess to knowing somewhere between zip and fuckall about him, his life, or the accusations. That’s not actually what this essay is about. Instead, I’d like to dive into the murky world of social media, monetization, and the ethics we as a society choose to live by.

I wrote the first version of this essay when a Quora user asked if YouTube has the legal right to demonetize Brand as ‘punishment’ for being accused of assault. Which is completely the wrong question. Punishment is something one does as retribution for an offense. Punishment is about the person being punished. YouTube doesn’t care about him, it cares only about its own brand. He’s not being removed so that YouTube can punish him, he’s being removed because not removing him hurts Google’s cash flow. (Google, naturally, owns YouTube.)

Does YouTube have a legal right to do this? Yes.

Does YouTube have a moral right? Well…that gets complicated. Buckle up, long essay is loooooong.

The legal part is straightforward, so I won’t spend a lot of time on it. When you create a YouTube account and click I Agree, you have signed a legally binding, court-enforceable contract with Google. That contract gives Google the absolute, unlimited, unilateral right to demonetize you or kick you off their platform for any reason or no reason. YouTube’s servers are private property owned by Google, they are not a public forum or a public space, and you are not the customer, their advertisers are the customer.

In the eyes of the law, this is what clicking “I accept” means. If you don’t like the contract, don’t sign. (Image: Scott Graham)

Legally and morally, you have no right to use YouTube or its servers. You are granted a limited, revokable permission to use private property belonging to Google under certain conditions, and that permission can be withdrawn at any time for any reason.

Legally, it’s open and shut. Nothing to see here, move along.

Ethically?

I think an argument can be made that it’s ethically dodgy. Trouble is, the ethical argument isn’t the one people are making.

First off, anyone who tells you “First Amendment my constitutional rights!” in any discussion about social media is an imbecile, and you can safely disregard any ignorant bleatings that issue forth from their pie-hole. You have no Constitutional right whatsoever to use someone else’s stuff for free.

“But it’s a public forum!” No, it isn’t. Shut up, you’re embarrassing yourself. It’s a private server, owned by a corporation and maintained at that corporation’s expense. You have no right to be there.

“But it gives big tech companies too much power!” And? And so? People who own communications media have always had that much power. Social media is, in fact, way more democratized than newspapers or television stations, and guess what? You have no right to march into a television studio and demand they broadcast whatever you want them to on the six o’clock news, or to demand that Time Magazine publishes your manifesto on toothbrush design.

Google data center. This is private property. You have no right to use this for free.

Magazine printing press. This is private property. You have no right to use this for free. (Image: Bank Phrom)

People who own media set the rules for what that medis will carry. That’s the way it’s always been, that’s the way the Founding Fathers intended it to be (many of them were media owners themselves!), and government regulations telling media owners they have to carry your stuff is an infringement on their First Amendment rights.

The actual ethical argument is way, way more subtle, and it’s not about the Constitution, it’s about the kind of society we want to live in.

So liberals and conservatives, as part of the tedious ongoing culture war designed to distract attention from the fact that the conservative party in the US no longer has a party platform or legislative agenda, have latched onto this idea of “cancel culture” as a stick to beat each other with.

Ironic, since liberals and conservatives both do it. It’s just that when they do it, they’re imposing their ideology by force on other people, but when we do it, we are making society safer by choosing to spend our money in ways that promote the ideals we want to see.

It’s asinine because all the folks engaging in this argument, left or right, are liars. They may see themselves as genuinely good people, but they’re still liars. And the thing about seeing yourself as a good person is, you stop watching yourself. You stop asking yourself ethical questions. Once you’ve accepted that you’re a good guy, it follows that what you’re doing must be right, because you’re a good guy, and good guys do the right thing. It’s written on the tin!

I’d far rather be trapped all night in a dark basement with someone who questions his own moral worth than someone utterly convinced he’s on the side of the angels, hands down.

But I digress.

The actual ethical issue is the issue of mob rule: the tyranny of torch and pitchfork.

A crowd of “good people” (Image: Hert Niks)

Why does Google revoke YouTube monetization for someone who’s been accused of something bad? Because if they don’t, advertisers will harm their revenue.

Why would advertisers harm their revenue? Is it because the corporations buying the ads are all fed from the milk of human kindness, motivated above all things by the desire to bring justice to the world?

Ah HA ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha nope.

It’s because advertisers fear an angry backlash if they don’t.

Why do advertisers fear an angry backlash if they don’t?

Because the Internet allows people to come together in flash mobs to punish the transgressors on a moment’s notice, and punish those standing next to the transgressors, and punish those who are insufficiently righteous in their zeal against the transgressors, and those who stand next to those who are insufficiently righteous in their zeal against the transgressors, and those who are peripherally associated in any way with anyone associated with the transgressors.

And these Internet flash mobs are fast. Much faster than the speed of Truth or Reason. In fact, in many corners it is considered morally wrong to suggest that maybe people ought to slow down to the speed of reason.

Just like Google has the right to decide you can’t use its servers for free for any reason or no reason, you have the right to decide you won’t buy Happy Pawz Cat Litter™ for any reason or no reason…including that you saw an ad for Happy Pawz Cat Litter™ on a YouTube video about cello tuning and you hate cello music. Or you don’t like the person in the video, or the person who made the video, or the person the video is about. Whatever. Your money, your rules.

And you have the right to tell other people “I really don’t care for Happy Pawz Cat Litter™ and I don’t think you should buy it either.”

So far, so good.

The place it runs off the rails is when “I won’t support X for reason Y” becomes “I will make sure nobody supports X for reason Y, and anyone who disagrees with me is Clearly Evil and must be punished too.”

In other words, it’s about locus of control. I will control how I spend my money: totally okay. I will control how you spend your money: Abusive, bullying, and toxic.

This is often framed as a liberal vs conservative thing. It’s not. It’s an authoritarian vs self-detemining thing.

No matter how pure your intentions or righteous your cause, if you deprive others of the ability to disagree with you, you are a bully.

And that’s the greatest secret of the Internet: it empowers bullies in ways no other technology ever has.

This, but electronically, is the ethical issue (image: egoitz)

Russel Brand may well be is a terrible person. If you don’t want to support him, that’s cool. If you believe nobody should support him, that’s cool. If you believe Google shouldn’t give him money for his YouTube content, that’s cool.

If you believe everyone else must think as you do, that’s not cool.

People really struggle with this, because at the end of the day, bullying feels good. There’s a reason it’s such an enduring part of the human experience. And bullying in the name of a virtuous cause? That feels awesome. It feels righteous. You’re Striking A Blow Against Evil! You’re making the world a better, more just place!

You can build utopia if only you can foce everyone to harass, shun, and exclude the people you think should be harassed, shunned, and excluded! Why won’t people see that we will all become more egalitarian and empowered if everyone would just do as I say??? What is wrong with them?

So that’s the world Google lives in: if they monetize the wrong people, there’s a real chance their advertisers will be harassed. I mean, think what happened when radio stations continued to play the Dixie Chicks when the torches and pitchforks crowd started the crusade against them—managers of radio stations were stalked, their families received rape and death threats.

Building Utopia by finding the right people to threaten and bully, amirite?

Now, I will admit I have a dog in this fight. I woke up a while back to discover that a person posing as a journalist had put up a website where a bunch of people claiming to be exes of mine—some exes, some not, some people I’ve never been in the same room with except in passing at a convention or something—were claiming to have been abused by me. It’s a…weird and unsettling experience to have people saying that more exes have come forward with tales of abuse than the total number of exes you have.

Anyway, as a result of that, owners of indie bookstores have been harassed for hosting book events with my co-author and me. People close to me have been threatened. A BBC reporter wrote a book on polyamory, and ended up being harassed after someone started a rumor that I actually wrote the book and used his name. He used to do a podcast; that ended when his co-host was harassed to the point she didn’t feel safe associating with him any more. Even though you can look up his name and yes, he’s actually a well-known and well-established British reporter…who is, in fact, not me.

And most bizarre of all, someone started an Internet rumor that I secretly run a polyamory conference put on by a British non-profit in London, and as a direct result, people scheduled to speak at that conference received a barrage of death threats in a coordinated campaign so serious, the non-profit canceled the conference. A conference that (it shouldn’t be necessary to point out but I’ll say it anyway) I do not run, profit from, or in any other way have connection with—as is easily verifiable because it is, err, run by a British nonprofit, and like all British nonprofits, its managers, members, and finances are all public record.

Not that pitchfork mobs are known for, you know, doing their research.

So I have firsthand experience with this kind of crap.

Now, absolutely none of this has anything to do with whether Russel Brand is a good person or not, whether Russel Brand is guilty or not, or whether Russel Brand deserves (for whatever value of “deserves” one might use) a platform or not.

The point is, it’s totally 100% ethical to say that you won’t spend your money with anyone who supports people you don’t like. Your money, your rules.

There is an ethical issue here. The ethical issue isn’t “but the First Amendment! Freeze peach!” The ethical issue isn’t “but public forum!” The ethical issue isn’t “but Big Tech has too much power!” Anyone yapping about that can forever be ignored.

The ethics are that we live in a world where if your radio station plays music from someone that the Internet horde doesn’t like, your managers will be stalked, their families threatened with rape and dismemberment, and venues that host their concerts will receive bomb threats.

Image: Ahasanara Akter

The ethics are that we live in a world where this sort of thing is so common, and so normalized, and so rationalized, that companies would rather preemptively cut people off if it seems like there’s a possibility that the Internet horde might pick up the pitchforks and torches.

I do absolutely 100% see that as a problem. In fact, I’ll even go one step further and say it might be one of the defining social problems of the modern age, a direct consequence of populism and a sense of entitlement common on all sides of the political spectrum that says “I have the right to send rape and death threats if I think my cause is righteous and just enough—I am doing good with every rape threat I send, I am building a better society one rape and death threat at a time.”

I often wonder how someone sits down at a computer and types out an email describing how they’re going to murder someone on another continent they’ve never met, then clicks Send, dusts off their hands, and says “Today I did the right and just thing, look what a good person I am!”

Yes, men are losing rights* in the age of feminism

[Note: This essay originally started out as an answer on Quora.]

If, God help you, you ever read incel or “men going their own way” forums, which I have done, you frequently find a complaint—

Well, hang on, wait. You frequently find many complaints, because that’s pretty much all the incels and MGTOW folks do: whine and complain. One of those complaints you’ll often see is that “men are losing their rights” thanks, of course, to those evil feminist women, hell-bent on stripping men of their natural God-given rights.

The standard answer to this particular whine is, of course, “egalitarianism doesn’t mean you lose your rights, it means women gain rights.” Which is true as far as it goes, but the fact is, yes, men have lost rights because of feminism. In fact, you can look at the changing legal landscape in the United States over the past century and point to specific legal rights men once had that they don’t any more, directly because of feminism.

Photo by author

I was born in the 1960s, so I’ve lived through the rise of modern feminism.

Men have lost rights, both legal and civil, due to the rise of women’s rights.

Here’s a partial list of rights and privileges I as a man have lost just in my lifetime due to women’s rights:

  • The right to rape my wife without being prosecuted. Before 1974, marital rape was legal in every state. It was banned in Delaware and Maryland in 1974, but remained legal in other states until 1993.
  • The right to control my spouse’s money. Until the early 1960s, women could be barred from opening bank accounts at all without a male co-signer. Until 1974, married women could be barred from opening a bank account; the bank account was always in the man’s name, and the man had control. Until 1974, women could be barred from having a credit card in their own name.
  • The right to sexually harass at work. Until 1980, sexually harassing women in the workplace was legal.
  • The right to have certain jobs reserved only for men. Until 1970, it was legal for employers to reserve certain jobs as “men only” even if the sex of the person in the job had nothing to do with the job. Advertising designer, newspaper reporter, and many other jobs were frequently reserved as “men only.”
  • The right to hire only single women. Before 1960, many employers banned married women—you had to be single to get a job, and you were fired if you got married.
  • The right to control estates. Until 1971, women were banned from administering estates and could be passed over for inheritance at the whim of the estate administrator.
  • The right to prosecute women as “public scolds.” Until 1972, men could take legal action against women for “being quarrelsome or public scolds.” The last public scold law was struck down in 1972.
  • Control over women’s housing. Until 1974, landlords could refuse to rent to women.
  • Control over women’s healthcare. Until 1976, laws in many states said that a woman could not seek certain forms of healthcare without the signature of their husband or a male guardian.
  • Control over women’s money part II: Until 1981, married men in Louisiana has complete control over their wives’ money and property under a law called—get this—the Louisiana Head and Master Law. It was finally struck down in 1981.

How do I, as a man, deal with that?

Simple: I don’t want to rape my wife. I don’t want to control her money, control her doctor’s visits, or have her arrested as a scold.

In other words, why am I losing my rights? Because the rights I’ve lost are rights that men should never have had in the first place.

That’s the pesky asterisk in “men are losing rights*”. And it’s a different argument than “ha ha ha LOL shut up you haven’t lost any rights.” Men have lost rights. Unpacking why, and whether we shoud’ve ever had them to begin with, is a different conversation, and one I think we need to be willing to have if we are to deconstruct the weird entitlement of the manosphere.

Some Thoughts on Donald Trump’s Appeal

[Note: This entry started out as an answer on Quora]

A lot of my liberal friends seem baffled by the fact that 45’s supporters seem…remarkably unfazed by the fact that Trump keeps announcing he’ll do things he never gets round to doing. Like, for example, when he said he’d post overwhelming evidence of his innocence and a vast conspiracy at a press conference…then when the day of the conference came and went, he’d present it in court at his trial. As with the tax returns he promised to release after e was elected that somehow he failed to release, this seems a pattern.

“Don’t his supporters notice?” my liberal friends say. “Doesn’t that bother them? When will he show us this evidence, anyway?”

That actually isn’t the right question.

It isn’t the right question because the answer is obvious. There is no evidence. There was no evidence. There never will be any evidence. He’s had plenty of chances to offer evidence and he hasn’t.

And, of course, we now know that he didn’t present any evidence at a news conference—he canceled the conference before it started, and now he’s claiming he will present this “evidence” at trial.

It is embarrassingly, painfully obvious that he doesn’t have anything.

So that’s not the right question, given that the answer is so obvious.

What is the right question?

The right question is “since it’s plain as the nose on your face Trump has no evidence that the election was in any way stolen, and since he keeps saying over and over that he does but every single time he says he’s going to show us this evidence he doesn’t, why do people still believe him?”

And the answer to that question says something fascinating about human beings.

Back in 2011, a Christian radio preacher named Harold Camping predicted the end of the world. He encouraged his followers to give up all their earthly possessions, sell their houses, and use the money to buy billboards warning that the end of the world was coming.

Of course, May 21, 2011 came and went and the world kept on turning.

You’d think this would have caused his followers to abandon him. It did not.

This actually wasn’t Camping’s first rodeo. He’d predicted the end of the world before, on May 21, 1988.

And then again on September 6, 1994.

When May 21 came and went, ol’ Harold, not one to give up in the face of, you know, reality, predicted that the world would definitely definitely end, for realsies, on October 16, 2011.

So far, so boring. People’ve been predicting the end of the world for as long as there have been people in the world. That’s not the interesting part.

Here’s the interesting part:

When each day came and went, the faithful didn’t lose faith, they became more faithful. They became more convinced.

In 1956, a psychologist named Leon Festinger wrote a book called When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World. In that book, he made up a term for people who struggle to reconcile a sincere, passionate, earnest belief that doesn’t align with reality. He named this psychological phenomenon he was studying “cognitive dissonance.”

His hypothesis: When you believe something that turns out not to be true, such as when you believe a preacher who tells you the world is going to end on a certain date and then nothing happens, it takes work to get your head around the fact that it didn’t happen. It takes effort. It takes labor.

You have to unpack your belief. You have to look at yourself. Why didn’t it happen? Why did I believe it was going to happen? How can I explain to myself that I accepted a belief that wasn’t true? Does this mean other beliefs I have also aren’t true? How can I tell? How can I be sure? Does this mean I have poor judgment in the people I choose to believe in? Is it possible that those people in a different tribe, the ones who kept telling me that my belief was wrong, could be right? Am I part of the wrong tribe? What else have I been wrong about?

All this is deeply difficult and deeply unsettling.

You would think that a religion that preaches the end of days to its followers would lose all its followers when the days don’t end. That doesn’t happen; in fact, its followers become more fanatic and more faithful and more likely to believe their preacher, because (and this is the bit that blows my mind) it’s actually easier—it’s less work, it’s less effort, it’s less painful—to reject reality than to reject a belief you’re emotionally invested in, reject a tribe you consider yourself part of, or reject an authority figure you believe.

One of the most potent tools for rejecting reality is what Festinger called selective exposure.

Selective exposure means you only talk to people in your tribe—your fellow believers—and refuse to listen to anyone else. You only watch media that reinforces your belief, and go out of your way to avoid media that doesn’t. You read, watch, and listen to only the things that reinforce your belief, and the stronger the cognitive dissonance, the more you isolate yourself in a bubble that rejects reality and confirms what you already believe.

So when Donald Trump says he is going to prove that the election was stolen, then he doesn’t, that creates cognitive dissonance, just like when a preacher says the world is going to end on May 21 and then it doesn’t.

And, of course, some people will wake up when the proof never materializes or the world doesn’t end and say “okay, fine, he was lying.”

But a lot of people won’t. They’ll accept any excuse: Oh, I miscalculated the date from the Biblical signs, it’s really October 16. Oh, my lawyer told me not to show you the proof, I’ll how it to you at my trial.

Paradoxically, the more dates come and go, the more the faithful cling to the belief that next time it’s definitely gonna happen. Just like Charlie Brown thinks next time, Lucy will definitely let him kick the football.

At this point, Donald Trump’s remaining followers are acting and behaving pretty much exactly like members of a cult. They sincerely believe that next time, he will show them proof that the election was stolen, and when he doesn’t, they’ll believe whatever excuse he gives them, and believe that the time after that, he will definitely show them proof that the election was stolen.

You cannot argue them out of it. You cannot point out that it hasn’t happened yet and it’s never going to happen. No combination of words, no evidence, no proof exists that can change their minds, because changing their minds is simply too painful. It would force them to confront that they have spent all this time, all this effort, all this money following the wrong man.

You have to recall that the people who still follow Trump have probably given up a lot. They’ve given him their money, yes, but they’ve also lost friends, lost family, endured being ridiculed and called stupid…and so they’ve turned inward, they’ve made a new tribe with new beliefs.

And now, at this point, to admit they were wrong? That means they lost their money for nothing. That means they gave up their friends and family for nothing. That means all those jeers were true. And, more than that, they would have to give up the new tribe they’ve created and the new friends they’ve made.

You really think there’s a combination of words you can say that would make them do that? No way.

Does silence mean consent?

[Note: This post started out as an answer on Quora]

Does silence mean consent? Sexually? No. Clearly not.

If you’re talking about Thomas More’s philosophy of qui tacet consentire videtur (he who is silent seems to consent), it’s…complicated.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot lately, and even had a long discussion about it with my co-author Eunice a few weeks back. We fall on opposite sides of the issue, or perhaps on subtly different sides of one aspect of the issue.

Buckle up, bruh, this might get long.

When people say “silence equals consent,” they’re uuuuusually not talking about sex. When More said “qui tacet consentire videtur,” he was responding to a legal question about why he didn’t recognize the king’s dominion over the Church. His answer basically meant “I didn’t object to it, therefore I recognize it.”

In law and international relations, qui tacet consentire videtur means something more like “silence means assent.” That is, if you don’t object to a statement or decision or policy or treaty or something, that is functionally the same as if you had voted “yes” to it.

Okay. So. Here’s the thing:

The same idea often seems to apply in social settings, especially in subcommunities. You’ll see this play out when, for example, people say “if you’re conservative but you don’t speak out against the fascists in your party, you’re basically saying you’re one of them.” Or “if you’re Muslim but don’t speak out against the violent extremists among you, you’re basically saying you agree with them.” (Whichever way you personally may fall on the political spectrum, dear reader, it always feels less comfortable when it’s turned around, doesn’t it?)

Now, I’ve seen this happen in a subcommunity that I used to belong to. I get how it works.

The thing Eunice points out, and I agree with, is qui tacet consentire videtur only applies if it’s safe to speak dissent. If you risk being beheaded for publicly saying that the king does not rightfully have dominion over the church, then keeping your mouth shut is not automatically assent.

The place we differ is whether or not remaining silent in the face of immorality is a morally defensible act.

Now I get it, I really do. If you live under the Taliban’s rule and you’re Muslim, you maybe might want to think twice about raising your voice in objection to extremism, or you and your family are at very real risk.

Where I think things get muddier is when you’re not at risk of having your head separated from your shoulders, but rather you don’t speak your dissent because you’re worried it will cost you social standing. Or friends. Or your position in your community. You know, something that’s not your life or your freedom.

Where Eunice and I differ is she’s way more patient than I am with people who don’t speak out about things they sincerely believe are wrong when doing so may cost something.

She believes, if I may take the liberty of stating her position as I understand it, that we all have the right to set for ourselves our own personal level of acceptable risk, and what we are willing to put on the line for our values. It is not necessarily wrong to decide the consequences for speaking dissent are more than we are willing to pay.

I’m a lot more hardline about it. I believe that, to quote Jon Stewart:

If you don’t stick to your values when they’re being tested, they’re not values, they’re hobbies.

If you make your values a part of your identity, but fail to express them whenever they might cost you something, then yes, your silence, functionally, does mean assent.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. The problem is, evil can make it expensive enough that nobody wants to be the first one to do something.

It’s like a criminal holding 30 hostages with a six-shot revolver. If everyone stood up, they’d win. But the first one to stand up is getting shot, so nobody wants to be the first one to stand up, so everyone meekly complies with the criminal and allows him to tie them up, so now he can kill all 30 at his leisure.

There’s actually a scene in a Marvel movie, of all things, that nicely illustrates the dilemma of qui tacet consentire videtur:

At what cost our dissent? Most of us would like to look in the mirror and tell ourselves we are like this man. Almost nobody actually is. I’ll bet folding money that most people will keep silent in the face of things they are think are wrong even if the cost of speaking up is quite small.

—–

When I posted this on Quora, a friend remarked that in his opinion, Eunice’s position shows greater empathy than mine; that is, Eunice is less hard-line than I am because she’s more sensitive to the plight of the person placed in the position of not being able to speak up without facing the community’s retaliation.

I chewed on that idea for weeks. I had a sense that there was something missing from that idea, but it took me a while to put my finger on what it was.

In situations where, for example, someone is in the closet as a member of some sexual or ethnic morality for fear of the community’s reaction if he comes out, I agree. That’s absolutely a reasonable choice, and deserves respect and compassion. In fact, I’ve chosen to live openly, as I’ve said in my memoir and also at events back as far as the 90s, in part because I can. I’ve never had a job that would be at risk because someone finds out I’m polyamorous, or family that would disown me.

In that sense, I’m privileged, and I know it, and it’s because I’m privileged I want to do whatever I can to make it easier for the next person to be open.

Image: Adrian Swancar

What I’m talking about here is slightly different from being in the closet, though. This answer is more about being silent in the face of things you know to be wrong—not silence in the sense of “I am silent about my own sexual orientation because I am worried people will harm me,” but in the sense of “I see people like me harming those who come out of the closet, and I’m silent about that because I don’t want those people to attack me too.” I do think those are two different situations, and in the latter, being silent to the bigotry of others does serve as assent to their bigotry.

If I as a straight person don’t stand up to homophobia, am I complicit in it? If I as a man don’t stand up to misogyny, am I complicit in it? I personally think the answer is yes.

The part about empathy is what triggered that realization, because it’s precisely empathy that makes me draw that bright line. I think that it’s easy to have empathy for the straight person who doesn’t stand up to the homophobe, because most of us identify with that person and it’s easiest to have empathy for those who are like us.

But the person who most needs empathy isn’t the straight person too scared to speak up, but the gay person being targeted in the first place.

Yes, it’s important to have empathy for the straight person who’s worried about being targeted by the bigots, because yes, bigots can and do come after those on the “side” of the disfavored group—look at, for example, American white nationalists who target Black people but also target “race traitors” they perceive as siding with Black people against their own race.

But in that particular case, who do we empathize with more? Who drives our compassion: the white person who is afraid of being branded a “race traitor” and harassed by the white nationalists, or the Black person at the receiving end of their hate?

I see that bright line not because I don’t empathize with the white guy who doesn’t want to draw attention to himself from the bigot, but because I do empathize with the person who has to live with that bigotry when nobody is willing to speak up.

So what’s wrong with social justice, anyway?

Well, to start with, nobody in the world actually wants social justice.

There. I said it.

Okay, lots of people sincerely believe they want social justice; the people who say they want it aren’t lying, exactly. It’s way more complicated than that, and a lot happens between “I’d like to live in a just world” and “I am going to work to make a just world happen.”

Buckle up, this answer is gonna get loooooong.


Let’s start here: The real world is complicated. Really, really complicated. You might think getting your scanner/printer to work with Windows is complicated, but that’s peanuts compared to socioeconomic and geopolitical reality.

And people, even smart people, handle complexity poorly.

Topical case in point: What’s happening in Israel and Gaza right now.

Image: Mohammed Ibrahim

If you want to understand what’s happening, you need to know quite a lot of history from the 1940s on. There’s a lot of “there” there: the Israeli offer, turned down by the Arabic population; the reasons Egypt and Jordan closed their borders to the Palestinians; the history of Hamas, which is both a terrorist organization and also a government (and before that, the Muslim Brotherhood); the way Egypt has deliberately played the Gaza refugees as political pawns…it’s complicated and ugly and no side has totally clean hands, but even understanding where the balance lies requires a pretty thorough history lesson…

…and oh God that’s, like, sooooooo complicated, whyyyyyyy can’t someone just tell me who the good guys are and who the bad guys are?

That’s the thing: a lot of people want to treat actual, real-world political situations like football matches or WWF wrestling, with a clearly defined good guy and a clearly defined bad guy, so they know who they’re supposed to root for.

Even people who start out genuinely, sincerely interested in social justice can easily get bogged down.

That’s the heartbreaking thing about, you know, empathy and compassion. When you sincerely want to leave the world in better shape than you found it, you soon find yourself fighting an uphill battle. Injustice doesn’t exist because someone woke up one day and said “Hey! You know what? I think I’ll be a dick to other people today!”

Injustice exists because entrenched economic, social, and political systems with roots thousands of years deep have entrenched ways of doing things because the people atop those systems benefit from doing things that way.

Fighting against that is hard. It grinds you down. However energetic and idealistic you were when you started, it pulverizes you.

Nobody has infinite time. Nobody has infinite energy.

Which is fine, except that most people want to believe themselves to be one of the good guys, on the side of Truth and Righteousness and Justice, even when we don’t want to—or can’t!—do the work of getting there. It’s not enough to say “You know what? I’m not informed enough about this to have a reasonable opinion.” Oh, no, no, we want to take sides but we don’t want to invest the time or labor in making sure we pick the right side.

We just want to know who to blame.

Knowing who the bad guy is helps define us as the good guy. If we’re against the bad guy, that makes us good, right? Right?

So what do we do?

We develop heuristics. Cognitive shortcuts. Quick and dirty rules of thumb to simplify complex situations and help guide us toward the ‘right’ team to root for. These fast and easy heuristics, at least in theory, cut through all the tedious drek of having to learn all that history and become informed of the goals and grievances of all the players and untangle a knotty and nuanced tangle that’s been all balled up for decades.

But here’s the thing:

Heuristics are not subtle. They’re fast intuitive guidelines that substitute for actual understanding. They feel right, but that doesn’t mean they are right.

Those heuristics—“believe women,” “always side with the most historically oppressed,” whatever they are—gradually become rules, then social tribal markers, then symbols of moral purity. Heuristics become adopted by tribes as ways to tell the in-group from the out-group. If you see a hashtag like #believewomen, you can probably make a pretty good guess about the politics of the person who subscribes to it.

Before long, it actually becomes morally wrong not to obey the heuristics.

Enforcing moral purity becomes a way to feel powerful, to feel like you’re accomplishing something, in the face of the overwhelming hopelessness and despair that comes from fighting an entrenched system day after day and ending each day with nothing to show for it.

What it feels like to care about justice

Say your crusade is animal welfare, for example. You’ve fought for years and what do you have to show for it? There are even more factory farms now than when you started. Consumption of animals is up, not down.

But then let’s say Bob, your staunch and stalwart ally, your comrade in arms, reveals that he’s not a vegan…he thinks it’s okay to eat fish. And…and…and eggs. And he wears leather belts.

You can’t end factory farming, you can’t stop the senseless slaughter of animals…but hey, you can rally the troops against Bob, because he betrayed the cause! You can destroyed his reputation and cast him out! Look! Look! You accomplished something!

This is inevitably what happens in social justice circles. We end up here because:

  1. People want a morality simple enough to fit in a hashtag; and
  2. Any morality simple enough to fit in a hashtag cannot capture reality, and therefore is rather limited as a tool to change reality.

People tend to think of “social justice” as a left thing, but this process knows no political bounds. Those on the right do it just as often—they simply don’t call it “social justice.”

But the same things still apply: they have a way they want the world to be; changing the world requires tremendous amounts of effort and work; people don’t have limitless resources; they fall back on simple rules to tell them who the good guys and bad guys are; those simple rules become tribal markers; before long, it becomes morally unacceptable even to question those simple rules.

We see the world not at it is but as we are. We invent narratives to describe the world, and to tell us who the good guys are, and who we should be in order to think of ourselves as good. Anyone who can co-opt those narratives can control the lines between Us and Them, the boundaries that define our tribes.

So here we are. We’re terrible at nuance, we don’t have tome to get informed, so we let the hashtag mentality do the work for us.

On the Problematic Aspects of Liberals

Recently, a Quora user asked a question about what problems we, the Internet horde, have with leftists.

I kinda wanted to start my answer with “the biggest problem I have with leftists is how easily they turn to being whiny, self-indulgent, virtue signaling pricks too lazy to do the work demanded by the ethics that they so love to pat themselves on the back about,” but Joreth thinks maybe that might not go over so well as an introductory paragraph, so perhaps I’ll start a bit more gently.

Oh dear. It seems I’ve started that way after all. Well then, to arms! Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war! I mean, god knows I spend a lot of time dishing on conservatives, so maybe it’s time for liberals to get some of that attention. You know, in the spirit of generosity and fairness of heart.

Image: stillfx on Adobe

One of the biggest differences between liberals and conservatives centers on social organization, and appears to be a consequence of concrete, identifiable structural differences in the brain.[1][2][3]

Conservatives favor vertical social hierarchies divided into leaders and followers, high status and low status.[4] A place for everyone, in other words, and everyone in their place.

Legitimate authority is to be obeyed without question; questioning authority is treason, an offense against all society. People on the bottom of the hierarchy should know their place and not get uppity.

People are sorted by physiology, and presenting yourself outside the accepted norms that communicate your station and position in the hierarchy—men wearing “women’s” clothing, people of one race “putting on airs” of another race (especially one of higher stature), these things are absolutely unacceptable.

Liberals, on the other hand, favor a horizontal, flat social organization. Leaders are not above everyone else, they serve everyone else. Questioning leaders to keep them on the right track? That’s not treason, that’s Tuesday. People who are structurally marginalized or disempowered by social convention? It’s the duty of society to equalize their position.

Which, okay, well and good, but…

Liberals like to ridicule conservatives as delusional imbeciles with their “alternative facts,” weird conspiracy nutters always yammering on about absurd hallucinations like “Jewish space lasers” and Democrat sex-slave rings run from the basement of a pizza shop that’s doesn’t have a basement.

But at the same time, liberals embrace their own delusions, they’re just delusions of a different flavor, and they go right back to that horizontal social structure ideology.

So a couple years ago, this guy:

got into hot water over the N-word.

No, not that N-word. The Chinese word 那个, pronounced something like “nà ge.”

This guy is Greg Patton. He’s a professor at the University of Southern California, where he teaches, among other things, business communication.

He was teaching about filler words—words that lack specific meaning but are inserted as pauses. English filler words include “like,” “uh,” and “um.” Spanish filler words include “pues” and “a ver.” German filler words include “ach so” and “klar.”

Chinese filler words include 那个. And 那个 sounds enough like the other n-word that students complained and he was removed from the class.[5]

This illustrates a problem, absolutely endemic in certain liberal circles, that several people I know call “rounding up to abuse.” Liberals get absolutely giddy over the idea that one of their own turns out to be An Abuser of some kind—a secret racist, a secret homophobe, whatever. They absolutely delight in it, and so will go hunting for reasons to label people atop the current social hierarchy Bad People.

Why?

Part of it is personal kudos and virtue signaling. “Look at me! Look at me! I’m not like those others! Watch as I tear down the hierarchy! Watch me stick it to The Man! Hey, everyone, look at me! Aren’t I wonderful? I’m a good person! I stand with the downtrodden! Praise me!”

But that’s only part of it.

Part of it is that a lot of liberals absolutely, positively loooooove being bullies…as long as they can make themselves believe their bullying is in defense of the marginalized and downtrodden.

image: Victor on Adobe

Yes, I’m serious.

I know liberals always whine about what bullies conservatives are. “The cruelty is the point,” we say of conservative policies.

And it’s true. Conservatives love bullying. They’re quite open about it. They get off on it. That’s why they punch down; in the hierarchical order of things it’s acceptable to bully people lower on the hierarchy than you are.

Liberals also love to bully people, but they’re sanctimonious about it. They say they don’t, and one of their favorite pastimes is feeling superior to conservatives because conservatives are so gleeful about punching down.

However, when liberals see an opportunity to bully someone and can rationalize it to themselves, they throw themselves into it with a zest and zeal that puts conservatives to shame. Liberals love bullying just as much as conservatives do, it’s just that liberals lie (and lie to themselves) about it.

Liberals are sanctimonious about how awful it is when conservatives punch down. But the truth is, liberals are better bullies than conservatives are…BECAUSE they’re sanctimonious about it. Far too many liberals believe—absolutely, truly believe—that if they can just find the RIGHT people to bully and harass, they can somehow bully and harass their way to a more just, more equitable, more peaceful and harmonious Utopia.

They look for reasons to bully—they round up to abuse, they get outraged because 那个 sounds like the n-word—because a white dude using the n-word is someone they’re allowed to bully, someone they feel good about bullying.

They wanted Greg Patton to be slinging the n-word around in his class, because it gives them license to let slip their inner bully and feel good—no, feel righteous—about it, and score virtue points with their fellow liberals at the same time. Liberals get off on that.

In short: Conservatives bully because it maintains the hierarchy. Liberals bully because it’s fun, and it makes them feel good about themselves.

The fact that Greg Patton didn’t actually use the n-word doesn’t matter. Liberals wanted him to have used it, because it feels so goddamn good to pick up the torches and pitchforks—it’s a big part of how liberals show themselves and each other that they’re Good People on the Right Side of History.

And if Greg Patton is generally fairly progressive himself? So much the better. Now they can show how fair-minded they are—they even go after the baddies in their own ranks! Not like conservatives. Oh no, we hold everyone accountable! See how good we are? Praise us!

Truth doesn’t matter. Reality doesn’t matter. What matters is that desire to prove your worthiness by attacking the bad guy, whether he’s actually a bad guy or not. (Greg Patton was completely exonerated after an investigation[6]—fortunately for him, he’d recorded the class.)

Image: @anniespratt on Unsplash

This is one thing self-described “social justice warriors” consistently get wrong. Truth matters. There can be no justice without truth. If your “social justice” has no truth-finding mechanism, it’s about conformity and mob rule, not justice.

I feel this should be obvious. Why is this not obvious?

Conservatives often accuse liberals of racism and sexism, in a “you want to keep Black voters dependent” and “you want to tell women they aren’t allowed to be mothers and housewives” kind of way.

This is, of course, absolute bullshit, not even remotely true…

…but it is in the neighborhood of truth.

Liberals often think in terms of archetypes. They’ll say on the one hand that we’re all people—young or old, black or white, man or women, we all deserve equal treatment.

Which is true.

But then on the other hand, they’ll tend to see people in terms of archetypes. oppressor and oppressed.

You see this play out in simplistic, bumper-sticker liberal morality. “Believe women” is an example. Not “support people who say they’ve been abused while also fact-checking,” which is too complicated to fit on a bumper sticker and therefore doesn’t work well with liberal virtue signaling.

Let’s turn that around a bit: “Believe whites.” That…feeeeels a little uncomfortable, doesn’t it?

Why is the one okay but the other isn’t?

Liberals will probably tell you “well, as a historically marginalized group, women have long been accustomed to not being believed, so historically, thee’s an imbalance that needs to be rectified, and and and…”

And and all of that is true. But why “believe women” rather than “don’t automatically disbelieve women?”

Because “believe women” lets you virtue signal while also avoiding, you know, actually doing the work that the ethics you claim to have would require.

If you have two different individuals who say two different things, and your goal is truth, you have work to do. It takes effort. It takes investigation, it takes careful consideration, it takes mental and (dare I say it?) emotional labor.

If, on the other hand, your social group tells you that there’s one side you always and automatically believe—you always believe the white person, you always believe the woman—then you can short-cut all that “truth” and “evidence” and “careful, critical thought” stuff to get to the ‘right’ answer—which is, of course, the one that gains you social standing in your social group.

Different classes of people are not treated as individuals by liberals. They’re treated as a member of their class, with built-in assumptions about who is hero and who is villain based on perceptions of which group is the oppressor and which is the oppressed.

That’s why you’ll see questions like this on Quora:

Actual question on Quora

This question is, of course, utter nonsense. We don’t despise Thomas because he’s black, we despise him because he’s corrupt.

And yet, liberals tend, by and large, merely to wave an airy hand and dismiss questions like this, without ever asking: Why would someone ask this? Where would they get this idea from?

Asking that question leads in some uncomfortable directions. Directions like, might someone who watches the behavior of many liberals each the conclusion that liberals hold double standards, condemning a behavior from someone they might justify or even accept from a different person who belongs to a different social group? (Uncomfortable answer: yes. I’ve witnessed liberals with radically different responses to domestic violence by men against women and by women against men.)

We liberals mock double-standards held by conservatives, while ignoring the plank in our own eye. This isn’t a liberal/conservative thing, it’s a human thing—we all, including you, including me, hold double standards—but goddamn, liberals can be so sanctimonious about our own double standards.

Which brings up another difference between conservatives and liberals: Conservatives attack the Other. Liberals attack their own.

There’s nothing more infuriating to a liberal than a fellow liberal who’s 99.87% in agreement with them—that last fraction of a percent is MORAL IMPURITY that must be PURGED WITH FIRE.

All you liberals who bitch and moan that liberal politicians are so ineffective, listen up: you can’t build your new egalitarian Utopia when you’re preoccupied with knifing your friends in the back.

This is the natural consequence of the horizontal vs vertical social hierarchy thing. In vertical hierarchies, those below always accept any behavior from those above.

Like Trump, for example. Those who accept him as rightful leader excuse his grift, his lies, his incessant self-absorbed pandering, his philandering, because he’s at the top of the hierarchy and submission to rightful hierarchy is a core moral value.

Liberals, on the other hand…if you’re not 100% with me, I will cast you into the lake of fire. Deviate even one iota and you’re gone.

This:

is funny because it’s true. It’s absolutely classic leftist behavior, and it’s one of the things that makes leftists so goddamn toxic.


[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/

[2] https://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.neuropsych.16030051

[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/

[4] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/many-differences-between-liberals-and-conservatives-may-boil-down-to-one-belief/

[5] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-suspended-saying-chinese-word-sounds-english-slur

[6] https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2020/09/29/usc-concludes-professors-controversial-comments-did-not-violate-policy/

On Avatar 2, Virtue, and Pretentious Posing

Liberals doing what liberals do best (image by ddrockstar)

It’s hard to see your heroes die.

So James Cameron’s new Avatar movie is out, and the Internet is in a tizzy. This isn’t actually about the movie, or James Cameron, much as I love Aliens (I’ve seen it 167 times and it keeps getting more inspiring every single time I see it; I spent two years designing a sex toy based on the xenomorph facehugger…yeah, it’s like that).

But I didn’t come here to talk about the movie, or James Cameron. I came here to talk about virtue signaling, and white saviors crusading against white saviors, and offer some hot takes that will almost certainly lead to angry emails in my inbox.

Before we dive in to the rage, let me say that when I talk about “virtue signaling,” I don’t mean Virtue Signaling™, the brand that the American right uses to tarnish any display of empathy or compassion that suggests one is anything other than a complete sociopath. (I expand a little on the distinction between virtue signaling and Virtue Signaling™ over here.)

Okay, let’s do this.

James Cameron and the Synthetic Rage Machine

Back in 2009, James Cameron, of Aliens and Terminator 2 fame, made a movie called Avatar. I watched it, thought it was really good, watched it again, and then forgot about it. It’s showy but, like cotton candy, it melts quickly, leaving nothing behind.

Raccoon watching Avatar

Avatar was fluff. Fluff that was a bit problematic, with its overtones of “white hero saves the noble savages” tropes, but fluff.

However, it made more money than a televangelist with a coke habit, so it was perhaps inevitable there would be a second.

Now the second movie is here, and the liberal internetverse is aflame with acrimony, because if there’s one thing the modern-day liberal is absolutely certain of, it’s that the path to a kinder, more just, more empathic and inclusive society starts with screaming hate.

The issue, which I will confess I haven’t done hours of research about as I don’t actually have much interest in the second Avatar movie, appears to be the issue of cultural appropriation, leavened with a heaping teaspoon of white-saviorism. If you want a dive down the rabbit hole, you can find out more here and here and here and here, and good luck to you.

Predictably, the outrage spread like wildfire on Twitter, where people eager to show other people how much they supported the indigenous without, you know, actually doing anything inconvenient or costly to support the indigenous took to their keyboards:

Oh, no, wait, sorry, wrong Twitter outrage.

Ahem. The outrage spread on Twitter, where one particular Tweet was copy-pasted (not retweeted, not shared, but posted word for word) about 6,000 times, according to Google, not including posts on locked accounts. I won’t bother to link to any of them—you can find them if you want—but I will say they were even copy-pasted by people I once had genuine respect for. People I used to look up to. It’s hard to watch your heroes die.

Now, here’s the thing:

I’m not saying that Avatar isn’t problematic. I’m not telling you to see it…I’ve enjoyed not watching it, and I look forward to not watch it again. This isn’t really about Avatar at all, it’s about public masturbation.

All those thousands of copy-pasted tweets, all those people publicly proclaiming their support for indigenous people in the same way by repeating other people’s words—they’re wanking. “Look at me! Loot at me! Am I a good person now? I’m saying the right things. That makes me a good person, right? Right? Look at me!”

Virtue vs Virtue Signaling

How do you tell the difference between virtue and virtue signaling?

Virtue makes the world a better place. Virtue signaling makes you feel better about yourself.

When I look at Tweets about supporting underprivileged indigenous people by not watching a movie, I can’t help but think, “Point to the person who has a better life because you didn’t watch this movie. Point to a tangible improvement in someone’s quality of life because you didn’t watch this movie. Point to the hungry person who was fed because you didn’t watch this movie. Point to the village that had no water but now has a new well because you didn’t watch this movie. Point to the sick child that now has medical care because you didn’t watch this movie.”

What? What’s that you say? Speak up. A little louder, please, I can’t hear you.

Oh, really? You didn’t actually improve anyone’s life? You just…didn’t watch a movie? That’s…that’s it?

Then shut the fuck up. You’re not supporting anyone. You’re showing off for the other people in your social set.

See, I could understand respecting someone who said “You know what, this movie has problematic aspects. An average theater ticket costs $15. Instead of watching it, why don’t you take that $15 and donate it to this particular fund that serves this particular underprivileged community in this particular way.”

If you do that, at least you’re actually benefitting someone besides yourself, even if it’s only in a small way. You’re actually, you know, making a tiny change in the world.

But if you’re not willing to do that? You’re showing off. Your “virtue” is empty, pretentious posing, benefitting nobody but you, a way for you to brag to people in your peer group without actually expending anything more than the barest minimum effort. You copy-pasted a sentence into Twitter! Ooh, you’re so courageous, posturing to win praise from your friends. Looking at you, making a difference in the world.

Paving the Way to a Better World

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The thing I like about my fellow progressives is that we—well, most of us, anyway—do sincerely want the world to be better tomorrow than it is today. We do genuinely want to live in a world that is more egalitarian, more open, more honest, more compassionate, more fair.

No matter how many “this is the world the Liberals want” memes the alt-right makes.

But too many progressives want something else more than we want a better world: We want to know where the lines are between Us and Them. Why? Because we want—indeed, need—to feel superior to someone. The most right-wing, hardcore Evangelical Baptist has nothing on an average urban progressive when it comes to sanctimony.

(Side note here: the irony of white men riding in to save the day against white saviors by copy-pasting Tweets, rather than, you know, actually saving anyone…well, if there were a Nobel Prize for Irony, I’m not saying it would win, but it would definitely be a contender.)

Tim Minchin put this superbly:

It cannot, it cannot be okay if the intention of progressives—which I assume it is—is progress forward into a future of more empathy and understanding for more people, it cannot be that the primary mechanism by which we’re going to make that progress is the suppression of empathy and understanding for anyone who doesn’t align with our beliefs. It cannot be that unmitigated expression of furious outrage will somehow alchemize into a future of peace and love.

If you want the world to be better when you wake tomorrow than it was when you woke today, but you want to bask in the warm glow of your own righteousness while you make empty gestures of great vengeance and furious anger those who dare tread too close to the line between Us and Them even more…

You.

Are.

Part.

Of.

The.

Problem.

The next time you sit down at your computer to blast evil from the comfort and safety of your keyboard, you brave and noble cultural warrior, you, but you cannot point to a single person whose cause you champion who actually ends up tangibly better off for it…mmmaybe don’t, okay?

Merry Christmas. May 2023 bring you less virtue signaling and more virtue.

Even if real virtue is harder.

Stochastic Terror as a Tool of Conformity

In 1170, King Henry II of England, fed up with his former BFF Thomas Becket (who started criticizing the Crown after becoming Archbishop of Canterbury), declared “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” And, of course, since he was the king, four knights (Reginald Fitz-Urse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton) heard that as a call to action, whereupon they rode to Canterbury and murdered Becket in what is likely the first recorded example of stochastic terrorism.

What is stochastic terrorism? Dictionary.com defines it as:

the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted

It’s about inciting people to acts of harassment, bullying, or violence without directly telling them what to do.

I’ve been thinking a lot about stochastic terrorism lately, not just in terms of American politics, but in a more immediate, more personal context.

Stochastic terrorism uses inflammatory language likely to get someone somewhere to commit violence, without quite going so far as to say anything that might be directly construed as incitement to violence. You know, like “I only lost the election because the Democrats cheated and they‘ll go on cheating until we all use our Second Amendment rights to take back our country.”

This isn’t a direct command to a specific person to take a direct action, but it has predictable effects.

But I didn’t come here to talk about Donald Trump.

Stochastic violence is a broad idea, and I think it plays out in a thousand tiny ways we might not think about at first. Thing is, we are all susceptible, to some degree, to indirect incitement; it’s just that different people have different levels of susceptibility and different lines past which they won’t go.

All of us are, in the right circumstances, willing to heed the non-specific but righteous call to take up arms, figuratively or literally speaking, for a noble but non-specific cause. Yes, including you.

Stochastic terrorism is, I think, the extreme end of a continuum, a gradual incline from low-level bullying to premeditative violence. Stochastic bullying is the gateway to stochastic terrorism. And we currently live in a world where this has become normalized, a background of our lives.

Stochastic bullying

Let me let you in on a dirty little secret of the human condition:

People like to bully.

People like to bully. People enjoy it. Take your average random person off the street, no matter his political affiliation, and give them a reason to bully someone—a reason that their peers, the people they care about, would find acceptable and justifiable. Let him loose and odds are good he will bully. You can make a bully of anyone; you need only find some value they care about and convince them that someone has violated that value and Bob’s your uncle.

Add the anonymity of the Internet and the deal is, for way too many people, sealed. People like to bully. Give someone a justification, a rationalization that lets them sleep at night, and give them the anonymity of the Internet, and boom, you can make a bully of almost anyone.

People bully for a lot of reasons, but there is no bully as zealous as the self-righteous bully, the bully who bullies with the pious fervor of one who is defending Truth and Justice. The stochastic bully is the keyboard warrior version of King Henry’s knights: a person who rides into battle harassing and doxxing others because someone he (or she) looks up to has declared a righteous cause.

Let me offer an example. I know this essay is getting long, but bear with me.

The Story

Some time ago, I knew a person who, after a bad breakup, was accused of abuse by their partner. These accusations were long on the pushbutton language in sex positive communities, but short on details.

All communities have rules and norms, signifiers that separate in-group from out-group. In sex-positive spaces, for instance, you’ll see people say things like:

  1. All accusations are always 100% truthful 100% of the time, unless they are made by someone who has been accused of abuse first, in which case they are always, without fail, an attempt to dodge accountability.
  2. Nobody ever lies about abuse. Nobody ever distorts, mis-states, or exaggerates…again, unless they’ve previously been accused of abuse themselves, in which case it is 100% certain that anything they say is a lie, 100% of the time.
  3. The only moral action when confronted by an accusation of abuse is to believe the accusation wholeheartedly. Asking for more details is enabling abuse. Asking followup questions is enabling abuse. Any attempt at fact-finding is enabling abuse, if it doesn’t support the accusations anyway.

It’s easy to see where these ideas come from. For decades—centuries, perhaps—we’ve lived in societies that tolerate and condone abuse, particularly along social power lines. Many people, in a genuine desire to create a more just and equitable society, are beginning to push back against that.

Somewhere along the way, though, these things became virtue signals: designators of who is good and who is bad, who belongs and who doesn’t. And, like all virtue signals, they became markers of who it is and is not okay to bully. Someone accused of abuse: OK to bully.

So, predictably, the person I knew became a target of harassment and bullying…and, of course, being stripped of her social circle made it far easier for bullies to harry and hound her.

Funny, that. Throughout history, it has always, always been true that depriving someone of their social support is the #1 tool of abusers. And so it is in many sex-positive communities, which say “Beware anyone who tries to separate people from their social support, that’s what abusers do…oh, so-and-so has been accused of something by someone? SHUN! SHUN”

You abused me by refusing to give me what I wanted

This person’s accuser was shy on details, and when I and someone else asked for those details, we eventually got something that was…distinctly not abuse, and in fact was reasonable and healthy boundary-setting. But the thing is, those details were never part of the accusation, and somewhere along the way, in many sex-positive circles, it became evil to ask for followup information when someone says “I was abused.”

I naively believed once the details of the accusation were known, the harassment and bullying would stop. I was wrong.

I was surprised at the time. I’m not any more. In fact, nowadays, it’s exactly what I would expect. It turns out that people who are logical and rational, who make reasoned decisions, who see themselves as genuinely good people, regularly—routinely, even—support and enable bullies and abusers.

And guess what? That’s a completely rational response.

The Bank Robber’s Gun

Picture the scene: It’s the middle of the afternoon. A bank robber bursts into a crowded lobby waving a pistol. He says “This is a stickup! Everybody down!” Chaos, panic, confusion. Maybe the security guard jumps at him and gets shot or something.

Now, there are 20 or 30 people in the bank. The robber is holding a revolver. It’s got six shots, or maybe five; and if he’s just taken a shot at the security guard, that leaves him with five, maybe four. If all the customers rush him, he cannot win. He can’t reload fast enough.

No rational person would rush him. Each of the 20-30 people in the bank will make the same calculation and come to the same conclusion: The first person to rush him is getting shot. I’m not going to let that be me. And so, nobody rushes him.

So he takes everyone hostage, and ties them all up, and now if things go sideways he can kill them all at his leisure. What was a situation where he could not possibly hope to win becomes a situation where he is certain to win, all because rational people made a reasonable decision in their own self-interest…a decision made by everyone else, that dooms everyone.

Classic example from history: the McCarthy Communist hunts. Anyone who is accused is assumed guilty. People on the sidelines who know a particular target of the McCarthyists is innocent sure as hell aren’t going to say so, because anyone who does, becomes the next target too. Silence becomes self-preservation.

So imagine some person in a subcommunity facing a situation like the one my acquaintance was in:

  1. He knows they’ve been accused of something bad.
  2. He knows they’ve being bullied and harassed.
  3. Beyond that, he knows them only as a vague blur, a face in the crowd. He has no connection with her other than that.

Of course he’s going to shun them. Of course it doesn’t matter if the accusations have merit. Of course it doesn’t matter if he even believes them or not. It would be stupid to expect anything else.

He would, in a purely rational sense, be a complete moron to do anything but shun them. Anyone who doesn’t go along with the shunning ends up on the wrong side of the in-group/out-group signaling, and becomes the target of the same people who are bullying her. If he lets her back in, he puts himself .

What rational person would stick up for someone, put himself in the line of fire for someone who is essentially a stranger?

That’s how stochastic bullying works.

And so, entire communities become held hostage by small numbers of bullies.

Virtue Signaling: Believing the Unbelievable

There’s an absolutely fascinating essay over on Slate Star Codex called The Toxoplasma of Rage. In it, the author makes an interesting observation:

But in the more general case, people can use moral decisions to signal how moral they are. In this case, they choose a disastrous decision based on some moral principle. The more suffering and destruction they support, and the more obscure a principle it is, the more obviously it shows their commitment to following their moral principles absolutely. For example, Immanuel Kant claims that if an axe murderer asks you where your best friend is, obviously intending to murder her when he finds her, you should tell the axe murderer the full truth, because lying is wrong. This is effective at showing how moral a person you are – no one would ever doubt your commitment to honesty after that – but it’s sure not a very good result for your friend.

The larger lesson here is this:

Virtue signaling is most effective when you signal some virtue that other people don’t necessarily agree with. You can’t make a useful virtue signal from something everyone always agrees with, like “serial killers are bad” or you shouldn’t eat babies.” The more dramatic, controversial, and absolute a virtual signal is, the more power it has.

And this causes values and moral principles—even generally sound moral principles, like “honesty is generally good”—to become completely decoupled from real-world consequences.

But of course, holding a nuanced view of the world—considering every situation on its own merits, thinking about edge cases, looking at your moral values with an eye toward seeing how well they fit in each individual circumstance…that takes work. Who has that kind of time?

Especially when it might put you in the crosshairs of someone who enjoys bullying people, and does so with the fire of zeal to purge the heretic and the unbeliever?

So a reasonable, completely supportable moral virtue, like “honesty is generally good,“ becomes an absolutist value.

What? You lied to the killer who asked where your girlfriend was??! You despicable person! I thought you agreed that honesty is good! And now to find out you’e nothing but a disgusting liar, someone who will throw away honesty whenever you find it convenient…what is wrong with you? How can anyone ever trust anything you say? Why should we believe a single word from you, you liar?

This plays out in sex-positive circles with the “believe survivors” trope.

Bumper Sticker Morality

“Believe survivors,” like “honesty is good,” is a fair, decent moral value. We live in societies that have spent far too long not believing when people talk about abuse they’ve suffered, harm they’ve experienced, particularly from people and institutions in power. I mean, great example: Catholic Church. Hell, even law enforcement institutions have a long and revolting history of refusing to take, for example, rape reports seriously.

But somewhere along the way, all moral values must confront the fact that no moral situation is absolute.

“Honesty is good” does not, therefore, mean “do not lie tell your friend’s murderous ex where she’s hiding, even though you know he wants to kill her, because dishonesty is wrong.”

When you reach the point where some moral value becomes more important as a bumper-sticker-sized signal of your virtue than as a guideline for treating others well—Honesty is always good, regardless of circumstance! Dishonesty is bad!—it ceases to be a moral value, instead serving as a justification to bully others (“You lying sack of shit, how dare you show your face among decent, honest folks when you’re such a mewling, festering liar you told a lie to an enraged murderer about where he could find the person he was looking to bury his hatchet in!”).

Any reasonable person will, at least in private, say there’s no such thing as a class of people who should always be believed under all circumstances. “Believe survivors,” like “honesty is good,” is an excellent general moral guideline—as long as you’re alert to the fact that no moral value is ever 100% true in 100% of circumstances. Human beings are messy, and when you create entire classes of people who are never to be doubted, you open the door to someone somewhere exploiting that for gain. “Always believe survivors” is exactly the same as “never believe survivors”—a way to avoid having to do the hard, messy work of evaluating individual people and individual situations. (Who has that kind of time, amirite?)

Stochastic Bullying, Stochastic Terrorism: Power Without Responsibility

As a tool for, you know, living a life that’s respectful of others, zealously defending bumper-sticker morality that brooks no exception, no nuance, no edge cases is a bit rubbish. But where stochastic bullying really shines is as a way of enforcing conformity and obedience to in-group/out-group borders.

Not long ago, I wrote about a bizarre, Twilight-Zone situation where some Internet personalities somehow decided I was running, or profiting from, or organizing, or something, a conference in London. I still have no clue where this notion came from, but someone got it in their head, and wrote about it online, in a This Will Not Stand kind of way, and the next thing you know, the conference organizers were receiving hate mail and threats. It got so bad, the organizers suspended the conference.

Now, this is serious “Jewish space lasers” territory. We’re so far past rationality here, we’ve looped all the way around Bizarro World and ended up in “Democrats secretly run a sex trafficking ring from the basement of a pizza shop that doesn’t have a basement” land. It shouldn’t really be too hard for someone who hears this story to say ‘hang on, a dude in Portland secretly runs a conference in London that’s been going on for years and how does that work exactly?’

But that’s the thing: Virtue signaling becomes more powerful as it becomes more outlandish. Sure, anyone can say they believe in QAnon, but believing that a secret trafficking ring works from the basement of a building that doesn’t even have a basement shows true commitment to the cause.

And the thing is, the person who started spreading rumors that I secretly run this conference in London never actually said ‘and therefore, you, specifically, should send death threats to the conference organizers.’ That’s how it works.

Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?

Will no one do something about this conference?

It is power without responsibility. It’s a way to accumulate control in a community, enforce boundaries between who’s in and who’s out, and let people know: Don’t be the hero. Charge me and you’ll get shot. Keep your head down and do as I say.

Nobody can take power this way in a subcommunity without everyone else being complicit. It’s hackneyed to say this, but all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for people of principle to do nothing.

But when you feel you have to keep your head down, because stepping out of line targets you for bullying and attack from quarters you cannot anticipate, it becomes a rational choice.

And we all lose.

The Evolutionary Root of the Internet Hate Machine

Your Rage is a Commodity

Faces in the Crowd: Tampa, Florida, late 1990s (photo by author)

You do not love all humankind.

This is a fact. It’s written into your biology. There is a limit, coded into the size and structure of your brain, on the number of people you can form close, personal connections to, or even remember as individuals before they start to blur into faces in a crowd. That is, I think, is one of the things that makes the online world so toxic, though perhaps not in the way you might think.

Before I get into why social media is so toxic, let’s talk about that limit. It’s called Dunbar‘s Number, named after anthropologist Robin Dunbar. The basic idea is there’s a specific, quantifiable number on the close interpersonal connections—not passing acquaintances, not faces in a crowd, but meaningful social interconnections—you can make. People debate exactly what this number is (and some anthropologists have questioned the validity of research that extrapolates from other primates to humans), but the most commonly accepted figure is in the neighborhood of 150 people or so—which tracks nicely with the size of early hunter/gatherer tribes.

That means we all have emotional space for somewhere around 150 people in our inner orbits. Again, these aren’t acquaintances—they’re your family, your friends, your lovers, your confidantes, the people you have a genuinely close connection to. Above this number, people tend to become faces in a crowd. You don’t fundamentally connect with people outside your inner orbit the way you do with people inside your inner orbit. You can’t. Regardless of whether your own personal limit is, 150 people or 200 people or 147 people or whatever, at some point you lose the ability to form independent, differentiable emotional connections. With eight billion humans on the planet, you can’t even remember everyone’s name!

That worked fine when we all lived in small tribes of a couple hundred people at most. Things started getting a little weird when human social groups got bigger than that. We had to invent surrogates for those close personal connections: governments, religions, structures that could impose boundaries on our behavior…because make no mistake, we hold very different standards for how it’s acceptable to treat people inside our personal spheres and outside them.

And that sorta worked for a long time, though at a cost. When you replace individual connections to people you know with abstract bonds with members of your religion or your city-state or your nation—in other words, with a group of people you’ve mostly never met—it becomes easy for people to hijack that apparatus and tell you who to love and who to hate. Instead of your tribe being defined by personal connections, it becomes directed for you from the top down: your in-group and out-group are defined not by people you personally know and trust, but by the hierarchy that directs these abstract groups.

Remember how you’re hard-wired to behave differently toward people within your personal sphere and outside it? Yeah, that. If someone convinces you that all members of your religion or your city-state are inside your sphere and everyone else is outside it, then getting you to trust people you shouldn’t trust, or commit acts of atrocity against people who’ve done you no harm, gets a whole lot easier.

It doesn’t help, too, that when you start dealing with people outside your inner circle, you have to make hasty group generalizations, which means you start judging entire groups of people based on superficial characteristics. So there’s that.

Being Human in an Age of Social Media

If our evolutionary heritage didn’t prepare us for living in groups bigger than a couple hundred people or so, it definitely didn’t prepare us for social media.

There are eight billion of us sharing space on this planet. Eight billion. That’s a number of people literally, not figuratively, impossible to grasp emotionally. We cannot really even imagine eight billion people.

Most of us live in enormous societies several orders of magnitude larger than the hundred and fifty to two hundred our brains evolved to cope with, so we create our own little subcommunities, social circles, networks of family and friends.

Social media gives us an easy, low-friction way to interact with other people. Problem is, interactions on social media feel like in-person interactions, but they aren’t. You’re presenting, and interacting with, carefully curated personas. Social media makes it much easier to curate these personas than it is in person—we choose what we show and what we share. And, importantly, it’s easy for us to hide things.

So we end up feeling like we have genuine connections with people we don’t actually know. We know only a carefully constructed facade, but to our emotional selves, to the parts of us that define our family, our tribe, these connections seem genuine.

Psychologists have a name for this: parasocial relationships. We become invested in people on social media, people who might not actually share a connection with us, who might not even know us at all except as a name on a follower list.

The thing about parasocial relationships is they occupy a slot in our inner sphere, even though they are not, in fact, genuine close relationships.

And that, I think, is a huge part of why the Internet is such a hate machine.

Mass-Produced Synthetic Rage

The Internet is a hate machine, fine-tuned to manufacture outrage in industrial quantities. Part of that is deliberate engineering, of course. Engagement drives revenue. Waving pitchforks and screaming for the heads of the heathens is “engagement.” Outrage sells, so Adam Smith’s ruthless invisible hand has shaped social media into high-efficiency outrage generation machines.

Early pioneers wanted to use the power of this globe-spanning, always-on communications network to bring people together. Looking back, that seems charmingly naïve, though in fairness it wasn’t obvious back then that anger would be more profitable. Who knew?

What happens when you fill up slots in your inner sphere with parasocial relationships—with people you genuinely feel a sincere connection to, but you don’t actually know?

You become easy to manipulate.

You feel a bond to a person you don’t know, whose motives you can never be certain of, who has an entire life lived away from social media. This person is part of your inner circle, and part of that evolutionary heritage I was talking about is that you are predisposed to believe things people in your inner circle tell you. You are descended from a long line of ancestors who were part of a tribe. For our early ancestors, losing their tribe meant death. We are descended from people who survived—the ones who did not get expelled from their tribes. Accepting the values, beliefs, and worldview of the people in your inner circle is wired into your genes.

So when someone who is part of your social media inner circle tells you someone else is a bad person, you’re disposed to believe it without question. When your social media tribe tells you who to hate, you do it. Yes, I mean you. You think you’re far more rational and less tribalistic than all those other people. You’re wrong.

Now consider that in the age of COVID over the past few years, more people are getting more of those social needs met online, and consider the digital generation growing up in a world where parasocial interaction is the norm, and, well, things get weird. How could social media become anything but a hate machine?

And, ironically, spaces that consider themselves “loving” and “welcoming” and “safe” are especially prone to this, because a great deal of in-group/out-group policing is done on the basis of feelings of comfort and safety; if someone tells you that someone else says that so-and-so is a bad person, you want to keep your space loving and safe, right? And it can’t be loving and safe if it has bad people in it, right? There’s only one thing for it: we must lovingly band together to drive out the evil among us.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a manipulator

The thing about parasocial interactions is your brain really wasn’t meant for them. You tend, when you interact with someone one or two steps removed, to see only a curated version of them—but at the same time, emotionally, the ancient parts of your brain will respond as if this was a person who’s a member of your family, who you can trust implicitly.

Believe me, that creates some really messed-up opportunities for things to go wrong.

The people you see on social media may have an agenda you’re completely unaware of. As a particularly vivid case, I know of one person who attempted to take over a conference that had been running for many years. She simply tried to walk up and start hosting a new conference using the same name, same trademark, everything. (This sort of thing is more common than you think. There comes a point in the normal development of any subculture or subcommunity when a tipping point is reached; once the community grows to a certain size, it’s easier to make a name for yourself by stealing someone else’s work than by doing the work yourself.)

When her attempted hijacking didn’t succeed, and the conference organizers informed her they would defend their trademark legally if necessary, well…Internet hate machine. She started so many rumors and accusations about the existing conference (each one laughably simple to debunk by itself, but quantity has a quality all its own…where there’s smoke, there must be fire, not someone running around with a smoke pot yelling “Fire! Fire!”, right?), the Internet hate machine did what it does best. The internetverse whipped itself into such a frothing frenzy, people unconnected with anyone remotely related to the conference started sending threats of violence to people scheduled to speak at the conference. It got so bad, the organizers had to cancel.

I might say here that if one person you’ve never met in person but know on the Internet tells you that another person you’ve never met but know on the Internet is a bad person and therefore you should send threats of violence to a whole set of other people you’ve never met but know on the Internet, you’ve completely lost the plot…yet here we are. The thing is, the nature of the Internet and your legacy evolutionary heritage makes this kind of thing feel right. It feels natural. It feels righteous and just.

You are a tribal being. We all are. It’s a fact of our biology. Social media is engineered to produce rage, because rage gathers clicks, and emotions like fear and anger make you less rational. Add that to the fact you’re already inclined to accept people into your inner circle you’ve never met because interactions on social media feel convincingly authentic, and it’s a perfect storm. People can manipulate you and make you feel righteous about it.

None of these problems is unique to the internet, of course, but the parasociality inherent in the Internet makes the problem much worse. And, of course, knowing that the Twitter hordes with the torches and pitchforks might turn them on you if you fail to pick up a torch or a pitchfork and rally to the cause when you’re told to, really doesn’t help.

Don’t be a sucker

What’s the solution?

I don’t know. I wish I did. I’d like to say it’s as easy as fact-checking and being aware, but it’s not. Your fact-checking is emotionally biased by in-group/out-group dynamics. Being aware that you can be manipulated doesn’t help as much as you might think, because awareness is so intellectual and manipulation is so emotional. It’s hard to stop and say “hey, wait a minute” when what you’re being told feels right. That feeling is exactly the Achilles’ heel I’m talking about.

So yeah, don’t be a sucker, but that requires constant vigilance, and the ability to go against the grain of the pitchfork-wielding mob. A lot of folks just plain aren’t prepared to do that.

So I don’t necessarily have a solution, but I will leave you with this:

In a world where you can be anything, be kind.

Image: Adam Nemeroff

The cost of your cat pictures

Every month, almost three billion people use Facebook.

Those people upload photos and video and it all gets saved—about 4 petabytes, four billion gigabytes, of data every day.

Those are abstract numbers. What does it mean? How Does Facebook not run out of space?

Exactly how you think. They buy more than 1,000 hard drives every day. (As of the time I write this, the information I can find suggests they prefer to use 4TB hard drives rather than larger drives for cost and reliability reasons.)

This is a pallet of 180 hard drives:

Facebook adds the equivalent of about 6 of these pallets of hard drives to its storage hive every day. They’re placed in server computers in Facebook’s Hive data store that have 12 hard drives per server, so they’re adding data equivalent to at least 83 servers per day. (That’s only for storing user generated data like photos, and does not include extra drives for RAID redundancy or data duplication, which I imagine likely doubles that amount.)

Here’s the inside of one of Facebook’s data centers.

Imagine building after building, row after row of these. Now imagine 6 pallets of hard drives coming in on trucks and 83 servers’ worth of storage being added today.

And again tomorrow.

And again the day after tomorrow.

And again after that.

And yes, they really do order hard drives by the truckload.

This is why any time some conservative tells you “BuT fAcEbOk iS vIoLaTiNg My FrEeDuMb Of SpEeCh SoCiAl MeDiA sItEs ArE pUbLiC sPaCeS DuRr DuRr,” you can laugh in their face and walk away.

See all those servers? See all those buildings? See all those pallets of hard drives being trucked in? See all those people installing them?

Are you paying for them? No. Is the government paying for them? No. Is public money paying for them? No. They are private property. Billions of dollars of private property.

Facebook spends, as a first order approximation, about $30,000,000,000 a year on server infrastructure, not including buildings, land, facilities maintenance, installation, or salaries.

Anyone who thinks that social media sites are “public spaces” is welcome to propose that Congress gives Facebook $30,000,000,000 a year to keep up that infrastructure. Otherwise, no, it’s not. That’s $30,000,000,000 a year in private money being used to buy private property.


Okay, so.

You can’t have a service where almost three billion people communicate without having tremendous political clout. Facebook can, and arguably has, influenced elections and changed the course of nations.

And that’s (rightly, I think) got a lot of people worried. When you have a private company with no public accountability that has that much influence, that’s a bad thing, right?

Well, yes.

But here’s the thing: This isn’t new.

People forget this isn’t new. It’s always been this way. In the 1700s and 1800s, elections were decided by newspaper barons.

Remember William Randolph Hearst? Remember the Spanish American War? That was a war basically started by one man, a newspaper mogul, who totally dominated public political discourse and established a whole new world of journalistic propaganda.

This is probably the most effective fake news in history.

So what’s different?

Ah, now that’s a question.


Modern social media is different from the media empires of old in one important way: they are participatory, many-to-many, not one-to-many. In the past, “media” meant the owner disseminated information to content consumers. Today, we are all content creators and content consumers.

And this has led to a great deal of confusion betwixt “public” and “private.”

The Internet allows anyone to use it, but few people actually know how it works, or what scale it operates on. Hundreds of companies spend billions per year on the infrastructure to give everyone a way to communicate with everyone else, so what feels like a public square is actually a private space. And that leads to confusion: “Facebook banned me! My CoNsTiTuTiOnAl RiGhTs!“…when in fact you have no right to use other people’s stuff for free at all.

And make no mistake, that’s what Facebook and Twitter and all those other sites are: other people’s stuff. Billions and billions of dollars of other people’s stuff, that you’re using for free.

In the past, this confusion didn’t exist. In the past, nobody felt they had the right to someone else’s newspaper. You could write a letter to the editor, which they might or might not print, but nobody (well, nobody serious, anyway) had the notion that they had the Constitutional right to use someone else’s newspaper to say whatever they want.

We understand when something belongs to someone else, right up until the moment we’re allowed to use it ourselves…at which point we tend to assume an entitlement to it.


Owners of of media distribution companies have always had an outsized impact on social media. This isn’t new.

What’s new is that people are more aware of it, and want more of a voice. What’s unfortunate is that so many people aren’t going about it the right way. You don’t have a right to use Facebook, and if you’re kicked off you aren’t being “censored.”

What we need is entirely different conversation, and that’s one we can’t have whilst everyone is looking at the wrong thing.