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amorphaBack when we first started writing down the thoughts and ideas that led up to this, a few months ago, we had just discovered that deja.com still existed, it had just been taken over by Google. The search feature was weird and didn't seem to work as remembered, or they haven't finished working out all the bugs in the system, but by plugging names into the right places, we somehow did manage to come up with a bunch of old posts to Usenet we made under old handles and emails, dating back almost from when we first got online.
(No, we're not going to mention what any of the names we posted under were-- we don't really see any point in it, considering that it would just bring up a bunch of things we said that had little relation to our real thoughts and opinions, or had grains of truth in them but were extremely distorted in many ways too complex to explain, ways we'd been taught to view ourselves both by therapists and by various social groups we'd moved around in or at the fringes of.)
We also said and believed some things back then that now look pretty disturbing or ignorant to us, apparently completely honestly. Though I think we'd be more concerned to have realized our beliefs and opinions were all exactly the same as they were back then and hadn't changed at all.
Reading our old posts was both... disturbing, and weirdly affirming of the fact that our struggles with connecting language to thought were at least as bad as we remembered them being, even worse if anything. We understood, in theory, the concept of connecting thoughts to language, but we'd learned words as something largely unconnected to thought to begin with, and even though our brain was good enough at pattern-spotting to put together usually coherent communication, it often didn't really reflect our actual experiences all that much. We were often heavily reliant on what others expected us to be (which sometimes helped, and was sometimes very negative, like in circumstances where we were trained into an infantilized role).
Riel once made the comparison that it was like being shown or looking at pictures all the time, and then taking those pictures, cutting them up into parts, and taping the pieces back together clumsily in various combinations to try to make images, instead of drawing our own pictures of whatever it was we wanted to show. That was honestly what our speech with most people most of the time was like up until we got an Internet connection, and even our typed online communication was often that, too, for several years. (With the difference that the speech had about no relationship at all to our actual thoughts or experiences much of the time; the writing came somewhat closer, at least under neutral circumstances. The writing was also heavily influenced by our ideas about what we should be, what we should think and believe rather than what we actually did, in many places. So even though we had a lot more control over what it sounded like, there were other factors keeping it from being an authentic expression of our thoughts.)
And like a certain amount of our speech, it apparently passed with a certain amount of people as being coherent and accurate, if odd, statements of what we were actually thinking. Then again, with the chatspeak that a lot of people we ran into in various places were spouting, the trolls and single-issue fanatics, and the fact that some of the places we went to were full of people who looked a lot less rational than we did even when they were representing their thoughts more or less accurately, it wasn't hard to look coherent by comparison. It was mostly the patterns of what we reacted to and why, and the types of language we used, that people seemed to find bizarre, when they found us bizarre.
Just, I don't think anyone could reasonably deny that we were seen as weird, even by standards of people who declared that everyone in a given place was weird, like at one of our old schools (but there were right ways and wrong ways, cool ways and uncool ways, of being weird).
We weren't even presenting as plural or autistic on this one group (mostly because we didn't realize we actually "qualified" as either, at the time), didn't talk about anything system-related or as being anyone other than The Birth Person, and there were still people on it who were saying we were insane, completely nuts, needed mental help, etc, just because of how we wrote and how we reacted to various things. Then again we've seen this kind of thing used against people too-- that the fact they were called crazy and so forth wasn't because they had an odd communication style or ways of interacting with people that others didn't know how to interpret, but rather "proof" that the people calling them crazy were right, that they were "totally out of touch with reality" or "actually schizophrenic" or whatever. (And of course, all psych labels are assumed to be very accurate and meaningful, and being actually crazy makes a person horrible and nasty and icky and unable to perceive anything accurately at all.)
One of the interesting things about reading our old posts is that both our autism and our plurality stand out really obviously to us in them, and apparently we thought we looked far more "normal," even in text, than we really did. The fact that there were different people writing (at least five people, over two or three years), even if our switching was a mostly unconscious thing, is... really very obvious to us if we look at posts made from different time periods even within a few months. We all had the same neurological limitations of working with that cut-and-paste expressive language, but it was like we were working from... different pools of raw material, I guess, in terms of the general style and tone of that language? It's not just that the writing styles and vocabulary changed; it was our opinions and attitudes also.
We're not sure how much other people ever picked up on that, though. We might have just seemed to be very malleable in our opinions, but there were singlets who did that too, in the places where we posted.
The thing is, even in the first year that we were online, we can see how much closer we were coming to making the words we typed have anything to do with what was in our head-- but only when we didn't feel threatened or pushed. Under pressure, if someone was harassing or trolling us or if we were angry or upset about something, or even if we were just pushing ourselves to write something as fast as possible, we'd go back into this state of only being able to communicate by tacking together all these chunks of random language floating around in our head and throwing them at people. And we'd realize that it wasn't coming out anything like the ideas we wanted to express, that we weren't actually typing anything close to our actual thoughts and feelings, and that would make us even angrier, which drove the whole thing into a vicious cycle we couldn't get out of.
We seriously didn't have much control over it at all; we would just literally find ourselves typing completely random stuff that obeyed some kind of sentence structure pattern and followed in the general model of what flames or insults were expected to be, send it off, and people would flame us back. (And then we'd often guilt-trip ourselves about it; but what we tried to write about the emotional part of that turned into a long introspective tangent, which we might post separately later. It was often hard for us to back down from confrontations then, in part because of crappy patterns we'd picked up from our birth family.)
So, anyway, Usenet. Not sure how many people reading this were on Usenet in the mid to late 90s; we gather it's not as popular as it used to be. Some Usenet groups were actually very good discussion places, but they varied from good to completely horrendous-- anyone who thinks that snark and treating trolling and bullying as a sport started in recent years with places like 4chan, never saw Usenet during that time or some of its career trolls. Particularly some of the alt.* hierarchy groups, where often the only thing close to moderation that existed was your own killfile, if you even had one.
Self-loathing geeky teenagers and young adults crammed together in one place with no rules and moderation are pretty much a recipe for incredibly fucked-up social situations and perceptions. A lot of people on certain groups looked worse than we ever did, and certainly the majority of the ones who called us crazy had a much worse track record for actual harassing behaviour than we ever did. However, the same kinds of privilege that ruled outside the groups also ruled within them, and so some people had much, much more leeway to pull endless shit than others did. If you were known to be female, a person of colour, gay or bi, disabled, to have a psychiatric label, or a range of other things, the moment you stepped "out of line" in many places, you'd be turned on with much more viciousness than a person in a more privileged group would be. Not even necessarily just in heavily trolled groups. Not everyone would turn on you, but the people who did... well, it's one of those things where we had no idea what was going on at the time, but can see clearly in retrospect that some people (including us on several occasions) were being punished for daring to not "know their place," and think they could get away with the same actions that more privileged people could.
Not that anyone else who got caught up in these awful dynamics seemed to know what it was all about, either, much of the time. The people doing the insult-slinging didn't seem to consciously realize that they were reacting to having their privilege challenged, that they felt they were entitled to. The priorities of some of the regular posters in some groups, in general, were... very, very distorted, even when no social power issues were involved. Which translated, in several cases, into very vicious bullying against entire groups of people, whose "crimes" were... ridiculously trivial, at best.
A lot of it, in the groups where we hung out regularly, was fandom-related. And fandom is not the most weighty issue in the world, definitely (although some of the people who claim not to take it seriously, seem to have a lot invested in mocking others in it). And... there was something in us that could put it into perspective, then and now, to realize that what people were flaming each other over was trivial in the bigger scheme of things. But it was sort of like... because there was so much injustice we couldn't control, we threw disproportionate amounts of our sense of fairness and justice and our outrage at comparatively minor issues. Some of them for genuinely altruistic reasons. We seriously were thinking along the lines of "but we were like those 'ignorant newbies' at one point too, they need someone to defend them, their opinions on this issue don't say anything about their moral character."
There was one group where a few people actually wanted us to stay, when we got sick of it and left, because they apparently saw us as a voice of reason against a couple of snarky otaku fanboys with entitlement complexes and no sense of perspective, who were basically chasing and flaming people out of the group and leading trashing campaigns against fans and groups of fans who wouldn't conform to their views and opinions. Apparently a lot of people didn't like them, but we were some of the only ones willing to stand up to them, from what other people's comments seemed to imply. They just let them take over and scare new people out of the group, and dominate the whole tone of the group, because it was one of those cases where just a few people were flooding it with so much flaming and trashing and intimidation that they were able to ruin it for everyone else, since they wouldn't leave and there were no moderators.
I mean... we've definitely seen it pointed out before that geeks, as a group, have issues with standing up to people of their own kind who are being complete assholes and ruining all the discussion in a given community. I think that's a lot of what was going on in a lot of these places. We just remember kind of staring around in shock, figuratively speaking, and wondering why no one was fighting back, when such an obvious example of injustice and unfairness was going on, even if it was minor in the scheme of things. (And the huge amount of drama and fuss they were making over stuff that was minor in the scheme of things, including comparing relatively inconsequential things to various forms of real atrocity, was pretty shocking to us to begin with, too. As was the fact that we were some of the only ones calling them out on how trivializing this was to victims of real violence and atrocity.)
I'm not sure if this was because we had a stronger sense of the need for justice and fairness than most of them to begin with (we're honestly not trying to say we were that special or anything; it might have just been a type of unfairness we were sensitized to), or because there were a whole bunch of unspoken signals to not stand up to or challenge these people which we never picked up on, or what. A lot of people apparently wanted to think it would work to "just ignore them," or ignore them when they were getting nasty (which seems to be another huge problem when geeks have to confront their own kind being jerks). But we could see that not only was the ignoring not working, because new people coming in not knowing their "rules" provided them with a constant stream of victims to attack, they were scaring longstanding and much more civil people out of the groups. Lots of people think they should "not rock the boat" and hope the problem, or the person causing it, will somehow go away on its own, but that just doesn't happen.
Amd I guess it's another reason why the "autistic = no empathy" idea really burns our asses, too, because one thing we kept trying to emphasize was "how would you feel if you came on the group for the first time knowing nothing and got attacked like this." I mean, I'm not claiming we were saints, or models of rationality when confronting the flamers and trashers. We'd have an idea of the arguments we wanted to make, but then when we started to get angry, the language skills we had managed to acquire in the course of being online would basically just evaporate, and we'd be stuck pasting together hacked-up bits of language again, so we said a lot of things we didn't feel or mean. We also believed (and again, this was probably family crap getting in the way, with a lifetime of having learnt that the only way to get people to stop tormenting you or fucking with your head was to hurt them enough so they'd go away; though at least in this instance we didn't have to resort to physical violence as the only means of communication left to us) that a lot of people wouldn't respect us if we just responded with arguments, rather than adding flames and insults.
...but again, really looking at it, the flamers and trashers looked worse to begin with than we did-- we weren't throwing insults at random posters and newbies, just at them. We still beat the hell out of ourselves emotionally for "losing control" and "being unreasonable," even though somehow, in the mess of mangled words that always resulted, there was sometimes more reason and logic than there was from some of the people we were arguing with. We were always convinced that next time, we'd get it right.
The other thing that pushed us over the edge in some cases was lack of people backing us up or supporting our views, even when some of them had told us privately they agreed with us. When you're the only goddamn one going to bat for the people being trashed time and time again, and nobody else says anything, you can get to think that maybe you are completely wrong-- and this can happen in any kind of environment. Maybe you are wrong, maybe the people trashing them are morally in the right, and it's perfectly okay for them to do so, because after all, no one else is complaining, are they? So you start questioning yourself. Second-guessing. If no one else is saying anything because this person is right, well, you're the irrational jerk for being reactionary and jumping on them now, aren't you? And there were times when we'd make a post and then literally, five minutes or a few hours later, declare that we were retracting it all, that "I just lost my temper," and try to make a peace with the bullies that could never really exist.
See, the thing is, if you have the perception of there being something seriously fucked-up about a certain person or group of people, it's almost certain that someone somewhere, or more than one person, has seen it and just isn't saying anything. But when you think you're all alone, it can really make you crazy, thinking you're seeing something that isn't there, when everyone else acts like there's no reason not to love this person or forgive them all their "little faults" because they agree with me/aren't attacking me the REST of the time.
We've tolerated abusive people for months and even years because we were convinced everyone else loved them and didn't see a problem with them, and that we were just overreacting-- then found out later that, no, it wasn't just us, other people thought they were assholes/abusive/creepy/stalking/etc. Sometimes other people's perceptions of what was going on matched up almost exactly with ours. This has happened to us repeatedly, so many times that we should know better than to think it's a problem in us when someone has an attitude we just can't stand to be around, or that we find at least potentially worrisome. Somehow our filters just won't pick this up, and insist on defaulting to "you have a problem with them only because there's something wrong with YOU."
And I guess one thing that is telling in retrospect is that when we posted "positive" defences, where we talked in a generalized way about the need to, say, Not Attack People For Doing X, without naming names (but in a specific enough way that people could probably guess who the parties being alluded to were), we'd get a lot more people coming out to vocally support us than when we actually went head-to-head against the Godzillas of the group. It was like the second we named them specifically, or responded to something they'd said in specific, many people who'd been backing us for the "generalized" posts would run away and pull out their support. Or they'd do it timidly, if at all-- like, gently venturing that maybe an Incredibly Inappropriate Holocaust/Nazi Comparison (when the thing being discussed was nothing like genocide of any kind) was extremely out of line and noting that a relative had lost every member of their immediate family who hadn't managed to escape Poland during the war. While we, who didn't have any family history like that, called the offender out on it very loudly the moment we saw it. (And, admittedly, we also can see in retrospect how the person might have seemed timid because things like that can just be really difficult to talk about, let alone in the face of someone who's just basically fulfilled the worst Godwin's Law stereotype. It was just... a mindboggling moment in many ways.)
Yeah, we still managed to get some coherent, direct criticisms of the trashers' behaviour in without others' support-- it wasn't like we fell apart when no one was backing us, even if we felt like we wanted to-- but it was a whole lot easier to do when even one other person was willing to join in.
It was honestly kind of freaky to see what happened when we, and the few other people holding out, started to give up, not because we'd changed our minds but because the resident Godzillas (and one in particular) just weren't quitting or listening to anything resembling logic. When we (and those others) started to drift away from the group and stopped trying to make either generalized defenses of people being trashed or calling specific people out so much, the tone of the group shifted more and more to be like the trashers' attitude. Even six months later, people who had previously posted in support of our "don't attack newbies for this" posts were snarking on newbies themselves, sounding a whole heck of a lot like the original group of trashers. People we'd known and been friendly with, even.
It was like there was this whole "mushy middle" whose expressed opinions would shift around based on whether the trashers were dominating the community unchallenged, or whether they were being called on their shit. When no one was calling them on it, people started to follow the trashers and to act more like them; when they were being called on it, the same people had been holding out defending the targets.
And we saw even more extreme examples of this in Usenet groups that got heavily trolled-- some people who'd previously been decent enough posters started literally going along with the trolls once the community got anarchic enough, either by just posting tons of off-topic nonsense or actually joining in the activities of the malicious trolls, and eventually ending up looking indistinguishable from them in words and deeds. There was a giant mess of wankery and trolling on one group we were involved in, with people, including us, being accused left and right of being other people and having created various troll sockpuppets out of malice. (We were accused for some reason of having been someone who posted scat fetish photos during a troll attack on the group. Never had any idea why in the world anyone would believe that.)
Anyway. Looking back on all of this... it is both troubling and relieving to see how much the basic patterns of certain dynamics in certain communities don't change, whether or not we were involved in them. The things we wrote about in the last couple of paragraphs, we're... still fully taking it in, I think, and considering the connections to more recent situations we've been in or around. And how, despite incredibly awkward language ability, we weren't actually the overwhelmingly negative force we feared we were, a few times, in some of those groups.
I think people who get involved in situations like ours, and respond by ultimately going, "lol, IT'S JUST FANDOM, PEOPLE WHO TAKE IT TOO SERIOUSLY ARE STUPID" (or variations on that basic idea) are missing the point. Because the kind of social dynamics we saw as far as attacking and defending people, and people changing their opinions based on who was dominating the community at any given time, are also prevalent in communities where far more serious things than fandom are at stake.
Also, we are tentatively setting comments on this to being screened, in case anyone wants to mention anything they don't want to be public. Just let us know if you want your comment screened or not.
-mostly Julian and Riel
(No, we're not going to mention what any of the names we posted under were-- we don't really see any point in it, considering that it would just bring up a bunch of things we said that had little relation to our real thoughts and opinions, or had grains of truth in them but were extremely distorted in many ways too complex to explain, ways we'd been taught to view ourselves both by therapists and by various social groups we'd moved around in or at the fringes of.)
We also said and believed some things back then that now look pretty disturbing or ignorant to us, apparently completely honestly. Though I think we'd be more concerned to have realized our beliefs and opinions were all exactly the same as they were back then and hadn't changed at all.
Reading our old posts was both... disturbing, and weirdly affirming of the fact that our struggles with connecting language to thought were at least as bad as we remembered them being, even worse if anything. We understood, in theory, the concept of connecting thoughts to language, but we'd learned words as something largely unconnected to thought to begin with, and even though our brain was good enough at pattern-spotting to put together usually coherent communication, it often didn't really reflect our actual experiences all that much. We were often heavily reliant on what others expected us to be (which sometimes helped, and was sometimes very negative, like in circumstances where we were trained into an infantilized role).
Riel once made the comparison that it was like being shown or looking at pictures all the time, and then taking those pictures, cutting them up into parts, and taping the pieces back together clumsily in various combinations to try to make images, instead of drawing our own pictures of whatever it was we wanted to show. That was honestly what our speech with most people most of the time was like up until we got an Internet connection, and even our typed online communication was often that, too, for several years. (With the difference that the speech had about no relationship at all to our actual thoughts or experiences much of the time; the writing came somewhat closer, at least under neutral circumstances. The writing was also heavily influenced by our ideas about what we should be, what we should think and believe rather than what we actually did, in many places. So even though we had a lot more control over what it sounded like, there were other factors keeping it from being an authentic expression of our thoughts.)
And like a certain amount of our speech, it apparently passed with a certain amount of people as being coherent and accurate, if odd, statements of what we were actually thinking. Then again, with the chatspeak that a lot of people we ran into in various places were spouting, the trolls and single-issue fanatics, and the fact that some of the places we went to were full of people who looked a lot less rational than we did even when they were representing their thoughts more or less accurately, it wasn't hard to look coherent by comparison. It was mostly the patterns of what we reacted to and why, and the types of language we used, that people seemed to find bizarre, when they found us bizarre.
Just, I don't think anyone could reasonably deny that we were seen as weird, even by standards of people who declared that everyone in a given place was weird, like at one of our old schools (but there were right ways and wrong ways, cool ways and uncool ways, of being weird).
We weren't even presenting as plural or autistic on this one group (mostly because we didn't realize we actually "qualified" as either, at the time), didn't talk about anything system-related or as being anyone other than The Birth Person, and there were still people on it who were saying we were insane, completely nuts, needed mental help, etc, just because of how we wrote and how we reacted to various things. Then again we've seen this kind of thing used against people too-- that the fact they were called crazy and so forth wasn't because they had an odd communication style or ways of interacting with people that others didn't know how to interpret, but rather "proof" that the people calling them crazy were right, that they were "totally out of touch with reality" or "actually schizophrenic" or whatever. (And of course, all psych labels are assumed to be very accurate and meaningful, and being actually crazy makes a person horrible and nasty and icky and unable to perceive anything accurately at all.)
One of the interesting things about reading our old posts is that both our autism and our plurality stand out really obviously to us in them, and apparently we thought we looked far more "normal," even in text, than we really did. The fact that there were different people writing (at least five people, over two or three years), even if our switching was a mostly unconscious thing, is... really very obvious to us if we look at posts made from different time periods even within a few months. We all had the same neurological limitations of working with that cut-and-paste expressive language, but it was like we were working from... different pools of raw material, I guess, in terms of the general style and tone of that language? It's not just that the writing styles and vocabulary changed; it was our opinions and attitudes also.
We're not sure how much other people ever picked up on that, though. We might have just seemed to be very malleable in our opinions, but there were singlets who did that too, in the places where we posted.
The thing is, even in the first year that we were online, we can see how much closer we were coming to making the words we typed have anything to do with what was in our head-- but only when we didn't feel threatened or pushed. Under pressure, if someone was harassing or trolling us or if we were angry or upset about something, or even if we were just pushing ourselves to write something as fast as possible, we'd go back into this state of only being able to communicate by tacking together all these chunks of random language floating around in our head and throwing them at people. And we'd realize that it wasn't coming out anything like the ideas we wanted to express, that we weren't actually typing anything close to our actual thoughts and feelings, and that would make us even angrier, which drove the whole thing into a vicious cycle we couldn't get out of.
We seriously didn't have much control over it at all; we would just literally find ourselves typing completely random stuff that obeyed some kind of sentence structure pattern and followed in the general model of what flames or insults were expected to be, send it off, and people would flame us back. (And then we'd often guilt-trip ourselves about it; but what we tried to write about the emotional part of that turned into a long introspective tangent, which we might post separately later. It was often hard for us to back down from confrontations then, in part because of crappy patterns we'd picked up from our birth family.)
So, anyway, Usenet. Not sure how many people reading this were on Usenet in the mid to late 90s; we gather it's not as popular as it used to be. Some Usenet groups were actually very good discussion places, but they varied from good to completely horrendous-- anyone who thinks that snark and treating trolling and bullying as a sport started in recent years with places like 4chan, never saw Usenet during that time or some of its career trolls. Particularly some of the alt.* hierarchy groups, where often the only thing close to moderation that existed was your own killfile, if you even had one.
Self-loathing geeky teenagers and young adults crammed together in one place with no rules and moderation are pretty much a recipe for incredibly fucked-up social situations and perceptions. A lot of people on certain groups looked worse than we ever did, and certainly the majority of the ones who called us crazy had a much worse track record for actual harassing behaviour than we ever did. However, the same kinds of privilege that ruled outside the groups also ruled within them, and so some people had much, much more leeway to pull endless shit than others did. If you were known to be female, a person of colour, gay or bi, disabled, to have a psychiatric label, or a range of other things, the moment you stepped "out of line" in many places, you'd be turned on with much more viciousness than a person in a more privileged group would be. Not even necessarily just in heavily trolled groups. Not everyone would turn on you, but the people who did... well, it's one of those things where we had no idea what was going on at the time, but can see clearly in retrospect that some people (including us on several occasions) were being punished for daring to not "know their place," and think they could get away with the same actions that more privileged people could.
Not that anyone else who got caught up in these awful dynamics seemed to know what it was all about, either, much of the time. The people doing the insult-slinging didn't seem to consciously realize that they were reacting to having their privilege challenged, that they felt they were entitled to. The priorities of some of the regular posters in some groups, in general, were... very, very distorted, even when no social power issues were involved. Which translated, in several cases, into very vicious bullying against entire groups of people, whose "crimes" were... ridiculously trivial, at best.
A lot of it, in the groups where we hung out regularly, was fandom-related. And fandom is not the most weighty issue in the world, definitely (although some of the people who claim not to take it seriously, seem to have a lot invested in mocking others in it). And... there was something in us that could put it into perspective, then and now, to realize that what people were flaming each other over was trivial in the bigger scheme of things. But it was sort of like... because there was so much injustice we couldn't control, we threw disproportionate amounts of our sense of fairness and justice and our outrage at comparatively minor issues. Some of them for genuinely altruistic reasons. We seriously were thinking along the lines of "but we were like those 'ignorant newbies' at one point too, they need someone to defend them, their opinions on this issue don't say anything about their moral character."
There was one group where a few people actually wanted us to stay, when we got sick of it and left, because they apparently saw us as a voice of reason against a couple of snarky otaku fanboys with entitlement complexes and no sense of perspective, who were basically chasing and flaming people out of the group and leading trashing campaigns against fans and groups of fans who wouldn't conform to their views and opinions. Apparently a lot of people didn't like them, but we were some of the only ones willing to stand up to them, from what other people's comments seemed to imply. They just let them take over and scare new people out of the group, and dominate the whole tone of the group, because it was one of those cases where just a few people were flooding it with so much flaming and trashing and intimidation that they were able to ruin it for everyone else, since they wouldn't leave and there were no moderators.
I mean... we've definitely seen it pointed out before that geeks, as a group, have issues with standing up to people of their own kind who are being complete assholes and ruining all the discussion in a given community. I think that's a lot of what was going on in a lot of these places. We just remember kind of staring around in shock, figuratively speaking, and wondering why no one was fighting back, when such an obvious example of injustice and unfairness was going on, even if it was minor in the scheme of things. (And the huge amount of drama and fuss they were making over stuff that was minor in the scheme of things, including comparing relatively inconsequential things to various forms of real atrocity, was pretty shocking to us to begin with, too. As was the fact that we were some of the only ones calling them out on how trivializing this was to victims of real violence and atrocity.)
I'm not sure if this was because we had a stronger sense of the need for justice and fairness than most of them to begin with (we're honestly not trying to say we were that special or anything; it might have just been a type of unfairness we were sensitized to), or because there were a whole bunch of unspoken signals to not stand up to or challenge these people which we never picked up on, or what. A lot of people apparently wanted to think it would work to "just ignore them," or ignore them when they were getting nasty (which seems to be another huge problem when geeks have to confront their own kind being jerks). But we could see that not only was the ignoring not working, because new people coming in not knowing their "rules" provided them with a constant stream of victims to attack, they were scaring longstanding and much more civil people out of the groups. Lots of people think they should "not rock the boat" and hope the problem, or the person causing it, will somehow go away on its own, but that just doesn't happen.
Amd I guess it's another reason why the "autistic = no empathy" idea really burns our asses, too, because one thing we kept trying to emphasize was "how would you feel if you came on the group for the first time knowing nothing and got attacked like this." I mean, I'm not claiming we were saints, or models of rationality when confronting the flamers and trashers. We'd have an idea of the arguments we wanted to make, but then when we started to get angry, the language skills we had managed to acquire in the course of being online would basically just evaporate, and we'd be stuck pasting together hacked-up bits of language again, so we said a lot of things we didn't feel or mean. We also believed (and again, this was probably family crap getting in the way, with a lifetime of having learnt that the only way to get people to stop tormenting you or fucking with your head was to hurt them enough so they'd go away; though at least in this instance we didn't have to resort to physical violence as the only means of communication left to us) that a lot of people wouldn't respect us if we just responded with arguments, rather than adding flames and insults.
...but again, really looking at it, the flamers and trashers looked worse to begin with than we did-- we weren't throwing insults at random posters and newbies, just at them. We still beat the hell out of ourselves emotionally for "losing control" and "being unreasonable," even though somehow, in the mess of mangled words that always resulted, there was sometimes more reason and logic than there was from some of the people we were arguing with. We were always convinced that next time, we'd get it right.
The other thing that pushed us over the edge in some cases was lack of people backing us up or supporting our views, even when some of them had told us privately they agreed with us. When you're the only goddamn one going to bat for the people being trashed time and time again, and nobody else says anything, you can get to think that maybe you are completely wrong-- and this can happen in any kind of environment. Maybe you are wrong, maybe the people trashing them are morally in the right, and it's perfectly okay for them to do so, because after all, no one else is complaining, are they? So you start questioning yourself. Second-guessing. If no one else is saying anything because this person is right, well, you're the irrational jerk for being reactionary and jumping on them now, aren't you? And there were times when we'd make a post and then literally, five minutes or a few hours later, declare that we were retracting it all, that "I just lost my temper," and try to make a peace with the bullies that could never really exist.
See, the thing is, if you have the perception of there being something seriously fucked-up about a certain person or group of people, it's almost certain that someone somewhere, or more than one person, has seen it and just isn't saying anything. But when you think you're all alone, it can really make you crazy, thinking you're seeing something that isn't there, when everyone else acts like there's no reason not to love this person or forgive them all their "little faults" because they agree with me/aren't attacking me the REST of the time.
We've tolerated abusive people for months and even years because we were convinced everyone else loved them and didn't see a problem with them, and that we were just overreacting-- then found out later that, no, it wasn't just us, other people thought they were assholes/abusive/creepy/stalking/etc. Sometimes other people's perceptions of what was going on matched up almost exactly with ours. This has happened to us repeatedly, so many times that we should know better than to think it's a problem in us when someone has an attitude we just can't stand to be around, or that we find at least potentially worrisome. Somehow our filters just won't pick this up, and insist on defaulting to "you have a problem with them only because there's something wrong with YOU."
And I guess one thing that is telling in retrospect is that when we posted "positive" defences, where we talked in a generalized way about the need to, say, Not Attack People For Doing X, without naming names (but in a specific enough way that people could probably guess who the parties being alluded to were), we'd get a lot more people coming out to vocally support us than when we actually went head-to-head against the Godzillas of the group. It was like the second we named them specifically, or responded to something they'd said in specific, many people who'd been backing us for the "generalized" posts would run away and pull out their support. Or they'd do it timidly, if at all-- like, gently venturing that maybe an Incredibly Inappropriate Holocaust/Nazi Comparison (when the thing being discussed was nothing like genocide of any kind) was extremely out of line and noting that a relative had lost every member of their immediate family who hadn't managed to escape Poland during the war. While we, who didn't have any family history like that, called the offender out on it very loudly the moment we saw it. (And, admittedly, we also can see in retrospect how the person might have seemed timid because things like that can just be really difficult to talk about, let alone in the face of someone who's just basically fulfilled the worst Godwin's Law stereotype. It was just... a mindboggling moment in many ways.)
Yeah, we still managed to get some coherent, direct criticisms of the trashers' behaviour in without others' support-- it wasn't like we fell apart when no one was backing us, even if we felt like we wanted to-- but it was a whole lot easier to do when even one other person was willing to join in.
It was honestly kind of freaky to see what happened when we, and the few other people holding out, started to give up, not because we'd changed our minds but because the resident Godzillas (and one in particular) just weren't quitting or listening to anything resembling logic. When we (and those others) started to drift away from the group and stopped trying to make either generalized defenses of people being trashed or calling specific people out so much, the tone of the group shifted more and more to be like the trashers' attitude. Even six months later, people who had previously posted in support of our "don't attack newbies for this" posts were snarking on newbies themselves, sounding a whole heck of a lot like the original group of trashers. People we'd known and been friendly with, even.
It was like there was this whole "mushy middle" whose expressed opinions would shift around based on whether the trashers were dominating the community unchallenged, or whether they were being called on their shit. When no one was calling them on it, people started to follow the trashers and to act more like them; when they were being called on it, the same people had been holding out defending the targets.
And we saw even more extreme examples of this in Usenet groups that got heavily trolled-- some people who'd previously been decent enough posters started literally going along with the trolls once the community got anarchic enough, either by just posting tons of off-topic nonsense or actually joining in the activities of the malicious trolls, and eventually ending up looking indistinguishable from them in words and deeds. There was a giant mess of wankery and trolling on one group we were involved in, with people, including us, being accused left and right of being other people and having created various troll sockpuppets out of malice. (We were accused for some reason of having been someone who posted scat fetish photos during a troll attack on the group. Never had any idea why in the world anyone would believe that.)
Anyway. Looking back on all of this... it is both troubling and relieving to see how much the basic patterns of certain dynamics in certain communities don't change, whether or not we were involved in them. The things we wrote about in the last couple of paragraphs, we're... still fully taking it in, I think, and considering the connections to more recent situations we've been in or around. And how, despite incredibly awkward language ability, we weren't actually the overwhelmingly negative force we feared we were, a few times, in some of those groups.
I think people who get involved in situations like ours, and respond by ultimately going, "lol, IT'S JUST FANDOM, PEOPLE WHO TAKE IT TOO SERIOUSLY ARE STUPID" (or variations on that basic idea) are missing the point. Because the kind of social dynamics we saw as far as attacking and defending people, and people changing their opinions based on who was dominating the community at any given time, are also prevalent in communities where far more serious things than fandom are at stake.
Also, we are tentatively setting comments on this to being screened, in case anyone wants to mention anything they don't want to be public. Just let us know if you want your comment screened or not.
-mostly Julian and Riel
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-16 08:51 pm (UTC)When you're the only goddamn one going to bat for the people being trashed time and time again, and nobody else says anything, you can get to think that maybe you are completely wrong-- and this can happen in any kind of environment.
*nods* It isn't just online communities, either. That describes too many social settings I've been in, from elementary school on.
No wonder I learned just to withdraw, after enough realtime nastiness that just kept feeding into itself, no matter what I said. This also left me with the idea that maybe some of my language abilities were not as good as they probably were--not just the stress and pressure fouling things up, but the "am I even talking?" factor. What I was saying was frequently not as out of line as I was led to believe at the time. It sounds like you may have run into some of these other factors too.
Because the kind of social dynamics we saw as far as attacking and defending people, and people changing their opinions based on who was dominating the community at any given time, are also prevalent in communities where far more serious things than fandom are at stake.
Oh my, yes. I wish I had more sensible to add at the moment.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-28 08:04 am (UTC)You know, it reminds me a bit of a conversation I had with a friend recently. We were discussing the topic of insulting and laughing at others, and my friend was saying that there was a major difference between laughing directly in a person's face and laughing away from that person while with a group of friends. While I did believe there was a big difference, it seemed to me that while one seemed more harmless and more trivial, it still perpetuated the more serious offense of blatantly belittling people without concern and empathy for them.
The little things that go on in small, seemingly-insignificant circles do show up in areas that may seem bigger and more important as well, as you said.
I'm not sure what your musical tastes are like, but you might enjoy Alanis Morissette's "Underneath." The lyrics are quite a bit relevant to this topic.
The other thing that I wanted to say was "wow." I wish I could be more eloquent after reading all of what you've written in this entry, but there's little that I can think to say. It was enjoyable to read the entire entry, from beginning to end, though, and I found it to be amazingly thoughtful. I just had to say that. I suppose I could read it and pass over it without saying anything at all, but I want you to know that I did read and that I greatly enjoyed it--oh, and that I agreed very much with a lot of what you said and particularly liked the talk about how people can end up feeling alone/"wrong" if no one else is expressing similar thoughts aaaand the talk of issues you've had with language/communication (I can relate, definitely).