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amorphaSummary of this article, basically: A lot of people act like assholes online, and this can have significant negative consequences, and something should be done about it. Seriously, this is kind of up there with the various studies we've seen about how offline bullying is harmful, in terms of Pointing Our The Bloody Obvious.
...we're also avoiding the comments section and pre-emptively headdesking because in these kinds of discussions, there will almost inevitably be someone who tries to blame the abundance of people being complete assholes online on "geeks with poor social skills," and possibly from there to "geeks with Asperger's Syndrome," and from there to equating autism and/or "lack of empathy" in the sense of what they seem to believe empathy means, with sociopathy and lack of a conscience.
I can't even begin to describe all the things that are screwed-up about this interpretation. Autistic people online, as offline, are vastly more likely to be the victims of this stuff than its perpetrators. Whatever patterns seem to allow bullies offline to sniff out and target those who are different in some way, also seem to operate online in many places. Which is obviously not to say there can't also be autistic bullies-- we've dealt with a few-- but even "difficulty imagining others' mental states" is a completely different thing from genuine lack of conscience. Which is something we've seen a bit too up close and personal, at various times, to not have a horrible reaction to people equating it with either autism or "lack of empathy."
And while geeks often do have really bad ways of handling trolls and assholes in their own communities, it generally has almost nothing to do with autism or empathy (unless someone is being bullied for being autistic). 95% of the time, in situations we've been involved in, it has to do more with trying to avoid direct conflict, and hoping that sticking your head in the sand will somehow make the problem go away. And often with trying to hold a more positive, optimistic view of a bully or troll than their actions warrant, really. It's not that there are huge numbers of socially inept geeks who don't know any better than to be complete assholes to others, it's that there are huge numbers of people who stand by passively and enable bullies through inaction. Until it gets to the point where the bullies start banding together, and (like we mentioned in our post about Usenet) previously-neutral parties will start jumping in and going along with what the prevailing attitude of a group seems to be.
I guess... what bothers us for reasons we're finding hard to explain is the idea that this should be viewed as a natural consequence of the Internet or semi-anonymity, and requires some kind of new different totally unprecedented actions to prevent.
See, we're familiar with various ideas about the GIFT (Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory), and various attempts to analyze why some people who seem "normal" will turn into complete jerks when given an Internet handle to hide behind, and/or don't perceive people online as being real in some sense. We've also read about studies like the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment, demonstrating that under the right circumstances most "normal" people can be made to engage in behavior they'd normally consider cruel and sociopathic; and about many more real-life examples of the same dynamics that demonstrated this stuff even more vividly. We're familiar with the theory of "bad barrels" rather than "a few bad apples in the barrel," that there are certain kinds of power structures that intrinsically push people towards that sort of behavior or encourage/condone it.
What we don't agree with, have never agreed with, is the idea that the Internet-- or any long-distance communication environment, really-- intrinsically is or must be one of these places, or naturally and inherently drives people to dehumanize others more than they normally would. Institutions and prisons, yes. Online messageboards, no. One of the things about institutional power structures that makes them so incredibly corrupting is the enormous amount of power they grant people over other people, up to and including the power to determine whether they live or die. Being a moderator of a messageboard doesn't grant anything close to that kind of power.
So why is it that some people, when brought in contact with an environment where they can potentially anonymously (or even non-anonymously) bully and dehumanize others with no consequences, capitalize on it so readily? It's a question worth asking, but what exactly is different there from being in a situation, offline, where you have the ability to assault or scream insults at someone and get away with it? (And we're not meaning to suggest people don't capitalize on it in those situations, too-- some people most definitely do.)
I guess we're just wondering, why is online interaction supposed to require some new, special kind of deliberate structuring of social dynamics to ostensibly prevent bullying, in a way that face-to-face interaction wouldn't? (Apart from the obvious things like being able to hack others' servers, create sockpuppet accounts, etc. But preventing that is... as much technical as social.)
We mentioned some time back that we'd remembered our posts on various Usenet groups (and various mailing lists, messageboards, etc) as being much more negative and disruptive and inflammatory than they really were. When we went back and read them, we could see where we'd done things like throw in insults because everyone else was using them and we were afraid we wouldn't be listened to otherwise, but we could also see that the people we were arguing against were far, far worse-- we were just feeling disproportionate panic and guilt over having stood up to them at all. Actually much of what we said, the vast majority of the time, was quite mild compared to what some other people ostensibly on the same side as us were saying.
We'd... inaccurately remembered ourselves as expressing in full the amount of frustration and anger we were feeling at the time, rather than trying to restrain ourselves in our words. And at the time, we spent much of our time being afraid of our own emotions because we didn't have much ability to regulate them. Anger was a major problem, and we were always afraid of what we were going to do and say when we got angry, even online-- we'd said some things to people in the heat of the moment that we really, genuinely regretted. But... also, part of our basis for trying to understand the world around us was the belief that our instinctive reactions to things were always wrong. Therefore, when we were really angry about what we perceived as an example of injustice, we'd often still try to force ourselves to see the "merits" in the other person's view. Even when there were few merits and little logic to what they were saying. (We came to... appreciate our instinctive reactions to many things much, much later, after being hurt too many times by people whom we couldn't find a "logical" reason to dislike. I think there was a great deal of logic in our pattern-based reactions to them, it's just a kind of logic that words are not well suited for explaining. But back then, we thought words were everything, because the rest of the world acted like they were.)
But... later on, there was a time when we'd try to force ourselves to swallow what we thought were examples of bullying and excessive nastiness, because we wrongly remembered ourselves as having been "just as bad, back when we didn't know better." And actually, we weren't. We were angry, yes, but not against the same things that bullies directed their anger towards. We said disparaging things about some of the same people and groups bullies liked to target, but they weren't the same disparaging things that the bullies harped on, and we didn't spew the same amount of absolute vitriol, expressing hopes for certain people to have horrible things happen to them. Actually, in some cases we were profoundly confused about why many online bullies and trolls latched onto certain groups in the way they did-- our reaction was more like "huh? Why am I supposed to hope all these people would die or find it infinitely hilarious to mock them? It's not our cup of tea but it's not hurting anyone."
There have also been repeated instances in our life when people told us to read or look at something or even pushed us at it and insisted, and seemed absolutely sure that we'd find it funny, amusing, or agree with it, or see the people doing/saying it as being "on our side." And we... didn't find it funny; we saw it as bullying and as nasty. People also seemed surprised that just disagreeing in principle with what a certain person or group of people were saying, didn't mean that we would necessarily find any criticism or snarking of them (or wishes that they'd be harmed, die, etc) to be automatically righteous or hilarious. And there are some subcultural and social groups in which people seem to genuinely find this really surprising, even shocking, and may even see you as absurd, unenlightened, a "traitor to the cause," or "not with us, therefore against us" if you insist that such things aren't funny or fair. Some people will go to great lengths to patronizingly lecture you on why it really is okay and why These People really do somehow deserve it.
But even when your pattern recognition is screaming against it, social pressure to do certain things still exists. And it can be worse, more intense, when the people trying to pressure you into it are "outcasts like you," in some way or another. We gave in to that pressure a few times, with our singlet fandom identity, which we're still ashamed of.
Though part of the problem there, too, was that we were defining "rant" in a different way from a lot of the people around this. We used to do this thing with a couple of online friends where we'd try to find the worst fanfics we possibly could, and sometimes do a sort of MST3K-style treatment of them as we were reading them. But it wasn't anything that ever spread beyond a very small group, for a while-- we never even posted our MSTs anywhere because we'd feel bad doing so without having the author's permission. Then under prompting (and in a year when, for various offline reasons, we were pretty messed-up to begin with), we got together with a few people and created an online group where people could post this kind of thing routinely. At first, when the posts were just by us and people we knew, it was... silly, but when strangers began finding it and joining up, it quickly spiraled into something really not-fun and nasty. They didn't just want to do MSTs, they wanted to rip on everyone they saw as "too weird" in the wrong way.
We tried to keep pace with what the atmosphere of the group was degenerating into, at first, by trying to direct people towards things we thought it was justifiable to rant about, people we could express genuine anger towards-- like fundamentalists, and people advocating a return to "traditional gender roles." But the people joining up that we didn't know seemed increasingly inclined to want to just use it to spout bile. We felt horrible, actually, like we'd created this terrible monster. And eventually it did return to bite us in the ass, in that some of the people whom others attempted to rip on there were groups we belonged to. It was... a lesson, I guess, in how letting one's spirit-of-interaction twist towards what may look like "harmless" meanness often perpetuates that atmosphere into something more vicious and not always harmless.
There really always did seem to be something stopping us from crossing the same line that the committed bullies crossed, in social situations generally. We knew other people who wouldn't cross that line either, but didn't seem to see the problems with those who crossed it, or even that the line existed (or thought there was a line but that it was in a very different place from where we thought it was: "It can't be really bad unless they're actually coming to your house and trying to kill you!").
And the thing is, that line, and our perceiving it, and other people seeming not to perceive it or to not perceive it in the same place, didn't start with the Internet-- far from it. It started back in school, and in our own family. There were times when, like online, we would go along with the bullying or mocking of another person-- that's not something we can deny.
But... for the most part, we were able to restrain ourselves from stuff like that by reasoning, "Being bullied was hurtful to us. Therefore, we shouldn't bully others, and it would make us as bad as the people who did it to us." I mean, there were exceptions, because it's not like we're infallible or anything. But generally, we can remember every single time when we did it-- the ones that were actually us initiating or joining in on some kind of active bullying, not lashing out at someone because they had bullied us first. And we'd generally feel very guilty about it-- not even necessarily guilt later, but sometimes at the very time when we were doing it. Likewise with not necessarily joining in on bullying, but passively standing back and watching, or finding something fun or funny in it. We knew it was wrong, we knew there wasn't really any excuse for it. And this applied both online and offline.
But a lot of bullies will keep on doing what they're doing for years, months, even decades, without feeling guilt compunctions of any kind. And child bullies often grow up to be adult bullies.
Thinking about this stuff in light of the concept of spirit-of-interaction, that we wrote about earlier, puts a new angle on a lot of it that makes some things seem more understandable to us. It seems to us that the kind of bullying that arises spontaneously in a place that's not a "bad barrel," often requires a twistedness of spirit-of-interaction in order to occur. It's not that the Internet innately causes amorality and lack of conscience, or causes twisting of spirit-of-interaction in and of itself; it's that people bring in twisted spirits-of-interaction regarding what they think are okay ways to treat other people. And these personal twistednesses generally are at least partly founded on twistednesses that run deep in the society that gives rise to them. A person who passively enables bullying through inaction is reflecting some of that twistedness, as well, in many cases.
On the other hand, just being surrounded by it doesn't necessarily mean a person will take that twistedness and completely make it part of their own spirit-of-interaction, or make it permanently so. We've certainly known other people who never engaged in this stuff, and avoided any place where it seemed to be perpetuating, and had no other society to reference besides mainstream American (or Western, American-influenced more generally) society. For us, I think our plurality may be part of what prevented it from taking hold in us, but again, we've seen complete singlets who wouldn't cross certain lines either. And members of plural systems who would cross them.
And I also don't think being autistic or otherwise atypical inherently insulates anyone against this stuff, despite what some people seem to want to believe. If it does provide any kind of insulating effect, it's probably largely because a lot of us don't internalize various cultural norms until significantly past the age when we're expected to (provided we did grow up in the mainstream culture of wherever we live). But it doesn't mean that we can't be vulnerable to them when we do start internalizing them, or be bigots, or abuse whatever types of power and privilege we might hold.
But all of this is why we don't think, long-term, many strategies to "make the Internet nicer" will really work that well. There has to be change from within the culture, some untwisting and rebalancing of what is twisted, that allows for this stuff to take root and proliferate.
(Gah, and I hate having to use words for this, or at least English, because all of this makes it sound like it could be seen as some new-age thing. It isn't, not remotely-- it's all about patterns and values and more patterns; and patterns, observation of them over long periods of time and passively putting stuff together in the back of our head to gradually form a bigger picture, is how our brain makes sense of the world. No "toasters" required. And while it takes us longer to understand many things because of that, it also means we can spot some things that a lot of people seem to overlook. Like the thing we mentioned about people who'd shove us at things that they expected us to find funny or agree with, and being bothered by them because we spotted some pattern in them that was exactly like the patterns of various bullies we'd known, even from people who were insisting they'd always been the bullied persecuted underdogs so couldn't do it to anyone else.)
Partly, if we had to name specific things, we think it has to do with things like privilege and entitlement, and not always just the obvious ways of holding privilege. There are some people who seem to react, again for reasons we don't fully understand, to things, ideas and people considered strange or culturally non-standard even if not harmful to anyone, with rage and rantings about desire for something awful to happen to them. Or even just plain desire to mock them. We have some old entries from an online journal we were keeping in 2001 (it's not online any more, but we have all the entries in a textfile) which... recorded our initial reactions with first coming in to contact with various kinds of people whom many people's reaction to is "omg wtf that's so crazy/sick/delusional/perverted, let's laugh at these ridiculous awful people and talk about how we hope we're never near one and that they'll kill themselves off eventually." And did... not respond in the "expected" ways. The only thing we ever got reactive about to an unreasonable extent, was having bad reactions to people out of fear that they regarded themselves as better than and above others, and would naturally look down on us. But it wasn't any kind of huge struggle to convince us that, actually, no, not everyone who does/believes/likes X thing considers themselves better.
So there's stuff in all these patterns and dynamics that we still just really don't understand. Along with the whole idea that "people online aren't real people," which as we've already mentioned, was never something we could believe. Maybe because we were acutely aware that our communication online was much more reflective of what was really going on in our head, and therefore more reflective of who we really were, than the words that came out of our mouth. But I think, again, we might have found ourselves unable to cross that barrier even without that factor.
Blah. Hope all of that makes some kind of sense.
-Riel and Julian
...we're also avoiding the comments section and pre-emptively headdesking because in these kinds of discussions, there will almost inevitably be someone who tries to blame the abundance of people being complete assholes online on "geeks with poor social skills," and possibly from there to "geeks with Asperger's Syndrome," and from there to equating autism and/or "lack of empathy" in the sense of what they seem to believe empathy means, with sociopathy and lack of a conscience.
I can't even begin to describe all the things that are screwed-up about this interpretation. Autistic people online, as offline, are vastly more likely to be the victims of this stuff than its perpetrators. Whatever patterns seem to allow bullies offline to sniff out and target those who are different in some way, also seem to operate online in many places. Which is obviously not to say there can't also be autistic bullies-- we've dealt with a few-- but even "difficulty imagining others' mental states" is a completely different thing from genuine lack of conscience. Which is something we've seen a bit too up close and personal, at various times, to not have a horrible reaction to people equating it with either autism or "lack of empathy."
And while geeks often do have really bad ways of handling trolls and assholes in their own communities, it generally has almost nothing to do with autism or empathy (unless someone is being bullied for being autistic). 95% of the time, in situations we've been involved in, it has to do more with trying to avoid direct conflict, and hoping that sticking your head in the sand will somehow make the problem go away. And often with trying to hold a more positive, optimistic view of a bully or troll than their actions warrant, really. It's not that there are huge numbers of socially inept geeks who don't know any better than to be complete assholes to others, it's that there are huge numbers of people who stand by passively and enable bullies through inaction. Until it gets to the point where the bullies start banding together, and (like we mentioned in our post about Usenet) previously-neutral parties will start jumping in and going along with what the prevailing attitude of a group seems to be.
I guess... what bothers us for reasons we're finding hard to explain is the idea that this should be viewed as a natural consequence of the Internet or semi-anonymity, and requires some kind of new different totally unprecedented actions to prevent.
See, we're familiar with various ideas about the GIFT (Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory), and various attempts to analyze why some people who seem "normal" will turn into complete jerks when given an Internet handle to hide behind, and/or don't perceive people online as being real in some sense. We've also read about studies like the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment, demonstrating that under the right circumstances most "normal" people can be made to engage in behavior they'd normally consider cruel and sociopathic; and about many more real-life examples of the same dynamics that demonstrated this stuff even more vividly. We're familiar with the theory of "bad barrels" rather than "a few bad apples in the barrel," that there are certain kinds of power structures that intrinsically push people towards that sort of behavior or encourage/condone it.
What we don't agree with, have never agreed with, is the idea that the Internet-- or any long-distance communication environment, really-- intrinsically is or must be one of these places, or naturally and inherently drives people to dehumanize others more than they normally would. Institutions and prisons, yes. Online messageboards, no. One of the things about institutional power structures that makes them so incredibly corrupting is the enormous amount of power they grant people over other people, up to and including the power to determine whether they live or die. Being a moderator of a messageboard doesn't grant anything close to that kind of power.
So why is it that some people, when brought in contact with an environment where they can potentially anonymously (or even non-anonymously) bully and dehumanize others with no consequences, capitalize on it so readily? It's a question worth asking, but what exactly is different there from being in a situation, offline, where you have the ability to assault or scream insults at someone and get away with it? (And we're not meaning to suggest people don't capitalize on it in those situations, too-- some people most definitely do.)
I guess we're just wondering, why is online interaction supposed to require some new, special kind of deliberate structuring of social dynamics to ostensibly prevent bullying, in a way that face-to-face interaction wouldn't? (Apart from the obvious things like being able to hack others' servers, create sockpuppet accounts, etc. But preventing that is... as much technical as social.)
We mentioned some time back that we'd remembered our posts on various Usenet groups (and various mailing lists, messageboards, etc) as being much more negative and disruptive and inflammatory than they really were. When we went back and read them, we could see where we'd done things like throw in insults because everyone else was using them and we were afraid we wouldn't be listened to otherwise, but we could also see that the people we were arguing against were far, far worse-- we were just feeling disproportionate panic and guilt over having stood up to them at all. Actually much of what we said, the vast majority of the time, was quite mild compared to what some other people ostensibly on the same side as us were saying.
We'd... inaccurately remembered ourselves as expressing in full the amount of frustration and anger we were feeling at the time, rather than trying to restrain ourselves in our words. And at the time, we spent much of our time being afraid of our own emotions because we didn't have much ability to regulate them. Anger was a major problem, and we were always afraid of what we were going to do and say when we got angry, even online-- we'd said some things to people in the heat of the moment that we really, genuinely regretted. But... also, part of our basis for trying to understand the world around us was the belief that our instinctive reactions to things were always wrong. Therefore, when we were really angry about what we perceived as an example of injustice, we'd often still try to force ourselves to see the "merits" in the other person's view. Even when there were few merits and little logic to what they were saying. (We came to... appreciate our instinctive reactions to many things much, much later, after being hurt too many times by people whom we couldn't find a "logical" reason to dislike. I think there was a great deal of logic in our pattern-based reactions to them, it's just a kind of logic that words are not well suited for explaining. But back then, we thought words were everything, because the rest of the world acted like they were.)
But... later on, there was a time when we'd try to force ourselves to swallow what we thought were examples of bullying and excessive nastiness, because we wrongly remembered ourselves as having been "just as bad, back when we didn't know better." And actually, we weren't. We were angry, yes, but not against the same things that bullies directed their anger towards. We said disparaging things about some of the same people and groups bullies liked to target, but they weren't the same disparaging things that the bullies harped on, and we didn't spew the same amount of absolute vitriol, expressing hopes for certain people to have horrible things happen to them. Actually, in some cases we were profoundly confused about why many online bullies and trolls latched onto certain groups in the way they did-- our reaction was more like "huh? Why am I supposed to hope all these people would die or find it infinitely hilarious to mock them? It's not our cup of tea but it's not hurting anyone."
There have also been repeated instances in our life when people told us to read or look at something or even pushed us at it and insisted, and seemed absolutely sure that we'd find it funny, amusing, or agree with it, or see the people doing/saying it as being "on our side." And we... didn't find it funny; we saw it as bullying and as nasty. People also seemed surprised that just disagreeing in principle with what a certain person or group of people were saying, didn't mean that we would necessarily find any criticism or snarking of them (or wishes that they'd be harmed, die, etc) to be automatically righteous or hilarious. And there are some subcultural and social groups in which people seem to genuinely find this really surprising, even shocking, and may even see you as absurd, unenlightened, a "traitor to the cause," or "not with us, therefore against us" if you insist that such things aren't funny or fair. Some people will go to great lengths to patronizingly lecture you on why it really is okay and why These People really do somehow deserve it.
But even when your pattern recognition is screaming against it, social pressure to do certain things still exists. And it can be worse, more intense, when the people trying to pressure you into it are "outcasts like you," in some way or another. We gave in to that pressure a few times, with our singlet fandom identity, which we're still ashamed of.
Though part of the problem there, too, was that we were defining "rant" in a different way from a lot of the people around this. We used to do this thing with a couple of online friends where we'd try to find the worst fanfics we possibly could, and sometimes do a sort of MST3K-style treatment of them as we were reading them. But it wasn't anything that ever spread beyond a very small group, for a while-- we never even posted our MSTs anywhere because we'd feel bad doing so without having the author's permission. Then under prompting (and in a year when, for various offline reasons, we were pretty messed-up to begin with), we got together with a few people and created an online group where people could post this kind of thing routinely. At first, when the posts were just by us and people we knew, it was... silly, but when strangers began finding it and joining up, it quickly spiraled into something really not-fun and nasty. They didn't just want to do MSTs, they wanted to rip on everyone they saw as "too weird" in the wrong way.
We tried to keep pace with what the atmosphere of the group was degenerating into, at first, by trying to direct people towards things we thought it was justifiable to rant about, people we could express genuine anger towards-- like fundamentalists, and people advocating a return to "traditional gender roles." But the people joining up that we didn't know seemed increasingly inclined to want to just use it to spout bile. We felt horrible, actually, like we'd created this terrible monster. And eventually it did return to bite us in the ass, in that some of the people whom others attempted to rip on there were groups we belonged to. It was... a lesson, I guess, in how letting one's spirit-of-interaction twist towards what may look like "harmless" meanness often perpetuates that atmosphere into something more vicious and not always harmless.
There really always did seem to be something stopping us from crossing the same line that the committed bullies crossed, in social situations generally. We knew other people who wouldn't cross that line either, but didn't seem to see the problems with those who crossed it, or even that the line existed (or thought there was a line but that it was in a very different place from where we thought it was: "It can't be really bad unless they're actually coming to your house and trying to kill you!").
And the thing is, that line, and our perceiving it, and other people seeming not to perceive it or to not perceive it in the same place, didn't start with the Internet-- far from it. It started back in school, and in our own family. There were times when, like online, we would go along with the bullying or mocking of another person-- that's not something we can deny.
But... for the most part, we were able to restrain ourselves from stuff like that by reasoning, "Being bullied was hurtful to us. Therefore, we shouldn't bully others, and it would make us as bad as the people who did it to us." I mean, there were exceptions, because it's not like we're infallible or anything. But generally, we can remember every single time when we did it-- the ones that were actually us initiating or joining in on some kind of active bullying, not lashing out at someone because they had bullied us first. And we'd generally feel very guilty about it-- not even necessarily guilt later, but sometimes at the very time when we were doing it. Likewise with not necessarily joining in on bullying, but passively standing back and watching, or finding something fun or funny in it. We knew it was wrong, we knew there wasn't really any excuse for it. And this applied both online and offline.
But a lot of bullies will keep on doing what they're doing for years, months, even decades, without feeling guilt compunctions of any kind. And child bullies often grow up to be adult bullies.
Thinking about this stuff in light of the concept of spirit-of-interaction, that we wrote about earlier, puts a new angle on a lot of it that makes some things seem more understandable to us. It seems to us that the kind of bullying that arises spontaneously in a place that's not a "bad barrel," often requires a twistedness of spirit-of-interaction in order to occur. It's not that the Internet innately causes amorality and lack of conscience, or causes twisting of spirit-of-interaction in and of itself; it's that people bring in twisted spirits-of-interaction regarding what they think are okay ways to treat other people. And these personal twistednesses generally are at least partly founded on twistednesses that run deep in the society that gives rise to them. A person who passively enables bullying through inaction is reflecting some of that twistedness, as well, in many cases.
On the other hand, just being surrounded by it doesn't necessarily mean a person will take that twistedness and completely make it part of their own spirit-of-interaction, or make it permanently so. We've certainly known other people who never engaged in this stuff, and avoided any place where it seemed to be perpetuating, and had no other society to reference besides mainstream American (or Western, American-influenced more generally) society. For us, I think our plurality may be part of what prevented it from taking hold in us, but again, we've seen complete singlets who wouldn't cross certain lines either. And members of plural systems who would cross them.
And I also don't think being autistic or otherwise atypical inherently insulates anyone against this stuff, despite what some people seem to want to believe. If it does provide any kind of insulating effect, it's probably largely because a lot of us don't internalize various cultural norms until significantly past the age when we're expected to (provided we did grow up in the mainstream culture of wherever we live). But it doesn't mean that we can't be vulnerable to them when we do start internalizing them, or be bigots, or abuse whatever types of power and privilege we might hold.
But all of this is why we don't think, long-term, many strategies to "make the Internet nicer" will really work that well. There has to be change from within the culture, some untwisting and rebalancing of what is twisted, that allows for this stuff to take root and proliferate.
(Gah, and I hate having to use words for this, or at least English, because all of this makes it sound like it could be seen as some new-age thing. It isn't, not remotely-- it's all about patterns and values and more patterns; and patterns, observation of them over long periods of time and passively putting stuff together in the back of our head to gradually form a bigger picture, is how our brain makes sense of the world. No "toasters" required. And while it takes us longer to understand many things because of that, it also means we can spot some things that a lot of people seem to overlook. Like the thing we mentioned about people who'd shove us at things that they expected us to find funny or agree with, and being bothered by them because we spotted some pattern in them that was exactly like the patterns of various bullies we'd known, even from people who were insisting they'd always been the bullied persecuted underdogs so couldn't do it to anyone else.)
Partly, if we had to name specific things, we think it has to do with things like privilege and entitlement, and not always just the obvious ways of holding privilege. There are some people who seem to react, again for reasons we don't fully understand, to things, ideas and people considered strange or culturally non-standard even if not harmful to anyone, with rage and rantings about desire for something awful to happen to them. Or even just plain desire to mock them. We have some old entries from an online journal we were keeping in 2001 (it's not online any more, but we have all the entries in a textfile) which... recorded our initial reactions with first coming in to contact with various kinds of people whom many people's reaction to is "omg wtf that's so crazy/sick/delusional/perverted, let's laugh at these ridiculous awful people and talk about how we hope we're never near one and that they'll kill themselves off eventually." And did... not respond in the "expected" ways. The only thing we ever got reactive about to an unreasonable extent, was having bad reactions to people out of fear that they regarded themselves as better than and above others, and would naturally look down on us. But it wasn't any kind of huge struggle to convince us that, actually, no, not everyone who does/believes/likes X thing considers themselves better.
So there's stuff in all these patterns and dynamics that we still just really don't understand. Along with the whole idea that "people online aren't real people," which as we've already mentioned, was never something we could believe. Maybe because we were acutely aware that our communication online was much more reflective of what was really going on in our head, and therefore more reflective of who we really were, than the words that came out of our mouth. But I think, again, we might have found ourselves unable to cross that barrier even without that factor.
Blah. Hope all of that makes some kind of sense.
-Riel and Julian