The Terrible, Awful, Bad Internet

Apologies as I hijack this blog for a post not about D&D.  The below does not fit into the series I'm writing.  It addresses a mutually good-spirited conversation between ViP and myself that begins on the last post and ends up here, so I can stretch out.  You'll need the previous post for context.  Feel free to 
comment below if you have something meaningful to add.

Here are the points I'm addressing:

1. Humans need group dynamics.
2. Once upon a time, people had to deal with disparate opinions; they were not able to live in a bubble. The "social reality" of time and place.
3. The widespread validation of thought, obsession, what have you, is self-harming and — going out on a limb — harmful to others ... and the internet empowers this.
4. The physical instrument of the internet, and the device that connects to it, encourages dark impulses.

Please understand ViP; none of this is directed at you, but at various points you make, that I hear all the time, especially from folks like Jonathan Haidt. I'm extremely not right wing; if anything, I'm left of Haidt; but every once in awhile, to support some point he's made — and this is common throughout the species — some notion is dredged up from the past that qualifies as make-believe.  Contrary to what some believe, it's possible to disagree with someone's premises while completely agreeing with someone's conclusions.  That is my position on Haidt, and generally on the points being addressed here.

Furthermore, I had to paraphrase your statement first, because it's SO easy to be called out on misunderstanding something. So let me make something else clear: I don't think any of your arguments are strawmen, or specious. I've heard every one of these in the last 15 years, so I understand where you're getting them from and why they appear to explain what's happening.

1. Do humans need other humans?  Yes, 100% agree.  Only it must be understood that biologically, psychologically, anthropologically, I need about 30 to 40 humans who think and act exactly like I do ... and that's all I'll ever "need" for the rest of my life.  This is the size of group in which human and pre-sapiens species lived in for millions of years; this is what my brain patterns are designed to recognise; and this is what I actually need to be happy.

I hear this saw dragged out all the time by psychologists who want to short cut through the actual reason we need other humans — to ensure our immediate safety, help find food, keep each other clean, do for each other in times of crisis, etcetera, as FAMILY — straight to an argument that says I should put down my phone and step away from my computer, so that I can step out into the local environment and buy a coffee from a fucking stranger who doesn't give a good gawddamn if I live or die.  I need my partner, my daughter, my friends, the people I have carefully vetted these last thirty years.  If these are not the people at the nearby park, then no, I have no reason to go to the park.  At no time in history or prehistory have human beings obtained a "recalibration" from strangers.  Right from the get-go, strangers are competitors for our food and territory, and are a THREAT.  My lizard brain is built to automatically identify them as such, and warily discount them as persons not of my tribe.

Any notion that strangers exist to "remind me of how other people think and feel" is something barely a century old, and for all of that century has absolutely been ignored as an ideology.

Again, please understand.  I only disparage the argument being made ... that we "need" other people.  No, no in fact we really don't.  And that is the bloody problem.  The tribalism we see is an outpouring of small groups of people acting according to their biological dictates in the highest extreme.  They're sheltering with "their own kind" comfortably because their own kind are the only people they can trust.  If we are going to make this argument, please, let's not argue "communality" for anything other that what it actually is: a dangerous social behaviour that encourages groups of the same mindset to act violently when their den is threatened.

As such, let's ditch this ridiculous notion that the internet invented this behaviour!  The behaviour of violently striking out at humans not of my family and immediate association has been around for literally (using the term accurated) millions of years.  What the internet does is enable these fuckers to speak to the whole world at the same time, and by chance hit upon some other similar group of fuckers to find them, so that something that could never have happened a million years ago can happen now.  We can actually pile up a random tribe of 20,000 like-minded people because we've invented a way for them to find each other and communicate.  Therefore we ought to be very, VERY careful about encouraging potentially psychotic loners to emerge from their bedrooms into the real world, as we don't know what sort they are.

2. Did we ever have to deal with disparate opinions?  No.  Not really.  Maybe it's because I came of age in an upper-middle class suburb in the late 1970s, and this gives me a different perspective on what a "bubble" is ... I don't know.  The reader is free to identify my take on this as a part of my background.

I hear pundits argue all the time, even on the mainstream news, that the internet has made it possible for everyone to choose the media they want to consume, so that today they all live in a bubble where they never have to hear anything they don't want to hear.

This is completely garbage.  If it were true, the present siege mentality wouldn't exist.  But it does exist — because we simply can't isolate ourselves from things we don't believe.  No matter how hard we try.

Examples are a weak argument, but I'm forced to try a few.  For each of these, I'll compare the world of 1955 with the present day, despite my having been born in 1964.  Therefore, I'll have to rely on my Father's personal life, coupled with everything I was told as a youngster was the "way the world worked."

In 1955, owning a gun wasn't seen as a dividing social matter.  People didn't like them, but they existed as a normal, common, everyday thing.  Shooting clubs — my father was part of one until I was 18 — were responsible, public organisations that operated according to what every member believed: guns were dangerous, using a gun had a place, common discussion of guns in social gatherings was unacceptable, if you owned a gun, it was a personal responsibility you undertook.  Those who behaved irresponsibly were ostracised.  Criminals had guns, but no one hesitated to shoot a criminal with a gun in 1955.  Cops were not held accountable for doing so.

Okay, okay, save your opinion a moment.  I'm not arguing this should be the case, or even that it was the universal case.  It's what I witnessed personally as I grew up; and later, when I used to hunt with my father, between the age of 16 and 25, when I gave it up, talking about guns was something that happened all day, especially as we met other hunters, Canadian mounted police, fish and wildlife inspectors on many occasions, in what may be fairly describes as an Mayberry R.F.D. sort of culture.

Second example ... in case the above doesn't sink it.  In 1955, no one way gay.  Of course they were; of course all the choices and motivations that exist today existed then, but as far as the culture went, no, no one was gay.  Homosexuality didn't exist on the media, it wasn't discussed, in the world I grew up it did not appear in books, it was not mentioned in school classrooms and so on.  The only place the matter of homosexuality obtained attention was that every boy constantly accused every other boy of being gay, as a joke, as a vindictive way to hurt, as a means to prove that one was not gay.  By accusing others, one vouchsafed one's own innocence.  The more violently one attacks a potentially gay other, the more assertively one can argue that "I am not gay."

Oh, and the word used wasn't "gay."  It was faggot.

I apologise if that term is offensive.  Once upon a time, I heard it aimed at me hourly ... and what was hard to accept later, as I emerged into my twenties, was that every boy did.  That's not how it seemed at the time; however, by sharing notes with the grown-up versions of childhood enemies, we learned things.

THESE are bubbles.  These are bubbles on a scale incomprehensible in the present day.  I find it strange that the same evils that we fight every day, those into which the mid-20th century invested themselves, all began as social cultures without disparate opinions, of any kind.  There are thousands of books written in the period specifically addressing the lack of society's disparate opinions, yet here and now I regularly encounter university professors and perfectly intelligent people talk about today's "bubbles" as something new and unique brought on by the internet.

Take my favourite: the argument is nearly always applied to those who choose to watch Fox News, as evidence of their unwillingness to consider alternate new sources.  In 1955, there were NO alternate news sources.  Even mentioning an alternative point of view was a jailable offense in many, many cases.  Mention it too hard and you might find yourself shot down in the street.  No matter what colour you were.

People once upon a time weren't forced to deal with a disparate bunch of random people.  Random people were forced NOT to be disparate.  And if you were, gawd help you.  That's what "normality" was.

ViP, you say that once upon a time, "we all had to define ourselves in relation with the actual social reality of our time and place."  This is nostalgic and, I'm sorry, also nonsense.  Thank the internet, and every other media advance that's been made in the last 40 years, that we DON'T have to define ourselves by what other people think.

3. Is the widespread validation of thought and obsession self-harming?  This relates to this video that began these thoughts.  I have to be careful here.  It's so easy to be misunderstood as a monster — which I am, but if the reader thinks so too certainly, you'll stop reading and miss the point.

Present society is founded on the belief that all persons are inherently valuable to the same degree.  The premise began to be incrementally advanced in western culture as early as the 12th century, and found traction progressively with books like Thomas More's Utopia and political units such as that of Switzerland, parts of Italy, certain religious groups and the Netherlands.  Americans like to claim the title, but the reason Jefferson uses the phrase, "by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," is because in his day, he wasn't inventing this idea, he was expressing an idea that already predated him by a few centuries.

It has to be understood, however, that equal inherent value is a philosophy, not an evidentiary fact.  We choose to view it as a fact, because to do otherwise would be, as I say, monstrous ... but nonetheless in discussing anything about human nature and character, we're forced to view ourselves intelligently and plainly, and not as a matter of religious faith.  If your particular take on equality makes it impossible for you to distinguish between something we WANT and something we HAVE, then I suggest you stop reading right now.  You won't like where this is going.

As a matter of society, we are faced with two salient realities.  The first, and most obvious, as it's here on the internet everyday as the mainstream media's raison d'etre, is that many, many people simply refuse to accept inherent value as a philosophy.  I shouldn't have to recount the details here.  Twitter is doing a fine job of proving the point.

The second, and without a doubt the less comfortable, as no one ever addresses it, is that for most of history any single human being, whose name or work we do not know, has been, unpleasantly and for the most part, irrelevant.  I won't say entirely irrelevant.  As an example, there must have been several persons in the 12th century, say, who raised persons whose descendents survived well enough to eventually beget my family and, of course, me.  I can make the same argument about a group of humans living 150,000 years ago.  And two million years ago.  I can even make the argument that some group of precursor primate 60 million years ago accomplished their survival well enough for me to be born.

In short, since this was done often enough to produce all of us today, on the scale of "relevant," it has a number, but that number is very, very, very low.

Beyond this, I know nothing about my ancestors in the 12th century.  I know even less about the others.  On the whole, whether they were bastards, or good people, or kept themselves clean, or burned witches, or acted as whatever counts for the worst behaviour by our standards, doesn't mean a good gawddamn, since none of those things has anything to do with my thinking today.

You, dear reader, may be ready to endure this line of thinking, but it requires one more step.

Nine centuries from now, most everything that's going on right now will have next to no relevance to the people living then.

I make this argument because as a culture, we tend to give monumental IMPORTANCE to every facet of every human being's life, and there's just no logic in that.  In the linked video above, the first six words are, "He'll do great things, that boy."  The implication being that "doing great things" matters on some level ... and as the story continues, we find the boy progressively choosing a path not to do great things.  And we're left with the moral at the end, paraphrased, "Well he could have done great things, if only he'd applied himself."

The premise, right from the outset, throws the human being's inherent value into the trash.  The message is, you're only inherently valuable if you do great things; and if you don't do great things, you're self-harming.  If you let yourself behave experientially, you'll never reach your potential — which, of course, is not defined by you, but by the other members of your village.  What ought to matter to you is that which matters to the people of the town, to the girls, to whomever, who have decided that anything that doesn't live up to their expectation, is self-harm.

Not to put too light a buff on this shine, but this is the toxic bullshit that powered the world of 1955, described above.

If I'm equal as a person to anyone else, then what I choose to do with my time is my fucking business.  If I want to spend that time writing a 4,000 word essay on internet culture, that's my choice.  If I don't, I'm the only judge of that behaviour that I need consider.  None of us here are self-harming by choosing to do something which some tiny segment of society thinks we ought to give a royal shit about.

But ...

We're hyper-aware of the whirlpool sucking a selection of human beings, especially young human beings, into a culture of cutting, suicide, excessive celebrations of violence and the encouragement of causing harm to others.  Psychologically, the path between harming oneself and harming others is very clear.  And so, the mandate for addressing self-harming behaviour is arguably critical as a means of circumventing the darker influences of internet culture.  Earlier I mentioned twitter.  All of us here should be very concerned about the substantially diseased corners of the internet ... and we should be concerned about people, especially young people, finding those corners.   As Dan Olson of Folding Ideas put it on a recent podcast, the internet has industrialised grift.  And young people are not mature enough to understand how a grift works.  Hell, many adults aren't either.

But if we're going to name a culprit here, it's "free speech," not the internet.  Most of those "dark corners" of the internet could have been legislated out of existence 20 years ago, and should have been.  Most of the grifters should have been identified and isolated years ago.  Facebook, Twitter and TikTok have no business being the unregulated grift merchants we've allowed them to be.  Any argument that says, "for the good of an individual, we must encourage them not to self-harm on the internet," has to include an element that says, "Emotional abuse on the internet cannot be allowed to exist."

The problem is not the internet itself.  Radio was regulated.  Television was regulated.  Both were regulated in a manner for decades that held fast to that vicious bubble of 1955 (or any like year that applies).

The internet blew that bubble all to shit.  It gave a voice to millions of people whose existence was ignored and persecuted, and that was a good thing.  Unfortunately, the force of that liberation was applied indescriminately to everything and every person, regardless of their agenda.  And so here we are.  You can have one without the other; but you can't raise freedom of expression if you're not willing to legislate against freedom of persecution, cruelty, grift and hate.

It doesn't work.  Either you crush the personal freedoms pre-internet, pre-cable television, pre-free radio, video recording and every other media advancement post-1955, or you crush the personal freedom of every person today who wants to use the internet to spread lies and social corruption.

Until that's sorted, however, my personal contact with the internet — and that of my anthropological clan — is a matter of my personal responsibility.  But I'll leave how that works for another post, on another day.

I contend that the linked video about the failed young man does nothing to discourage self-harm.  It's not nearly as sophisticated as arguments and techniques being used against it (which, point in fact, even a frank discussion of which must be placed behind a content warning).  We have no hope of educating, or changing the direction of vulnerable persons if we can't even steal ourselves to discuss the subject!  The dark side is much, much better at validating the thoughts of such persons because that's all it cares about.  It couldn't give a damn about making anyone feel valuable or ambitious.  Whereas the so-called positive forces are apparently more interested in making fairy tale stories where young boys grow up to be "great" ... which is exactly the sort of pressure that sends them into the open arms of the dark web, which assigns zero expectation.

I'd agree, yes, validation of thought and obsession is harmful ... but not because the internet as a force supplies these things.  The internet is a tool.  If you use a hammer to bash my brains in, that's not an inherent problem with the hammer.  The internet could just as easily be the tool that rescues such people ... but it won't so long as grift exists, on both the left and the right.  As I see it, every faction, regardless of their agenda, or their self-assessment, is more interested in bucks and support than they are in making any difference in the world.  This is what free speech gets us.

4.  Does the internet encourage dark impulses?  Of course it does.  It also encourages good impulses.  It encourages every kind of impulse.  But it really depends on what you consider a "dark" impulse as compared to another.  I've no doubt that I pursue many so-called dark impulses on the net.  There are things I can read today that I couldn't have 20 years ago; there are experiences I can have here that I couldn't have.

Right now, I work as one of 40 persons for an international corporation whose head office is not in my country.  I've met two of my bosses, once.  I sometimes talk with other people who do what I do; they're located in different countries, with different language skills.  None of us will ever meet in person, I expect.  I've made a very good living from this company.  Hell, they sent me on their dime, for free, to Montreal for a week.  I can't say anything definitive about the company, ever, for the rest of my life, but I don't care.

So I'm quite at odds about anyone describing the "internet," as opposed to a percentage of people on it, as a bad thing.  One might just as well say the PLANET is a bad thing.  And guess what — living on the planet Earth encourages dark impulses.  Much, much worse impulses than can be found on the darkest corner of the internet.  Don't go to Burma, Zaire or Equatorial Guinea, ever.  Just don't.  On a lesser scale, I can also point out alleyways in Calgary that you don't want to walk down.  Seriously.  Those are places you just don't go.

It's a big bad scary world.  Stop blaming the internet.  The only thing the internet has done is to make more people aware of it.  Which is also scary.

It's so much easier to pretend something doesn't exist if there aren't webpages for it.