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Well, Actually CHAPTER 5 WELL, ACTUALLY Cyber Sexism and Racism within Online Settings and the Enabling Discourse of E-Libertarianism INTRODUCTION Since its inception, the Internet has been hailed as a great equalizer, promoter of progress and democracy with unlimited potential and reach. What propels this mythology is the concept of the Internet as a neutral site, where identity is irrelevant other than the persona one chooses to create and share. Social life on the Internet is presented as an idealized, random collection of atomized individuals who happen to come together to interact over shared interests, with collectivity stopping there. Of course, this mythology has always been attractive to a certain segment of the population, who has always been able to utilize the Internet and shape society as they wished: Straight white men, often considered the default Internet user, see the Internet as a neutral tool because it conforms so exactly to their expectations, everyone else had to make adjustments and look for loopholes in order to use the Internet in the way they wanted. (Poland, 2016, p. 213) Indeed, for the women and minorities who are constantly harassed on the Internet, they are met with the dismissive (if not hostile) attitude that this is the price to pay for having the nerve to disrupt the “wide, open cyberspaces” that they are violating because of their unwillingness to no longer let racism, sexism, and homophobia go unnoticed. This can take the form of name calling, threats, and a blurring of online and offline stalking and violence. Far from being a neutral, idealized space, what the Internet reveals is “a story of how the deepest prejudices in a society can take purchase in new settings due to technology” which has been in the process of “transforming not only online spaces but real lives and potentially even the trajectory of our politics” for some time now (Beauchamp, 2019, para. 9). Though presented as hip, progressive, and current, the very foundation of the tech industry itself is misogynistic, with women occupying less than 30% of jobs at major tech firms such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft (Jotanovic, 2018, p. 32). Among leadership jobs, women hold only 10% of higher- level positions and these are virtually nonexistent for non-white women (p. 32). Lee © FAITH AGOSTINONE-WILSON, 2020 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004424531_006 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 License. Faith Agostinone-Wilson - 9789004424531 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:47:24AM via free access CHAPTER 5 (2017) captures the experiences of being female in the tech industry, not unlike the experience of being a woman who interacts online: To be a woman in tech is to know the thrill of participating in one of the most transformative revolutions humankind has known, to experience the crystalline satisfaction of finding an elegant solution to an algorithmic challenge, to want to throw the monitor out the window in frustration with a bug and, later, to do a happy dance in a chair while finally fixing it. To be a woman in tech is also to always and forever be faced with skepticism that I do and feel all those things authentically enough to truly belong. There is always a jury, and it’s always still out. (para. 13) Added to this, conservative discourse on social media has experienced many structural changes since the late 1990s, the most important being its global organizing and reach. Daniels (2009) identifies this as the formation of a “translocal white identity” where whiteness is privileged over national origin as a point of connection (p. 68). This is paired with more anarchistic organizational structures that are no longer one-way or top-down in terms of communication as was the case in the pre- digital era. The sheer reach of social media via its sharing features has transformed disinformation into a major weapon, turning “the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenges it” (Benkler et al., 2017, para. 4). Here, outright lies are not even needed, just enough of an insertion of doubt and let sharing accomplish the rest. The irony is that underneath the innovative, subversive trappings of hacker culture and trolling, the philosophy underlying all right-wing movements on the Internet is profoundly traditionalist and retrograde (Nagel, 2017; Penny, 2017b). Discourse surrounding feminism and its contribution to the decline of the West is a common sight in comments, blogs, and websites. As Burton (2018a) notes, the Internet provides a powerful forum for cultivating right-wing political beliefs, first by promoting the mythic, where “the world has an inherently meaningful and exciting structure” (para. 20). This is then paired with participation and the immediacy of response, which represents the power of “belonging to a cohesive group with the thrill of cultural transgression” (para. 23). This combination of rigidity and transgression is highly alluring, making things like racism, sexism, homophobia and violence something refreshing and different when presented in online contexts, where “to be a traditionalist is, increasingly, to be countercultural” (para. 21). While Facebook has formally banned white supremacist and separatist groups from its site as of March 27, 2019, and Twitter taking similar measures, this has made barely a dent into hostile discourse in cyberspace as a whole. This chapter first outlines the philosophy of e-libertarianism, which is foundational to the formation and distribution of discourse on the internet, in particular, harassment of women and minorities. Next, an overview of the persona of the troll and functions of trolling are presented as a major aspect of this discourse, using the countercultural frame. Cyber organizing is 114 Faith Agostinone-Wilson - 9789004424531 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:47:24AM via free access WELL, ACTUALLY then addressed, highlighting some key aspects of right-wing content distribution and translocal white identity underlying alliance-building. This culminates in a discussion of the misogyny inherent within the online manosphere, consisting of groups such as men’s rights activists, new atheists, incels, and pick up artists. E-LIBERTARIANISM The ideological foundation of the Internet can best be conceptualized as e-libertarianism. A fusion of the tenets of traditional libertarianism with online settings, e-libertarianism asserts that the Internet is a self-governing, neutral location with equal access to all that should not be interfered with by regulations of any kind. This is reflected in Barlow’s (1996) widely distributed acerbic and patronizing white male missive, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace where he states that the Internet is a different space, apart from society: You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. (para. 5) At the same time, e-libertarians aggressively support the notion of the invisible hand of the free market, self-interest, and monetizing the Internet, not seeing the glaring contradiction between these concepts and their claims that the Internet is a naturally evolving, neutral space or that it promotes equality for all. As Daniels (2009) explains, those who share this perspective envision the internet as a sort of unregulated marketplace usually only found in economics textbooks…the cyberlibertarian view of the internet is one rooted in a particular American geography imbued with a frontier ethos, tied to both a free-market analysis of the internet and a very recent (mis)reading of the first amendment as an absolute protection of all speech. (p. 181) E-libertarianism asserts four claims that drive its discourse and structures: (1) First Amendment Absolutism; (2) the Internet is neutral; (3) the Internet isn’t real, and (4) harassment is the price of admission. These claims are interrelated and serve to reinforce an overall hands-off ideology that provides the climate for right wing populism and fascism online. First Amendment Absolutism A key tenet of e-libertarianism is that unrestricted free speech, or First Amendment absolutism, is the optimal policy to govern the Internet. Any attempt 115 Faith Agostinone-Wilson - 9789004424531 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:47:24AM via free access CHAPTER 5 to regulate speech is viewed as an anti-democratic transgression that is evidence of government overreach that always seems to lurk around the corner. Citing “slippery slope” logic, proponents of free speech on the Internet assert that if something racist is banned or moderated, the floodgates to repression will open where an increasing amount of ideas will be banned. It is important to note that e-libertarians never invoke the more likely reverse scenario of the slippery slope argument: that allowing unrestricted white supremacist or misogynistic speech will result in normalization of such speech and an increase in racist/ sexist discourse and violence. For this reason, Daniels (2009) posits that the e-libertarian conceptualization of the First Amendment “is an interpretation born out of a white racial frame, rooted in colonialism, and stands at odds with the wider democratic global community” (p. 162). It is also a concept that is hegemonically embedded within cyberculture; you’ll only realize its presence when you attempt to challenge aspects of it online. Free speech as envisioned by e-libertarians is hyper-individualized and devoid of social context (Daniels, 2009). This frames all speech as initially equal in value, with the “marketplace of ideas” ultimately the decider of which speech is more popular.
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