Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 5. Alienated: You Fail It! Your Skill Is Not Enough! Joseph Reagle Published on: Apr 03, 2019 Updated on: May 14, 2019 Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 5. Alienated: You Fail It! Your Skill Is Not Enough! “They call you hater well they’re just jealous Your constructive pearls of wisdom give me thrills I can’t deny How will we know if you don’t tell us We could improve our YouTube channels by “fucking off and dying”? … You wished me cancer and misspelled “cancer” But I know that it’s a metaphor. You hope that I will grow, Just like the tumour you hoped would kill me Inside the tits on which you said you’d also like a go.… Some might say you’re a … sexually aggressive, racist, homophobe, misogynistic, cowardly, illiterate, waste of human skin, … But if it wasn’t for you my darling, I would never have written this tune.…” —Clever Pie and Isabel Fay, “Thank You Hater” “Fail.” This short comment, frequently seen online, says much: it signifies an ironic, disastrous, or confounding misfortune, with “epic fail” describing the sublimely stupid. This contagious idiom (or meme) went viral in 2004 and may have been inspired by a poorly translated caption to a 1998 Japanese video game: “YOU FAIL IT! YOUR SKILL IS NOT ENOUGH.”1 “Fail” appears in comments, in the titles of YouTube videos, and as an “image macro” (a shocking or funny image with a large textual caption). It is the subject of the FAIL Blog, which once featured a photo of traffic stopped behind a hearse and its escaped casket. “Fail” is also used self-deprecatingly, as when an online community collectively shakes its head in bewilderment. “RaceFail ’09” is one such incident and resembled a classic flame war from Usenet, the Internet’s early discussion forum. On Usenet, a provocative message could spark a heated exchange in which people said things that they ordinarily would not say and later regretted their participation. The metaphor of the flame was apt since tempers flared, and the resulting conflagration spread quickly, often “cross-posted” across 2 Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 5. Alienated: You Fail It! Your Skill Is Not Enough! newsgroups. The same thing happens on blogs and Twitter today. A friend of mine wished she could opt out of the “retweet fights” that occur when someone in her stream retweets his or her opponent “so that, presumably, we can all fight with them too.” In the RaceFail ’09 incident, two professional science fiction authors blogged about writing for “the other” (creating characters that are not like the writer). One of those authors, Elizabeth Bear, reflected on the “ongoing problem” of “Writing The Other without being a dick.” She recommended that when writers create characters that are unlike themselves, they should think of such characters as people first, listen to others’ experiences, research their history, not reduce characters to tokens, avoid stereotypes (especially in creating alien peoples based on our prejudices), and “Accept that no matter what you’re doing, some people are going to think you’re getting it wrong.”2 Avalon Willow, a comics enthusiast, blogger, and person of color, thought that Bear had gotten it wrong. In an open letter to Bear, she listed many instances of cultural appropriation and negative stereotypes that she found in science fiction, including some by Bear herself. Although she said that Bear was not a “racist” or a “monster,” she thought that Bear’s posting demonstrated ignorance and privilege.3 Friends and colleagues of Bear responded in her defense and a flame war ensued on the issues of covert racism and cultural appropriation. Unlike other cases discussed in this chapter, there was relatively little explicit racism, hate, or harassment. Nonetheless, there were claims of abuse and racism by both sides. Even well-meaning people can get ensnared in angry conversations that leave most participants feeling upset and burnt out. This pattern of discourse exemplifies Godwin’s law, an observation that cyberlawyer Mike Godwin made in 1990 about the Usenet: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” However, the understanding of this darker side of online interaction that we inherited from the 1990s, including Godwin’s law and the suggestion “Don’t feed the trolls,” is outdated. Back then, conflict was characterized by participants in an ongoing discussion coming to see their opponents in partisan terms, eventually to the point of calling one another Nazis. This behavior could be sparked or inflamed by a troll seeking to annoy people. Today, comment sections can quickly fill with posts that would’ve shamed Hitler himself (hence the suggestion “Don’t read the comments”). The lone mischievous troll who attempted to stir up trouble is now part of a larger culture, and the classic flame wars from before the Web now look harmless with the arrival of bullies and haters. 3 Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 5. Alienated: You Fail It! Your Skill Is Not Enough! Lolz, Trolls, and Anonymity My middle-school friend Jason used to pester me to hang out on his bulletin board system (BBS), a “war board” that he and his older brother had set up for the sole purpose of trading expletives. As one former BBS user wrote, war boards were “an attempt at witty repartee—a verbal one-upmanship. Unfortunately, because many of us were teens, it was rarely witty and often devolved into ‘your mamma’ arguments when people ran out of creative ways to insult one another.”4 I never took to it. I could not generate animosity toward people that I had no reason to quarrel with. My BBS of choice was The Science Lab, which was populated by nerds, including some who worked at NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute. Tempers flared, and insults were exchanged, but that was never the point. In fact, after one such paroxysm, morale plummeted, and some abandoned the system. Later, when I first experienced the Internet, I recognized elements of both the war board and science board in Usenet’s flame wars. Among the hundreds of discussion groups, an exchange could be serious, playful, and heated. This mixture is seen in the famous feud between Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tanenbaum mentioned earlier. Tanenbaum declared that the design of the Linux operating system was “obsolete”; Torvalds responded with “some serious flamefesting” and called Tanenbaum’s projects “brain-damaged.”5 Even though some felt that Torvalds had crossed the line, this was different from recent incidents: the hostility was bracketed as flaming, it was limited to the participants, the topic was substantive, ideas were exchanged, and there were no threats or harassment. Some scholars at the time argued that flaming was potentially valuable because it “encourages clear writing and no-nonsense communication”: it educated the ignorant, enforced rules, and facilitated effective communication.6 But an undergraduate is not likely to characterize a professor’s work as “brain-damaged” to his face, as Torvalds did to Tanenbaum. This behavior has been confirmed in experiments: online, people exhibit greater status equalization (for example, between student and professor) and disinhibition (such as flaming).7 One theory is that with a relative paucity of textual interaction, we miss the social cues, context, and information that normally are relied on to regulate interpersonal exchanges. We can easily blunder without realizing how we are affecting other people—despite smiling emoticons. But what happens if visibility is completely removed? Plato asked this question millennia ago via the story of Gyges, a shepherd who was in the service of the king of Lydia. Gyges found a ring of invisibility and used it to bed the queen, kill the king, and 4 Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 5. Alienated: You Fail It! Your Skill Is Not Enough! become the new ruler. Plato asked whether a just man could be corrupted in such a circumstance. J.R.R. Tolkien thought so and had Frodo, a virtuous and modest hobbit, falter at journey’s end and fail to cast the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. (It is destroyed by Sméagol, who bites off Frodo’s finger to reclaim his “precious” and accidentally falls into the fires below.) More recently, in an episode of the radio program This American Life, people were asked if they would prefer to be an invisible man or a hawk man. The consensus seemed to be that flight would likely lead people along a heroic path and invisibility would lead to shoplifting and voyeurism. These philosophical and popular suppositions have empirical support. In 1969, psychologist Phil Zimbardo reported an experiment in which people were asked to administer shocks to others. Research accomplices then pretended to receive the shocks. Researchers found that participants who wore large lab coats and hoods were more willing to shock others than participants who wore name tags. Zimbardo believed that the veiled subjects experienced deindividuation: a loss of a sense of self and social norms. In another early study, thirteen hundred children were secretly observed trick- or-treating. They were told to take a single candy. Lone children who were identified by name rarely cheated, and anonymous children in a group cheated most of the time.8 More recently, psychology researcher Tatsuya Nogami attempted to tease apart the differences between identity (such as a name) and anonymity (an inability to associate a person with his or her behavior). As part of a take-home assignment, he asked over a hundred university students to flip a coin twice.