I’ve been too busy to post much lately, but someone named Silicon Fades (e: siliconfades@gmail.com, added at their request) sent me an email which brought up some interesting ideas. I’m reposting it with permission. Whether or not you agree with it, I think it’s worth a read.

Hi, you probably don’t remember but I sent you an email a while back about some gamergate stuff. I’ve read pretty much all of your blog and agree with a lot of what you write about manipulation on the internet. I was reading this (http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/jon-ronson-interviews-adam-curtis-393) today and the book about public shaming made me think about your writing so I thought I’d shoot you this email and make you aware about it in case you weren’t already.

Adam Curtis, the guy being interviewed has a few really interesting documentaries that touch on social control that you might be interested in as well, I think most of them are on youtube. A lot of his work centres on fear and how the concept of an “other” is used by politicians to create narratives that engender policy change. I don’t agree with everything he says but it’s interesting stuff nevertheless.

I see a lot of this in “SJW” culture, and other internet sub cultures in general. I think that the majority of activity that comes under the “Social Justice” banner in fact has little to do with actual activism and is really to do with facilitating and protecting a type of tribal identity. Once you’re “in the gang” the primary objective is protection of those who are also in the gang. In this case however, before one can even get to attacking the others who aren’t in the gang, one has to expound a huge amount of energy existentially justifying the gang in the first place. The necessity of the Crips to it’s members is self-evident, it’s an entity based on practical security and financial gain. The existence of the Social Justice Gang is markedly less evident, especially to it’s members, and so a large part of the workings of the gang are creating, exploiting and uncovering events and people that can be pointed to as reasons for the existence of the gang. At it’s most fundamental, the gang really exists to help facilitate an easy to understand identity for the people in it.

This ties in a lot to some stuff written by Alvin Toffler who you’ve probably already heard of. I’ve only read Future Shock by him but it’s fascinating stuff. He misses the mark at a few points but overall it’s a remarkably prescient look at contemporary society written in the late sixties. One bit that really stuck out to me was how he basically manages to predict the existence of “Anonymous” as a culture:

“Leisure-time pursuits will become an increasingly important basis for differences between people, as the society itself shifts from a work orientation toward greater involvement in leisure. In the United States, since the turn of the century alone, the society’s measurable commitment to work has plummeted by nearly a third. This is a massive redeployment of the society’s time and energy. As this commitment declines further, we shall advance into an era of breathtaking fun specialism – much of it based on sophisticated technology.

We can anticipate the formation of subcults built around space activity, holography, mind-control, deep-sea diving, submarining, computer gaming and the like. We can even see on the horizon the creation of certain anti-social leisure cults – tightly organized groups of people who will disrupt the workings of society not for material gain, but for the sheer sport of "beating the system” – a development foreshadowed in such films as Duffy and The Thomas Crown Affair. Such groups may attempt to tamper with governmental or corporate computer programs, re-route mail, intercept and alter radio and television broadcasts, perform elaborately theatrical hoaxes, tinker with the stock market, corrupt the random samples upon which political or other polls are based, and even, perhaps, commit complexly plotted robberies and assassinations. Novelist Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49 describes a fictional underground group who have organized their own private postal system and maintained it for generations. Science fiction writer Robert Sheckley has gone so far as to propose, in a terrifying short story called The Seventh Victim, the possibility that society might legalize murder among certain specified “players” who hunt one another and are, in turn, hunted. This ultimate game would permit those who are dangerously violent to work off their aggressions within a managed framework.

Bizarre as some of this may sound, it would be well not to rule out the seemingly improbable, for the realm of leisure, unlike that of work, is little constrained by practical considerations. Here imagination has free play, and the mind of man can conjure up incredible varieties of “fun.” Given enough time, money and, for some of these, technical skill, the men of tomorrow will be capable of playing in ways never dreamed of before. They will play strange sexual games. They will play games with the mind. They will play games with society And in so doing, by choosing among the unimaginably broad options, they will form subcults and further set themselves off from one another.“

Anyway he postulates that a large reason for the existence of subcultures is that it provides a ready made template for a person to use as an example of how they want to live their life, and helps reduce the number of decisions they have to make in a world that’s saturated with decisions. Over abundance of choice is one of the core tenets of future shock. This is useful in understanding some of the actions we see in something like gamergate. If one thinks of oneself as an affiliate of the social justice gang, then when confronted with any actions or ideas that can be seen as signifiers of the enemy gang (fat neckbearded fedoras) then the reaction that you have to be seen to be having is already decided. You don’t have to waste any of your precious thinking time with analysing a new situation, because the gang and your premade identity have already figured out how you’re supposed to react. Hence the large numbers of people deriding the gamergate movement without any attempt being made to inquire what was really happening. “I’m a social justice advocate (however casually), this movement has been defined to be counter to ours, therefore it can safely be ridiculed.”

Notice also how many of the rhetorical devices used by both sides of the gamergate divide are essentially the same. Take something like this page (http://ggobservations.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/the-five-people-you-will-meet-in.html) linked on the siderbar of /r/gamerghazi. It seems sensible enough at first, but with a quick find and replace you can make it sound horrible. Replace “Gamergate” with “A Liberal University”, “The Common Troll” with “Cultural Marxists” and “Conservative Bloggers” with “The Jews” and you get some pretty typical Stormfront esque propaganda. Interestingly enough, the way that page treats minorities as agency-less hordes to be utilised by Machiavellian masters means that you can just leave that section as it is. The oft-seen argument that “Gamergate has some good ideas but the name has become tainted, the people who want real good change to happen should move on and leave that name behind” sounds an awful lot like “I’m not a feminist, I’m an egalitarian. Feminisim as a label is associated with crazy feminnazis.”.

In the end it all comes back to identity. It’s comforting to know that you’re the group that’s “in the right”, and it’s useful to paint your enemy is both a caricature to be ridiculed and a genuine threat to the safety of those you share your identity.

Obviously this is just my way of looking at things. I think it’s useful but I’d be wary of applying it in too many places. I think that’s one of the pitfalls of sociology in general that lead to internet social justice being what it is today. Someone comes along with a perfectly good metaphorical device (in this case the concept of “privilege”) that describes a particular situation, interaction or system in a way that makes that sense and illustrates the situation. For example - “I have privilege that you do not have and thus my view of this matter is different than yours, and I should try and understand it from your un-privilged point of view in an effort to reach a more just situation” is a perfectly reasonable and useful way of thinking about things that happen in society. The problem arises when, after this tool is applied in a few different scenarios and it is shown it work, people latch on to it and think of it as some kind of grand unified theory of sociology through which all of human interaction can be predicted and we end up with where we are right now.

In this case I think the best way to move forward for everyone is to consider anybody who you interact with online as a real human, and not as a representative of any movement or generalised identity. It’s only if we take individuals on their own terms and try and do something about their concerns in a compassionate way that we can move beyond looking at each other as two-dimensional boogeymen.

It should be pretty apparent by this point in the rambling that I’ve got absolutely zero formal sociolgical education, but it makes sense to me.

Anyway I thought you might like the book.

Peace