“Accel_” has 231 views. Left alone, his contribution to civilization is essentially zero. Then Wolf, who has a much larger and more sensible audience, screenshots him, and suddenly this nobody’s dumb remark becomes content. It’s dispiriting how often this happens. Ironically, the idiots and trolls end up controlling the discourse, because the 90% of sane people can’t resist quoting, retweeting, and making recurring inside jokes about it. The marginal pollution from one retweet is negligible. But millions of individually defensible decisions determine what everybody sees, until the information environment becomes disproportionately composed of things almost nobody actually endorses. A classic “tragedy of the commons” problem. Each individual is tempted to dump a little bit of sewage into the conversation supply, but then we all end up getting cerebral cholera. Mockingly, ironically, or earnestly, the bacteria get shared all the same.

In a room of twenty people, somebody acting like an ass for attention can encounter the devastating response of nineteen people simply looking away. Everyone can see everyone else looking away, so silence itself communicates a norm. Online, silence has no visible social presence. You cannot see the ten thousand people who encountered something and declined to engage with it. You see the fifty who replied. So the platform systematically hides successful norm enforcement and displays failed norm enforcement. On sites like Twitter, the audience is indefinite. Membership is nearly costless. A troublemaker can parachute into a conversation among strangers. Sanctions in one subcommunity may be rewards in another. And, most perversely, the mechanism by which you punish the offender —quote him, ridicule him, make him notorious — is the same mechanism that rewards him with engagement.

The deepest truths often seem to present themselves in paradox. Lao Tzu said that “the way that can be named is not the way,” and was mocked for adding 5,000 characters of elucidation. I, too, will risk accusations of hypocrisy and self-contradiction by attempting to name the way out of the trap. I just offered an example yesterday, in fact. Did you notice? On the surface, it may have appeared to be a semi-serious post about Paul Valéry, a conspiracy-obsessed priest, and my own youthful attempts at poetry. But if you look a little closer, you’ll notice a conspicuous absence, like Holmes’s dog that did not bark. That’s right: there are no references to a blonde bombshell’s nude ads for a gambling app. There were no mentions of high-profile court cases involving child murder. There was zero attention paid to any form of “-maxxing.” Now I’ve tarnished this post by referring to those things, even obliquely, but it was for a good cause. I wanted to stress that you can just refuse to engage with any of it. The catch is that no one will applaud you for doing so. The troll will never know that you rolled your eyes and went back to your book. Your friends will never see the devastating reply you chose not to make. There will be no little heart count beneath your silence. But the only way not to add sewage to the commons is to accept that nobody will know or care that you resisted. Online, restraint has no audience. That is both its weakness and its virtue.