crime and punishment

Everybody Decadancing

By in crime and punishment, extraordinary popular delusions, media/propaganda, the geist of the zeit, unintended consequences, waiting for the barbarians

Gary Saul Morson:

Why didn’t the liberals and businessmen see it coming?

That question has bothered many students of revolutionary movements. Revolutions never succeed without the support of wealthy, liberal, educated society. Yet revolutionaries seldom conceal that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies.

…Though some liberals recognized their differences from the radicals, most acted like intelligentsia wannabes who were unwilling to acknowledge, even to themselves, that their values were essentially different. Socialized to regard anything conservative as reprehensible—and still worse, as a social faux pas—they contrived ways to justify radical intolerance and violence as forced, understandable, and noble. They had to, since the fundamental emotional premise of liberalism—hostility to those ignorant, bigoted, morally depraved people on the right—almost always proved more compelling than professed intellectual ­commitments.

Casting “unworthy, furtive glances at who liked what,” Berdyaev observed, these liberals illustrated how “moral cowardice develops, while love of truth and intellectual daring are extinguished.” Captivated by public opinion, they signed petitions they did not agree with and excused heinous acts, always observing the rule: Better to side with people a mile to one’s left than be associated with anyone an inch to one’s right.

I thought of this nearly-six-year-old article after seeing this contemptible display from the New York Times in defense of “microlooting,” or “petty theft,” as most of us know it. Piker, as we’ve noted before, is a typical millionaire Marxist who wants to, like, burn down the system, maaan, the same system that lucratively rewarded his uselessness, and Tolentino, a New Yorker writer, is sitting pretty herself. This is the essence of the luxury belief: danger outsourced downward, righteousness retained upward. One suspects that if the dialectic ever wandered onto their own property — if someone decided to “microloot” the mansion, the brownstone, or the NYT building — the revolutionary mist would clear instantly and the old bourgeois nouns would come marching back in full uniform: trespass, theft, violation, police.

And then there is the Times, kneeling obligingly beside all this like a butler holding the tray. Disaffected radicals will always exist. Every society produces its crop of nihilists and vigilantes looking for a theory to excuse their impulses. The truly pathetic part is the abasement of a prestige institution that once at least pretended to maintain a distinction between public seriousness and fashionable degeneracy. Here the paper of record goes slumming, treating antisocial behavior as a kind of righteous Les Misérables cosplay for people with real estate portfolios. Theft becomes “microlooting.” Assassination becomes “understandable anger.” A lawyerly joke is offered at the end to imply that the speaker’s official disavowal of violence should not be mistaken for his actual sympathies.

This is how exhausted liberalism advertises its decay, by aestheticizing it, joking about it, flirting with it, and assuring itself that all this blood talk is only a game played among civilized people. But the history Morson described is precisely the history of people who assumed the same thing. Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess now seems almost endearingly innocent by comparison. She was at least pretending at rustic simplicity. These people are pretending at revolutionary virtue. Piker, with all the intellectual depth of the retarded stoner he is at heart, pronounces UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson guilty of “social murder,” which makes his actual murder, like, just a difference of degree when you think about it, maaan.

Apocryphal Mark Twain cautioned against arguing with idiots, who will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. The danger of equating every distant harm, every bureaucratic cruelty, every structural injustice to the moral equivalent of murder is that literal murder gains camouflage, prestige, and finally primacy; the real thing drags its metaphoric rivals down and beats them through sheer experience. An imbecile like Piker isn’t going to kill anyone, of course. He’s too comfortable and lazy. But he and his idiot enablers will do all they can to clear the way for people who aren’t playing games. The conceit of parlor radicals is that they can abolish moral distinctions in language without abolishing them in life. They think “murder” can remain a clever metaphor in their hands. But once everything oppressive is promoted to murder, real murder enters the room with a terrible advantage: it is the only participant not speaking figuratively. The word-game ends where the firing squad begins.

Unbanked

By in crime and punishment, technology, the geist of the zeit

A deeper concern is what happens when private institutions like corporations, universities, and media exercise the same power without even the pretense of accountability. If the large financial institutions want to, they can act as gatekeepers to society and would be held accountable only by the market, to which they also hold the keys. Given that institutions are heavily dependent on each other, if the institutions that hold important positions in the global financial web decide to freeze someone out, they can do so with the push of a button. Worse yet, we can imagine a scenario in which a system of freeze-outs could be automated based on people’s credit scores, purchasing histories, political donation patterns, key words in social media postings, carbon footprints, or political activism. It’s not hard to imagine a situation in which a citizen of a democracy wakes up one day to find themselves unable to participate in the digital economy, where almost all financial transactions take place, due to an automated system which flags them as being undesirable in some way.

Corporations and government have always exercised tremendous power, of course. Government has a monopoly on the use of force, using the policing powers to enforce laws. Corporations have always exercised enormous power via market share, advertising, lobbying, and other financial instruments. But never before have they been able to lock ordinary citizens out of social participation with the flip of a switch.

This push-button tyranny is real, and it represents a greater abuse of power than any that has been exercised before within the boundaries of liberal democratic government. It is new, it is breathtaking, and it is very dangerous.

— Michael Young, “We Will Delete You”

****

There is power in information, and progressives seek to use their political advantage in states such as New York and California to lean on technology firms to impose an Orwellian blackout on wrongthink — removing unpopular voices and views from social media, cutting off verboten institutions and communications from the digital infrastructure, and, if it comes to it, manipulating GPS services to simply erase unwelcome charities and businesses. If you ever were bewildered by the old Stalinist practice of airbrushing photos to remove figures who have fallen into disfavor, this is the same sensibility at work.

It is easy to see the kind of politics practiced by Letitia James et al. descending into any number of dystopian scenarios. If we are all using self-driving cars in 20 years, you can be sure that the Letitia Jameses of the future will try to control where those cars will go — and where they won’t. Progressives already have weaponized the financial system against their political enemies — here, again, Letitia James is a major offender — and you can be sure that in a cashless society they will simply try to exclude wrong-thinking businesses, if not entire wrong-thinking industries, from the system. (Sturm Ruger & Co. makes a legal — and excellent — product, but it has been unbanked three times because of left-wing political pressure.) And it is not as though weaponizing travel would be unprecedented: You already can have your passport taken away over a relatively small tax debt — even if the debt is the subject of an ongoing dispute.

The Internet was supposed to be a decentralizing power, but, in many cases, the rise of ubiquitous information technology has had a centralizing effect that must be guarded against and, where possible, counteracted — because it is liable to be exploited by those who believe that justice requires that their fellow citizens be something other than free.

— Kevin D. Williamson, “America on Parole“

This Democratical Hurricane, Inundation, Earthquake, Pestilence, Call It What You Will

By in crime and punishment, political philosophy, revillaging, the great awokening, the madness of crowds

Count de Monet: It is said that the people are revolting.

King Louis XVI: You said it! They stink on ice!

Aaron Freedman:

This sentiment is more than just petty contrarianism. Apply it in the real world, and it becomes clear that contempt for cancel culture is little more than contempt for democracy.

After all, what is derided as “cancel culture” is nothing more than a large group of people choosing who and what they want to watch, read and listen to. Though “canceling” on its own suggests the work of the anonymous censor or autocratic TV exec, “cancel culture” reflects the opposite: the public and democratic engagement of ordinary people.

By the standards of sophistry, this is on the same low level as “political correctness just means being considerate and polite,” which is to say, hardly worth the strain of an eye-roll. But anyway, since we’re on the subject, ancient Athens used to practice a form of cancel culture. They called it ostracism. Many people might be familiar with Plutarch’s story of Aristides, who was approached by an illiterate voter looking to cast his vote for a candidate for ostracism and asked to write down the name…Aristides. Uh, what harm has Aristides done to you? he asked, understandably. None at all, replied the man of the people. I don’t even know him. I’m just sick of people always calling him “Aristides the Just.” Twenty-five hundred years later, and people’s careers and personal lives are ruined on social media for equally facile, spiteful reasons.

Safe to say Plutarch and Aristides were wiser men with a keener understanding of the nasty tendencies of human character than Mr. Freedman. And while I don’t want to be here all day naming other examples of men with more brains and psychological insight than some smug junior-varsity Jacobin writing opinion pieces in the Washington Post, John Adams deserves a mention. He also held ostracism in contempt. “History nowhere furnishes so frank a confession of the people themselves, of their own infirmities and unfitness for managing the executive branch of government, or an unbalanced share of the legislature, as this institution.” He wasn’t too enamored of “the public and democratic engagement of ordinary people” either:

Dear Sir
In your fifth page You Say “Mr. Adams calls our Attention to hundreds of wise and virtuous Patricians, mangled and bleeding Victims of popular Fury.” and gravely counts up several Victims of democratic Rage as proofs that Democracy is more pernicious than Monarchy or Aristocracy.” Is this fair, sir? Do you deny any one of my Facts? I do not say that Democracy has been more pernicious, on the whole, and in the long run, than Monarchy or Aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as Aristocracy or Monarchy. But while it lasts it is more bloody than either.

…You Say I “might have exhibited millions of Plebians, sacrificed to the pride Folly and Ambition of Monarchy and Aristocracy.” This is very true. And I might hav[e] exhibited as many millions of Plebians sacrificed by the Pride Folly and Ambition of their fellow Plebians and their own, in proportion to the extent and duration of their power. Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and no where appears in history. Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Government, and when unchecked, produce the same Effects of Fraud Violence and Cruelty. When clear Prospects are opened before Vanity, Pride, Avarice or Ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate Phylosophers and the most conscientious Moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves, Nations and large Bodies of Men, never.

Freedman makes it sound like a simple, rational process. Nothing but friendly persuasion and free choice involved, right? But as Adams would instantly recognize were he around today, the easy gratification of vanity, pride, avarice and ambition play a dominant role in determining who gets canceled, and the mob’s appetite is insatiable. Contempt for democracy? Damn straight. Have you ever met the demos? Wherever two or three people gather in its name, stupidity and mischief will be there with them.

Deep In Thought I Forgive Everyone

By in books, crime and punishment, revillaging, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds

Before the advent of the internet, people’s mistakes could be remembered within their communities or circles. Then being able to start a new life somewhere else in the world was at least a possibility. Today, people may be followed by their doppelgänger wherever they go in the world. And even after death the excavation and tomb-raiding will go on, not in a spirit of enquiry or forgiveness but in one of retribution and vengeance. At the heart of which attitude lies the strange retributive instinct of our time towards the past which suggests that we know ourselves to be better than people in history because we know how they behaved and we know that we would have behaved better. There is a gigantic modern fallacy at work here. For of course people only think that they would have acted better in history because they know how history ended up. People in history didn’t — and don’t — have that luxury. They made good or bad choices in the times and places they were in, given the situations and shibboleths that they found themselves with.

To view the past with some degree of forgiveness is among other things an early request to be forgiven — or at least understood — in turn. Because not everything we are doing or intend to do now will necessarily survive the whirlwind of retribution and judgment. Can such an attitude of forgiveness be applied to the personal as well as the historical? To the people going through history with us?

— Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

There’s also a good interview with Murray here.

Shut Up, Memory

By in crime and punishment, nietzsche, socmed, technology, the geist of the zeit

Charles Lehman:

What should be concerning to us is not that people are being cancelled per se, but the sheer power of digitally-enforced orthodoxy. The Twitter mob is really just an appendage of this machine—it is humans doing what humans do when they are presented with a social transgression. Cancellation is merely a necessary consequence of digital memory. As long as we continue to analyze the “why” rather than the “how,” no discussion of cancel culture will be fruitful. The question is not how punitive to be, but how to not be absolutely punitive in the era of perfect memory. It is how to mutually disarm, how to do by law or social norm what the limits of technology used to do. If we cannot, we all become beholden to a beast of our own invention. Justice is no longer a human affair. It becomes the task of a million cameras, a million tweet-scraping scripts; the ever-watching eye and perfect mind of the cancellation machine.

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche called active forgetting “a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette,” without which “there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present.” Those who lack this ability to actively forget may, he said, be accurately compared to dyspeptics: “he cannot ‘have done’ with anything.” Injustices, insults and slights, if not properly digested and eliminated, cause upset stomachs, irritable personalities, and overall vengefulness. Healthy people, practiced in the art of active forgetting, feel free to act, to create, to live deeply without feeling crushed by an overabundance of historical sense, or paralyzed by a sense of the futility of action given the endless flux of existence. Sickly people with reactive over-awareness spend too much time locked in their own heads, breathing in the dust and mold of decaying memories, losing perspective while rooting around in the footnotes and minutiae of historical trivia. (Tim Short provides a nice summary of this recurring theme in Nietzsche’s writing.)

There’s no doubt the resentful and vengeful are still with us today, thriving in the new technological environment which vastly extends the jurisdiction of their bitter quest for “justice.” But Lehman, I think, brings up an equally important but overlooked point: the complicity, through laziness, of the rest of us. As is often the case, we’d rather outsource the unwelcome burden of agency to technology. Machines will do our thinking, and our remembering, for us. We have no choice but to follow their prompts. If the Eye of Google says you’re guilty and wrecks your social credit score, well, what do you expect us to do about it? The techlaw is the techlaw. Those unfortunate enough to be born in the age of digital memory, faced with audio/video evidence of that time in fifth grade when they used a “problematic” taunt toward a classmate, or that time in high school when they flirted with socially unjust ideas, will have to summon the strength to declare such gotcha-moments off limits, to consign them to the landfill in the name of active forgetting. Those “laws or social norms” will have to be created by people who refuse to be intimidated by resentful inquisitors, who refuse to be sacrificed to a narrative of historical injustice which can never be appeased.

They Bloat the Present With the Undigested Past

By in books, bricolage, crime and punishment, nietzsche

In Sophocles’s play that bears her name, Electra speaks of her father’s murder as a sorrow (or evil) that cannot be forgotten and describes her own passion (or anger) in similar terms, though in this case the Greek for “not forgetting” (our láthei) might better be translated from its root meaning—“it does not escape notice,” “it is not hidden.” The image is of anger as a thing that the mind cannot bury, cannot help being aware of. Electra’s passion won’t let her alone. It’s intrusive. It bugs her. We do not control the unforgettable; it controls us.

The spirits of such unforgetting are called the Furies, the Erinyes. They cling to the memory of hurt and harm, injury and insult. Their names are Grievance, Ceaseless, and Bloodlust. Their names are Grudge, Relentless, and Payback. They bloat the present with the undigested past. “Most dreaded of the forces of insomnia,” they harry the mind, demanding for its release a ransom paid in blood.

— Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past

****

New caution.— Let us stop thinking so much about punishing, reproaching, and improving others! We rarely change an individual, and if we should succeed for once, something may also have been accomplished, unnoticed: we may have been changed by him. Let us rather see to it that our own influence on all that is yet to come balances and outweighs his influence. Let us not contend in a direct fight — and that is what all reproaching, punishing, and attempts to improve others amount to. Let us rather raise ourselves that much higher. Let us color our own example ever more brilliantly. Let our brilliance make them look dark. No, let us not become darker ourselves on their account, like all those who punish others and feel dissatisfied. Let us sooner step aside. Let us look away.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

If I Am Canaille, You Ought to Be So, Too

By in crime and punishment, extraordinary popular delusions, nietzsche, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, tribalism

A cause-creating drive is powerful within him; someone must be to blame for his feeling vile. His “righteous indignation” itself already does him good; every poor devil finds pleasure in scolding – it gives him a little of the intoxication of power. Even complaining and wailing can give life a charm for the sake of which one endures it: there is a small dose of revenge in every complaint, one reproaches those who are different for one’s feeling vile, sometimes even with one’s being vile, as if they had perpetrated an injustice or possessed an impermissible privilege. “If I am canaille, you ought to be so, too”: on the basis of this logic, one makes revolutions. Complaining is never of any use, it comes from weakness. Whether one attributes one’s feeling vile to others or to oneself – the socialist does the former, the Christian for example does the latter – makes no essential difference. What is common to both, and unworthy in both, is that someone has to be to blame for the fact that one suffers – in short, that the sufferer prescribes for himself the honey of revenge as a medicine for his suffering.

— Nietzsche

Progressives used to insist that all their talk of “privilege” was not meant to be accusatory, merely descriptive. In the real world, however, it should be obvious that a world without privilege would be a world without a past, a world in which reputation and trust count for nothing, a world in which some all-powerful centralized authority relentlessly enforces a Procrustean equality. This is the stuff of dystopian nightmares. The only thing you can possibly offer in defense of its proponents is that they are too naive and stupid to really understand what it is they’re calling for. In practice, then, this monomaniacal obsession with ranking people and groups by degrees of privilege, rather than elevating those at the bottom of the hierarchy, would necessarily end up expressing itself through the attempt to tear down anyone perceived to have too much of it. In practice, you can’t even conceptualize how to make everyone equally successful and contented, but you can come close to making them equally miserable.

And so we find this article in a popular leftish tabloid, in which the author can barely contain her resentful glee over the misfortune of an American college student sentenced to years of hard labor in a North Korean prison camp. This allows her to imagine a blow being struck against the phantom of white privilege that haunts her every waking moment. In the real world, however, the suffering is borne by individuals, not abstract concepts or statistical aggregates. The arrears here are metaphysical, and even a billion more Otto Warmbiers couldn’t reduce them to the satisfaction of the fanatics who have been seduced by an ahistorical fantasy of statistical equality.

These people are intellectually diseased.

Question-Beggars Can’t Be Choosers

By in conspicuous crusading, crime and punishment, revillaging, socmed, the geist of the zeit

Anil Dash:

How do we fix it? Simple: Hold platforms accountable. Whether it’s a big news publisher or a large social network, if we’re sharing information or ideas on a platform and are immediately overrun by abuse that threatens to silence smart conversation or the potential for meaningful connections to be made, put the burden on the platform. Instead of “Never read the comments”, we can simply say the name of the publisher, owner or CEO of the site in question, and then mention that they don’t want to invest in solving abuse on their site. If we’re being charitable, we can say they simply haven’t invested enough in preventing abuse.

But either way, the solution is about sharing the pain of online harassment with those who have the resources and the power to prevent it before it starts. Right now our tendency is to treat it like a joke, so there’s no wonder why those in charge, who don’t face the abuse dished out from the communities they host, treat online abuse like a joke too.

Well, it may be simple to invent a new slogan, but despite Dash’s false advertising, it’s far from clear what, exactly, tech CEOs are supposed to do to prevent people from behaving badly online. No, wait, let me amend that. The obvious implication is that commenting online should require one to provide all sorts of verifiable real-life information up front, while agreeing that anything you say can and most certainly will be used against you in the kangaroo court of public opinion. The fact that Dash avoids spelling this out explicitly is probably just due to the unpalatable optics of doing so.

I thought it was bizarre last year when Choire Sicha, in a review of Jon Ronson’s book about public shaming, whined that the real problem was that tech companies aren’t doing enough to protect women from being harassed online. Now, I’m seeing this as a symptom of what Jonathan Haidt described as a transition between moral cultures — our default option now is to authorize powerful overseers to protect us from all the bad people. And what will we do about the predictable, inevitable abuses of that system? I’m sure there will be a “simple” fix there as well.

Seeking No Truth, Winning Is All

By in conspicuous crusading, crime and punishment, tribalism

He’s talking about this sorry spectacle, the link to which he has already prohibited anyone from posting in his comments. Don’t worry, he’ll tell you everything you need to know about it. No need for you to bother seeing for yourself, since— hmm? I’m sorry, Mo, did you have something you wanted to say about Peezus’s newfound respect for privacy and the workings of the legal system?

Indeed.

Of all the many things that make Peezus such a contemptible sack of fetid sewage, his gleeful participation in the toxic “callout culture” so beloved of social justice warriors would have to be somewhere near the top of my list. You see, there’s a strain of radical thinking popular among his crowd which sees the legal system itself as a construct of the patriarchy, where the standards of evidence required for justice to be done in cases of sexual assault, harassment and rape are so onerous, so heavily weighted against the female victims, that there’s no point in reporting assaults to the authorities. Their only recourse is to air their accusations via social media. Granted, one can easily conjure up a sympathetic scenario in which a genuine victim, shafted by an impersonal system, gets a little bit of deserved payback this way. Of course, if one is not a fanatical ideologue, one can also easily imagine a bunch of unbalanced, vindictive liars taking advantage of anonymity to publicly trash someone’s reputation, trusting that most neutral observers will see smoke and assume fire. First, do no harm — the remedy to injustice is not to create a different type of injustice. There is no abstract, cosmic scoreboard in which all these injustices somehow cancel each other out. The fact that, if looked at from a particular perspective, “women” may have historically fared worse than “men” does not justify creating injustice for an individual man on behalf of an individual woman. People who try to sell you such ends-justify-the-means logic are not to be trusted.

Peezus himself famously used his blog last summer to accuse someone of rape, based on what a friend of a friend claimed to have happened several years ago. The only reason he’s singing a different tune in this instance is because he’s long since publicly committed himself to backing his tribal ally, and now, having seen the evidence for the other side displayed in public, he doesn’t have the integrity or the bravery to admit that he might have jumped to conclusions for political reasons, that he might be wrong. Thus lack of thinking makes a coward of him after all.

Nine-One-One Is a Joke in His Town

By in crime and punishment, jests japes jokes jollies

Who says a leopard can’t change its spots? Peezus has finally renounced his flirtation with illiberal ideology and realized that scurrilous, politically-motivated, evidence-free accusations of criminal activity are beyond the pale:

I just got back from the campus police, where I was read my Miranda rights and recorded giving a statement, because the Geiger cranks have apparently made a formal complaint, accusing me of stealing their rags and adding a new charge, that I’d vandalized the latest edition, scribbling an “str” on the cover to change “right-to-life” to “right-to-strife”. So I also had to leave a handwriting sample.

It’s gone well past ridiculous. Singling me out as a scapegoat (I am not alone in my contempt for their awful paper), making baseless criminal accusations, wasting the time of the university police and lawyers…this is now in the territory of harassment.

I’m kidding, of course. You didn’t seriously fall for that, did you? No, he’s only angry because he’s on the receiving end this time. I wonder, though, if this episode will at least temper his adolescent scorn for the justice system and instill a new respect for legal standards of evidence. Ha! Man, I’m a jokester tonight! No, I’ll bet you a shiny quarter that when he gets off (generously assuming he isn’t actually guilty; he is on record advocating that people throw copies of that paper in the trash), he’ll credit his white male privilege and go right back to business as usual.

You May Say to Yourself, “My God! What Have I Done?!”

By in conspicuous crusading, crime and punishment, jests japes jokes jollies, non compos mentis

Wow, I’ve been crazy-busy the last couple of weeks. Plus, the European fútbol leagues have started back up for a new season, the pool keeps calling out to me on these scorching afternoons, and frankly, the bedside tower of dead-tree books I’m slowly working my way through makes for much more interesting reading than most of the garbage I encounter in my web browsing.

That said, I do have time to note the hilarious spectacle of a certain atheist who, ironically, might yet develop a newfound appreciation of the Biblical wisdom about sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind.

Felonious Bunk

By in books, crime and punishment

Kottke:

In a book called Three Felonies A Day, Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate says that everyone in the US commits felonies everyday and if the government takes a dislike to you for any reason, they’ll dig in and find a felony you’re guilty of.

That looks very interesting, in a pants-shitting sort of way, of course. Additionally, it looks like it might be useful as a definitive response to the “If you’re not doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?” types.

Breaking the Law, Breaking the Law

By in crime and punishment, identity, jests japes jokes jollies, music

Tom Jacobs:

The researchers believe such youngsters tend to congregate with peers who have similar musical tastes, creating cliques that are cut off from mainstream influences and behavioral norms. “In peer groups characterized by their deviant music taste, norm-breaking youth may ‘infect’ their friends with their behaviors,” they speculate.

If they’re right, it isn’t the music per se that leads kids into delinquency (although anti-social lyrics could conceivably play a role). It’s more the fact that kids who gravitate to other nonconformists at a young age miss out on the benefits of being part of mainstream society—including the positive influences of popular peers.

So if your preteen is listening to Metallica, some early intervention may be in order. On the other hand, if he or she is into Mozart or Monk, fear not: Such kids may also be outside the mainstream, but this isolation does not manifest itself in a negative way.

In other words, if your kids are already displaying self-assuredness and independence of thought and taste by age twelve, there’s perhaps a slightly greater chance that they may end up coloring slightly outside the legal lines as they continue to mature and experiment with the boundaries of their free-spiritedness. Now, I realize that this is just one of those baked cheez-puffs of ephemeral news you can’t use, the sort of study from the Institute for Stating the Staggeringly Obvious that constitute three-quarters of the posts on sites like Pacific Standard and Big Think, but I found it particularly funny for a couple reasons. One, the earnest tone, which makes me imagine the author going up to a group of misfit teenagers to ask them if they’ve heard the good news about the benefits of fitting in with the popular kids. And two, the idea that, almost twenty-two years after the release of the eponymous Black Album, Metallica can still be considered by anyone to be outside the mainstream.

Depraved New World

By in conspicuous crusading, crime and punishment, free speech, revillaging, socmed, technology, the madness of crowds

Ron Rosenbaum:

At last we come to politics, where I believe Lanier has been most farsighted—and which may be the deep source of his turning into a digital Le Carré figure. As far back as the turn of the century, he singled out one standout aspect of the new web culture—the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websites—as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself. At the time, this objection seemed a bit extreme. But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn’t hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism.

It’s taken a while for this prophecy to come true, a while for this mode of communication to replace and degrade political conversation, to drive out any ambiguity. Or departure from the binary. But it slowly is turning us into a nation of hate-filled trolls.

…And here’s where Lanier says something remarkable and ominous about the potential dangers of anonymity.

“This is the thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is constant.

“Social lasers of cruelty?” I repeat.

“I just made that up,” Lanier says. “Where everybody coheres into this cruelty beam….Look what we’re setting up here in the world today. We have economic fear combined with everybody joined together on these instant twitchy social networks which are designed to create mass action. What does it sound like to you? It sounds to me like the prequel to potential social catastrophe. I’d rather take the risk of being wrong than not be talking about that.”

It seems like two different things are being conflated here. I mean, I agree with the general sentiment in that last paragraph, as I’ve said many times. But in each one of those infuriating instances, it hasn’t been some anonymous sociopath instigating flash mob rule; it’s been a famous film director, or bloggers who post under their own names to an enormous audience. Even if most hateful trolls are anonymous, it doesn’t follow that most anonymous commenters are hateful trolls. The grease on the skids to this particular hell is the fact that social media is designed to remove the onerous burdens of reflection and effort, the very things that might prevent people, during a rush of blood to the head, from retweeting vague rumors or attempting to casually wreak havoc with an opponent’s job or personal life. People are the same stupid, impulsive primates they’ve always been; the problem is that so many of them now have the personal tools to drastically magnify, amplify and accelerate whatever petty thought or emotion flits through their mind. Sign your name to your opinion or don’t, but much more importantly, stop and take some time to think before you start a snowball rolling.

Sure, you can force people to provide their full name, address, place of employment, etc. if they want to express an opinion online, but all you’re going to do is create an anodyne environment where no one dares express anything remotely controversial (i.e., actually interesting) for fear of attracting the crusading attention of the Internet’s Erinyes. Personally, I’m more scared of those who feel empowered to act by virtue of representing conventional, moralizing wisdom than I am of those who express subversive opinions under a cloak of anonymity.

And I Swear That I Don’t Have a Gun

By in crime and punishment, revillaging, socmed, the madness of crowds

Will Oremus:

Crowd-sourced reporting via social media can be invaluable, particularly in situations like the Arab Spring, the Haiti earthquake, or Hurricane Sandy, in which critical, actionable information about what’s going on is widely distributed among the populace. But as we also saw in the immediate aftermath of the Aurora shooting, we tend to expect too much of the Internet when it comes to quickly pinpointing the identity and motives of the perpetrators of crimes. In those cases, information is usually concentrated in the hands of a few, and most of them are already busy talking to authorities. Nice as it would be to have immediate answers, jumping to the wrong conclusion only compounds the damage. The truth may be out there, but it’s not always just a click away.

There’s this friend of mine. Years ago, her teenage son was accused by some friends of being the mastermind of a plot to carry out a Columbine-style attack on his school. A politically ambitious prosecutor got wind of this and took the opportunity to make a criminal case out of it. As it turned out, there was no plot, there were no weapons; there was nothing but some cryptic remarks on MySpace and some adolescent rumor-mongering. Nonetheless, his name and picture ended up on the front page of the newspaper under the shrieking headlines, despite his being underage. A year or so later, the court case had come to nothing, but the subdued retractions, of course, didn’t rate the front page or even the slightly-larger font.

Even the relatively-glacial pace of “old media” didn’t necessarily protect against that sort of potentially-disastrous misinformation being disseminated.

Most of the shiny-object fascination with social networking is a harmless, if intensely annoying, kind of stupidity. But these increasingly common gestures in the direction of flash mob justice make me want to take those whose myopic self-absorption is far out of proportion to their actual presence and grind their stupid fucking faces into their smartphones.

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