If you spend time on social media of any kind then the \u201cflame war\u201d (to use a fading phrase) is likely to become a way of life. Hate seems to be the first, and sometimes only, language of the internet.<\/p>\n
Sometimes the divisions that prompt these furious engagements are obvious. \u201cGamerGate\u201d \u2013 whatever its origins \u2013 has come to pit Neanderthal sexism against the rights of women to express themselves freely. That the young men who scream abuse at, and threaten the life of, women dress themselves in the cloak of victimhood is perverse but it is also indicates something about the way in which online communications insulate people from reality and the consequences of their words.<\/p>\n
The notion of belonging to certain \u201conline communities\u201d has come to be an important part \u00a0of how some people define themselves. But I have never found one. If fact, I believe that \u201conline communities\u201d do not exist.<\/p>\n
The promise that cyber-libertarians and their utopian fellow travellers made in the 80s and 90s of weightless online worlds where people could come and go and \u201cdo what thou wilt\u201d was always a promise of freedom from consequence for those for whom investments of emotional and social capital already had negligible costs. Incinerating relationships on the online pyres of self-indulgent anger means little to them because they place little value on those relationships in the first place. That the people in this position are most often young, white men doesn\u2019t say anything about the inherent nature of any one individual \u2013 though individuals cannot shrug of the\u00a0consequences of their deeds\u00a0\u2013 but about the broad shape of power relations in our world.<\/p>\n
The continued dominant position of this demographic in the\u00a0companies\u00a0that build (and the audiences that make profits for) online industries has further shaped the tools we use to communicate, creating an environment that favours consequence-free hate \u2013 obsessive anonymity, hatred of government, distrust of the different. The distance that screen-based communications create between participants makes trust harder to engender and so those whose world view is based on the idea that they cannot trust anyone \u2013 that they are the lone voice of reason and decency holding the line against the barbarous beliefs of others \u2013 is always justified. In a low-trust, no-consequence environment, behaving as if Hobbes was right and we stand on the constant precipice of the war of all against all is almost always going to be self-reinforcing. The merest slight becomes deep betrayal (Requires Hate). The slightest deviation or mistake in judgement becomes evidence of incipient evil (Molly Crabapple).<\/p>\n
And because all that most people have to go on in these arguments is who they like best, initial divisions quickly become personalised, bitter and destructive. The idea that there might exist honest differences or simple misunderstandings become buried under accusations of corruption and conspiracy. Rinse and repeat.<\/p>\n
For now, most online relationships exist only as sets of individualised transactions. They are the perfect realisation of the Thatcherite conception of the world\u00a0 \u201cthere is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.\u201d<\/p>\n
But society does exist. And there are real communities.<\/p>\n
Real communities have weight. They have history. They have mutual interdependencies that go beyond the gratification of instant emotional needs (*hugs*). They build things and destroy things as part of communal decisions that require investment of time and energy and faith. Of course such communities experience division, distrust and even mutual animosities that become hatreds, but the need for day-to-day interactions weighs against their disintegration. \u201cAgonism\u201d, as Chantal Mouffe has it, is fundamental to the nature of our communities, but they thrive because of these disagreements, because of the tensions, because there is a use<\/em> in rubbing up against those with whom we disagree and yet still having to face them every day rather than just burning bridges and walking away. The weight of real communities acts against those who behave as though the needs, desires and basic respect due to others is none of their concern. We do not yet spend most of our lives in a \u201cLord of the Flies\u201d dystopia \u2013 for all that they have been eroded, for all that they are underfunded and under-loved, the institutions and structures that we have built in our real world continue to bind together communities that are stronger and kinder than we sometimes suspect.<\/p>\n We could do with similar communities online but, so long as the libertarian foundations of the online world go unchallenged, we will continue to watch people tear each other apart needlessly and break the fragile ties they have created. Meanwhile,\u00a0the only ones who benefit are those who are already in positions privileged enough that they don\u2019t have to care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you spend time on social media of any kind then the \u201cflame war\u201d (to use a fading phrase) is likely to become a way of life. Hate seems to be the first, and sometimes only, language of the internet. Sometimes the divisions that prompt these furious engagements are obvious. \u201cGamerGate\u201d \u2013 whatever its origins […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[20,25],"tags":[127,133,129],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27AP7-Hu","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2696"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2696"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2702,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2696\/revisions\/2702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}