Category: Free Speech

Thoughts on Leaked Steubenville Video

steubenville videoIn response to the tragedy in Newtown, CT the idea was raised by news commentators and in the blogosphere that the names of people who commit heinous crimes should be de-publicized in order to deny them even a posthumous fame we believe to be a constituent of their twisted motives. It is hard to imagine, though, that even if we could instantaneously erase the names of these sociopaths, that this would really serve as a deterrent to crimes born in psyches we cannot understand in the first place.

I find myself thinking about the subjects of infamy, depravity, and justice since watching the video released last week in which teenage boys jokingly boast about an alleged multiple rape of a sixteen year-old girl in Steubenville, OH.  The video was accessed and released to the public by a group or individual identified on Twitter as KnightSec, who claims alliance with the hacktivist group Anonymous. KnightSec exposed the video on the grounds that officials in Steubenville have been papering over the case because the accused assailants are members of the very popular football team in this small, working-class community.  This is a familiar and easy-to-grasp narrative, one that might even be true; and although I believe KnightSec is acting in a good-faith effort to see justice done, the case in general, including the release of the video, raises some disturbing and challenging questions unique to our digital times.

According to CNN, one of the difficulties in the case, even if we give local law enforcement and prosecutors the benefit of every doubt, is that much of the evidence so far amounts to teenagers referring to criminal behavior via digital and social media. Reports indicate that even the victim herself was unconscious during the alleged assaults and cannot serve as a witness to her own abuse.  There is even a report that the victim text messaged the accused saying, “I know you didn’t rape me.”  Rape cases are often hard enough to prosecute, and this one appears to be complexly warped by the bizarre world of communications in which we now live — one where depraved speech is so common among certain users of social media, that it is very hard to tell who is merely presenting himself as a pig and who is referring to actual events in real life.  Certainly, this would not be the first time a bunch of jocks assaulted a defenseless girl; and it would not be the first time teenagers used social media to brag about their own hideous behavior; but it also wouldn’t be the first time teenagers produced comments, photos, and videos that exaggerate or distort actual events for no other reason than that’s how some people behave in cyberspace.

Even the kid featured in the video released by KnightSec is not one of those presently accused in the alleged assault; and while I would like to see him and his friends marched out to the woodshed for their lack of humanity, it’s hard to get past the fact that in the video, he’s behaving exactly like an Internet troll. In fact, his similes are frankly so childishly dorky that what we’re watching could be the blabbering of an accomplice, a witness, or pathetically enough, a wannabe.  If you think the idea of a wannabe rapist is farfetched, let’s go back to October for a moment . . .

Before Gawker outed super-troll Michael Brutsch (aka Violentacrez), the senior staff at Reddit saw no problem with the enormous volume of this man’s posts glorifying sexual assault of teenage girls. To the contrary, Brutsch was rewarded with what the Internet troll wants most — attention.  And because Violentacrez yielded literally tens of thousands of followers, Reddit even rewarded Brutsch with a statuette for his popularity. Is there a connection between Brutsch and the kid in the Steubenville video?  I think there is, and it comes back to the notion of infamy.

In the age of social media, attention is currency; and negative attention is not necessarily of lesser value than positive attention. Hence, this raises just one of the questions as to the value of the kind of net vigilantism, however well intentioned, conducted by KnighSec in this case. In order for there to be a video to expose, the video had to be shot in the first place and then loaded onto a storage device somewhere that could be hacked.  Hence the choice by these boys to memorialize and save a record of this offensive and imbecilic monologue suggests at least an instinctive desire for attention. In this context, then, does releasing the video to the public potentially satisfy a dysfunctional wish for infamy among these kids? If we would contemplate erasing the name of the already-dead Newtown shooter, what about giving fifteen minutes of fame to this morally-bankrupt teenager, who may face no consequences of any kind in this matter? More broadly, as we shake our heads and think, “How can these kids behave like this?”  are we missing subtleties in the design of our technologies that reward cruelty through mob acceptance?  I don’t know the answer, but I do know that this video is not an anomaly among teenagers, and I know that misogynistic themes are very common in shadowy regions of social media that many parents may not know exist.

Of course, there is another way to look at incidents like Steubenville.  Perhaps this kind of case is no more common than it was twenty years ago; and thanks to social media, we are able as a whole society to confront these incidents more frankly and to demand both justice and solutions. It is hard not to feel, though, that human depravity is lately on the rise.  Perhaps this perception is an illusion itself, one borne of the constancy of our communications technology and, hence, the universal competition for attention.

We hope, of course, that officials in Ohio are able to parse the gibberish from the evidence, that the facts of this case will see justice served, and that above all, the girl in question receive whatever support, comfort, and help she needs.  But whether the dumb kid in the leaked video is implicating himself in an attack or just shooting his mouth off, the confusion I believe should serve as instructive in this utopian, free-speech bonanza of the digital age — that words have a tendency to correspond to actions, if not by the speaker, then by somebody who’s listening.

Printing Guns as Freedom of Expression

First, I’ll lay some cards on the table:  I believe, as many do, that the contemporary view of the Second Amendment exceeds common sense — that like the Third Amendment, it was written in a time and for a purpose that has been outdated for more than a century.  Yet, because it is etched into the Bill of Rights, the gun industry, the NRA, and libertarian and conservative pundits have been able to play the civil liberties card in order to fuel a vicious cycle that has made the U.S. the leader among industrialized nations in unchecked gun-related homicides.

With each new firearm technology that our musket-wielding founders could never have imagined, the lobbyists, industry representatives, and gun-rights activists assert that any move to regulate even new and stunning tools for committing mass murder would be tantamount to infringing on a foundational civil liberty.  The threat of regulation itself is then portrayed as an example of government tyranny, which becomes the justification for unfettered access to more weapons.  And the cycle continues.  As I see it, we end up condoning mayhem for the sake of an illusory principle based on an obsolete reality.  If you have similar feelings about gun proliferation and the arguments behind it, stand by because it could get much worse in the digital age.  Take people like Cody Wilson of the Wiki Weapon Project seriously, and we have to imagine a future in which the incessant diffusion of sophisticated weapons is protected not by the Second Amendment, but by the First.

Wilson, a University of Texas law student, founded the Wiki Weapon Project on a premise of  Second Amendment absolutism through technology.   With the apparent goal of one day making DIY guns as easy to produce as music is to download, Wilson’s agenda sees technology obviating any conversation about gun control. This question is posed on the Our Plan page of wilson’s site, DefenseDistributed.com:   “How do governments behave if they must one day operate on the assumption that any and every citizen has near instant access to a firearm through the Internet?”   The question, of course, is both paranoid and infantile because it skips past the fact that the U.S. government remains of and by the people; and many of us people do not hope for a future in which we are all heavily armed, least of all as a means to keep our representative government in check!  The premise is fundamentally suicidal, but it is one logical extension of the kind of free speech maximalism that entices techno-utopians toward inventive means of self-destruction.

Photo by Syntag
Photo by Syntag

To the techno-utopian, who spends perhaps a little too much time in virtual and actual ivory towers, nearly all human activity is destined to be protected by the unassailable right of free expression.  This is, after all, how the world looks to a computer — that we humans are just nodes sharing data with one another. This world view has been used to argue that media piracy is a form of free speech while ignoring the more tangible problem of counterfeiting; it’s been used to argue that child pornography should be legalized while ignoring the realities of bullying, stalking, or human trafficking; it’s been used to justify mass dumps of hacked information despite the fact that sometimes secrets actually save lives. And in Cody Wilson’s future, free expression would be used to justify access to designs and software required to have a 3D printer build you an assault rifle for pennies on the dollar and without regulation of any kind. This technology is hardly around the corner, but advancement tends to happen more quickly than we expect; and the Wiki Weapon idea raises some important social, legal, and economic questions.

If Wilson is right, for example, one thing we in the media world can assure the gun industry is that piracy of weapon design and software is inevitable. The long-standing NRA mantra “everyone should have a gun” may be on a collision course with the millennial generation sensibility that believes “information wants to be free.” Combine these two messages, and the gun industry will have a serious intellectual property problem on its hands, so much so that notions of federal regulations might suddenly look very attractive to traditional manufacturers.

I think the big question the Wiki Weapon Project really raises is whether or not we are prepared to allow technology to obviate the need for law itself, even to the extent that such absolutism just might kill more people in the very real world?  In 1996, John Perry Barlow embodied with The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace what many techno-utopians sincerely believe — that we crossed some line about twenty years ago whereby we effectively shed the rule of law for the rule of instantaneous vox populi linked through social media. At the same time, we often refer to the Internet, both positively and negatively, as “the Wild West.”  Call me crazy, but if the vision for the future is indeed the Wild West with real guns, I have a hard time calling that progress.

See Q&A with Cody Wilson on Popular Science.

Tools & Hands

We hear a lot about community and free expression when it comes to the Web.  From tech bloggers to legal scholars, the boosters spare little praise for the social benefits of technologically connected groups.  Some cyber gurus even go so far as to predict that these new communities are already spawning a new, populist dialogue that will ultimately change the nature of state governance itself.

In the wake of Friday’s heartbreaking events, we know of course that the blogosphere amped up on the subjects of gun control and mental health.  And while we tragically have to admit that there may be no policy safety net we might erect that would have stopped this particularly horrendous mass murder, I am hopeful that some of the shared opinions, stories, ideas, and even outrage might cause some measure of reflection on how we relate to the tools we create. Sometimes, social media really does foster a village, and we do extraordinary things like get help to hurricane victims or share thoughts with friends half way around the world and truly connect in ways I believe are unprecedented, profound, and positive.  But sometimes a technologically linked crowd is just one catalyst away from turning into a knuckle-dragging mob, and we need to pay attention to that, too.

When the Newtown story broke, I happened to be writing about Anita Sarkeesian, who appears in this video to talk about her experience with the wisdom of one crowd that didn’t like her form of free expression and sought to silence it in an ugly way.  Described on her blog as a feminist media critic, Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign last May to raise funds for a video project called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, which examines the portrayal of female characters in these games and the social significance of those depictions. Sarkeesian is a gamer herself who works with, not against, the gaming industry; but that didn’t stop at least some of the online gamer community from launching a cyber attack on her that included death threats, rape threats, death with rape threats, invasions of her privacy through hacking, and a torrent of images depicting her likeness being violated and/or mauled in ways that suggest an investment of time, imagination, and loose coordination within the mob.

The average gamer in the U.S. is a male age 30, so this alliance of village idiots was not just a handful of dopey teenagers. And well beyond the gaming community per se, we’ve seen this kind of testosterone-rich, misogynistic cyber-bullying among high school kids, in certain memes, and even on the fringes of political debate.  During the overheated battle on SOPA, media executives were harassed at home, and a staffer for Representative Lamar Smith received similar sex-offending manipulations from netizens who clearly don’t know the difference between free expression and assault.  Happily for Sarkeesian, and for society’s better angels, revulsion to the attacks on her resulted in an outpouring of support, and she wound up raising seven times her original goal on Kickstarter. This enabled her to broaden the scope of her work, and several video game studios have also invited her to speak with them.

The clowns who attacked Sarkeesian are very likely a minority of gamers, probably even fairly decent people in real life, so is there something about the technology or the environment that brings out these depravities?  Odds are, you’ve been in chats where it’s hard to maintain or moderate a civil tone, even among friends.  Why do these interactions turn normal people into sanctimonious, vitriolic, trolls?  In his book You Are Not a Gadget, technology expert Jaron Lanier argues that the design of Web 2.0 is fundamentally dehumanizing, and here’s what he says about social media discourse:  “If you look at online chat about anything, from guitars to poodles to aerobics, you’ll see a consistent pattern:  jihadi chat looks just like poodle chat. A pack emerges, and either you are with it or against it.  If you join the pack, then you join the collective ritual hatred.”

I do believe tools sometimes have a way of becoming the masters of their makers, that certain tools are not exclusively neutral objects occasionally weilded by sinister or unbalanced people. Some tools change some people.  Isn’t this what the cyber gurus keep promising about the unchecked expansion of the digital age, a whole new kind of human being?  New maybe, but how human remains to be seen.  By relating to our toys and devices (and yes, even our guns) as extensions of ourselves, I think we all get a touch of a dissociative disorder that undermines empathy and, therefore, functional humanity.

In the same way some 2nd Amendment zealots imbue their weapons with a false notion of freedom from an imagined tyranny — therefore, turning a right into paranoia — I suspect the technology addicts who attacked Anita Sarkeesian imagined themselves as an odd band of freedom fighters.  They were using Photoshop and social media as weapons to defend their “way of life.”   And, of course, the hypocrisy is all too obvious — that the sexual nature of the attacks justifies precisely the questions Sarkeesian hopes to answer.

It seems we have a tendency to either want to blame or absolve certain of our creations for the harm that can be done with them. In the face of abhorrent, human behavior, we want simple answers to complex questions; but the truth is that it’s never one thing. It’s not as simple as blaming the guns or video games or violent movies any more than it would be to blame our keyboards for the almost universal lack of civil debate on the Web.  I don’t have answers anymore than anyone else.  What does seem true, based on the many comments I read over the weekend, is that we are groping around for our posterity and finding little satisfaction in the ever-expanding cacophony.  One word that seems to be at everyone’s fingertips right now is enough.  There’s a reason I call this blog The Illusion of More.