Tag: Jenna Wortham

Online Harassment & The Internet Experiment

In last weekend’s New York Times Magazine, staff writer Jenna Wortham asks Why Can’t Silicon Valley Fix Online Harassment? Citing some alarming statistics from a 2104 Pew Research study, she writes …

“… 40 percent of adult internet users have dealt with online harassment. And those numbers go up among young adults (especially women) and nonwhite users. Women are significantly more likely than men to report being stalked or sexually harassed on the internet, and 51 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they had experienced harassment, compared with 34 percent of whites.”

Online harassment is no joke. At scale, it can be emotionally devastating and legitimately terrifying for victims. It has been known to cause economic and social harm and to catalyze both physical assault and suicides. While we extoll the virtues of connectedness fostered by an “open” internet, harassment is the mutant howling in the basement nobody wants to talk about. And Wortham rightly observes that the monster is a byproduct of Silicon Valley’s unique blend of new-money libertarianism built on a foundation of faded, hippie idealism—incongruous doctrines that were, for many, synthesized in the manifesto A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, delivered by John Perry Barlow at Davos in 1996.

But if online harassment is a disease and the first step to recovery is admitting there’s a problem, then perhaps that first step is to properly contextualize Barlow’s Declaration as the naive and petulant outburst it was. A moment of whimsy rather than the foundation for a sustainable, or even humane, proposal. Nevertheless, the belief that cyberspace remains some magical realm beyond the normal boundaries of society continues to delay rational discourse on any number of problems specifically caused or exacerbated by the technology.

Although harassment will occur on a public forum like Twitter, it often begins by brewing on a site like 4Chan, a “discussion” board populated by mostly males from pre-teen to mid-30s, who, in every sense of the cliché, have too much time on their hands. And although everyone on 4Chan is anonymous—it is in fact the site where the hacktivist group Anonymous began—they might collectively be seen as that mutant creature borne by Barlow’s Declaration. Like most adolescents, the thing they seem to hate most is being told what to do—hence the the harassment-filled shitstorm known as “Gamergate.”

Although I would never condone harassment, I think I understand how at least some of it starts. This blog has very occasionally elicited accusations of racism or sexism because there are people in the world who will filter literally any topic through such lenses, even when there is no rational basis for doing so. If I were an adolescent who spent inordinate time among other adolescents in a forum like 4Chan, the temptation to retaliate against these absurd accusations by weaponizing overt racism or sexism—at least for my own amusement—could be very great. And once it begins, it’s easy enough for a little spark to become a flash fire.

In all likelihood, the majority of trolls out there are young men who harass for the lulz—an expression derived from the acronym LOL. Think of this class of trolls as easily excitable chimpanzees who will gather around a target of ridicule and pile on, but who are also easily bored and distracted by the next shiny object. So, if the target of their ridicule or cruelty doesn’t respond, this group usually returns to its natural state of online gaming and metaphorically throwing feces at one another.

But if the target of their ridicule does respond, this only increases the opportunity for lulz, which means the chimps remain engaged and incentivized to keep raising the bar of harassment of their target. Hence, the truly hideous invocations of rape and murder—complete with photographic depictions of these acts—that are so commonly employed by harassers of this nature. From this phenomenon comes the common-sense directive Don’t Feed the Troll, which is fine up to a point but can also be a form of victim-blaming as the volume and virulence of the harassment increases.

Wortham notes the apparent futility of “counterspeech,” which she describes as “the practice of bystander intervention that overpowers aggressors in an attempt to deter them.” I’m not at all surprised the EFF endorses this self-governing tactic as a “solution,” seeing as the organization (co-founded by Barlow) remains mesmerized by the fallacy that the internet naturally enables good to triumph over evil as long as pesky rules don’t get in the way.

I’m also not surprised that the two organizations Wortham highlights as designed to deploy “counterspeech” seem to be finding the method ineffective. If the general rule of thumb is Don’t Feed the Troll, then an attempt to surround a victim in a barrier of Twitter-hugs is like dipping her in chocolate and Cheetos. It’s only going to whip the trolls into a feeding frenzy. As stated above, it is important to remember that a large segment of the people who engage in this kind of harassment HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO. This is a hobby for many a young male, who really needs to get a life; and it is therefore difficult for people who do have lives to outlast or overwhelm the harassers.

Presumably, there are casual harassers as well—people who don’t spend time seething on 4Chan, but who obey an impulse to add their 140 characters of vitriol when they see a trend piling onto a target they don’t like or who has pissed them off. And I suppose we have to assume at this point that people can be harassed by bot swarm as well. But the fact that a real human being can be remotely and anonymously hounded to the point of being harmed or harming herself is a very real problem we have yet to confront in any substantive way. What is the responsibility of one voice in a million that feeds the proximate cause of a suicide? I don’t know, but it sure as hell belies Barlow’s dreamy assumptions.

Of course the thesis question Wortham asks is this: Can Silicon Valley do anything about online harassment? In theory, why not? As stated in several other posts, the internet companies are telling a half truth at best when they claim to have free speech obligations. They may wish to support free speech, and that’s fine, but the individual platforms are no more bound by the First Amendment than a retail store or restaurant in the physical world. Wortham is right to view the deciding factors as both ideological and financial, and in that order—a story of what happens when hippies become billionaires.

The policy positions and Terms of Service that still flow from Barlow’s Declaration have made the internet into a computer model of a social experiment which—to an extent—places people in philosopher John Locke’s hypothetical state of nature. Like Locke, the model then asks whether or not Man really needs to make a bargain with the State in order to protect his sovereignty as an individual. In 1996, Barlow declared the internet to be a “home of Mind,” a place where the legal conventions of statehood (namely law) have no purpose—an ideal based on the assumption that people are basically good and law is exclusively coercive.

But in 1689, in his Second Treatise of Government, Locke argued that Man in a state of nature (i.e. without government) is more free but also more vulnerable to human predators, who may enslave him, kill him, or take his property. Hence, the bargain one makes with the State is to trade as little freedom as possible in exchange for relative security. Thus, if a woman in a Target store were harassed in Twitter style (i.e. told by a swarm of men that they hope she gets raped and killed), the security and police who will soon arrive on her behalf are a manifestation of that Lockean bargain.

In principle, the major platform owners can take steps to mitigate online harassment, and they will likely discover this ability the moment there is a financial incentive to do so. But in the meantime, we might learn something from the computer model, which reveals exactly what can happen in a stateless and lawless “community.”

Consider the rash of hate crimes and threats following the election—all presumably committed by people who believed Trump’s presidency granted them permission to act upon latent antipathy. But how many Swastikas have been spray-painted by committed Nazis and how many by teenagers doing it for the lulz? Hard to say, but it’s likely that both motivations are present and that this is one way in which real life comes to resemble cyberspace rather than the other way around. And that may prove to be the most dangerous phenomenon of all.

Unrepentant Bad Thinking on Piracy

Jenna Wortham, technology writer for The New York Times, offers this article in which she questions the illegality of IP theft online.  Titled, The Unrepentant Bootlegger, Wortham begins with a description of what some may consider an unjustifiably heavy-handed raid by DHS officers in the arrest of Hana Beshara, a co-founder of the illegal media site NinjaVideo, shut down in 2009.  One can argue that non-violent criminals should be arrested in a less dramatic way (though I wonder how that sentiment might apply to insider-trading felons), but that isn’t the point of Wortham’s article.  No, her thesis asks wether or not Beshara’s actions ought to be illegal in the first place; and I’d like to jump to her quote about SOPA near the end of the article because so much of her inquiry poses naive questions based on false premises like the following:

After the seizure of NinjaVideo and the other sites, the M.P.A.A. pushed federal legislation to continue to crack down on illegal downloading. But the bill, SOPA, was so loosely worded that it could have required all websites to be responsible for monitoring their services for potential violations — an expensive and nearly impossible challenge — prompting sites like Wikipedia, Tumblr and Craigslist to rally online sentiment against the legislation. Outrage about the bill came to a head in 2012, and lawmakers backed off.

This narrative about SOPA has been repeated so many times that even a writer for the NY Times can get away with presenting it as fact. But it just ain’t so. There was nothing about the wording of the SOPA/PIPA bills that could be used to hold US-based websites any more responsible for infringement than they already were in 2011, or than they still are at this moment.  In fact, language in the bills explicitly stated that they do not trump precedent, domestic law. The bills were specifically designed to starve foreign-based sites, dedicated to piracy, of their revenue streams strictly because the site owners themselves operate beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement.  Wortham’s own emotional introduction to her article, describing the flack-jacketed arrest of Hana Beshara ought to indicate to anyone how utterly unnecessary it would be to have introduced SOPA/PIPA as domestic-focused laws.  Clearly, what Beshara and her NinjaVideo colleagues were doing is already enforceably illegal in the U.S., hence the guys busting into her condo and the 16 months she spent in prison.

The notion that SOPA could have shut down Facebook, et al was the result of well-orchestrated, and well-funded fear-mongering; and I stand by the assertion that (issues of piracy aside) the anti-SOPA campaign was the most successful corporate-serving bamboozlement of the electorate in my lifetime.  The campaign was holistically corrupt in that the very tools being employed to manipulate the political process simultaneously created the illusion that people believed themselves empowered through information to take action.  Never have I seen so many intelligent friends motivated to reaction based on such illogical, let alone unsubstantiated, claims.  Did it not occur to any of my progressive, educated colleagues at the time that in all likelihood no member of congress, no matter what we may think of his/her other politics, would sign the “shut down Facebook and Twitter” bill?  Yet, here we are, almost four years later, and NY Times writers are behaving as though the Internet industry talking points are historical facts.  And that brings us to the crux of Wortham’s article, summed up in this quote:

 Ms. Beshara, however, still can’t accept that what she was doing deserved the heavy hammer of the law. She served 16 months in prison for conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement, but she still talks about NinjaVideo as something grand.

Something grand indeed.  It is astonishing that even when independent artists recite their stories of working for years on a project only to have it hijacked by a pirate site, they’re accused of whining; but when profiteering site founders are busted, they’re treated like martyrs to the cause of culture and smarter business practices.  This narrative that we should credit the NinjaVideos and Megauploads of the world for giving us iTunes and Netflix is another false premise; and it is always perplexing to read declarations about the public “wanting 24/7 on-demand everything for free or really cheap” as though those making such statements believe they’re revealing some profound ethnographic discovery. Really?  People would like instant gratification and would prefer to pay next to nothing for it.  That is a shocker.  If only there were a Pulitzer Prize for the Numbingly Obvious.

The problem is that when writers like Wortham, under the imprimatur of venerable publications, repeat this self-evident observation about consumers and then pose the rhetorical question about the illegality of piracy, they fail to recognize through the fog of their own presumed humanism that they’re in fact promoting an anti-fair-trade market.  This is because it simply isn’t possible to produce all major motion pictures and television in a manner that makes all of these works instantaneously available in every market worldwide and for prices that compete with the unlicensed option of free.  To make such a demand on motion picture producers, both great and small, implies that the stake-holding subcontractors whose skills, labors, and constituent products used to produce these films must have their interests (i.e. means of living) subverted to the exigencies of black-market economics.

Going forward, I expect we will see more and more film projects organized at the contractual stage of development to facilitate early release on legal, web-based platforms — we’re already seeing this occur in some cases — but the conclusion Wortham implies is that the attitudes about piracy are so socially ingrained at this point that we ought to simply accept them and perhaps even praise them as enlightened. This isn’t surprising of course.  Normalizing negative behaviors or trends does have a tendency to screw up perceptions about the consequences of those behaviors.  Articles like Wortham’s remind me of a moment back in college when I bumped into a fellow film major — he wasn’t  the sharpest tool in the shed — one afternoon and he told me he was bummed because his friend had been expelled.  I asked why, and he said that the friend had “set his dorm room door on fire.”

“Um, Dude, that’s arson,” was all I could think to say.

“Yeah,” he replies, “but there’s so much other shit he did that the school never caught him for.”

This was sound reasoning in his mind.  His friend’s miscreant, even dangerous, behaviors had become so normalized that it seemed entirely unreasonable for the college to take disciplinary action.  And that’s the thing about the many thousands of words at this point that have been dedicated to re-contextualizing media piracy.  Call it what you want, but, at a certain point, all we can conclude is, “Dude, that’s larceny.”