Tag: Reddit

Dawn of the Prankster

About two weeks ago, some disgruntled friends shared a story about Urban Outfitters apparently marketing a faded and blood-stained-looking Kent State college sweatshirt.  Then, in a follow-up story reported by Jordan Sargent in Gawker, an email sent by the retailer’s CEO Dick Haynes explains that the sweatshirt shown in their marketing materials was not representative of a new, purposely designed line of clothing but was a legitimately vintage item purchased at a Rose Bowl flea market and that the red stains on the shirt are not in fact blood.  The photo of the Kent State sweatshirt, according to the email, was being used to promote a new line of faded looks being offered by UO.  Assuming Mr. Haynes is telling the truth about the sweatshirt (and there is no reason to think he isn’t), the story is a pretty good example of so much that is wrong with marketing in the digital age.  In short, does the campaign reveal stupidity or ignorance?  And at what point do such distinctions cease to matter? Do the economics of the Internet expect everyone to become a prankster in order to win?

As Sargent rightly implies, the marketing team at Urban Outfitters almost certainly knew they were courting negative reactions by using the image of this sweatshirt because in the age of social media, controversy can be a great way to get campaigns to go viral. Still, it is not yet clear that “any press is good press” is a universally wise tactic for all brands.  Certainly, a brand can align itself on the side of certain issues, which can be a great link to customers whose values correspond with the brand.  But in the bizarre dynamics of social media, even a hater becomes an evangelist of sorts when he/she shares a story for the purpose of denouncing it.  If the story or campaign offends ten thousand people but appeals to one thousand customers, cha ching.  Not only does this achieve market penetration for pennies, but the people who hate your brand did your selling for you for free.  That said, this can be dangerous territory for a brand looking to build customer relationships over time. Being a shock-jock can backfire.  More importantly, brands and their marketing campaigns are themselves creators of culture and thus feed public consciousness, which is part of why I believe our reaction is so strong against this apparent trivializing of the Kent State shootings.  It becomes a form of revisionist history, which brings us to the question of ignorance in this story.

Jordan Sargent raises the possibility with regard to this sweatshirt campaign that “…various people involved in the transaction were too young to even realize the implications of selling a Kent State sweatshirt that looked like it was bloodstained”  This may be true, and if so, it is yet another unfortunate phenomenon of our times.  Despite the fact that we treated the dawn of Internet access as a great boon to education, we do seem to encounter frequent examples of digital natives achieving adulthood woefully ignorant of some rather significant cultural icons and events.  That anyone in the United States might enter the workforce, let alone in a communications role, without ever hearing of the 1970 shootings at Kent State is both extraordinary and, at this point, not the least bit surprising.  In fact, I personally wondered many years ago whether or not a glut of data (which is not necessarily information) might result in a decline in general cultural literacy.

It was the late 1990s, and I was creative director on a photo shoot in New York.  The photographer and I were joking around, making references to the Marx Brothers, and our comments were sailing over the heads of the models and assistants who were a good decade or so younger.  Who doesn’t know The Marx Brothers, I thought?  Their films were hardly contemporary when I was growing up; they were 40 years old.  Driving home from the shoot, I wondered if the volume and rate at which we were increasingly consuming sounds, words, and images might not have a deleterious effect on long-term memory of important cultural and historical items.  Add to this the ease with which information can be manipulated through the web, coincident with a general distrust of traditional news sources, along with marketers willing to gin up controversy to sell tee shirts, and you get a digital age Tower of Babel.

Perhaps one of the worst phenomena to manifest from all this is that it feeds moral absolutism, which believes the ends justify the means.  For a business owner, those ends might be selling some product, but in the world of civic affairs, this psychology produces more serious results.  We’ve occasionally seen hacktivists identifying as Anonymous meddling self-righteously in politics or in events like the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and they’re free to make a mess of things once in a while because they can’t be held accountable.  It is the same psychology that produces the bottom-feeders at Reddit and 4Chan who would share stolen nude celebrity photos and produce rape and death imagery of Emma Watson in response to her speech at the UN on feminism.  But, interestingly enough, it is also the same psychology that produced a bizarre attempt to attack 4Chan.

In case you missed it, a site was created called emmawatsonyournext.com, which was purported to be the work of anonymous users at 4Chan and appeared to be hosting a countdown to the distribution of revealing photos of the actress.  But according to this story by Rich McCormick in The Verge, the countdown site was in fact a hoax and PR ploy designed to drive traffic toward a campaign to take down the 4Chan site for its exploitation of women.  Now, I personally don’t care if 4Chan disappears; it is of no value to anyone, and the only people who spend time on the site are either losers or FBI agents.  But this hoax of a campaign against the site is likewise exploitative of Miss Watson and the values of feminism, and even if its rather murky ends are anti-misogynist, its means are unacceptable.  Coincidentally, according to McCormick, it was Redditors who apparently identified the companies behind the hoax.

“Some Reddit users were able to sniff out the hoax before its countdown expired, and linked the company behind it to FoxWeekly, a site that plagiarizes from other news sources to solicit views and Facebook likes, and Swenzy, a company that sells followers, likes, and views.”

BUT . . .

According to other sources like The Huffington Post, the organization behind the Emma Watson leak hoax is called Rantic Marketing, except that there doesn’t appear to be any such company because, writes James Cook for Business Insider, “Rantic Marketing is a fake company run by a gang of prolific internet spammers used to quickly capitalize on internet trends for page views.”

So…

I guess what I’m driving at is that the Internet can be kind of a cesspool of idiocy, self-aggrandized hackers, and exploitative opportunists all filtered through the manipulative algorithms of social media’s walled gardens.  And I think the truth is that, even as adults, we are not innately good curators or editors of the fragments of information with which we choose to be bombarded. If nothing else, who has the time?  When I think about the digital native generation growing up in this environment, it’s hard not to wonder if the biggest hoax of all might not be credited to whichever prankster first called this “the information age.”

The Nation of Reddit

From Redditor yishan:

“…we consider ourselves not just a company running a website where one can post links and discuss them, but the government of a new type of community. The role and responsibility of a government differs from that of a private corporation, in that it exercises restraint in the usage of its powers.”

Shh.  I won’t say anything right away. Just let those words tromp around in your mind for a few moments.  Let the hubris of them get mud all over the carpet and sticky Cheetos fingerprints on the door frames…

 Okay.  Here goes…

In a blog post entitled Every Man is Responsible for His Own Soul, paraphrasing a line from Shakespeare’s Henry V, Redditor yishan explains why Reddit removed a subreddit called TheFappening, making sure to point out that the decision was not based on the content of the thread, which unambiguously refers to masturbating while viewing stolen nude photos of the female celebrities, who were victims of the recent hacking.

In case anyone is confused as to exactly how self-aggrandized social media site owners can be, the managers at Reddit, it seems, perceive their enterprise to be a new form of government.  The Nation of Reddit, if you will, founded not so much on ideas or achieved by blood or steel, not by men (or women) who signed their names to a declaration and risked their lives, but by avatars who speak with the courage of anonymity and wring their virtual hands over the moral implications of profiting from exploitative jerking off.  What exactly will the flag of this new sovereign society look like?  Crossed swords, I suppose.

Though Reddit is a young nation, Ambassador yishan, exhibits the diplomatic nuance of a veteran stuffed suit when he proclaims, “Virtuous behavior is only virtuous if it is not arrived at by compulsion.  This is a central idea of the community we are trying to create.”  Once again, perhaps we should pause and just let the big idea resonate for a moment…

Right.  Moving on…

It’s true, of course.  Virtuous behavior can only be called virtuous when it is altruistic.  But failing that, sometimes we have to tell the assholes to knock it the hell off.  You know the ones — the guys who stand up and go for the luggage compartment while the plane is still taxiing.  Yeah, even in the freest of countries, that clown has to be told to sit back the fuck down in case the pilot has to step on the breaks and thus turns him into a 180-pound idiot projectile.  In a similar way, The Nation of Reddit could certainly choose to support free expression, even of the most puerile gibberish, while drawing a fairly clear line that it will make every effort to avoid benefiting from someone else’s misery.  Professional news organizations draw lines between coverage and exploitation all the time, and free speech manages to survive, but I guess that’s elitist.

As pointed out in this excellent piece by Ellen Seidler, The Nation of Reddit is actually a satellite state of the empire CondeNast Publications, and its wealth, like most web nations, comes from tourism (i.e. advertising).  As such, stolen celebrity nude pictures unquestionably bring the visitors in profitable numbers, but apparently, the government of Reddit feels it would be morally objectionable to refuse this windfall, which is nothing more than a byproduct of its absolute defense of free expression.  But as Seidler also points out, non-celebrities, usually women, who don’t have the resources of movie stars are frequent, un-reported victims of misappropriation of their images that are then exploited by stateless nations like Reddit and the rogue 4Chan.

The actual quote from Henry V comes in the scene when Harry walks cloaked in disguise among his men on the night before the battle at Agincourt.  A soldier, Williams, opines that the virtue of the war and the inherent sinfulness of death in battle is the sole moral responsibility of the king.  But within in the ensuing monologue, Harry replies, “Every subject’s duty is the king’s; but each man’s soul’s his own.”  It is poetry, but it is also a poor reference for a modern, free, and democratic society far removed from ancient monarchy.  Because our more enlightened view is that we do blame the leadership and not the soldier for entering into a bad war.  And we do hold business owners, the ones who make the real money, responsible for the manner in which they earn their revenues.

But here’s the main message we might send The Nation of Reddit:  If you’re apologizing for shutting down a thread called TheFappening, at least spare the world your ideological bullshit as if we’re supposed to think you’re doing something important.

Our Inner Troll

troll

One of my favorite observations by David Foster Wallace is about television, which he describes as essentially “watching furniture.”  As a recovered-TV-junkie (20+ years clean), I have long appreciated the sentiment; however, by contrast, the detachment involved in old-school TV viewing may be healthier for some than the two-way mirrors we use in our wired lives. Our screens of many sizes are not only private windows through which we can choose to view the world as we wish to see it, but they are also personal projectors through which we can reveal ourselves as we wish to be seen or even allow us to hide behind masks so that our latent monsters can roam free. These devices are not merely physical extensions of our hands but can be metaphysical extensions of our identities.

I joked with a friend who described herself on Facebook Chat as “moaning her head off” that she probably means “moaning her thumbs off,” complaining as she was via iPhone; but this isn’t entirely a joke, is it?  We might rekindle Descarte’s mind/body question to ask the new mind/body/gadget question. And would we conclude, I tweet therefore I am?

To what extent the id/gadget relationship presents itself must of course vary from individual to individual. Although we can probably assume that the association is strongest within the generation who’ve grown up alongside these devices and the social dynamics they’re programmed to foster, it is also true that some of the most extreme manifestations of this psychological shift are in no way restricted to the young.  Super-troll Michael Brutsch (aka Violentacrez), who was outed by Gawker in October of 2012, is a man in his mid-50s, who spent hours of his time moderating misogynistic and pedophiliac threads on Reddit; and he is cited as a prime example in this video from the series of original projects from Academic Earth entitled The Psychology of the Internet Toll.

One of the contributors to this video, a man named Jack Collins, contacted me directly and asked that I consider sharing it on this blog, and I do think it offers interesting food for thought on the mechanisms by which two forces that appear contradictory — anonymity and a desire for attention — actually conjoin through social media to spawn the ugliest of behaviors.  What matters of course is not merely exposing extreme examples like Brutsch and labeling the disorders at play, but rather asking ourselves to what extent we are all made a bit more troll-like (I would say narcissistic) through these media and devices.  To quote Jaron Lanier, “It would be nice to believe that there is only a minute troll population living among us.  But in fact, a great many people have experienced being drawn into nasty exchanges online. Everyone who has experienced that has been introduced to his or her inner troll.”

Beyond the value of personal introspection on our own behaviors, I believe the McLuhan question as to what extent the medium becomes the message is particularly relevant when we consider the influence of these media on our political process and the ways in which certain dissociative trends can be unhealthy for democracy. To Lanier’s point about getting “drawn into nasty exchanges online,” how many of those exchanges are about politics? By my reckoning, quite a few. So, the question becomes whether or not this new form of public debate is really fulfilling its promise to add nuance or is instead homogenizing discourse because its mechanisms too often call upon the voices of our lesser angels, who fail to listen, learn, or empathize. And well beyond the matter of us getting a little bitchy on Facebook is the question as to the role of social media in what appears to be a rise in narcissistic behaviors in general.

In my last essay, I wrote about balancing free speech rights between recipients and disseminators because it seems as though the internet itself wants to assert the rights of recipients as somehow more important than those of disseminators.  This would be consistent with an ego that has begun to merge with its appended machine to the extent that whatever that machine may provide is perceived as an entitlement.  Through these devices (which by the way are destined to become wearable), is it possible that we cultivate a visceral association with words, pictures, and sounds to the extent that the body itself comes to expect all content to be a natural right like air is to lungs?  If so, this might explain why, at a certain point, the ego no longer recognizes the right of the other who may be harmed by one’s consumption of said content. This would explain not only the grotesque behaviors of a Michael Brutsch and his Reddit followers, but even the more subtle forms of everyday narcissism, including the ability to rationalize choices like media piracy in the name of an insidious notion called “permissionless culture.”

Popularized by scholars like Lawrence Lessig, “permissionless  culture” is assumed to mean that the permission being ignored or rejected is that of a corporate or government authority — some entity we feel should not even have the right to grant permission in the first place.  Unfortunately, the problem being overlooked is that we may indeed be fostering a permission-free culture — one that ignores individual permission from one another, and it is that permission that is the basis of all civil rights. If you don’t think there might be a relationship between ideas like “permissionless culture” and the rise in a phenomenon people are calling “rape culture,” I would recommend a visit to several of the threads on 4Chan.org, where frat-boy style narcissism is both medium and message in the service of what we might call a Cartesian circle jerk.

With its population of anonymous, young males engaged primarily in a less-violent version of Brtutsch’s misogyny, 4Chan is no obscure anomaly, but is in fact one of the nebulae whence political action originates on issues pertaining to free speech and the internet, and it is the site where the hacktivists known as Anonymous got their start.  In his book Freeloading, Chris Ruen even cites 4Chan as one source of the early efforts to stop the SOPA bill, the relevance not being SOPA itself, but the discomforting consideration that my thoughtful, progressive friends and colleagues were to some extent influenced by a lot of teenage neanderthals.  This raises a question about all politics pertaining to the digital age with regard to identifying who exactly are those defenders of the web often referred to as the “internet community?”

Of course we all use the internet and have Facebook pages and some other social media accounts, but are we all part of the internet community?  Typically, this reference is used broadly in news media to describe influential bloggers, activists, or site owners who speak out for the health of the internet on a regular basis and with consistent messages. But every community has its thought leaders and its base, who do much of the disseminating, distilling, and even wrongly interpreting the messages of the thought leaders.  I suspect the base of the internet community is actually quite small, despite its power to influence through viral media, and that it is also demographically very narrow.

Specifically, I suspect that the base of the internet community just might be a fraternity of economically privileged 15-34 year-old males, who are the first generation of guinea pigs in the mind/body/gadget experiment. If this is true, and the politics of digital life are in fact dispersed through what may be a clique of narcissists, this can produce a dramatic change in the social contract on which democratic freedom is based. In light of the fact that, economically, the internet appears to spawn more consolidated, personal wealth while yielding very little middle-class opportunity, paying attention to our collective inner troll may be more important than we think.