Fredrik DeBoer on "the nobody problem" the Accelerants who escalate vitriol on social media can do so because no one of the mob of them is significant enough to keep track of their cumulative conduct

In his tradition of usually self-destructing posts ...



https://fredrikdeboer.com/2020/08/17/the-nobody-problem/

the nobody problemAugust 17, 2020

You will have likely observed that social media has long since become a kind of perpetual fox hunt where a target is identified for social extermination and everybody joins in. Every morning on Twitter that’s the essential question: who will we hound today 

What you may notice is that those most dedicated to escalating every conflict into an excommunication are not the name brand blue-check types but low-follower, low-engagement accounts. (Which is no insult, or not from me; I was never a high-follower account myself.) Why?

I wrote a piece years ago, when I was on Twitter, and called them Accelerants – people who seem to exist only to make conflict on social media nastier. And I think the really essential piece is this: no one cares enough about them individually to know how morally they act themselves, and so they can engage in moral censure of everyone and everything. If you are enough of a visible personality that people might track your history, people can respond to your moral judgments by pointing out areas where you yourself have failed to act morally, or at least, to areas where your moral beliefs appear to be inconsistent. But if no one cares about you enough to remember what you’ve said and done in the past, you’re free. And in the middle of a Twitter mobbing there’s so many low-follower accounts coming at people that no one could possibly respond to them all even if they cared enough to know something about them. They draw power from their powerlessness; they have the strength of a faceless horde. Facelessness, after all, means there can be no accountability.

It is true that claims of hypocrisy are never dispositive for solving actual moral questions and that a tu quoque is a fallacy. But it’s also true that “you should follow the same basic moral rules that you judge others for failing” and “those who judge should take care as they themselves are subject to judgment” are pretty elementary (and elemental) aspects of navigating the human moral universe. There’s no possibility of that when you have all of these accounts that are for all intents and purposes burners, ones that combine literal pseudonymity with the inherent anonymity of being a face in the crowd – especially when that face is some avatar chosen for its disposability.

Anonymity breaks morality. It removes the basic sense of skin-in-the-game that’s necessary for accountability and adult conduct. It erases the requirement to be morally consistent and eliminates any sense of shame about shaming others. (You have a plank in your own eye, I assure you. We all do. You are not the exception.) And social media gives anonymity to a vast army of people who have, according to all available evidence, nothing but ill intent, the desire to do harm. Is it any wonder all of it is a horror show?

He could have written that such online social media mobbing is the obverse of the diffusion of responsibility ... but then maybe that point is too obvious to bother making.

Having chronicled the peak and demise of the former Mars Hill one of the reasons I avoid Twitter is because I don't care how smart you think you are about how you use Twitter, Twitter is where the worst aspects of cultish and mob conduct seem to emerge from flesh and blood people (never mind the proliferation of bots!).  Comparably cultish behavior proliferates on other platforms, too.  Former Mars Hill people might switch to Trump or Sawant or Bolz-Weber or the late Held Evans or some other mass media wielding celebrity and retweet or re-link to something one of those people wrote and then add 'This!" but the basic form of behavior hasn't changed.

Maybe now people are lamenting the patriarchy instead of the failure of men or asking "where's dad?" The core conformity has shifted or, as one of my relatives put it, people stop drinking a pint of red kool-aid and drink two points of blue kool-aid, or green kool-aid or whatever the newer, better flavor is.  People can leave Mars Hill, so to speak, but the forms of conduct inculcated and cultivated over the course of a decade or so don't leave them, whether they join a paleo-Confederate discussion group or identify with antifa, the core cult-joining impulse can remain the same, all the more potent for going unrecognized and why?  Because the person who left thinks that by embracing a new "what" the "how" of their embrace has changed when the "how" is what also needs to changed.

Since I've taken time to preserve a probably self-destructing post, his warning that you are not the exception resonates with a conviction I've had most of my adult life, that people in the United States who gamble on the assumption that "I'm the exception" are courting some kind of disaster.  It's wiser to think of yourself as an average person with average virtues and vices than to think of yourself as exceptional.  You might even be exceptional in some way but what do you, really, do to "earn" that?  Since I am starting into The Cult of Smart there could well be a whole lot of smart people who don't fully appreciate the role genetics or class have given them supremely unfair advantages over dumb people.  Worse than that, smart people may conclude that because they are smart they are insulated from falling sway to whatever they regard as the vices of the dumb people.  As Jacques Ellul warned in Propaganda, educated people who think their education preserves them from buying into propaganda don't understand how much education is a necessary component of what Ellul called pre-propaganda.  

Or as a Jewish proverb warns us, do you see a man who is wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him! As a way of wrapping up some thoughts on a recent probably self-destructing post from DeBoer, those people who are wise in their own eyes are very often the anonymous mob of social media users who deign to denounce whoever it is that isn't not as wise as they themselves are, with unfortunately predictable results across the spectrum.  

Not that you can't be on Twitter, whoever you are.  You totally can use Twitter!  I'm just sharing how my years at the former Mars Hill and seeing how people (including myself!) dealt with people on Midrash has made me more cautious about how I approach stuff.  Some stuff is better reserved for conversations rather than snippets of text that are only capable of being zinger-length axioms.