I wonder if my overactive sense of “empathy” is more accurately described as a susceptibility to emotional manipulation. You can explain away anyone’s behavior if you prioritize the pain they’ve experienced over the harm they’ve caused. There is always a moral loophole if you’re willing to disregard facts. I wonder, too, if this is a distraction from my own feelings.
(While I was writing the above, my cat delivered a dead squirrel to the foot of my bed. Apparently he figured out how to use the cat door after seven years. A gift / a challenge / a death. It took me forty minutes, three trash bags, a broom and its stick, a dust pan, a dish towel, a cat crate, a piece of cardboard – I’m sure I’m forgetting something – but I figured it out.🐈)
I just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s 2023 - Doctorow, Cory - The Internet Con. It’s been on my TBR list for a while + I was surprised to see a copy a couple of weeks ago a new indie bookstore. It was a really engaging read throughout, but I annotated nearly every line of the last few chapters.
One chapter focused on algorithmic radicalization. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I read about the gender gap between Gen Z men and women; it’s been on my mind more since the 2024 election.
But I’ve found myself questioning the…… point (?) of framing people’s movement toward the right as an algorithmically-driven shift. I say it all the time – that I think “the internet is radicalizing young people”* – and kind of drive right by the fact that I am also one of those young(ish) people, just on the other side of the compass.
As I’ve learned more about the world, my politics have adjusted accordingly; they would tell you the exact same thing.
I guess Doctorow made it click for me: this is just how the entire internet works. It’s literally how we use the internet – all of us.
When you have a question, you cast a broad net; you don’t know what you don’t know, so you may not even have the language to articulate what you’re really asking. Browsing the web, your searches and rabbit holes become more and more specific, until ultimately you end up on some niche forum or livestream where someone has just the right hook to reel you in.
Coincidentally, I started listening to a podcast episode last night (find it lateraction) where a man who had been ”radicalized online” was explaining that we’re missing the mark by not assigning people agency when they go down this “pipeline”. He compared it to a sales funnel. Sure, this is largely content from manipulative grifters, but you ultimately determine whether you engage with it.
Doctorow also points out that we tend to tell ourselves that internet trolls aren’t Like That in real life, but they very much are. Insufferable bullies tend to be insufferable everywhere.
I laughed reading it, because of course they are. I have a sort of begrudging sympathy for people being nasty online – surely no one wants to be like that – but the most awful people I know online are that bad or worse out in the real world.
My point is, I don’t know why I’m so determined to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Not just in blaming an algorithm for someone’s politics or content preferences or assuming that someone is only abusive when they’re anonymous – I think I’m destructively optimistic about people’s characters in general.
And it’s not like life has taught me that people are good + trustworthy so far!
And the problem ☝️ is that I go through these mental gymnastics at the expense of myself and others.
It seems impossible to me that a person could just have bad intentions, so I have to assume that something much deeper – something less controllable – is happening. For some reason, it then follows that we owe them some type of mercy, some turned cheek, because their behavior is an expression of pain.
On the one hand, maybe this is just the product of a youth group sermon I heard on a particularly formative day. On the other hand, it doesn’t feel like a virtue so much as it feels like a way for me to avoid the concept of malice.
*I think there’s still a vital conversation to have about children being exposed to these extreme ideologies on the internet.