You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto (10 page)

Some of the regulating mechanisms for collectives that have been most successful in the preinternet world can be understood as being like treble and bass controls. For instance, what if a collective moves too readily and quickly, jittering instead of settling down to provide a stable answer? This happens on the most active Wikipedia entries, for example, and has also been seen in some speculation frenzies in open markets.

One service performed by representative democracy is low-pass filtering, which is like turning up the bass and turning down the treble. Imagine the jittery shifts that would take place if a wiki were put in charge of
writing laws. It’s a terrifying thing to consider. Superenergized people would be struggling to shift the wording of the tax code on a frantic, never-ending basis. The internet would be swamped.

Such chaos can be avoided in the same way it already is, albeit imperfectly: by the slower processes of elections and court proceedings. These are like bass waves. The calming effect of orderly democracy achieves more than just the smoothing out of peripatetic struggles for consensus. It also reduces the potential for the collective to suddenly jump into an overexcited state when too many rapid changes coincide in such a way that they don’t cancel one another out.

For instance, stock markets might adopt automatic trading shutoffs, which are triggered by overly abrupt shifts in price or trading volume. (In
Chapter 6
I will tell how Silicon Valley ideologues recently played a role in convincing Wall Street that it could do without some of these checks on the crowd, with disastrous consequences.)

Wikipedia had to slap a crude low-pass filter on the jitteriest entries, such as “President George W. Bush.” There’s now a limit to how often a particular person can remove someone else’s text fragments. I suspect that these kinds of adjustments will eventually evolve into an approximate mirror of democracy as it was before the internet arrived.

The reverse problem can also appear. The hive mind can be on the right track, but moving too slowly. Sometimes collectives can yield brilliant results given enough time—but sometimes there isn’t enough time. A problem like global warming might automatically be addressed eventually if the market had enough time to respond to it. (Insurance rates, for instance, would climb.) Alas, in this case there doesn’t appear to be enough time, because the market conversation is slowed down by the legacy effect of existing investments. Therefore some other process has to intervene, such as politics invoked by individuals.

Another example of the slow hive problem: there was a lot of technology developed—but very slowly—in the millennia before there was a clear idea of how to be empirical, before we knew how to have a peer-reviewed technical literature and an education based on it, and before there was an efficient market to determine the value of inventions.

What is crucial about modernity is that structure and constraints were part of what sped up the process of technological development, not
just pure openness and concessions to the collective. This is an idea that will be examined in
Chapter 10
.

The “wisdom of crowds” effect should be thought of as a tool. The value of a tool is its usefulness in accomplishing a task. The point should never be the glorification of the tool. Unfortunately, simplistic free market ideologues and noospherians tend to reinforce one another’s unjustified sentimentalities about their chosen tools.

Since the internet makes crowds more accessible, it would be beneficial to have a wide-ranging, clear set of rules explaining when the wisdom of crowds is likely to produce meaningful results. Surowiecki proposes four principles in his book, framed from the perspective of the interior dynamics of the crowd. He suggests there should be limits on the ability of members of the crowd to see how others are about to decide on a question, in order to preserve independence and avoid mob behavior. Among other safeguards, I would add that a crowd should never be allowed to frame its own questions, and its answers should never be more complicated than a single number or multiple choice answer.

More recently, Nassim Nicholas Taleb has argued that applications of statistics, such as crowd wisdom schemes, should be divided into four quadrants. He defines the dangerous “Fourth Quadrant” as comprising problems that have both complex outcomes and unknown distributions of outcomes. He suggests making that quadrant taboo for crowds.

Maybe if you combined all our approaches you’d get a practical set of rules for avoiding crowd failures. Then again, maybe we are all on the wrong track. The problem is that there’s been inadequate focus on the testing of such ideas.

There’s an odd lack of curiosity about the limits of crowd wisdom. This is an indication of the faith-based motivations behind such schemes. Numerous projects have looked at how to improve specific markets and other crowd wisdom systems, but too few projects have framed the question in more general terms or tested general hypotheses about how crowd systems work.

“Troll” is a term for an anonymous person who is abusive in an online environment. It would be nice to believe that there is a 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.

I have tried to learn to be aware of the troll within myself. I notice that I can suddenly become relieved when someone else in an online exchange is getting pounded or humiliated, because that means I’m safe for the moment. If someone else’s video is being ridiculed on YouTube, then mine is temporarily protected. But that also means I’m complicit in a mob dynamic. Have I ever planted a seed of mob-beckoning ridicule in order to guide the mob to a target other than myself? Yes, I have, though I shouldn’t have. I observe others doing that very thing routinely in anonymous online meeting places.

I’ve also found that I can be drawn into ridiculous pissing matches online in ways that just wouldn’t happen otherwise, and I’ve never noticed any benefit. There is never a lesson learned, or a catharsis of victory or defeat. If you win anonymously, no one knows, and if you lose, you just change your pseudonym and start over, without having modified your point of view one bit.

If the troll is anonymous and the target is known, then the dynamic is even worse than an encounter between anonymous fragmentary pseudo-people. That’s when the hive turns against personhood. For instance, in 2007 a series of “Scarlet Letter” postings in China incited online throngs to hunt down accused adulterers. In 2008, the focus shifted to Tibet sympathizers. Korea has one of the most intense online cultures in the world, so it has also suffered some of the most extreme trolling. Korean movie star Choi Jin-sil, sometimes described as the “Nation’s Actress,” committed suicide in 2008 after being hounded online by trolls, but she was only the most famous of a series of similar suicides.

In the United States, anonymous internet users have ganged up on targets like Lori Drew, the woman who created a fake boy persona on the
internet in order to break the heart of a classmate of her daughter’s, which caused the girl to commit suicide.

But more often the targets are chosen randomly, following the pattern described in the short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. In the story, residents of a placid small town draw lots to decide which individual will be stoned to death each year. It is as if a measure of human cruelty must be released, and to do so in a contained yet random way limits the damage by using the fairest possible method.

Some of the better-known random victims of troll mobs include the blogger Kathy Sierra. She was suddenly targeted in a multitude of ways, such as having images of her as a sexually mutilated corpse posted prominently, apparently in the hopes that her children would see them. There was no discernible reason Sierra was targeted. Her number was somehow drawn from the lot.

Another famous example is the tormenting of the parents of Mitchell Henderson, a boy who committed suicide. They were subjected to gruesome audio-video creations and other tools at the disposal of virtual sadists. Another occurence is the targeting of epileptic people with flashing web designs in the hope of inducing seizures.

There is a vast online flood of videos of humiliating assaults on helpless victims. The culture of sadism online has its own vocabulary and has gone mainstream. The common term “lulz,” for instance, refers to the gratification of watching others suffer over the cloud.
^*

When I criticize this type of online culture, I am often accused of being either an old fart or an advocate of censorship. Neither is the case. I don’t think I’m necessarily any better, or more moral, than the people who tend the lulzy websites. What I’m saying, though, is that the user interface designs that arise from the ideology of the computing cloud make people—all of us—less kind. Trolling is not a string of isolated incidents, but the status quo in the online world.

There are recognizable stages in the degradation of anonymous, fragmentary communication. If no pack has emerged, then individuals start to fight. This is what happens all the time in online settings. A later stage appears once a pecking order is established. Then the members of the pack become sweet and supportive of one another, even as they goad one another into ever more intense hatred of nonmembers.

This suggests a hypothesis to join the ranks of ideas about how the circumstances of our evolution influenced our nature. We, the big-brained species, probably didn’t get that way to fill a single, highly specific niche. Instead, we must have evolved with the ability to switch between different niches. We evolved to be
both
loners
and
pack members. We are optimized not so much to be one or the other, but to be able to switch between them.

New patterns of social connection that are unique to online culture have played a role in the spread of modern networked terrorism. If you look at an 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.

If we are to continue to focus the powers of digital technology on the project of making human affairs less personal and more collective, then we ought to consider how that project might interact with human nature.

The genetic aspects of behavior that have received the most attention (under rubrics like sociobiology or evolutionary psychology) have tended to focus on things like gender differences and mating behaviors, but my guess is that clan orientation and its relationship to violence will turn out to be the most important area of study.

People are not universally nasty online. Behavior varies considerably from site to site. There are reasonable theories about what brings out the best or worst online behaviors: demographics, economics, child-rearing
trends, perhaps even the average time of day of usage could play a role. My opinion, however, is that certain details in the design of the user interface experience of a website are the most important factors.

People who can spontaneously invent a pseudonym in order to post a comment on a blog or on YouTube are often remarkably mean. Buyers and sellers on eBay are a little more civil, despite occasional disappointments, such as encounters with flakiness and fraud. Based on those data, you could conclude that it isn’t exactly anonymity, but
transient
anonymity, coupled with a lack of consequences, that brings out online idiocy.

With more data, that hypothesis can be refined. Participants in Second Life (a virtual online world) are generally not quite as mean to one another as are people posting comments to Slashdot (a popular technology news site) or engaging in edit wars on Wikipedia, even though all allow pseudonyms. The difference might be that on Second Life the pseudonymous personality itself is highly valuable and requires a lot of work to create.

So a better portrait of the troll-evoking design is effortless, consequence-free, transient anonymity in the service of a goal, such as promoting a point of view, that stands entirely apart from one’s identity or personality. Call it drive-by anonymity.

Computers have an unfortunate tendency to present us with binary choices at every level, not just at the lowest one, where the bits are switching. It is easy to be anonymous or fully revealed, but hard to be revealed just enough. Still, that does happen, to varying degrees. Sites like eBay and Second Life give hints about how design can promote a middle path.

Anonymity certainly has a place, but that place needs to be designed carefully. Voting and peer review are preinternet examples of beneficial anonymity. Sometimes it is desirable for people to be free of fear of reprisal or stigma in order to invoke honest opinions. To have a substantial exchange, however, you need to be fully present. That is why facing one’s accuser is a fundamental right of the accused.

For the most part, the net has delivered happy surprises about human potential. As I pointed out earlier, the rise of the web in the early 1990s
took place without leaders, ideology, advertising, commerce, or anything other than a positive sensibility shared by millions of people. Who would have thought that was possible? Ever since, there has been a constant barrage of utopian extrapolations from positive online events. Whenever a blogger humiliates a corporation by posting documentation of an infelicitous service representative, we can expect triumphant hollers about the end of the era of corporate abuses.

It stands to reason, however, that the net can also accentuate negative patterns of behavior or even bring about unforeseen social pathology. Over the last century, new media technologies have often become prominent as components of massive outbreaks of organized violence.