Beware the Internet Mob

"Justice for Cecil."

The shaming of Walter Palmer strongly resembles a witch hunt. Who among us would survive such scrutiny? Even if we haven't killed a lion, most of us have done some stupid or immoral things. Sometimes repeatedly. "He who is without sin, throw the first stone." (Right?)

Clarificatory update: I actually agree that it was wrong to kill the lion for sport, that the wrongness was made worse by the fact that lions are endangered, and was also made worse because of the role this particular lion was playing in the ongoing research on how to protect the endangered lion populations. So I agree with many of the grounds that people are citing to justify their criticism of and use of social sanctions against Mr. Palmer. But the response to Palmer seems excessive in the light of his actual moral error, and is yet another example of the angry internet mob's frightening power. You could be next!

Second clarificatory update: Lots of people cross moral lines and should be punished, whether through the criminal justice system or through social sanctions. I am not opposed to using social sanctions against people who commit moral crimes, or against people who break the law. We should shame murderers, rapists, and thieves, for example, and Palmer also deserves a certain amount of social censure. But we also have a duty to make judgments about what legal punishments or social sanctions are justified in a calm, rational manner, lest we inadvertently make moral errors ourselves through disproportionate responses to others' immoral actions. Anger, hatred, scorn, and the other passions associated with moral outrage have a way of burning unchecked. It's not that we should forgive everything and punish nothing, but we owe it to ourselves to be careful in how we go about judging and punishing others. I fear that the internet is enabling and encouraging us to give into crude vigilantism and a mob mentality (even in cases where someone really did do something morally wrong). The short of it is, you can't reduce considered moral judgment to instant, unchecked outrage. I don't like where this is going, and I fear it will not end well for our society.

Third clarificatory update, now with more Reason: Three points worth bearing in mind: First, even if outrage is sometimes morally permissible or obligatory, what seems to be happening is people are equally outraged by all immoral actions, regardless of the severity of the immorality. For example, people seem just as outraged against Palmer (or even moreso) as they would be if he had killed a person, or 20 people, or 200 people.

Second, even if it is correct to be just as outraged against Palmer as many people are, there is still something troubling about the way the Internet and social media are causing people to focus excessively and obsessively on the particular day's cause celebre, and ignore everything all of the other crimes that are going on in the world. This excessive, obsessive focus is feeding our lack of proportion and perspective, and is leading to the harassment, firing, bankruptcy, etc. of people around the world (sometimes people who have legitimately done something wrong, but don't necessarily deserve the level of harassment they receive, occasionally people who don't seem to have actually done anything wrong in the first place, and therefore don't deserve any level of sanction or harassment).

Third, there is a case to be made that outrage in general is not morally permissible, at least if 'outrage' entails burning anger or hatred. As the Dhammapada puts it: "Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal." (Dhp I.5).

Addendum: It seems others have been writing about this as well. 

Blogs vs. Social; or, Old Internet vs. New

I often cross-post Facebook updates to this blog, which has gotten me thinking about the relative merits of social network websites and apps on the one hand, and blogs and the Old Internet on the other.

Even though they are considered unfashionable, blogs provide a much better medium for providing multiple links as references, for presenting sustained argument and analysis, and for facilitating complex discussions between multiple commentators and across blogs.

Discussion boards are also great for long-form dialogue and multi-way discussions.

Social networks should be viewed as an enhancement or addition to blogs and discussion boards, rather than as a total replacement for them. Social network websites and apps seem harder to search and harder to thoroughly scan or scroll, and content is often blocked from the wider Internet through privacy settings. When I do Google searches related to software debugging or gaming, for example, I often turn up discussion board posts and blog posts, but rarely social posts.

In addition, posting content on social websites or apps effectively releases control of the content to the companies which own the websites and apps. Now, there is no reason why a DIY or open source social network couldn't arise and replace the privately owned, for-profit ones, but this has not yet happened, so de facto going social means going corporate, at least for now. This has given rise to the Indie Web movement, with its advocacy of syndicating content to social networks from independently owned and operated blogs and websites. 

In any event, obsession with the new for the sake of the new, together with ever-shortening attention spans, have evidently caused people to look down on blogs and boards, despite their excellent functionality and comparative advantage with respect to some kinds of communication. It's as if every time we get a new tool, people feel compelled to throw out the old ones, instead of just adding the new one (social) to the box beside the others (blogs and boards).

This reminds me of how people have become strangely insensitive to issues of quality and archivability of data (whether audio, visual, or video) with the advent of streaming. I'm not saying that iTunes, Netflix, Amazon or other forms of streaming are bad because of their poorer quality; it's just that people treat streaming as a one-size fits all solution for their data needs, without realizing that there are trade-offs. CDs, DVDs, and BluRay have superior quality and archivability to streaming, and also give the owner greater control over the data, at least in certain respects. For example, with a Netflix subscription, there's no guarantee you'll be able to access the same content tomorrow that you can access today (it's for this reason that I often used to ruefully refer to this service as "Netflux").

At least, with the Indie Web movement, people are aware of some of the problems with social, and starting to do something about it. My dream is to see strong open source social networks, and to see them integrated with blogs, boards, and the other still useful tools of the Internet of Yore.

Preserving Culture in the Internet Age

There's a real risk that the twin forces of corporate (and individual) greed on the one hand and passive indifference on the other are going to doom large swaths of internet history and culture (or--more pessimistically but probably more accurately--of human history and culture) to utmost oblivion. 

To clarify: the corporate side of this dismal duo refers to the politically-connected private interests that are preventing increasing numbers of cultural products from entering the public domain, thus preventing them from being cheaply and efficiently preserved by crowd-sourced projects. The corporations also frequently attempt to claw back cultural products from the public domain; examples here include Milton Bradley's "Monopoly", and [if memory serves] Disney's attempts to assert ownership over elements of the Alice and Wonderland mythos.

The indifference side of the dismal duo simply refers to the fact that most people lose interest in cultural products once references to them have fallen below the top screen of their Facebook or other social media feed. If there is a guiding spirit of our age, it is surely the god of Blind Novelty--or else his cousin, Heedless Forgetfulness.

However, this article profiles the good work being done by the Internet Archive and other kindred projects to counter the two disturbing trends aforementioned. If druthers were to be had in this dreary domain, I would that a few idealistic billionaires part with a handful of millions to put projects like these on cultural and legal terra firma. (And while they're at it, could they please create an endowment for Wikipedia, and also set up an open-source, nonprofit, ad-free social media project? Cheers.)