I once had a guy tell me that no one would ever love me as much as he did, that I wasn’t allowed to get nipple piercings because he liked me better innocent, that he would fix me, and that when I lost my virginity, he needed it to be to him. He told me that if I loved him, I would run away with him, and that despite the fact that we were not dating, nor had we ever, I was not allowed to have a girlfriend- but he was. He was my best friend— the operative word being “was.”
Who is Anna Delvey? Where did Anna Delvey come from? What is Anna Delvey’s mental health diagnosis? These are some of the questions I’ve been asked lately. Well, I don’t know her personally so I can’t diagnose her, but we’ll be looking at some of her personality traits shown in the media (60 Minutes, Netflix, newspapers etc). I want to know from you guys… What do you think? Is Anna Delvey (or Anna Sorokin) a “villain” like she is made out to be or is she an antihero?
Last Christmas, while preparing for a family gathering, I continued the long and arduous process of ensuring every child in my extended family is raised exactly the way I was: surrounded by an inexhaustible supply of Legos.
The children had aged a lot since I first began my endeavor to produce clones of myself. I had already upgraded them from the larger, colorful blocks to the more advanced models and it was getting time to take that next step into functional things with working mechanical parts. For the boys, this was easy: there was no shortage of complex machines with a variety of versatile pieces, marketed to look more action-packed and enticing than a backhoe has any right to be. For the girls, though, I was faced with a different problem entirely.
On one hand, I didn’t want to have the little girls open their presents and think I had accidentally given them something meant for their brother. It’s bad enough that I had forgotten all these children's names and solely referred to them by their height and hair color; I didn’t want to make it look like I had forgotten their genders too. Not to mention if they just ended up trading the presents to a sibling, I would have failed in my attempt to create clones of myself.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to enforce gender roles on these small children. If you look at the Lego products that are marketed toward girls, they’re not very… Lego. They have a strong focus on characters and accessories, and any actual building is typically limited to very simple tables, countertops, and other elements of interior decorating. Something with building versatility or actual mechanical functions was completely out of the question - the closest you got was this “inventor workshop” that was ultiimately little more than a doll representing the concept of invention.
How do the chemical vials and microscope relate to her mechanical work? Who knows. The math on the chalkboard isn’t even actual math; it’s just “A+D = C”. It’s the conceptof algebra. This might be more excusable if it wasn’t coming from Lego; while boys are marketed actual robotics kits, girls are effectively marketed a toy of a toy.
I was raised pretty gender-neutral. My parents got me Polly Pockets and stuff right alongisde my action figures, and it wasn’t until I was much older that I learned about that implicit divide between “girl activities” and “boy activities”. I didn’t want to start pushing these kids into strict gender roles just by trying to get them a gift that was clearly for them, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do.
So, I consulted a Lego Store employee on the matter.
She suggested I get something gender neutral for the girls. While everything mechanical and functional was very explicitly marketed toward boys, she pointed out to me that their Creator line was much more neutral. It had the pieces to build colorful houses and animals and stuff. If the girls liked it, maybe they’d eventually move on to the more advanced things in spite of the masculine marketing. That’s what she did.
I wasn’t entirely happy with it, but it was the best I had. I went with some gender-neutral-yet-overly-childish-looking animal-building kits for the girls, and some running cars and machinery for the boys. The presents went over well; as usual I was totally the cool relative who made everyone else’s presents look lame. The experience was something that stuck with me, though. It was the first time I really came face-to-face with this curious absence not just in Lego’s product line, but in the market in general.
Pink Gears
Lego makes no pink gears.
I mean, yeah, sure, girls don’t have to like pink things. They’re allowed to shop in the whole toy store, not just the Fabled Pink Aisle, and there are plenty of gray and black gears out there should they choose to play with them. But why is there this necessity to sideline femininity if you want to explore these things?
I read an interesting piece recently by a game writer who made the rather poignant statement that sexism comes at her from two directions: in the male-dominated technology field she was expected to pretend to be “one of the guys”, while in the female-dominated publishing field she was expected to be a “proper woman”. I think this highlights the important point: sexism does not favor men or women, but dichotomy - the real losers being the stereotype-breaking people whose interests don’t cleanly fall into either the male/female category. We don’t do much to recognize those who straddle the divide, and this means we get no pink gears.
This is pretty silly, though. There is nothing explicitly masculine about engineering or robotics. In fact, it has some very traditionally feminine elements that I think you could play up into a brilliant marketing angle. Machines can be delicate, intricate, and beautiful. An action-packed piece of boxart showing a fast car skidding across a muddy highway is just as representative of mechanical creation as an elaborate piece of clockwork.
In fact, watch, I’ll come up with a Lego product line right now:
On the low-price end, I went for a hummingbird. I figure it’d come with alt instructions to rebuild it into a dragonfly or butterfly or something, and basically be playing up this idea of turning circular motion from a crank into up-and-down motion to animate wing flapping. Maybe it could even make that conversion twice: a cable going up the stalk being pulled back and forth would be converted back into gear rotation, which would then power the wing flapping. It’d entail enough small parts that you could make some cool stuff with it.
On the mid-tier, I went for a kitten. I figure it’d be built around a pouncing function, its associated muscles rigged up with rubber bands. You could wind it up (maybe an excuse to use a worm screw?) and then hit its tail or something and it could probably clear at least three feet of air. Throw in some alt instructions for a turtle or something that can use the same spring principles for a wind up engine that makes it turtleflop across the ground.
For the highest priced bit, I’d go for a panther. Swap in green gears for pink to make it more special, have lots of sparkly green parts to accent the black. I’m envisioning this being motorized - large felines have a very iconic walk cycle, and I think the right parts could simulate it pretty well. Heck, depending how good its designer is maybe you could even have a secondary motor that will bend its midsection and shift its weight to the side so you can actually steer its movement. Alt instructions would probably be a dolphin or something; instead of a walk cycle it’d just be on wheels and animate its fin/tail movement.
You could market these things in an extremely feminine way. Like, go full Lisa Frank on the fucking box art. They’re pretty and they play up an angle to robotics and creation you don’t see in toys much. And not just that, but it goes all the way up - it’s not just some gateway drug to get girls to buy the trucks and racecars, but rather a whole line of robotics that plays up traditionally feminine elements. Girls could buy it without feeling like they’re sacrificing their femininity to experiment with these interests. Boys would uncomfortably buy it and defend its awesomeness to their friends. It would make so much money.
Companies are apparently afraid of money, though, since this hasn’t happened yet. Well, maybe the truth is a little more complicated than that.
Breaking Patterns
I frequently refer to myself as an Overglorified Fanfiction Author because it’s funny. There’s a lot of humor in the fact that I’m best known for writing a story based off an eight-year-old video game, and calling it “fanfiction” highlights the sheer ridiculousness of the entire situation. When you get down to the specifics, however, the stuff I write isn’t fanfiction - it’s parody.
The distinction is an important one that a lot of people miss when they try to undertake similar projects. There are tons of people who try to do Elder Scrolls-inspired stories that very accurately or realistically chronicle their experiences in the game, yet such stories quickly fade out of existence without you ever hearing about them. Sometimes it’s even by people who really love the source material, but they’re simply not saying anything about it. You saw the same phenomenon in the Homestuck fandom at its apex: hundreds of people coming up with their own “Sburb Groups” of internet friends and chronicling their adventures into the Medium. They saw a formula that worked, and they struck out to imitate it.
I think this is sort of the same mentality that drives gendered marketing. People know it works - products that hit every stereotype of masculinity have an audience among men, and products that hit every stereotype of femininity have an audience among women. So, creators make fanfiction that tries to capitalize off these successes, showing reverent respect and homage toward the companies that have sold better than them.
And you rarely see that proper sense of parody toward these things. Like, you don’t see that drive that makes a creator simultaneously imitate and attack something. It’s baffling, because when this does happen it’s often wildly successful. Who would’ve thought to take the traditionally masculine concept of monsters and zombies and build a line of fashion dolls around it? Who would’ve thought to build a setting and adventure cartoon around traditionally feminine palettes and iconigraphy? These are ideas of parody - attacking the problems or monotony of a concept while simultaneously paying it homage, and it’s something that can generally only be created through a conscious effort to do just that.
People who just try to ignore gender stereotypes alltogether often fall into them anyway. Like a fantasy author who insists his story isn’t just Star Wars with dragons, people tell themselves that they're not going to play their work into gendered stereotypes, but then do it anyway simply because they’ve come to view it as how things work. To make things worse, they don’t even call the resultant work “masculine” or “feminine” - they play into the stereotypes exactly but give it names like “serious”, or “pro-social”. In an attempt to be progressive with their language, they make an implicit statement that women are frivolous and men are antisocial.
It’s something I think you can only really circumvent through intentional parody. You need to find that middleground that sexism attacks and openly start dancing around in it. Mock the work of others; acknowledge the established rules and violate them anyway. You need to be a beacon or weirdness that spurs other people to stand along with you, until in time you have created a bastion where your unconventional tastes are Just Plain Okay.
Market Mercenary
You don’t defeat ideas by criticizing them. You defeat them by outcompeting them.
Far too few people recognize that criticism is a means to an end: you isolate the problems with something so that you can eventually render it powerless or irrelevant.
As I established at the beginning, Lego’s approach to gendered marketing left me without a satisfactory solution in my attempts to build a clone army. I’m probably not the only one who feels this way. There is an untapped money mine here while creators continue to pick away at the long-hollow ridges at each end of the gender spectrum.
This isn’t just something that affects big companies. If you’re a creator, stop making fanfiction and start making parody. Be honest with yourself - no matter how original you think your work is, you’re paying homage to something you like. Recognize this, and poke a little fun at it instead. Address your biggest criticism. Combine it with something else you like. Do something no one else would ever think of doing. Don’t think it will work? Well it’ll definitely work better than a straight-up rehash of something else.
The worst thing you can do is nothing new. Remember that the next time you make your gears gray.
Still working on the stuff I’m supposed to be doing! But I’m reblogging this old post since the holidays are coming up, and I (along with probably many others) have been doing this same gift-buying dance yet again.
Credit where credit’s due: in the years since writing this, Lego has branched out their female-targeted product lines and now holds about as much real estate in the Pink Aisle as any of the heavy-hitters. They’re still not really pushing advanced mechanical models or selling things so cool that even boys want them, but they have some solid adventure- and superhero-based themes. There are entire sets that don’t contain a single piece of furniture!
A stronger shoutout goes to Nerf’s Rebelle line, which has really come into its own since 2013 when I wrote this. Early on it was just a handful of standard Nerf designs spruced up with pink and flowers, but it’s since moved into having a strong focus on bows and smallarms, some of which have rather neat designs that are not available on any other current product (see: the CornerSight, with at least one review boasting that the recipient’s brothers were now jealous). This isn’t just a matter of “girls can get cool things too” - it’s an opportunity for companies like Nerf to explore elegant and specialized designs that would be difficult to market under the traditional “safety orange and mechanical” look. I mean, let’s be honest: the sort of boys who are into bows probably don’twant something that looks like a motorcycle.
Like I emphasized in the original post, the creation of products like this isn’t just about gender equality: these things make money. Whether you’re talking about gender in toys, or genre in games, or structure in fiction, the fact is that very few people are completely satisfied with the current “norms”. There will be girls who want to pretend they are Katniss without looking like they’re carrying a motorcycle, just like there will be RPG fans who love RPGs but wish they could try exercising diplomacy with the monster tribes they’re mowing down, or fantasy fans who can identify the elements of the Hero’s Journey so fluently that the entire structure has become dull. While all the proven formulas are certainly proven, everyone has a certain way they want to see them broken. In many cases, people might not even know how much they want it until they see it in front of them, making the little girl look at the Lego box and say “yes… I want to build that goddamn robot cat”. Except without the “goddamn”, because she’s twelve.
In short: if you make those pink gears, and you love and understand gears enough to do it well, you’re bound to find an audience. And while some literalpink gears would no doubt bring more women into tech fields than a Barbie doll holding a laptop will, this advice extrapolates to all manner of absences in the market. If you can take something out there and make it just a little different according to your personal criticisms or a demand you see, you can potentially reach a lot of people who share your critique.
I vaguely remember hearing about the Rebelle line. Of course, I can see the complaints about the Cornersight from people who don’t know what they’re talking about. “Oh, sure, put a mirror on the girl’s gun, so she can check her makuep because she’s a girl. Sexist mysogyny blah blah blah”
I remember seeing a video a while ago that some parents took of their girl saying something like “pink is bad becasue they want to say all this stuff is for girls, and ‘they’ want me to not play with the boy stuff” And that was just so surreal. I think some people just have this attitude that the color pink is the perpetrator in an insidious plot to control women. I just don’t understand.
I think if anyone actually fielded that criticism of Nerf’s Cornersight, my response to them would be “so what?”. A gun you can check your makeup in is like a Swiss army knife simultaneously made manlier andmore effeminate. Their criticism might be warranted if it was a cheap Nerf gun with a superfluous makeup kit on the side, but the whole Rebelle line is solid and functional.
I needed some Nerf weapons for a tabletop game I DMed recently (long story), and it gave me an opportunity to try a bunch out. Compared to most Nerf weapons, I’d actually say the Rebelle line contains much less stuff that is vestigial to its core function. The mechanical, 90s-punk design is foregone in favor of a sleeker, ergonomic build, replacing all the boxy fake mechanics with airy aesthetic choices (compare Nerf’s Thunderbow to their Arrow Revolution). If we’re criticizing non-gun elements slapped on for gender appeal, we should be more offended by all the fake pistons and bolts that line most Nerf weapons to make them more “manly”.
The stigma around pink stuff stems from the fact that - in many cases - it is a legitimately inferior product. When people become too dedicated to the idea that ”pink is for girls”, it means companies can market an inferior or overpriced product and people will stillbuy it if there is nothing better being sold “for girls”. The reason I’m praising Rebelle so much is because it takes the feminine design and fucking delivers. Not only do the weapons have seemingly equal quality to Nerf’s other products (at least from what I’ve seen), but those two bows I linked up there are sold at the exact same price point.
By contrast, the reason I’m so critical of Lego’s female-targeted products is because they don’t have the same level of functionality as the male-targeted ones. They’re getting better, and the new sets have much more in the way of moving parts and creative piece usage (and I kind of want some of the Elves stuff, maybe), but it’s still very much a “gateway drug” to advanced Lego sets, whereas Rebelle delivers a well-rounded arsenal and only stops short of fully-automatic weapons (which I view as understandable, given the whole “elegant spy” aesthetic).
Last Christmas, while preparing for a family gathering, I continued the long and arduous process of ensuring every child in my extended family is raised exactly the way I was: surrounded by an inexhaustible supply of Legos.
The children had aged a lot since I first began my endeavor to produce clones of myself. I had already upgraded them from the larger, colorful blocks to the more advanced models and it was getting time to take that next step into functional things with working mechanical parts. For the boys, this was easy: there was no shortage of complex machines with a variety of versatile pieces, marketed to look more action-packed and enticing than a backhoe has any right to be. For the girls, though, I was faced with a different problem entirely.
On one hand, I didn’t want to have the little girls open their presents and think I had accidentally given them something meant for their brother. It’s bad enough that I had forgotten all these children's names and solely referred to them by their height and hair color; I didn’t want to make it look like I had forgotten their genders too. Not to mention if they just ended up trading the presents to a sibling, I would have failed in my attempt to create clones of myself.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to enforce gender roles on these small children. If you look at the Lego products that are marketed toward girls, they’re not very… Lego. They have a strong focus on characters and accessories, and any actual building is typically limited to very simple tables, countertops, and other elements of interior decorating. Something with building versatility or actual mechanical functions was completely out of the question - the closest you got was this “inventor workshop” that was ultiimately little more than a doll representing the concept of invention.
How do the chemical vials and microscope relate to her mechanical work? Who knows. The math on the chalkboard isn’t even actual math; it’s just “A+D = C”. It’s the conceptof algebra. This might be more excusable if it wasn’t coming from Lego; while boys are marketed actual robotics kits, girls are effectively marketed a toy of a toy.
I was raised pretty gender-neutral. My parents got me Polly Pockets and stuff right alongisde my action figures, and it wasn’t until I was much older that I learned about that implicit divide between “girl activities” and “boy activities”. I didn’t want to start pushing these kids into strict gender roles just by trying to get them a gift that was clearly for them, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do.
So, I consulted a Lego Store employee on the matter.
She suggested I get something gender neutral for the girls. While everything mechanical and functional was very explicitly marketed toward boys, she pointed out to me that their Creator line was much more neutral. It had the pieces to build colorful houses and animals and stuff. If the girls liked it, maybe they’d eventually move on to the more advanced things in spite of the masculine marketing. That’s what she did.
I wasn’t entirely happy with it, but it was the best I had. I went with some gender-neutral-yet-overly-childish-looking animal-building kits for the girls, and some running cars and machinery for the boys. The presents went over well; as usual I was totally the cool relative who made everyone else’s presents look lame. The experience was something that stuck with me, though. It was the first time I really came face-to-face with this curious absence not just in Lego’s product line, but in the market in general.
Pink Gears
Lego makes no pink gears.
I mean, yeah, sure, girls don’t have to like pink things. They’re allowed to shop in the whole toy store, not just the Fabled Pink Aisle, and there are plenty of gray and black gears out there should they choose to play with them. But why is there this necessity to sideline femininity if you want to explore these things?
I read an interesting piece recently by a game writer who made the rather poignant statement that sexism comes at her from two directions: in the male-dominated technology field she was expected to pretend to be “one of the guys”, while in the female-dominated publishing field she was expected to be a “proper woman”. I think this highlights the important point: sexism does not favor men or women, but dichotomy - the real losers being the stereotype-breaking people whose interests don’t cleanly fall into either the male/female category. We don’t do much to recognize those who straddle the divide, and this means we get no pink gears.
This is pretty silly, though. There is nothing explicitly masculine about engineering or robotics. In fact, it has some very traditionally feminine elements that I think you could play up into a brilliant marketing angle. Machines can be delicate, intricate, and beautiful. An action-packed piece of boxart showing a fast car skidding across a muddy highway is just as representative of mechanical creation as an elaborate piece of clockwork.
In fact, watch, I’ll come up with a Lego product line right now:
On the low-price end, I went for a hummingbird. I figure it’d come with alt instructions to rebuild it into a dragonfly or butterfly or something, and basically be playing up this idea of turning circular motion from a crank into up-and-down motion to animate wing flapping. Maybe it could even make that conversion twice: a cable going up the stalk being pulled back and forth would be converted back into gear rotation, which would then power the wing flapping. It’d entail enough small parts that you could make some cool stuff with it.
On the mid-tier, I went for a kitten. I figure it’d be built around a pouncing function, its associated muscles rigged up with rubber bands. You could wind it up (maybe an excuse to use a worm screw?) and then hit its tail or something and it could probably clear at least three feet of air. Throw in some alt instructions for a turtle or something that can use the same spring principles for a wind up engine that makes it turtleflop across the ground.
For the highest priced bit, I’d go for a panther. Swap in green gears for pink to make it more special, have lots of sparkly green parts to accent the black. I’m envisioning this being motorized - large felines have a very iconic walk cycle, and I think the right parts could simulate it pretty well. Heck, depending how good its designer is maybe you could even have a secondary motor that will bend its midsection and shift its weight to the side so you can actually steer its movement. Alt instructions would probably be a dolphin or something; instead of a walk cycle it’d just be on wheels and animate its fin/tail movement.
You could market these things in an extremely feminine way. Like, go full Lisa Frank on the fucking box art. They’re pretty and they play up an angle to robotics and creation you don’t see in toys much. And not just that, but it goes all the way up - it’s not just some gateway drug to get girls to buy the trucks and racecars, but rather a whole line of robotics that plays up traditionally feminine elements. Girls could buy it without feeling like they’re sacrificing their femininity to experiment with these interests. Boys would uncomfortably buy it and defend its awesomeness to their friends. It would make so much money.
Companies are apparently afraid of money, though, since this hasn’t happened yet. Well, maybe the truth is a little more complicated than that.
Breaking Patterns
I frequently refer to myself as an Overglorified Fanfiction Author because it’s funny. There’s a lot of humor in the fact that I’m best known for writing a story based off an eight-year-old video game, and calling it “fanfiction” highlights the sheer ridiculousness of the entire situation. When you get down to the specifics, however, the stuff I write isn’t fanfiction - it’s parody.
The distinction is an important one that a lot of people miss when they try to undertake similar projects. There are tons of people who try to do Elder Scrolls-inspired stories that very accurately or realistically chronicle their experiences in the game, yet such stories quickly fade out of existence without you ever hearing about them. Sometimes it’s even by people who really love the source material, but they’re simply not saying anything about it. You saw the same phenomenon in the Homestuck fandom at its apex: hundreds of people coming up with their own “Sburb Groups” of internet friends and chronicling their adventures into the Medium. They saw a formula that worked, and they struck out to imitate it.
I think this is sort of the same mentality that drives gendered marketing. People know it works - products that hit every stereotype of masculinity have an audience among men, and products that hit every stereotype of femininity have an audience among women. So, creators make fanfiction that tries to capitalize off these successes, showing reverent respect and homage toward the companies that have sold better than them.
And you rarely see that proper sense of parody toward these things. Like, you don’t see that drive that makes a creator simultaneously imitate and attack something. It’s baffling, because when this does happen it’s often wildly successful. Who would’ve thought to take the traditionally masculine concept of monsters and zombies and build a line of fashion dolls around it? Who would’ve thought to build a setting and adventure cartoon around traditionally feminine palettes and iconigraphy? These are ideas of parody - attacking the problems or monotony of a concept while simultaneously paying it homage, and it’s something that can generally only be created through a conscious effort to do just that.
People who just try to ignore gender stereotypes alltogether often fall into them anyway. Like a fantasy author who insists his story isn’t just Star Wars with dragons, people tell themselves that they're not going to play their work into gendered stereotypes, but then do it anyway simply because they’ve come to view it as how things work. To make things worse, they don’t even call the resultant work “masculine” or “feminine” - they play into the stereotypes exactly but give it names like “serious”, or “pro-social”. In an attempt to be progressive with their language, they make an implicit statement that women are frivolous and men are antisocial.
It’s something I think you can only really circumvent through intentional parody. You need to find that middleground that sexism attacks and openly start dancing around in it. Mock the work of others; acknowledge the established rules and violate them anyway. You need to be a beacon or weirdness that spurs other people to stand along with you, until in time you have created a bastion where your unconventional tastes are Just Plain Okay.
Market Mercenary
You don’t defeat ideas by criticizing them. You defeat them by outcompeting them.
Far too few people recognize that criticism is a means to an end: you isolate the problems with something so that you can eventually render it powerless or irrelevant.
As I established at the beginning, Lego’s approach to gendered marketing left me without a satisfactory solution in my attempts to build a clone army. I’m probably not the only one who feels this way. There is an untapped money mine here while creators continue to pick away at the long-hollow ridges at each end of the gender spectrum.
This isn’t just something that affects big companies. If you’re a creator, stop making fanfiction and start making parody. Be honest with yourself - no matter how original you think your work is, you’re paying homage to something you like. Recognize this, and poke a little fun at it instead. Address your biggest criticism. Combine it with something else you like. Do something no one else would ever think of doing. Don’t think it will work? Well it’ll definitely work better than a straight-up rehash of something else.
The worst thing you can do is nothing new. Remember that the next time you make your gears gray.
Still working on the stuff I’m supposed to be doing! But I’m reblogging this old post since the holidays are coming up, and I (along with probably many others) have been doing this same gift-buying dance yet again.
Credit where credit’s due: in the years since writing this, Lego has branched out their female-targeted product lines and now holds about as much real estate in the Pink Aisle as any of the heavy-hitters. They’re still not really pushing advanced mechanical models or selling things so cool that even boys want them, but they have some solid adventure- and superhero-based themes. There are entire sets that don’t contain a single piece of furniture!
A stronger shoutout goes to Nerf’s Rebelle line, which has really come into its own since 2013 when I wrote this. Early on it was just a handful of standard Nerf designs spruced up with pink and flowers, but it’s since moved into having a strong focus on bows and smallarms, some of which have rather neat designs that are not available on any other current product (see: the CornerSight, with at least one review boasting that the recipient’s brothers were now jealous). This isn’t just a matter of “girls can get cool things too” - it’s an opportunity for companies like Nerf to explore elegant and specialized designs that would be difficult to market under the traditional “safety orange and mechanical” look. I mean, let’s be honest: the sort of boys who are into bows probably don’twant something that looks like a motorcycle.
Like I emphasized in the original post, the creation of products like this isn’t just about gender equality: these things make money. Whether you’re talking about gender in toys, or genre in games, or structure in fiction, the fact is that very few people are completely satisfied with the current “norms”. There will be girls who want to pretend they are Katniss without looking like they’re carrying a motorcycle, just like there will be RPG fans who love RPGs but wish they could try exercising diplomacy with the monster tribes they’re mowing down, or fantasy fans who can identify the elements of the Hero’s Journey so fluently that the entire structure has become dull. While all the proven formulas are certainly proven, everyone has a certain way they want to see them broken. In many cases, people might not even know how much they want it until they see it in front of them, making the little girl look at the Lego box and say “yes… I want to build that goddamn robot cat”. Except without the “goddamn”, because she’s twelve.
In short: if you make those pink gears, and you love and understand gears enough to do it well, you’re bound to find an audience. And while some literalpink gears would no doubt bring more women into tech fields than a Barbie doll holding a laptop will, this advice extrapolates to all manner of absences in the market. If you can take something out there and make it just a little different according to your personal criticisms or a demand you see, you can potentially reach a lot of people who share your critique.
I get the sense you’re too eager to dismiss intent when intent is a fundamental component to the legal system in USA. Check youtube for a video titled “Rep. Gowdy Questions FBI Director Comey ”, it should be under 7 minutes long, but the lawmaker explains why intent has to be examined as evidence. In a different video, he brings up the frequency in ignorance being used as an excuse to avoid responsibility (“I didn’t KNOW I wasn’t supposed to kill these people!”).
I didn’t mean for what I was saying to extrapolate to issues of legal persecution! You weren’t the only one to criticize what I was saying from a legal perspective, though. I guess I should’ve made it more clear in my post that I was talking about political discourse and argument - especially if I’m going to just be linking the previous posts rather than leaving the massive reply-tower.
When you’re dealing with crime and punishment, you have a transgression that has alreadyoccurred and are trying to either prevent it from happening again or transfer resources in a way that makes up for the harm (Lawpixels’ reblog outlines this very well, and this response is sort of defending myself to them too). The style and magnitude of correctional action required to dissuade repeat incidents is going to vastly differ between someone who, say, commits murder for revenge versus someone who commits manslaughter by rolling a bowling ball off their balcony, meaning intent plays a large role in determining what response is necessary.
When you’re talking about politics, though, there is no criminal behavior occurring. Someone is engaging in an ongoing action (or inaction) that you believe is causing harm, and - since what they’re doing isn’t wrong in any legal sense - your goal is essentially to convince them that it’s a bad idea. I’d say it’s more equatable to trying to convince a business partner that they’re taking the company in the wrong direction. It doesn’t matter whether they’re intentionally trying to elicit the action’s outcome or if they just haven’t thought it through: in both cases, you’re still following the same structure of explaining “this is what will happen” and “this is why it’s bad”.
I can offer you a very good reason to differentiate between them: What you’d need to do to change their behavior is wildly different. […]
That’s sort of the belief I am calling into question, though, because I’m inclined to say that the difference in tactics required to dissuade someone from an action holds little relation to the line we draw between “reckless allies” and “scheming enemies”. Sometimes there are people who directly act against us, yet are driven by simple misinformation and biased experiences that can be easily addressed. Other times, there are people who are trying their hardest to help us, yet adamantly support counterproductive tactics and will take any criticism of their approaches as a personal affront. It’s a very person-by-person thing, where everyone is inadvertently causing us problems for their own unique reasons, independently of whether or not they see themselves as “on our side”.
At best, someone who shares more views with you mightbe easier to persuade, since you may only need to convince them that their actions will lead to a particular outcome, as opposed to also convincing them that outcome is actually bad. However, consider that the inverse is also true: someone who is actively opposing you already knows they are facilitating a particular outcome, and all you have to do is convince them that it’s bad. Even that division isn’t consistent, though, as there are also people “on your side” who have very different views about what constitutes a positive/negative outcome, as well as people “against you” who share your concept of right/wrong but are mistaken about what sort of outcome their tactics will lead to.
I’m not claiming that there is a single tactic that will dissuade someone from a harmful action regardless of whether they are your “on your side” or “against you”, but rather, that the tactics required for any specific individual hold little if any correlation with that individual’s supposed allegiance.
The way I see it, far too many people simplify allegiance into a rigid binary of “enemies” who are trying to harm us deserve our vitriol and “allies” who are trying to help us deserve our endorsement. Not only does this view let false-flaggers and other harmful elements within a person’s group operate unhindered, but it removes the person’s ability to win over even the easiest-to-convert opponents. The entire ally/enemy dichotomy as we currently have it feels almost like a trap: we will defend counterproductive allies because they’re "well-intentioned” or “on our side”, and forego benign communication with opponents because they’re “trying to hurt us” or “are the enemy”. Or, keeping with what I’m saying, it might be more accurate to say this mentality isa trap, regardless of the believer’s intent.
That’s not to say that dissuading someone from harmful action is always easy. Like you got at in your reblog, there are some people who see outright harming others as a viable solution to problems, and there’s probably some deep-seated and hard-to-address issue that leads them to that belief. But this is one of the reasons why I think it’s so important to ignore whether someone is “on your side” or “against you”: these labels don’t really denote how easily someone can be won over or what sort of tactics will work on them the best. In many cases, a person who actively opposes you is doing so based on simple misinformation and you can spur a total flip with little effort at all (especially when it comes to issues of bigotry, in my experience). Other times, a person who genuinely thinks they are serving your best interests is going to be the most difficult, damaging, and steadfast opponent you ever face. As far as I can see, there’s really no reason to even recognize declared allegiance as a concept. The determinant of allegiance should be what outcomes an individual facilitates.
Yesterday someone linked me to an old Cryptome post essentially outlining tactics for stopping activists without ever being recognized as their enemy. I have no idea who wrote it, or how often these tactics are actually employed, but the whole thing is a pretty interesting read in that every tactic it describes is something we’d readily dismiss as unconscious or non-directed behavior. This part in particular, though, really hits home the point about allegiance:
In some situations, to get control, the agent will tell the activist:
“You’re dividing the movement.”
This invites guilty feelings. Many people can be controlled by guilt. The agents begin relationships with activists behind a well-developed mask of “dedication to the cause.” […] It’s amazing how far agents can go in manipulating an activist because the activist will constantly make excuses for the agent who regularly declares their dedication to the cause. Even if they do, occasionally, suspect the agent, they will pull the wool over their own eyes by rationalizing: “they did that unconsciously… they didn’t really mean it… I can help them by being forgiving and accepting ” and so on and so forth.
(emphasis mine)
I’m not saying that we should be constantly suspicious that everyone is a false-flagging agent trying to ram our political groups and movements in the ground. Rather, I’m saying that we should avoid creating constructs that outright facilitate these sort of tactics. People who cause problems while claiming to share our allegiances should be viewed in the same light as those openly against us, and subject to the exact same dissuasion tactics we would show them if they had declared themselves our opponent.
That’s not to say they should be treated with malice, of course - unless you genuinely believe that to be an effective tactic in dissuading problematic behavior. I’d personally say it’s not.
“I don’t see any reason to differentiate between the scheming people…and the purely uniformed” Are you saying we shouldn’t differentiate between intentional and reckless action? It’s the difference between acting to bring about a specific consequence and acting without knowledge or care of what may happen.
I guess it’s a kind of strange position to take, but yeah. That’s basically what I’m saying.
If two people are engaging in the exact same action, one out of carelessness/apathy and the other out of a genuine desire to bring about that action’s consequences, they’re stillboth facilitating the same outcome. Neither person is causing more or less harm than the other. Even the tactics for dissuading them are basically the same: you try to convince them that their actions are bringing about an outcome they will not like. The exact arguments needed to convince them of this might vary, but they vary between everyone.
The distinction between “scheming” and “reckless” makes it seem as though problems are somehow less serious when they’re caused by well-intentioned people who aren’t actively trying to cause problems, which isn’t at all true: a problem’s seriousness pivots on the magnitude of the negative outcomes it causes. Worse yet, this division makes it seem as though scheming people aren’t well-intentioned - treating it like they’re driven purely by a desire to cause us harm rather than because they think their actions will bring about better outcomes - a mindview which inhibits our ability to understand and influence them. At least from my perspective, the difference between these two groups seems utterly illusory, and feels like it exists solely to inhibit our ability to solve problems.
It’s scary, I think, that we have concepts of “on our side” and “against us” that are separate from “helping us” and “causing us problems”. I guess a lot of people would say that it is cruel to treat someone as your enemy for purely accidental behavior, but I take that more as a sign that our treatment of perceived “enemies” is overly hostile, probably to the point of being counterproductive. In the end, “enemies” are just people performing actions you disagree with, no different from perceived “allies” who do the same. And no matter what label you’ve given them, you should be responding with whatever tactic is most likely to stop the harmful behavior.
This kind of assumes they’re making fully aware, conscious decisions.
So often they’ll just go off half-cocked without considering the consequences, and its cause they’re more interested in their own peace of mind than advancing the goals of the people they’re championing. It’s like someone upset about animal’s rights violations burning down a PETA building. They can rationalise it, but it really just makes them, and all their fellows in the movement, look like crazy people. […]
I didn’t mean to imply everyone’s decisions were necessarily well-thought-out! It’s more that I don’t see any reason to differentiate between the scheming people who go into things with a mentality of “I need to burn down this building to make this activist group look dangerous” and the purely uninformed people who go into things with a mentality of “I need to burn down this building to show how serious we are and help our cause”. It’s not as though one of these people has committed a greater or lesser wrongdoing than the other. Both are simply individuals whose actions (or inaction) lead to negative outcomes.
The way I see it, most people ultimately want the same things. The Green Party and far right both want a healthy and livable planet 50 years from now - the far right simply thinks that will occur on its own without regulation. Racists and non-racists both want safe living conditions for the maximum number of people - racists just believe race to be a reliable predictor of criminality. A lot of line-crossing activism fails right off the bat because we wrongly assume our opponents are operating off different goals than us, rather than simply seeing viability in different tactics (asking someone who opposes environmental regulation “why do you want to destroy the environment”, for example, just reveals you have no comprehension of their position). When you start to see your opponents as nothing more than people who pursue tactics counterproductive to their goals, they’re not any different from the people on your own “side” who go about things in counterproductive ways. To defend one group’s counterproductivity as being less of a problem is nothing more than a defense of counterproductive behavior.
That’s why I don’t like thinking of the “careless, emotional, or uninformed” people who facilitate unfavorable outcomes as being a different group than the people who facilitate the outcomes more intentionally and tactically. They’re both just people we believe to be engaging in actions that will lead to bad outcomes, and we try to dissuade them by showing evidence that our prediction is true. Someone who can get their negative-outcome actions to go uncriticized on the basis that they’re “on your side” is nothing more than an extra-dangerous opponent, and someone who convinces you to attack and stigmatize misinformed people because they’re “on the wrong side” is nothing more than an extra-dangerous manipulator.
At least that’s how I see it. If other people reply and disagree, there’s at least a 50% chance Tumblr’s coding will show their comment in the notes of this post.
One one level, it’s because I just really enjoy the concepts and ramifications anonymity - which by extension makes me one of the disconcertingly small number of creators who can maintain a positive relationship with 4chan and the other Anon Cultures. On another level, though, it’s a professional interest: anonymity is very important to anyone who deals with crowds, public opinion, and data gathering. Statistically speaking, the responses people give when others are watching and judging them tend to be very different than the responses people give under the veil of anonymity.
However, the other thing I like to talk about on this blog is social manipulation. In all my discussions of anonymity, there’s still one topic I haven’t really touched on very much: how do you control anonymous people?
Anonymity as a data gathering tool is well and fine, but one of the big fears people have of 4chan and similar cultures is their seemingly uncontrollable, chaotic nature. With 4chan in particular, popular culture knows them largely by their external actions - 4chan raids, 4chan harassment, 4chan hacktivists, etc. Content creators especially seem pretty clueless when it comes to actually exhibiting control over anonymous figures - which is strange because, like I’ve said before, it's not complicated. It’s really kind of confusing how people can be so bad at it.
So, in this post I’m going to more or less just talk about how to control anons. To understand the techniques, though, we have to get into a bit of psychology and history.
Put on your psychologist scarves, kids. We’re gonna talk about brains.
Crime and Punishment
Before I get into the thick of this, the first thing you have to understand is the difference between reinforcement and punishment.
The concept is pretty simple. The idea behind reinforcement is that someone receives a reward for behaving in a certain way, which encourages them to behave that way more frequently. It can be a positive reinforcement (giving them something they want, like a cupcake) or a negative reinforcement (taking away something they dislike, like an annoying singer), but in both cases it leaves them better off than they were.
Punishment is the opposite. Someone faces consequences for behaving a certain way, and this discourages them from doing it again. Like with reinforcement, punishment can be either positive (someone sings annoyingly until you leave) or negative (they take away your cupcake). The common trend is simply that it leaves you worse off than you were before. You fear the punishment happening to you, and this causes you to act a certain way.
Our culture has a very large emphasis on punishment. On some level, this is an institutionalized thing we recognize and accept - we know and approve of the fact that people get charged money for driving recklessly, or will be locked away from people if they physically harm someone else. There are a lot of other types of punishment that are used to control behavior, though, which we tend to overlook.
For instance: social ostracization. We have very strict and complicated rules governing everything from eye contact to the appropriate progression of discussion topics. If someone violates these rules, it’s not a crime, but we still try to make them get hurt a little. For things like inappropriate conversation progression or eye contact, they’ll be accused of obsession with a topic, or their sexuality will be called into question in a way that makes them uncomfortable. In more serious cases of someone violating norms in a way we disapprove of, we will inflict viral misinformation against them - this is where you see stuff like slander and decontextualized quotes used to harm someone’s reputation or career. At this point, you’re usually not trying to discourage that person’s behavior - you’re trying to make an example out of them, and show others the cost of violating your beliefs of how people should act.
Rape is another punishment that is pretty widely accepted in our culture. If you go to prison, for example, it’s taken for granted that you’re going to get raped. People don’t complain about this a lot, probably because they recognize that prison on its own looks like a pretty good deal for a lot of people - it’s a warm place to sleep and three state-funded meals a day. The fear of rape is regarded as one of the things that makes prison an effective punishment. You also see this fear of rape used in politics - any time a conservative politician uses the classic “it was her fault for dressing that way” line, he’s establishing rape as a de-facto punishment someone incurs for violating what he sees as an appropriate dress code. It’s effectively an attempt to weaponize rape as punishment.
Even death is a pretty common punishment in our culture. Like, even outside arguments of capital punishment, we are taught that you simply don’t walk certain places at night, or reach into your pockets in the wrong way, or make any sudden movements when a cop pulls you over, or things like that. We recognize that, yes, if you do these things then you're probably going to die. Like rape, it’s also something that’s been politicized in the past - if you’ve ever read the beautifully dated “Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle”, the comic’s whole premise is that if you’re gay you will die. It’s not used as a statement of “we should do something about HIV”, but instead as a political statement that you really shouldn’t be gay. In general, our culture is pretty okay with death as long as the person was doing something we disapprove of.
And like… sometimes, I just like to think about how fucked up and dangerous our entire culture would seem to an alien visitor.
Anyway, the point here is that our culture is utterly terrifying. Outside of the written rules, we have a complex web of social standards and personal beliefs that are enforced through vigilante justice. Good and bad are irrelevant - you just can’t piss off the wrong people, or they’ll come and get you. However, there’s always been one defense to this: anonymity.
One of the earlier forms of this was confessionals in the Catholic church. People who committed a mortal sin would confidentially tell it to a clergyman who offered them ways to seek absolution without the clergyman judging or hating them. Later on, you also saw the concept of anonymous crime tipping emerge - letting people report a crime in a way that the criminals could not trace it back to them. In both cases, anonymity was being used as a way to encourage positive behavior by inhibitingproblematic people who would enforce punishments on it. The tipper or confessor could still be rewarded with the positive feelings of making amends for their wrongdoing or inhibiting a crime, but they were less likely to be punished for it.
In some ways, this had a dark side: it’s where we got things like the magazine-clipping ransom letter. In other ways, it got romanticized: we saw fiction stories of superheroes concealing their identity so that criminals could not attack them or their families at home. In all cases, though, anonymity came about as a defense against punishment.
With the advent of the internet, it became easier than ever to conceal your identity. You might be a lowly fry cook by day, but by night you were just a name on a forum like everyone else. At school you might get beat up for being a nerd, but at home you were a Level 50 Paladin in your MMO guild. Nobody could hurt you for what you were or did while wearing a mask.
On top of this, people discovered that they could have their identity completely concealed to the point of not even having a persistent online name, and it would still be psychologically rewarding to interact with people. Under complete anonymity, people could act and take chances without even the fear that their beloved Level 50 Paladin would be punished for it in their stead.
In a hostile and punishment-driven world where you could have all your career aspirations permanently destroyed by holding a conversation topic for a sentence too long, people realized that they could be invincible. They just needed to put on a mask.
Fighting Faceless
As long as there is punishment, there will be anonymity. The very act of punishment gives people two options: they can meet the punisher’s demands, or they can learn to defend against it. Anonymity represents the latter: people weakening the effectiveness of punishment. For better or for worse, an anonymous individual can act without personally suffering negative consequences.
This, I think, is where most people falter in their attempts to fight anons. Anonymity is a defense against punishment. They are still susceptible to everything else.
For a lot of people, this can be a kind of disconcerting experience as they realize exactly how much they rely on threats and coercion to control others. Sometimes, this is a very big sign you are doing something wrong - if you rely on bullying or slander to control others, you will have a very hard time controlling an anon culture. Other times, it’s a bit more innocuous - if you rely on institutional laws like DMCA, the inability to punish people in an anon culture who violate it can be frustrating.
External punishments still affect them. You can threaten to hurt someone an anon cares about, or destroy something they love - all the standard villain tactics that work against masked superheroes also carry over here pretty well. Of course, this is also a really stupid thing to do, since it provides them with positive reinforcement in the form of moral justification.
This highlights an important point, though: moral justification does affect them. Feeling like they made a positive difference affects them. Heck, any kind of positivity or reward affect them.
Like I mentioned above, anonymity is a defense against punishment, and everything that isn’t punishment is fair game. You can reinforce positive behavior, evoke feelings of righteousness, reward them with things they want, and even influence them with empathy and camaraderie. You can control them or stop them or anything like that, and it’s really not that hard. Most people outside of me wouldn’t even call this “manipulation”. It's kindness. They’re incredibly susceptible to it.
The Big Twist
So, you know all that stuff I just wrote about controlling anons? It also works on normal people. In fact, it works better than coercion.
Like I mentioned earlier, we often don’t recognize the degree to which we rely on fear and punishment as a culture. We’re accustomed to it, and those of us lucky enough to be born with social aptitude can navigate these complex interpersonal relationships with relative comfort. Someone’s reactions and strategies in their first encounter with an anon culture can be a telling indicator of how much said person relies on punishment - or even the ways in which they rely on punishment. It can be a humbling experience, having a branch of manipulation tactics suddenly cut off from you, but you become more powerful because of it.
Anonymity and similar defenses against punishment are an ingrained part of our culture that will not be going away any time soon, and your success these days will largely depend on your ability to adapt to them. Services like Steam, for example, are viable in the modern age because they try to combat the unpunishable forces of piracy by providing better service than the pirates can. They rely on reinforcement rather than punishment, and it works. Meanwhile, companies that try to enforce punishments slowly dry up and die.
And not only is it economically non-viable, but a reliance on coercion can be dangerous and self-deceptive. As I said at the very beginning, the opinions people present around others differ from the opinions they present under the veil of anonymity, and their actual habits are better reflected by the latter. Someone might share your political beliefs when they see how you treat people who disagree with you, for example, but you have no idea what that person is doing when they enter a voting booth and gain their anonymity. If they are siding with you out of fear, you can bet they’re secretly fighting you when consequences are removed. Thanks to the very existence of anonymity, all coercion does is obscure your knowledge of who’s on your side and who isn’t. When the masks are on, the rules are different.
I think that’s what makes anon cultures so interesting to me. For all their depravedness and hostility, they largely represent a place in which punishment is less effective. The cultural differences that emerge from that are neat - not entirely positive, nor entirely negative, but certainly different. I think the world would benefit from more people learning the techniques to effectively control anons, because they carry over into about everything. People in an anon culture are no different from normal people, other than being more resistant to the cheapest of manipulation strategies.
That’s not to say I think anonymity creates the end-all perfect culture or anything like that, but it’s definitely an interesting step that is worth learning from. In particular it’s important to know how to respond to it, since elements and effects of of anonymity are only becoming more prevalent as time goes on.
Anonymity and the idea of consequence-free social interaction might be be scary, but as long as you understand how it works, it’s relatively harmless and there’s nothing to be afraid of. If nothing else, it’s simpler and safer than the world you’re living in now.
I don’t usually talk about politics, but I’m reblogging this old post due to its relevance to current events.
Like I explain above, our culture relies very heavily on social punishments. We often get people to do what we want through threats of ostracization, threats of placing derogatory labels, or even threats against someone’s employment status or social connections. However, anonymity exists as a defense against punishment. When anonymity is granted, punishments cannot be executed against the anonymous party, and the threat of punishment therefore carries no coercive value. If anything, the attempted threat may lead the anonymous party to act against the manipulator out of spite.
Places like 4chan are an example of what happens when you build an entire culture around anonymity, but anonymity exists in many other places to a lesser degree. A very important one we tend to forget about is public elections.
I live in a guaranteed blue state. I’ll readily admit I voted for Jill Stein this election because 1.) I agree with her political views and 2.) my state’s ten electoral votes are going to the democrats either way, so the only way my vote can make a difference is by trying to help my favored party get the 5% they need for federal funding. The only thing I could’ve done to further influence this election was write a guide on how to control anonymous people, which I did.If you tried to influence people’s voting decisions using the sort of tactics that anonymity provides a defense against, a failure to adequately influence those people is your fault. There is no other way to put it.
Something being your fault isn’t bad. It means you have control over it, and that - even if you use that control poorly - your decisions canmake a difference. Yet already, I’m seeing a lot of people blaming the election outcome on things completely outside their influence. They’ll say Donald Trump won because the US had a massive, undefeatable horde of racists going out to vote, or because too many people voted third-party (really guys, if you looked up how the voting system works, maybe we’d get that 5%). Too few people are willing to accept that this outcome is largely because the Democratic party used tactics that do not work in an anonymous environment. All the people who said they’d vote for Hillary Clinton out of fear of being labeled a bigot and gave us those polls estimating her at a 90% chance of victory went out and voted against her as soon as anonymity was granted. Heck, a lot of your friends who are lamenting Clinton’s loss probably actually voted for Donald Trump. As a worthless greenie who writes about the importance of anonymity and makes a point about not judging people for their political views, people admit their votes to me. And you wouldn’t believe some of the people who are lying for the sake of their personal safety and friendships.
It’s okay to be upset if you did not get the outcome you wanted, but it’s also important to start thinking ahead for 2020. People are already falling into attacks and stigma mechanics against Trump supporters, further biasing their own data and inhibiting their ability to isolate where rhetoric is most necessary. Not only that, I already see a lot of people operating under the assumption that Trump’s presidency is going to be so bad that the democratic candidate is going to win 2020 by default. In the event that his presidency is not that bad, it’s going to decimate the credibility of many people opposing him (and with the amount of doomsaying going on, “not that bad” is a veryeasy bar for him to surmount). And don’t forget, with the level of stigmatization from the left surrounding Trump support, further stigmatization makes it increasingly unlikely that Trump supporters (or even undecideds who fell on his side) are going to flip. Discovering your tactics to be ineffective is not a good time to double down on them, and assuming disaster should not be your sole plan for victory.
Like I said in the post I reblogged, the rules are different when masks are on. The mechanics you ordinarily rely on to to control behavior will not necessarily work when punishment tactics are disabled. These are observable facts of human behavior, and to disregard them is not an act of protest - it’s an act of surrender. Don’t do that! If you want to be the “shepherd of the masked”, it falls upon you to engage in the behaviors that facilitate it.
I’ve been too busy to post much lately, but someone named Silicon Fades (e: [email protected], added at their request) sent me an email which brought up some interesting ideas. I’m reposting it with permission. Whether or not you agree with it, I think it’s worth a read.
Hi, you probably don’t remember but I sent you an email a while back about some gamergate stuff. I’ve read pretty much all of your blog and agree with a lot of what you write about manipulation on the internet. I was reading this (http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/jon-ronson-interviews-adam-curtis-393) today and the book about public shaming made me think about your writing so I thought I’d shoot you this email and make you aware about it in case you weren’t already.
Adam Curtis, the guy being interviewed has a few really interesting documentaries that touch on social control that you might be interested in as well, I think most of them are on youtube. A lot of his work centres on fear and how the concept of an “other” is used by politicians to create narratives that engender policy change. I don’t agree with everything he says but it’s interesting stuff nevertheless.
I see a lot of this in “SJW” culture, and other internet sub cultures in general. I think that the majority of activity that comes under the “Social Justice” banner in fact has little to do with actual activism and is really to do with facilitating and protecting a type of tribal identity. Once you’re “in the gang” the primary objective is protection of those who are also in the gang. In this case however, before one can even get to attacking the others who aren’t in the gang, one has to expound a huge amount of energy existentially justifying the gang in the first place. The necessity of the Crips to it’s members is self-evident, it’s an entity based on practical security and financial gain. The existence of the Social Justice Gang is markedly less evident, especially to it’s members, and so a large part of the workings of the gang are creating, exploiting and uncovering events and people that can be pointed to as reasons for the existence of the gang. At it’s most fundamental, the gang really exists to help facilitate an easy to understand identity for the people in it.
This ties in a lot to some stuff written by Alvin Toffler who you’ve probably already heard of. I’ve only read Future Shock by him but it’s fascinating stuff. He misses the mark at a few points but overall it’s a remarkably prescient look at contemporary society written in the late sixties. One bit that really stuck out to me was how he basically manages to predict the existence of “Anonymous” as a culture:
“Leisure-time pursuits will become an increasingly important basis for differences between people, as the society itself shifts from a work orientation toward greater involvement in leisure. In the United States, since the turn of the century alone, the society’s measurable commitment to work has plummeted by nearly a third. This is a massive redeployment of the society’s time and energy. As this commitment declines further, we shall advance into an era of breathtaking fun specialism – much of it based on sophisticated technology.
We can anticipate the formation of subcults built around space activity, holography, mind-control, deep-sea diving, submarining, computer gaming and the like. We can even see on the horizon the creation of certain anti-social leisure cults – tightly organized groups of people who will disrupt the workings of society not for material gain, but for the sheer sport of "beating the system” – a development foreshadowed in such films as Duffy and The Thomas Crown Affair. Such groups may attempt to tamper with governmental or corporate computer programs, re-route mail, intercept and alter radio and television broadcasts, perform elaborately theatrical hoaxes, tinker with the stock market, corrupt the random samples upon which political or other polls are based, and even, perhaps, commit complexly plotted robberies and assassinations. Novelist Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49 describes a fictional underground group who have organized their own private postal system and maintained it for generations. Science fiction writer Robert Sheckley has gone so far as to propose, in a terrifying short story called The Seventh Victim, the possibility that society might legalize murder among certain specified “players” who hunt one another and are, in turn, hunted. This ultimate game would permit those who are dangerously violent to work off their aggressions within a managed framework.
Bizarre as some of this may sound, it would be well not to rule out the seemingly improbable, for the realm of leisure, unlike that of work, is little constrained by practical considerations. Here imagination has free play, and the mind of man can conjure up incredible varieties of “fun.” Given enough time, money and, for some of these, technical skill, the men of tomorrow will be capable of playing in ways never dreamed of before. They will play strange sexual games. They will play games with the mind. They will play games with society And in so doing, by choosing among the unimaginably broad options, they will form subcults and further set themselves off from one another.“
Anyway he postulates that a large reason for the existence of subcultures is that it provides a ready made template for a person to use as an example of how they want to live their life, and helps reduce the number of decisions they have to make in a world that’s saturated with decisions. Over abundance of choice is one of the core tenets of future shock. This is useful in understanding some of the actions we see in something like gamergate. If one thinks of oneself as an affiliate of the social justice gang, then when confronted with any actions or ideas that can be seen as signifiers of the enemy gang (fat neckbearded fedoras) then the reaction that you have to be seen to be having is already decided. You don’t have to waste any of your precious thinking time with analysing a new situation, because the gang and your premade identity have already figured out how you’re supposed to react. Hence the large numbers of people deriding the gamergate movement without any attempt being made to inquire what was really happening. “I’m a social justice advocate (however casually), this movement has been defined to be counter to ours, therefore it can safely be ridiculed.”
Notice also how many of the rhetorical devices used by both sides of the gamergate divide are essentially the same. Take something like this page (http://ggobservations.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/the-five-people-you-will-meet-in.html) linked on the siderbar of /r/gamerghazi. It seems sensible enough at first, but with a quick find and replace you can make it sound horrible. Replace “Gamergate” with “A Liberal University”, “The Common Troll” with “Cultural Marxists” and “Conservative Bloggers” with “The Jews” and you get some pretty typical Stormfront esque propaganda. Interestingly enough, the way that page treats minorities as agency-less hordes to be utilised by Machiavellian masters means that you can just leave that section as it is. The oft-seen argument that “Gamergate has some good ideas but the name has become tainted, the people who want real good change to happen should move on and leave that name behind” sounds an awful lot like “I’m not a feminist, I’m an egalitarian. Feminisim as a label is associated with crazy feminnazis.”.
In the end it all comes back to identity. It’s comforting to know that you’re the group that’s “in the right”, and it’s useful to paint your enemy is both a caricature to be ridiculed and a genuine threat to the safety of those you share your identity.
Obviously this is just my way of looking at things. I think it’s useful but I’d be wary of applying it in too many places. I think that’s one of the pitfalls of sociology in general that lead to internet social justice being what it is today. Someone comes along with a perfectly good metaphorical device (in this case the concept of “privilege”) that describes a particular situation, interaction or system in a way that makes that sense and illustrates the situation. For example - “I have privilege that you do not have and thus my view of this matter is different than yours, and I should try and understand it from your un-privilged point of view in an effort to reach a more just situation” is a perfectly reasonable and useful way of thinking about things that happen in society. The problem arises when, after this tool is applied in a few different scenarios and it is shown it work, people latch on to it and think of it as some kind of grand unified theory of sociology through which all of human interaction can be predicted and we end up with where we are right now.
In this case I think the best way to move forward for everyone is to consider anybody who you interact with online as a real human, and not as a representative of any movement or generalised identity. It’s only if we take individuals on their own terms and try and do something about their concerns in a compassionate way that we can move beyond looking at each other as two-dimensional boogeymen.
It should be pretty apparent by this point in the rambling that I’ve got absolutely zero formal sociolgical education, but it makes sense to me.
Anyway I thought you might like the book.
Peace
After I asked permission to repost his message, they sent me an addendum. I’m assuming the reposting permission applies to it as well:
One other small point. I think a lot of the frustration that people like you and I (apologies if none of this jives with you, but it seems to be in line with your observations and analysis) have with regards to "anti gamergate” and established Internet social justice cliques is a result of the dissonance between their stated goals and their unconscious goals. What we see as tactically unsound and exasperating only looks that way to us because we’re considering those actions in the context of of the surface objective, eg “stop gamergate” . In reality, the actions might be perfectly serviceable at achieving other aims that are beneficial to the clique, eg protect and define our identity, or the personal advancement of individuals through accumulation of social and economic capital.
Social identities are probably memetic in nature and as such operate on a survival of the fittest basis. The meme of the social justice warrior identity (as you’ve stated before, not necessarily someone who advocates social justice, but someone who takes it to unnecessary and detrimental extremes) has survived through a relative amount of turmoil in its life. The fact that it’s survived thus far is an indication that it’s fit for some purpose, whatever that purpose may be. Though it might seem to us to be inefficient in achieving what we see to be its goals, that’s a failing of understanding on our part. Essentially, the fact that the identity prevails is an indication of its usefulness to the people who choose to adopt it, and the onus is on us to determine what needs it fulfils for those people, and how to manipulate it to achieve our goals.
When I was about to post this, I checked and there was another addendum providing a counterpoint to the previous addendum. I’m going to post that too.
Actually, I’ve been think about a counter point to that last email that ties into some of what Toffler posits in future shock.
Everything I just said relies on the capabilites of memetic selection. However, if memes are anything like their genetic counterparts, then it could be said that there’s a natural (one must avoid automatically assuming that natural = perfect but I think it holds true here) ratio of mutations per generation that allows natural selection to filter out the beneficial traits from the detriment ones. Too many (and too drastic) mutations per generation and the chances are the species suffers. On the other hand, too few mutations and the species stagnates, unable to cope with its changing environment. We can imagine a similar scenario with the development of ideas, and a large part of what Toffler says in the book hinges on the fact that we’re developing and sharing new ideas at an ever accelerating rate. If we don’t have sufficient time to test these ideas, then it might be that what at first seems beneficial comes to be disastrous at worst, or a waste of time at best.
Just as many believe (erroneously, in my opinion) that natural selection in humans has stagnated due to modern medicine and needs eugenics to prune our gene pool, one can easily imagine a corresponding inverse, where, faced with the ever accelerating onslaught of information technology, an elite few need to be responsible for a sort of eugenics of ideas (eumemics?) to keep our collective consciousness fit. This terrifying and fascinating concept is basically the plot of metal fear solid 2 (it really is about ethics in video-game plot contrivances). Toffler proposes the much less fascist idea of separate communities designed to accelerate at different rates, with people who struggle to cope with the transient nature of modern life living in much more traditional lifestyles (which also serve as handy living museums), those who are able to cope with a rapid rate of development living in ways that push technological and social boundaries, and with most of the population living somewhere in the middle, with the developments from the accelerated communities gradually filtering through once they have been shown to be sound. Free movement from one group to the other is encouraged as each individuals capacity for transience can vary throughout ones life.
That diverted pretty weirdly, but the takeaway of all this is that some of the things I said in my last email are reliant on the stress-tolerances of memetic evolution as a self-regulating mechanism. Personally, I think that although there’s a possibility that things like social justice cliques could simply be a manifestation of social development moving too fast, I’m still liable to believe that they do serve a valid purpose for the people who engage in them, even if I can’t figure it out yet.
This actually feels really good. It’s like I just wrote a seven-page essay, but it only took me like twenty minutes. I think I get Tumblr’s whole thing with reblogging now.
Random possessive ( with a touch of yandere ) sentence starters.Change to make it more fitting, etc. Trigger warnings for: Suicide, Self harm, Kidnapping, Abuse, Manipulation.
“ Do you really think you can get away from me? “
“ You’re mine and only mine. “
“ I don’t want to see you talking to them again. “
“ The only person you need is me. “
“ I love you more than anything else. Why don’t you love me back? “
“ If you leave me I’ll kill myself. “
“ You’re so beautiful and all mine. “
“ If you try to run away again I’ll make sure you won’t be able to walk for a while. “
“ I’m sorry that I had to lock you up but that’s the only way to protect you. “
“ No one could love you as much as I do. “
“ C’mon, I want to hear you saying that you love me and only me. “
“ I won’t let you go. I love you too much. “
“ I don’t like it when someone else touches you. “
“ I want you to look at only me and no one else. “
“ If you really love me then tell me who you were talking to. “
“ No one can take you away from me now. “
“ I made sure that no one can get in my way now. “
“ Just give up and give in, my love.~ “
“ You can try to run all you want but I’m always going to find you. “
“ You look so cute when you’re scared like this.~ “
“ You’re the only person that makes me feel that way. “
“ I know everything about you.~ “
“ Be a good boy/girl and do what I tell you to~ “
“ Don’t you lie to me. I know you were seeing them again. “
“ I’m doing all of this for you! Don’t be so ungrateful to me! “
“ I want to be the only person on your mind. “
“ You don’t need them. You have me. “
“ You belong to me. Your heart, your soul, your body. All of this is mine. “
“ Please don’t leave me or I’ll hurt myself! “
“ I’m sorry that I hurt you but how else was I supposed to keep you from leaving? “
“ Please don’t look at me like this. It really breaks my heart. “
“ I don’t care how horrible you are to me. I love you and I won’t let you go.”
“ Break me, if that makes you happy then I’m fine with it. “
“ You should only trust me. I know what’s good for you. “
