You Won’t Have Nixon to Kick around any More
By: Frank Portman
Tags: Internet, Politics, Music, Art, Songs

IN THE NEWS

— The vagaries of the nested pile-on: I note an item that bears on this internet mob dynamic I’ve been muttering about lately. It’s that incident at the Northwestern University and its Journalism school, in which the editors of the Daily Northwestern, under pressure of what appears to be the usual sort of take-no-prisoners harassment, apologized abjectly for their coverage of a campus protest that was deemed to be insufficiently deferential to the aims and sentiments of the activists involved. This was, of course, ridiculous and outrageous, and not a good look for a journalism school, and it prompted a wave of denunciation from journalists and “journalist adjacent” twitter against the very same student editors. This in turn prompted yet another wave of outrage against the journalist-y people for “punching down” on the kids, prompting some of them, in a chastened spirit, to delete their tweets and apologize for joining the pile-on and to pledge to be more judicious in the future.

Well, this sort of thing could go on forever, couldn’t it, back and forth, outrage lashing against outrage and pile-on subsuming pile-on in infinite regression— forever, or at least to the end of the school year. Everyone bullying everybody else in retaliation for bullying each other. The only winning move is not to play.

I’m all for the idea of being more judicious about these matters, though I very much doubt the resolve will hold. But the criticism from the journalists et al. was certainly warranted. And it was largely offered, from what I can tell, in good faith and out of genuine concern for the future of journalism as a profession if such ideas about how it should be conducted should become the norm. (The idea being that graduates of elite J-schools are the ones who will take hold of the reins of the New York Times, et al., when everybody who works there now has died or retired.) I haven’t seen evidence that this particular sub “pile-on,” within the nested series of pile-ons, turned particularly destructive as pile-ons go, but it was a bit of a pile-on, and from what I can tell very few who were piling on seem to have been aware that there was a pile-on going on. They were just saying what they felt, as I did over the breakfast table when I read about it, except they were broadcasting it to their “followers” and all the followers of their followers’ followers, and so on, and so on. Most of them probably put their phones away after a single retweet and didn’t think about it much while the replication process continued without their further participation and without anyone’s malign guidance.

This really is a weird machine. Real people are involved on both / all sides, but the process could be (and maybe sometimes actually is) completely handled by robots.

I think this points to a big reason why this problem of mass denunciation, public shaming, call-out culture, and “cancel culture” (and as you may have gathered I do think it is a problem) has no simple solution. Such mobs can form even without any bad actors consciously deciding to join them, qua mob. Sometimes it is indeed just a matter of individuals expressing their opinions. Most may be quite unaware that they are atoms in a threatening cloud. Regardless of this lack of ill intent, though, the mob, once formed, can be just as destructive, and it certainly feels that way to its targets. Of course, in addition, there often are bad actors in the mix, trying to spark mass outrage incidents where they judge it to serve their interests, and agitating to manipulate and direct the destruction at their preferred targets.

I have long had a personal policy against joining any protest or demonstration for precisely this reason: you never know where its leaders will take it, still less where it might go on its own, and you risk finding yourself inadvertently a part of a mass action you don’t agree with and want no part of.

You can’t, and shouldn’t, discourage people from simply expressing opinions, obviously. One might hope that some would think twice before joining so eagerly in on pile-ons on some poor schmuck just for the fun of it, but it would be very hard to eliminate the latter without a great risk of sweeping up the former. I’d say maybe keep it to the breakfast table and think twice before you “publish,” but that’s not the way this world of ours works. If we were to develop an ethos based on erring toward the most charitable reading of any given sliver of rhetoric and a default assumption that everything is likely more complicated than the first glance at 280 characters of it might indicate… well we’re not likely to develop that. That’s not how this world works either.

So I remain rather concerned about the, for want of a better word, “normalizing” of online recreational gang outrage and collective moral denunciation. It has a long, quite terrible history in its meatspace form; and it is one of the main problems liberal principles (like tolerance) were developed to address. Once upon a time the dangers of this sort of behavior were more clearly perceived in our society. (I didn’t have much of an education, but I did read The Ox-Bow Incident in school, and it stayed with me: do kids still read that these days?) I see it developing into a kind of cultural institution — which can be very difficult to dislodge — and I recoil. It is playing out on a platform that might as well have been designed to stimulate all our worst proclivities and to nudge its participants into becoming their worst selves. But maybe worst of all, it can happen without our consent or conscious participation.

Despite all this hand-wringing about it, though, I really don’t have any prescription other than a couple of clichés: try to be as kind to one another as you can. Plus: least said soonest mended. And there’s no future in that. I firmly believe these to be a good idea, a great idea in fact, but mobs won’t want to hear it, not now, nor ever, especially when they don’t even know they’re being mobs.