Adrian Chiles Thinks We Need To Do Something About Those Nasty Trolls, Part 1

Penny Arcade aren't wrong, but there's a bit more to this

So, Adrian Chiles craps out 300 words that amount to "my mate says we should get rid of online anonymity." The Guardian, of course, has the audacity to suggest I support it monetarily after that blistering tour-de-force of writing, as they do with all their posts. Why, so you can pay people £25 to write about how they're still whipped on their old boyfriend despite being married, rationalise the fact that they abandoned their family with the language of the LGBT community, or how they like to wank with teddy bears? Say what you want about the Telegraph (I will: it's a cesspit that gives voice to the worst impulses of this country's upper-middle-class right wing), at least it has the sense to hide its utter, utter garbage behind a paywall. The Guardian wants you to know about all this bollocks, it wants you to know Adrian Chiles "writes" for them. This is supposed to be a selling point, somehow.

Anyway, I'll stop, since ad-hominems are the preferred tactic of narcissists - "you're a dumbhead so I don't have to listen to you and potentially change my behaviour" - let's instead think about online anonymity, by which I mean let's think about "Who Bullies The Bullies" by The Last Psychiatrist. You can read it if you want, but I've ended up pasting like 90% of it here anyway, it's that good.

Time for the required disclaimer before I get into it - I think trolls are bad. So does Alone. I just don't think Adrian has found the right solution to dealing with them. Same thing with last month's jeremiad - I think being anti-racism is good, I just think the methods currently in use don't work at all.

I

TLP starts by eviscerating the publication his subject comes from. "What, you mean like tried to do?" Easy, wildman, if it's taken you 6 (six) months to work out I'm a TLP rip-off, you probably need to log off and start trying to tie your shoelaces now so you can be out of the house by October. In any case, he recommends emulation in some post or another that I can't find, it's actually good for you, rather than indulging that nagging desire in you to be completely uninflunced and original.

His subject is similar to mine. Amanda Hess writes the cover story for the Pacific Standard where she decries the threats trolls send her; just as Ade's mate recommended, her solution is the removal of anonymity. TLP pauses first to note a small problem - "while these [worries about trolls threatening to assault people] are all legitimate worries, someone should take a minute and ask why, when mustached men have been stalking women since the days of Whitecastle yet no systemic changes have been effected, the moment women feel threatened from the safety of their LCD screens America opens the nuclear briefcase. No one finds that suspicious?"

"The force for this change isn't coming from safety or ethics. Neither is it activism. If you see any group advocating influentially for change in a media they don't own or control, you can double down and split the 10s, the dealer is holding status and quo. No change is possible on someone else's dime, and if what looks like a supermodel approaches you with a microphone and a camera crew, you should run like she's Johnny Carcosa." The simplest part of this is that the media is not your friend. I'm well aware that that's a very basic, "I'm 14 and I've just discovered Rage Against The Machine and not listening to my parents" take, but it's true, and people seem to be forgetting this all the damn time. Scroll back to the intro momentarily - if posting your anonymous letter were an unequivocally good idea, why would the Guardian have to pay you £25 to do it?
The deeper point in there, though, is the successful advocation for change. This does not bode well for our radlib friends. The logical conclusion of this section is that all the "diversity wins" we see today have actually affected nothing. All our online clamouring, our desperate need for an "[insert minority group] *CLAP* DISNEY *CLAP* PRINCESS," has produced gains of precisely fuck all. In fact, considering all the energy we wasted opening Twitter and moving our thumbs to either retweet or like, it's been a net loss. "It was so important to have a superhero of colour like Black Panther, though, for representation reasons." No it wasn't, Wakanda doesn't even fucking EXIST, who does it represent except "blacks" in the abstract? Black Panther was an excuse for Disney to not have to think of a new character or do much in the way of creation, since all these Marvel characters already exist, and then rake in all those sweet #woke dollars. "But I felt seen!" That's only a positive emotion because you're an incurable narcissist that needs an omnipotent entity to tell you you're good. You think Toussaint L'Ouverture would've taken a "You are valid" from the French government? You think the February Revolution would've been stopped if Nikolai II had simply told Kerensky "I see you?" Being seen is the opposite of action, and that's why the establishment is more than happy to give you pittance after pittance after pandering pittance. You know who did good, actually representative work in their lives? Jack Kirby and Stan Lee produced art that subtly reflected their experiences as Jews in American society using metaphor; John Singleton produced Boyz N The Hood as a representation of the actual African-American experience in Los Angeles. Those three are dead now. Disney will be around forever. Stay seen though, sweetheart.

Honestly this is just here to break up the wall of text. Still true though.

II

"Wasn't this about anonymity?" Fuck you, Alone never focused on any one thing in his writing, and neither will I.

"Keeping in mind that actual stalking has never been dealt with in any significant way ever, the desire of a few female writers to curb online anonymity wouldn't be enough to get an @ mention, except that this happens to coincide with what the media wants, and now we have the two vectors summing to form a public health crisis. 'Cyberbullying is a huge problem!' Yes, but not because it is hurtful, HA! no one cares about your feelings-- but because criticism makes women want to be more private-- and the privacy of the women is bad. The women have to be online, they do most of the clicking and receive most of the clicks. Anonymous cyberbullying is a barrier to increasing consumption, it's gotta go."
There we go. The media are not your friends. Anytime they let you complain about something, you should be worried. They're making money out of you somehow, and I can all but guarantee nothing is going to change. There's not much else I can add here.

"You may at this point roll your eyes epileptically and retort, "well, who cares 'what the system wants', the fact is anonymity does embolden the lunatics, shouldn't we try to restrict it?" Great question, too bad it's irrelevant. You've taken the bait and put all your energy into accepting the form of the argument. The issue isn't whether we should abolish online anonymity, since this will never happen. For every American senator trying to curb anonymity there's going to be a Scandinavian cyberpirate who will come up with a workaround, and only one of them knows how to code. Besides, there's no power in abolishing anonymity, the power is in giving everyone the pretense of anonymity while secretly retaining the PGP keys to the kingdom."
This idea comes up a lot on TLP, the concept of 'accepting the form of the argument.' Watch out for it next time you argue with someone. I tend to do this a lot with essay questions - they'll ask me something simple, but I'll decide the question is stupid and go off on a tangent based on what they should've asked, and get a C instead. Or just not hand anything in. Mostly that one.

There's your answer by the way, Adrian; you can't abolish online anonymity. Lord knows legislators are trying, though, which is exactly why this article came out a few days before the EU ratified Article 13. Article 13 is about holding internet users, as well as companies, to account for the shit they post, especially the copyright they infringe, and you can't hold cuntfucker69 to account the same way you can with Steve Smith of Arlandria. The Guardian article is simply meant to soften you up to the idea, Chilesy-boy is a useful idiot you can use to give the idea a friendly, recognisable face, because what's less anonymous than that guy with the silly accent from the TV? "You hate nasty trolls, right?" says the Guardian. Yeah, you think, because you're not a complete cunt, there's a kernel of concern for your fellow human in there that the Tories haven't quite gotten to yet. "We should make them use their real names, so they'll own up to their nastiness, and then we can fuck up their lives, right?" of COURSE, you think, partly because you've accepted the form of the argument, and partly because the past thirty or forty years of British tabloid newspapers, combined with our latent narcissism, have been slowly leading us down a path of vindictiveness and revenge-lust that ends with the White Bear episode of Black Mirror. "Hanging's too good for 'em," says the lady on LBC. You know that sentence ends not with a full stop, nor a tut, but, subconsciouly, with "...consistent, unending psychological torture is more like it," right? Then they pass that nice law to get rid of the nasty trolls, and suddenly the only websites you can use are facebook, insta, and the BBC, and they're all just ads. Even the BBC. Especially the BBC. Escape to the Country isn't LITERALLY an ad for Kinleigh Folkard and Hayward but that's what it ends up being, we've gone over ads being ads for other things before. "But KFH are a London estate agent!" Where do you think these people are escaping FROM, you need someone to sell your old place when you eventually get bored of craft beers, or the traffic on Lordship Lane, or accidentally walking out of East Dulwich into Peckham and getting accosted by young 'urban' fellows, and then you can retire to somewhere you can read your Guardian in peace. Or Telegraph, I'm not judging (I am).

This map isn't perfect, but East Dulwich is directly east of Dulwich Village. Peckham is directly north of East Dulwich. They are all very different.

III

Here's a related phenomenon to Adrian's barely-longer-than-a-tweet "article". Now, you bourgie Spotify Premium fucks won't understand what's going on here, so just skip down to the next section. For my fellow proles, have you heard that one ad that goes like "I'm not a beast... tippity tap... misinformation, it's everywhere" and then it tells you to go to x government website to find the truth? This is proof that we've never been more fucked. Think about what this advert says. "You're too dumb to know what's real or not, there are literal demons making you do a wrongthink, but your sweet, precious, government will save you from them." Then think about what this advert COULD'VE said. Proper imagine it - you get that cockney bloke from the McDonald's ads to say  "there's a lot of nonsense on the web these days. Make sure you're using your critical faculties, double check things, and mitigate your usage, mate! Remember, Bjork says 'take a walk.' God bless, yeah?" So easy, and yet, they went for the one that makes you completely dependent on the government, this omnipotent entity, for your internet usage. "Why would they bother with that version, it's just info, they want clicks." Fair point, but the very next advert Spotify chucks at me is simply the RNLI telling me to avoid cold water shock. No "go here to find out the truth about drowning," just "breathe different." Passing along wisdom, rather than infantilisation. The RNLI think of me as an adult with the capacity to learn more than the government. Sad! 65 million such cases!

There's more variations on the advert, too. One suggests that the current measles outbreak can be blamed on "fake news", as though the anti-vaxx community isn't a thing because of that Andrew Wakefield cunt and his fallacious findings. Not only is this a defence that means the government doens't have to change anything, like making vaccinations compulsory, it's a really simple way of making you think the government is at all trustworthy. "Never mind that Andy got his qualification from our country's medical schools (i.e. it was us), it was fake news (i.e. not us) that did this, so go to gobacktosleepsheeple.GOV.UK (us) to be reassured on what to post and what not to post." It's fucking over. Anyway, I now return you to your regularly scheduled plagiarism.

IV

Back to Alone's ramblings: "To understand what's really happening, start from basics: if you're reading it, it's for you. I assume you're not a cyberbully or a stalker. So do you have any power to abolish anonymity?

If Hess has made you wonder, hmm, maybe unrestricted anonymity is bad because it gives trolls too much power, then the system has successfully used her for its true purpose: brand it as bad, to you. She is unwittingly teaching the demo of this article, e.g. women in their 20s with no actual power looking to establish themselves, who are the very people who should embrace anonymity, not to want this: only rapists and too-weak-to-try rapists want to be anonymous."
Just as Adrian's article only really exists to make you feel like Article 13 is a good idea, Hess' article exists to make vulnerable women feel like using their real identities online is a good idea. Why?

"Observe that the article's single suggested solution to cyberharassment is to reframe a criminal problem into a civil rights issue using a logic so preposterously adolescent that if you laid this on your Dad when you were 16 he'd backhand slap you right out of the glee club: "it discourages women from writing and earning a living online." Earning a living? From who, Gawker? ...none of them get paid 1/1000 of what they bring in for the media company. You know what they do get? They get to be valued by work, and in gratitude they are going to the front lines to fight for the media company's right to pay them less."
Narcissism tells you you aren't a writer because you write shit, you are a writer when someone else, perhaps that omnipotent entity I keep mentioning (it's not God btw, keep your fedoras to one side), tells you that you are a writer. Hence why these women will take fuck all for the job title of Writer. If you told them to start a blog like this where they'd also get paid nothing, but could hone their craft, write whatever they wanted, and build a following, they would hate it because the job title is the payment, the job title is what you wave in your cousins' faces at Thanksgiving, the job title means that you are seen. Stay seen, sweetheart.

"'So your solution is that she should use pseudonym? Isn't that blaming the victim?' No, not her-- you. You should use a pseudonym. You aren't writing for Gawker, you just use the internet, comment on things, etc. Why should you use your real name? 'Why shouldn't I?' I'm sorry, I wasn't precise: why are you being encouraged to use your real name? Again, the question of whether anonymity emboldens trolls is not the force of that article, it isn't about their behavior, it is about yours." Well? I don't use my real name on here or on twitter, and I know a couple of friends have followed suit. At our age, part of it is a concern that employers will find our social media and bait us out as edgelords, which is a whole separate problem, but for me at least, part of it was this article. Using my real name is of no benefit to me online, it just makes me easier to advertise to. "Voluntarily exposing yourself makes you a targetable consumer and targetable consumable. Is it worth it?"

To be continued later