Cunningham’s law: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.”
I have always firmly believed that the Internet as we know today is the real-life (virtual?) manifestation of the world envisioned in 1997’s Fallout – a nuclear-razed wasteland in which bits of discovery both wonderful and whacky can occasionally be made, which causes copious amounts of bodily fluids to fly around, and almost every living soul you encounter there is out to get you.
We’ve all experienced varying degrees of nastiness in dealing with other people, either known or unknown, over the Internet; but sometimes certain online events tend to spiral out of control, when “nastiness” mutates into full-blown toxicity, and the repercussions of which are felt in real life.
Despite my sheer distaste towards the trend, there’s no other way to refer to this one specific incident but to use the dreaded “hashtag” – #gamergate has been making a lot of Internet and video game-savvy folk violently scratch their heads in utter confusion since August. An Internet-wide crusade of sorts, to weed out unethical journalistic practices and their practitioners from the video game industry, #gamergate has seen an irreverent and irrational rise to choke the life out of coherent, meaningful dialogue … all the while leaving a bloody trail of harassment, doxxed information (the act of leaking one’s private information to a public space without the individual’s consent), and death threats.
Perhaps I’m not doing much to alleviate the confusion for the uninitiated, so I guess a little context is in order: All the way back in the hallowed days of August 2014, allegations rose against superstar indie video game developer Zoe Quinn – who is responsible for the critically lauded work-of-art that is Depression Quest – of having sexed her way into getting her work promoted and noticed. Already disenchanted by the annoyingly-growing tendency of video game critics attaching social commentary to their critiques, the “true appreciators” of the artform seized the opportunity to cry foul and dole out vigilante justice to the wrongdoers.
Trust me, the drama of it all is trite and hackneyed enough to make telenovela writers roll their collective eyes to exhaustion, what needs to be taken from this whole mess is the behaviour exhibited by the loudest of voices surrounding it. Screeching and barking like rabid lab animals about to be experimented on, Internet-dwellers, safe behind the brittle walls of their various screens and computer monitors, let the expletives and epithets fly every which way, attacking the central individuals in question (and some other hapless folks who were unfortunate enough to get embroiled in all this), making desperate attempts at compromising their integrity (through information which may or may not be falsified), and of course, the aforementioned doxxing.
I can imagine that for any outsiders looking in, how this whole thing must look like one big festival of hatred and paranoia … but that is the Internet in a nutshell, after all.
And now for something a little closer to home: Just before Eid-ul-Azha, an opinion piece was published in this very paper, which was subsequently uploaded to its website, written by one Rainer Ebert. The article dealt with a subject that is considered to be fairly prickly within the context of our society’s religious views, but ultimately it meant well enough. But you see, us human beings (the regular kind anyway) have a biological mechanism which allows us to regurgitate whatever we consume into this malodorous, assumedly green coloured bile, and not a second was wasted until it started to spill over onto that article and its author in the form of online comments. As was expected, men and women of rationality (already a rare breed) were buried in a sea of zealotry, harebrained attempts at attacking the writer’s credibility, and of course cussing.
I don’t know if old man Ward Cunningham realised this when he came up with that bit of sage advice written above, but he’d made quite an observation about human interaction, not just within the realm of the Internet but outside it as well: It is a constant game of one-upmanship and domination, which is only exacerbated by modifiers such as fear and conservatism.
It just goes to show you that behind every row of teeth and every encouraging word, we all harbour feelings of acute resentment towards one another; and the Internet, granting us the combined safety net of anonymity and untraceability, allows each and every one of us to be the proverbial Salvador Dalis in the art of fostering animosity.
So, how does one go about having a calm, considerate, and rational discussion over the Internet? You don’t. It’s the Internet – you either shut up or be prepared to put up one helluva fight.