My sister recently wrote this piece on the gendered empathy gap on the internet. You should read it, it got me thinking. I’ve been thinking about what it means to be anonymous or pseudonymous in your approach to your online life, to have to use it, to choose to use it, to not use it.
I don’t use it. If you search for stillwell gray or stillwellgray, eventually you’ll find me. And I wish it was higher up those Google search results. I use the same username for Twitter, Skype and a host of other platforms, so that people can find me. Expressly to be easily found, for employment or artistic or whatever opportunities. I came to the internet early and for me it’s always been about connectivity and personal broadcast, and trying to maximize both.
I left Facebook last year because I didn’t like who I was on that service. It was easy, in the pursuit of humour, to be too easily biting. Negativity was easy. I mean, I also left because it’s become a bit of a wasteland, but I wasn’t interested in being that online person anymore. Not to say I was a terrible hate-filled person; I would just go for the joke or the smarty-pants response somewhat relentlessly.
It wasn’t until I read the Book Riot piece that I realized what an unjustified privilege this is. To be purposefully findable. To be self-promoting. To make mistakes on the public record. To be seen to be trying (sort of, maybe). To leave services and not have it dug up and thrown in my face.
To face absolutely no real world ramifications for my online behaviour.
One time I tweeted a joke about someone picking their nose and work asked me not to do that during work hours. Sometimes people ask me about the reverend thing. And I got a date once. That’s it.
This is a privilege. I am myself online and I broadcast my thoughts and opinions and creations and face no resistance beyond apathy.
My sister had a different arc through social media. She adopted most services a beat or two ahead of me – Facebook, Twitter, quitting Facebook. At the beginning, she was pseudonymous. Then for a while, as her career began, she had an official public account, and kept her pseudonymous account private. Recently she’s been transitioning to a merged public/personal account as career and life goals suggest.
This has come with some static. As her online footprint has grown, so has the bullshit. Sustained, gender-specific bullshit. In our younger days, we would tee-off on ignorant Facebook posts together, when we both still had some fight. But as she’s become more visibly herself online, the unrelenting wall of shit-talking, threats and verbal abuse leads you to one option -> Block. Disable comments. Quit.
Think about that. People who want to be shitty anonymously on the internet always cry “freedom of speech”. But by being unable to control themselves, treat people like people, not threaten another human being over a book report, they themselves are what is closing down the all important comments sections across the internet.
And I do think comments sections are important. I think that if you are going to publish yourself to The Forum, the cost of that prideful act is that every audience member has the right to respond. It’s why I don’t mind hecklers at comedy clubs. Do your thing, but be prepared for feedback. The same right is bidirectional.
Unfortunately, this is overly optimistic, specifically because of men. This isn’t to say women can’t be terrible and scary – Kathleen Hale proved that. But ask anyone, with any notoriety on the internet, who is just trying to do their thing and get out their story on the internet; anyone, woman or man who they take shit from for being on the internet? It’s men.
It’s kind of shocking to realize there are men who will tweet death and rape threats from their personal accounts across a public, recorded medium. This is one of two things: sheer unbending ignorance of how the system works, or complete and utter disregard for any ramifications, because none have ever happened. These men do not even bother trying to hide.
And yet, the most hurtful, hateful vitriol comes from anonymous accounts. Why? Because without a direct connection (besides IP, geo location, time & date, cell tower, wifi information) it’s even easier, psychologically, to be a terrible person.
And this behaviour, the anonymous shitbaggery, is going to cost us an extremely important and precious resource if we are not careful.
Anonymity online is important. It is a tool for the people, in the most collectivist, anarchic and anti-establishment ways. It is how secrets about corporations and governments get out. It enabled the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements to communicate more effectively. It can help give people in transition the room they need to try on new identities. Whether you agree with any specific act of whistleblowing or revolution or self-expression is immaterial; at some point it will be your people on the grind, and you will need to have these tools.
But we are wasting it, and for the worst reason. We are wasting the very tool we use for transparency and accountability to call each other fags and whores and threaten each other with rape and death. And while it might be anonymous, which unless you’re trying really hard, it isn’t – IT’S STILL ON THE PUBLIC RECORD. These terrible things that we are saying will always have been said, in a way that has never been true before. Historians, archaeologists or alien explorers are going to have some serious questions about what the hell we were doing.
But far worse, we have handed government and private industry a moral lever with which to justify reducing our privacy and our access to anonymity. By wasting anonymity on nothing more than being shitty to each other, and to further couch that shittiness in freedom and rights, we weaken our imperative to have them in the first place. We have to call out this lower order behaviour for what it is, and work to stop it as we have other base human reactions, like violence and bigotry.
So I’m calling it out. If you’re a man, more specifically a white man, more specifically a cis-hetero white man, like I am, and you use anonymity to try to limit other voices, you’re a fucking coward, full stop. If you try to limit other voices at all, you need to look at your life, but at least have the decency and pay enough homage to your own privilege to own your garbage. If you sit at the top of the heap and all you do is throw shit at people just trying to get level with you: Stop. Log off. Quit.
Stop wasting one of the most powerful tools for change technology has ever given us, because we will lose it if you don’t.
