In 2016, how the Internet is the slime from ‘Ghostbusters II’.
“What we’re seeing play out online is analogous to road rage.” — Sam Harris
“Steer clear of the internet and you’ll live forever.” — Tina Fey
In this strange overheated year of 2016, most of us are probably feeling a little queasy and fevered, bombarded by outrage and white-hot electronic rhetoric from all sides. Left and right no longer seem to have much meaning, and the smallest of human indignities become instant campaigns of howling injustice on Twitter. We regularly hear intelligent friends espouse counter-rational views that make us feel like we are living in a version of Invasion of The Body Snatchers. Vicious virtual fights about identities we weren’t even aware of rage online, while a real blood-and-metal war does the same in Syria. The British Labour Party transforms itself into the Judean People’s Front, and the UK leaves the EU reluctantly after making the mistake of asking the people what they want.
It is a time when the loudest and least self-reflective voices become the ones we are compelled to engage with the most, from DeRay McKesson to Donald Trump. We seriously discuss which presidential candidate has the largest penis, and spray applesauce on the walls while we debate America’s complicated racial issues as if playing some deranged version of Who’s On First? “Black Lives Matter! No All Lives Matter! No Blue Lives Matter!” while rattling our aluminium food trays in indignation.
I think I remember, and am not alone, that we didn’t always used to talk to each other this way. I remember a time, even 5 years ago, when disagreement and discussion were much easier than they are now. I remember a time when we could actually talk about many emotive subjects without descending into insulting each other, or straw-manning or idiotic “Who are you to say that?” ad hominems. I even remember thinking for a while that the idealism of my 90’s generation was dying away and the one coming up found ideology about as obsolete as landlines.
In about 2010 or so, I was working as a teacher, and I asked my early-20’s students what they thought about feminism. I got blank stares in reply. I even remember having to suppress my laughter when I mentioned an Israeli magazine that was putting warning labels on images of women that had been photoshopped. A female student, in a completely unwitting reference to Spinal Tap, asked me: ‘But’s what’s wrong with being sexy?”. I was about to embark on an explanation of The Male Gaze, but the words died in my mouth . It would have felt like explaining why Blur were better than Oasis.
And then, round about the time that I got my first smartphone in 2011, this started to change. Suddenly the type of feminism that I had last encountered in obscure Cultural Studies textbooks was all over the opinion pages of the Guardian and every other story or opinion piece seemed to be about race, sexuality, gender or Islamophobia. I began to feel weirdly inhibited talking about these subjects with people, sensing that the unspoken pact that modern people have that its OK to have divergent opinions was being repealed. Suddenly disagreement was a personal affront to a person’s ‘lived experience’, and logical thinking simply a tool used by out-of-touch white males.
I suspect, and I wouldn’t be the first to notice this, that this strange sea-change is not simply caused by a normal reaction to social phenomena — it seems that something in the way the internet channels our ways of thinking and expressing ourselves, leads to anger and combativeness and away from reflection, conciliation and deep understanding. There’s something different about the way we communicate online, and it leads to misunderstanding and demonization as surely as whiskey leads to fistfights. Have you had an occasion in your recent life where a minor disagreement online flared up into a massive flame-war, which even now feels strangely unresolved? Do you find yourself composing retorts to online enemies in the shower? Do you ever skim-read an article and skip straight to the comments section so you can get a nice hit of rage to go with your morning coffee? I know I do these things, and would probably be ashamed to say so, if I didn’t suspect that many people reading this do the same.
I have found in the past year or 2, that this strange hair-trigger rage is creeping into real life as well. In a restaurant with a female friend-of-a-friend, she ordered 3 main courses at once, and thinking she was ordering for all of us in a sort of pro-active ‘You guys are gonna love this’ sort of way, I enquired what was in the dishes, only to have my hair pinned back by a shouted exhortation not to ‘Police her food choices’. Even I found myself, as if possessed, ranting about the evils of Islamic extremism after a few drinks with my friends, so exasperated at their denial of the obvious issues in that area that I was temporarily transformed into Nigel Farage.
Aptly enough, I think the best metaphor for this comes from a relative of a movie which generated a lot of online heat (but not much light) in 2016: Ghostbusters. Essentially the Internet as we experience it today is an electronic version of the toxic slime running through the sewers of New York in Ghostbusters II. All the hate, anger, loneliness, misogyny, misanthropy, misandry, racism, self-hatred and hopelessness in the world gets concentrated into an aggregate electronic slime, which is now leaking over all of us from the devices in our pockets:
Egon: Mayor, we’re here tonight because a psychomagnatheric slimeflow of immense proportions is building up beneath the city.
The Mayor: Psycho-what?
Egon: Psychomagnatheric…Negative human emotions that are forming into a vicious ectoplasm with *explosive* supernormal potential.
The Mayor: Can somebody speak English here?
Winston: Uh yeah. Your honor, what we’re trying to say is all of the bad feelings. You know hate, anger and the vibes of the city are turning into this *sludge*. I didn’t believe in it either. But, we just went for a swim in it and ended up almost killing each other.
Peter Venkman: Lenny, have you been out on the street lately, do you know weird it is out there? We’ve taken our own headcount, there seems to be 3 *million* completely miserable assholes living in the Tri-State area.
Ray: And what *fuggy brain* here doesn’t realize, that if we don’t do something fast this whole place is gonna blow like a frog on a hot plate.
*interestingly a character in this same movie, on Venkman’s terrible psychic TV show, predicts that the world will end on Valentine’s Day 2016.
Once upon a time these normal frustrations of human life would be released in harmless amounts onto one’s friends. A young man would get rejected by a girl he likes, say, and he’d moan to his friends for a little bit, and they’d take him out for drinks and listen to him, and maybe give him a gentle push onto the dancefloor when the healing was over. Now, that young man pours his frustrations into google, and before he knows it, he’s reading Roosh V blog posts and bitching about ‘feminazis’ and and learning the art of ‘negging’.
Or that young woman has an unpleasant interaction with a douchey construction worker on her way to work, and within minutes she is swimming in an ocean of such experiences on Laura Bate’s ‘Everyday Sexism’ blog, validating the awful feeling of powerlessness that overwhelmed her in that moment and assuring her that this is proof that she lives in a society that hates her entire gender.
Why does the internet have this catalytic effect on human anger? Well there’s several reasons as I see it. One is that the internet is mostly text/image based. As Sherry Turkle has argued, human empathy mostly resides in the eyes — when we are not in eye contact with people, we can be much crueler and more dismissive of them than we are in person. I could easily post a long rant on a forum about how evil Catholicism is — but I’d never shout the same rant in the face of some harmless old Irish Catholic lady, like the creature from Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’. Her presence would not just cause me to act nicer, it would actually cause me to moderate my views internally. This is happening less and less as political discussion migrates online.
Another is the effect of social media. Social Media is not just a way of talking to people, like telephone or email: it is a way of talking to people in a context in which most of your friends and potentially the whole world is watching you do so. This profoundly changes the way we talk to each other on it. In one respect, it makes everyone talk as if they are constantly on stage at the Oscars: The way of speaking that goes over best in that context is either sentimentality or righteous rage. A nuanced argument gasps for air in this space, and the temptation to grandstand about issues of importance is difficult to resist. It is similar to episode of the of the Simpsons where Bart and Lisa become news anchors — and Lisa’s principled reporting of facts gets wiped out by Bart’s shiny-toothed demagoguery: “But maybe there’s just no room, in this modern world, for an old man and his ducks.”
Most of us self-censor at least a little on social media, excising the complex opinions that we know will be misinterpreted on it, and the result is often a curious, de-natured version of ourselves that we hope other people are talking for real. I have several friends whose social media personality is a left-wing caricature of their real personality. They spend their time on Facebook doing the political version of holding the phone above their forehead to hide their wrinkles.The same person with whom you had a complex discussion about the ethics of the refugee crisis will be beating their breast and screaming “Oh won’t somebody please think of the children…” in response to this relentless pull to look good. I even do it myself sometimes.
Another thing is that the internet can provide instant crowd-sourced backup for any pre-conceived notion that you have. If you begin to suspect that vaccines cause autism, the internet can connect you instantly with thousands of people who will back you up on this, and provide you with studies and statistics to bolster the case. It is this which is behind so many modern panics, from the freak-out about Aspartame to the current fashion for the sort of crazed feminism that acts out daily all over the Guardian opinion pages.
As well as this, with newspapers going to the wall at the rate of tech startups, they are forced to compete for our attention like a desperate Jester before a medieval despot. They know we can close the browser window at any time and go look at ’10 best nipple slips’ on Buzzfeed. So their opinion pieces are full of the sorts of opinions most likely to make us click. And they know well, like Pig Vomit in Howard Stern’s Private Parts — that half of people click because they agree, and half click just to see ‘what they’ll say next’. And the more emotive the topic is, the more clicks it will get.
It is for these reasons that we seem to have entered the era of ‘Post-Truth Politics’ as the Guardian puts it, and we are all just a little bit angry and outraged, All. The. Goddamn. Time. Whether for left or right wing reasons. We are addicted to the dopamine hits of indignation we get from righteous internet-midwifed anger, too distracted to read anything longer than 140 characters and beginning to feel like some part of our lizard brain has been replaced with a gleaming piece of silicon while we slept. It’s what got Trump his victory. It is the reason that Brexit is a reality and the Labour Party will be muttering to itself in a corner while the Tories asset-strip the country for the next ten years. It is why some students on college campuses have turned into a sort of combination of Mao’s Red Guards and the characters from the Crucible.
So what is the positively-charged mood slime that might serve as an antidote to all this? Are we always going to talk to each other this way from now on, now that we have parceled off parts of ourselves and sold them to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr at al? This seems likely, but not inevitable.
Whether its Oxytocin, or just the presence of other human eyes, there is something about talking to people in real life that leads to real catharsis, transformation and mind-widening that just does not happen in electronic form. We are living in a world of rage, because we are using technology to circumvent the natural way of talking to each other that has sustained us for centuries.
In romantic moments, I sometimes imagine what it must have been like to be an intellectual in pre-war Paris — huddled urgently around that day’s newspaper in some left-bank cafe, in a crush of once-a-week washed bodies, passionately denouncing the encroachment of Fascism, vowing to leave the next day for the front in Catalonia. And then I imagine how those people would be today today: In separate rooms, their faces bathed in the sickly light of laptop screens, sending each other angry Twitter messages about why Jerry Seinfeld is a racist.
In a shared house I lived in recently, one of my flatmates had recently got involved with a happy-clappy church and had one of his brethren over for an evening. As I was wandering through the living room the friend emitted the declaration “Well of course, it’s impossible to be moral without being religious…”, which as you can probably tell from my tone here, is exactly the kind of statement guaranteed to bait me into a fight. So I did, I jumped in and we Dawkinsed it on each other for an hour or two. But unlike an online conversation, this was civil, and I felt none of the trembling free-floating rage that a screen seems to bring out of me. I walked away feeling like I’d learnt something, and hopefully so did he. I played music at his church for Xmas a few weeks later.
I’m not going to make any Luddite arguments here. Railing against the Internet in 2016 is pointless. I think, however, that the weird alienated up-tightness that the internet generates in us is pretty easily unwound by a few minutes in the company of actual people. There may be an argument for stepping away from the screen, replacing your smartphone with a dumb one, cancelling your Twitter and/or Facebook accounts and any number of other remedies. I’ve tried most of those things at some point and usually came back moth-like to the glowing screens. Whatever the solution is, in 2016, lets at least tip our hats in the direction of the problem.
