Numbered

I was watching a video by Hank Green, where he was announcing his new podcast, "Humans," and one of the points he was making was that to people who create media for the internet, whether that's YouTube videos, podcasts or what-have-you, they tend to see their audience in terms of numbers, rather than as individuals. Mr. Green said that he spends time in the comments of his videos specifically to interact with people as, well, people.

After that, I watched a short by a guy named "blumineck," in which he related the story of how he was fooled into making an outraged response video to someone appearing to be unsafe with a heavy bow, and had nearly posted it before he realized he'd fallen for a hoax. His takeaway from that was to always verify things, especially those that make one angry, before responding.

Which it pretty common advice about dealing with things on the Internet. I first encountered it well more than a decade ago.

But it occurs to me that between Mr. Green and blumineck, there may be a more general lesson there. And that is: "To many people on the Internet, you're simply a number."

When I posted a "fraudspotting" post on LinkedIn that gained enough traction to top 50,000 "impressions," LinkedIn didn't congratulate me on informing people, or potentially sparing a person whose profile had been copied from reputational damage. Rather they took note of the numbers, and encouraged me to post more in an attempt to keep those numbers rising.

Hank Green had pointed out in his video that for YouTube creators, their interests are somewhat aligned with those to YouTube (Alphabet) itself. YouTube's goal is to increase the number of people who watch videos on the website, and the amount of time that they watch. And to the degree that YouTube rewards more views with more money, a creator can share that goal.

But the goal of making numbers go up can lead to situations in which someone pretends to injure themselves to drive sharing of their video. It can lead to making inflammatory claims for the sake of responses. Or simply a raft of things that all come across as roughly the same as people copy what they have seen others be successful at, in a hope of driving the same numbers.

It's a different mindset than one would have for dealing with a live audience. And keeping that in mind makes the Internet more intelligible. 

Work To Do

I was listening to the most recent episode of Malwarebytes' Lock and Code podcast, this one on the topic of "pig butchering." I find the topic of online scams and frauds interesting, but perhaps just as importantly, being in the know can be prophylactic; a lot of what makes people vulnerable to being defrauded is not knowing the red flags that the person they're communicating with isn't who they claim to be, has ulterior motives or both.

But Lock and Code tends to repeat a mantra that I'm not 100% on board with; the idea that "anybody can be scammed." This isn't something that I find to be untrue, but I think the phrasing of it can give people the wrong idea. A lot of pig butchering schemes have a distinct romantic angle, the mark believes that they've encountered someone who genuinely cares for them, and is attempting to help them out; someone who could be a life partner as well as an investment partner.

But that's not a vector that everyone is susceptible to. Some people are going to reject the idea of an attractive stranger suddenly seeming to want a relationship, and others are going to look askance at the "investment opportunity" being offered. That doesn't make such people impervious to all fraud schemes, but it does inoculate them against this one.

I think a better way of putting it is that for any given individual, there is some amount of work that would fool them. And what protects most people is that for these schemes to operate at scale, the amount of work on any initial approach tends to be fairly low. But for more targeted schemes, a fraudster may be willing to put in quite a bit more effort.

This, for me, is the value of podcasts like Lock and Code; the knowledge shared makes low-effort frauds less effective. Because the biggest risk factor for being drawn in by a supposedly misdirected text message from a random stranger is not realizing that this is a common lead-in for all sorts of schemes. Knowing may have been half the battle on the old G.I. Joe cartoons, but when it comes to online fraud schemes, 85 or 90% may be a better number.

Sure, random podcasts, blog posts and news articles are never going to make anyone absolutely impervious to trickery; anyone willing to put in the work may find a way to get to their target. But these resources increase the amount of work that needs to be done, and given the number of schemes where the initial amount of effort is really minimal, that can save a lot of people a lot of grief. 

Stage Rage

I was listening to the most recent episode of the Decoder podcast; host Nilay Patel was interviewing Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela.

As far as I was concerned, Mr. Valenzuela was a poor spokesperson for his company and the broader generative automation industry. When asked whether his company used videos from YouTube to train its model, he stonewalled, and when asked whether a ruling that generative automation violated copyright could kill any hopes of profitability, he simply refused to engage with the question. It was, for me, really illustrative of why so many people mistrust "Big Tech" and the companies making generative automation. But it was also more or less what I expected from the CEO of a generative automation company. I understand what they're being graded on, and who is doing the grading, and leveling with the public tends to result in an "F" on that scale.

For some reason, however, I decided to read the comments; I think to see if anyone else had noticed how unwilling Mr. Valenzuela was to take on the questions that Mr. Patel had asked. And found this:

Something about Mario’s brother.

The reference to Luigi Mangione, and thus the implication, was clear. It also struck me as pointlessly over the top.

There are a lot of theories concerning why online discourse can start spawning death threats (or the wish that someone else would do the killing), veiled or otherwise, even over seeming trivialities. My personal conjecture is that it leads to a sense of power on the part of the self-professed keyboard warriors. If Mr. Valenzuela's security detail is noticeably more alert next week, someone chalks that up as a win.

But I also think that there's an impression that for all of the chatter that things like this generate, no-one really cares. In this case, the poster is a subscriber; I'm pretty sure that a good computer forensics technician could find them and have some people show up at their doorstep looking for an explanation. But that would be a game of whack-a-mole that would take ages to pay off, if it ever did.

The transformation of various sorts of threats and ill wishes into a form of performative outrage has desensitized people to them. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever," is now seen as the most rational response to anything that hasn't escalated to the idea that people may actually be on the move to someone's real-world location. Which I understand, but I think is going to wind up biting us sooner or later.

(As an aside, I wonder what Nintendo thinks about one of their most recognizable characters having become a coded way of talking about killing people.)

Dash Kindly

The "em-dash" has become the new "kindly."

Generally speaking, Americans do not use "kindly" in professional writing. It is, however, common in parts of the Commonwealth of Nations, especially those parts that many Americans associate with Internet fraud, such as India, Kenya and Nigeria. Accordingly, it's become the one thing that many unsophisticated people look for when attempting to sniff out a bogus investment scheme or employment offer, because it's allegedly a foolproof telltale that allows a correspondence to be immediately written off. Some people are willing to go so far as to claim that the use of "kindly" is a deliberate marker of fraud, and that people who continue to correspond after having seen it are showing themselves to be rubes, ripe for the plucking. This, in turn, has lead to a certain amount to ridicule being directed at anyone who shows uncertainty about a message with the word "kindly" in it.

The "em-dash" has become this marker for spotting "A.I. slop," as the Internet likes to call it. Because, supposedly, "real people" never use the em-dash, so any text in which is features prominently must have been created by generative automation. The fact that this forgets that large language models basically take their training data, chop it up into pieces, figure out the mathematical relationships between various parts and create their outputs based on that is surely of no real importance to the process.

The common thread here is the idea that there is a shortcut to discernment. Be on the lookout for "kindly" and you'll never be tricked by an Internet fraud. Stay alert to the "em-dash" and you'll always be able to tell when a passage was generated by an LLM. Utterly reliable and remarkably easy; who knew that the signs were so obvious?

That there is widespread anxiety about being deceived is understandable, at least in the case of internet frauds. While many schemes may only cost someone a small amount of money, individual losses can easily run into the thousands, or tens to hundreds of thousands. Avoiding that financial hit by spotting a supposedly ubiquitous telltale is clearly attractive. With text generated by LLMs, the case is a little less clear. Okay, so someone generated text with a Copilot or Perplexity prompt rather than writing it all out themselves. As long as it gets the point across, who cares? The intersection between generative automation and internet fraud is a concern, but the "em-dash" isn't something that is apparent in a faked celebrity pitch video for a fraudulent investment scheme.

It seems that a lot of what drives the hype (hysteria?) concerning both "kindly" and the "em-dash" is the need to appear discerning to other people. Despite the fact that there weren't any consistent glaringly obvious tells in GPT-2's text output, the idea that there's a silver bullet to detect generated text from any current LLM is strong and, if the enduring attachment to "kindly" is any indication, not going anywhere anytime soon. It's common for people to seek ways of ranking themselves against one another; it's been postulated that people find meaning in positive self-worth, and one way of attaining that is to seek out ways of showing that one is better than others. But that also means avoiding indicators that one might be worse than others. If one doesn't jump on the "em-dash" or "kindly" bandwagons and is subsequently tricked, the ego-bruising ridicule is likely to follow.

I spend more time than is likely healthy looking at dodgy material in my Junk Mail folder and, quite often, my inbox. And I've done my share of looking at things online. While there are certainly tells for a good amount of internet fraud, most of them come from the fact that the average would be perpetrator of internet fraud isn't targeting specific people, or is clearly attempting to pass themselves off as someone they aren't. An e-mail that claims to have found someone's résumé online but is addressed to "applicant" or the recipient's e-mail alias, or a LinkedIn profile that claims to be for a recruiter working in a hybrid model for a company in Texas but who supposedly lives in Liechtenstein. But these are really markers of poverty and poor education; the things that drive people to internet fraud for a living in the first place. It's how "kindly" first became a marker of fraud; people attempting to pass themselves off as Americans without having any idea of how Americans actually write. Pretty much no-one in the United States feels the need to remind another American that Atlanta is in Georgia, let alone the United States.

The tells from the uneducated are easy to spot, because they tend to recur over and over again. The graduates of "hustle kingdoms" in West Africa, for instance, go on to teach others the same things that they have learned, and this seemingly rote transfer of knowledge results in tells that are decades old still being common. And these are the sorts of fraudsters that the average person is likely to encounter. The truly sophisticated fraud artists aren't randomly e-mailing people, playing a numbers game.

With the "em-dash" the motivation, avoiding looking like a rube, is the same, but this time, it's the reader who is uneducated. Again, LLMs use the "em-dash" because it's common in the training data. To the degree that the "em-dash" is a marker of LLM-generated text, it's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy; people are starting to avoid the punctuation mark specifically because Internet paranoids have marked it as a surefire sign of inauthenticity. And because most of the people who have the time to be online a lot are young, and young people are reading less, they're not as exposed to how people older than themselves commonly write. But the makers of LLMs do not limit themselves to the young and online; they're vacuuming up all the data they can get. "Doesn't read like a human" is really "doesn't read like a young and affluent online Westerner."

The idea that there is a quick way to be "smart" about things is an attractive one, and difficult to debunk, so it's going to persist. With any luck, it's not too expensive of an idea to hang on to.

Totes Manipulative

Here's a retail hack that you may not have heard of. It works like this:

1. Find an inexpensive, but useful, item, like the $3.99 Trader Joe's miniature tote bags, that's going viral.

2. Put one (yes, just one, not the set of all four colors) up on an eBay store for $49,890.00.

I can't imagine anyone having that much more money than sense.

3. Wait for the news media to post a link to the listing, as being supposedly indicative of the crazy prices the viral item is going for, despite the fact that no rational person would pay that, given that they can see what other people are actually paying (which is maybe $15 - $20 or so a bag) just below the listing.

4. Profit, apparently.

I get the appeal of a good hype story, but anyone can list something on eBay for literally any amount of money that the site will allow them to. The $1,000.00+ listings seem to be bids to be picked up in the media, who will bite because irrationally high "prices" will drive clicks. And for a few people, they work; the media coverage is, effectively, a free advertisement for their eBay store.

It's the attention economy starting to bite its own tail. Although I wouldn't rule out an attempt to fleece the unwary. It's possible for the inattentive to mistake $49,890.00 for $49.89, although that's still a very high price to pay for one of the bags, given the other eBay listings. But in times of economic uncertainty, people are even more likely to look to take advantage of one another than they are usually.
 

Faced Down

There is a phenomenon known as "YouTube face." Put simply, it's when a video maker places a picture of themselves with an exaggerated facial expression into the thumbnail for their YouTube video (although I suppose it could be for any similar service). The idea is that people are more likely to click on a video where someone's making a weird face, even when the facial expression seems completely divorced from the content.

Some fairly mild examples of the phenomenon.

It occurred to me while reading an online comment thread that was something of a debate over whether or not the average member of the public had any real agency. On one side was a set of people who were basically saying "rather than complain, do something," and the other side responded with "we have no power, and can't change anything."

And that's when YouTube face popped into my head. Because this phenomenon isn't something that was dictated to people... there wasn't a YouTube executive who announced one day that everyone had to do this. In an article on the trend from 2018, when it was already well entrenched, Joe Veix noted:

At some point, a user discovered that a catchy preview image tended to trigger potential viewers’ curiosity enough that they clicked through more frequently.

That anonymous user started a trend that has persisted for years. Sure, the YouTube algorithms have something to do with it. But so do video makers and their audiences. One person started something that changed much of the face of video. And enough people followed them that the change persists. Sure, it doesn't work for everyone. I've seen people try it for a time, and then give up. But they tried it. Because they understood its potential.

I've chatted with a few people about this, and they tend to downplay it, in the big picture. And the reason for that, I think, is that it's not predictable. The person who first tried it didn't know that it was going to be huge. (Otherwise, I suspect they would have gone after a trademark on it.) But I think that a lot of things work this way... it's just that the failures fade into obscurity. Survivorship bias in action.

But there are a lot of trends that work this way. Take short-form video content, which is (was?) TikTok's stock in trade. There's nothing magical about videos under a minute long. People tried it, and other people liked it, so it worked.

Serendipity, however, is different from intent. And I think that people don't really believe in the idea of a deliberate bottom-up movement genuinely being successful. And sure, nothing would stay bottom-up forever; there are always opportunists who would rush to position themselves as leaders of the parade, and seek to make themselves wealthy (or more wealthy) by attempting to sell access to, or the attention of, the group's members.

That's something that can be dealt with. The bigger problem is one of coordinated collective action, when people actually have expectations of the outcomes of those actions. Occupy Wall Street didn't fail because it couldn't muster people to it's cause. I went down to the Seattle branch of the movement, and there were a lot of people there. Occupy Wall Street fizzled because once the street protests didn't bring about sweeping social change over the span of a few months, everyone just dropped it and went home. But that many people could have moved markets. And once they'd started doing so, the alleged "powers that be" would have been forced to pay attention.

In any event, I'm not sure that I buy into the idea that one person can't change the world. I think that it simply takes a different approach, and a different attitude, than people normally bring to the project.

Unneighborly

Exclusive: Homebuyers can access neighbors' political leanings with new real estate platform

Because stories about political polarization in the United States sell. Even when they don't deliver. This is really a story about (or advertisement for, if one is being cynical) a new real estate website called Oyssey. (Maybe there's a "d" missing... I don't know.) The basic gist of it is, I suppose, that it has information that other websites don't have. But there's a catch. In order the view the listings on the site, and the "block-by-block consumer and political data," would-be home buyers have to be invited to the site by a real estate agent, and sign a contract with said agent. The "win-win" here is that purchasers can access more information, and real estate agents can negotiate higher commissions in exchange for allowing access to it.

According to the company's CEO, a former real estate agent, "buyers often shift from asking whether the water heater is leaking to wondering if their neighbors are folks they'd like to invite to dinner some day." Personally, having had a water heater go out, I'd be more concerned with that than whether the people next door voted for someone I don't like. Not that the site could tell you that... secret ballots are, after all, secret. It's possible the site could tell you that a potential neighbor made a campaign contribution, but as the number of companies rushing to buy some of Donald Trump's fickle goodwill demonstrates, one doesn't have to support someone to know which side one's bread is buttered on.

It's unclear to me who the target audience of Axios' headline was; there may be just as many people who feel that they need assistance with their project to sort themselves politically as there are people who wring their hands over the phenomenon. Whether "Oyssey" (I still think there should be a "d" in there) sinks or swims will depend on whether real estate agents feel that the site brings enough value to home buyers that it's worth paying for a subscription, given that the cost (and more, supposedly) will be passed on to those buyers.

Maybe the headline should have focused on that; the idea that a website is looking to compile publicly-available data on people, and dangle that in front of prospective home purchasers. I'm curious to see what happens when (and it's only a matter of time if this catches on) a sale falls through based on incorrect or outdated information. It will also be interesting to see what happens if people in the markets the site covers start asking what data is has, and is sharing, about them. "Oyssey" may turn out to have a sideline, like other data broker sites, in asking for payment to correct the information they present about people. That might end up being the most viable part of this business.

Whatever

Whatever happened, I wondered, to Connie Sun? After I'd heard about her comics blog from NPR, I followed it for a while, then would drop in now and again, and eventually some time had gone by since I'd last read it. I dropped in, and found that the most recent post was more than a year old.

It is, in a way, the curse of the Internet. It's remarkable easy to feed more interests than one can reasonably keep up with, and so it's inevitable that some, if not many of them are going to fall by the wayside, until something reminds one of them. By which point, the thing in question may no longer exist.

I understand, intellectually, that the internet is ephemeral. In the end, it's all just links to digital media, and digital media is ephemeral in a way that other things are not. I have a few books in my home that are older than I am. And while those books may be out of print, the books themselves are still there. They are physical objects, and that lends them a durability (nothing in genuinely permanent) that seems to be lacking from computer files.

The tenuous connections and pseudo-connections facilitated by the Internet are just as ephemeral, but at least to me, they also tend to lend the people themselves that same quality. I'm petty sure that Ms. (or maybe she's become Mrs. in the meantime) Sun is still doing her thing, and still being a perceptive observer of the world, her place in it, and how she and it interact as she moves through it. But I don't actually know Ms. Sun; I simply followed her cartoons from literally the other side of the continent. At that remove, I can't even prove that she's a real person; it could have been a pseudonym, for all that I know. And in that sense, the lack of updates to her blog are no different than if she'd been deleted by someone who decided that they no longer needed to maintain that identity.

I've "met" a lot of people on the Internet who have effectively ceased to exist in the same  way. I suspect that they're still out there, but with the digital connection between us broken, it's like they were never really there at all. Kind of like losing a telephone number or an address back in the day,

And so I wonder. Are there people out there for whom I am simply another ghost in the network of machines? A person who wandered in out of the digital ether, touched their lives briefly and then disappeared again?

Blotted

The Culture Wars make things strange.

I live in a sleepy suburb of Seattle. Almost nothing happens out here. But from time to time, I'll be online, and someone will ask "I'm thinking of moving there... is it safe?" And one can tell by the answers which side of the Liberal/Conservative divide that people come down on.

For a certain segment of the online Conservative population, playing up their concerns of crime, and their responses to/preparations for it is a form of virtue signalling. They will list off the things that happen in their neighborhoods, even petty offenses like vandalism, and inform people that they carry mace when walking the dog (even if they make it a point to say they leave their guns at home). Every trip out of doors is a cause to be vigilant and ready.

For me, the Seattle Eastside (those suburbs on that sit East of Lake Washington, like Redmond, where Microsoft is located) are about a safe as your average pre-teen sleepover. Most of the crime out here is an annoyance, Cars are broken into, and occasionally stolen and there's a certain background level of property crime in the service of financing drug habits. When I lived in Chicago and Evanston, on the other hand, a roommate was mugged, a co-worker was raped and I knew more than a few people for whom the sound of gunshots didn't warrant a response. (My car, however, was left alone.) By comparison, crime here is more bothersome than worthy of concern. But then, I don't pine for the 1970s. Mainly because I realize that I don't have an accurate picture of the 1970s... after all, I was in grade school for most of it. It had its own problems, but internet culture and high levels of partisanship weren't among them.

Concerns over crime mean different things to different people. For some, they're about the collapse of good government (a.k.a., what they remember as draconian punishments for criminals), for others, it's about the inherent wickedness of mankind and the immanent return of the divine to earth. There are, however, those people for whom it's a real, day-to-day, concern. But when you live were I live, those people are few and far between.

Backing In

This caught my eye...

"Social-media companies deny quietly suppressing content, but many users still believe it happens. The result is a lack of trust in the internet."

This isn't the way the world works. The causal chain works like this: Social-media companies deny quietly suppressing content, but there is a lack of trust in the internet. The result is many users still believe it happens.

Of course, I'm being nitpicky here with grammar and the order of things, but I still think that there's something important here. What's really happening is that certain people have an understanding of the way "the Internet," or, more accurately, their social media platform of choice, should operate, and they take deviations from that mental model that disadvantage them to be evidence of deliberate action against them. They don't trust the social media powers that be, suspecting corporate executives of collaborating with the enemy, as it were, and the result is that they believe that any part of the internet not run by a known ally can be turned against them.

Distrust comes from a violation of expectations. And a lot of people expect that not only will "the Internet" just work, but that they never do anything that may legitimately be considered over some or another line drawn in the content-moderation code. Because it's always someone else's fault.

Now it's true that many web services are opaque. I've had Blogger/Alphabet take down pictures that I've posted here without telling me... had I not had occasion to look at some old posts now and again, I might never had discovered the removal. Had I broken some rule, and Alphabet simply didn't bother to tell me? Or were they stored on some server that was disconnected along the way? Who knows? And even if I were given an explanation, how would I validate it? I can't read code.

In my case, it's not a big deal. I don't real on whatever pictures I happen to post to my blog for my livelihood, or to get out some message of dire importance. But there are a lot of people who have put themselves in a position that they rely on Twitter or TikTok or what have you. And to the degree that this reliance gives them the feeling that they are owed something, their sense of grievance when they don't receive it will fuel their self-important narrative that someone's gunning for them.

Hook

I have to admit to a certain curiosity about things like this. What "Pfizer vaccine reward" does the party than sent this e-mail think that people are expecting, or hoping for? While it's fairly clear that they're attempting to keep up with the times, and capitalize on current events, I find myself wondering what they think they mean.

I suspect that most of these sorts of e-mails are simply cast out into the void on a wing and a prayer. With the costs of sending them being effectively zero, even a desperately poor person in some stricken part of the world can hope that someone clicks on a link and renders themselves vulnerable to ransomware or is drawn in to an advance fee scam. Maybe they're counting on finding one of the ten thousand people who are new to internet fraudsters and criminals. I was wondering aloud to a friend if, perhaps, a lot of the illicit e-mails that land in people's inboxes are just the output of abandoned scripts that people wrote, deployed, gave up on and then never shut down.

For all that people think of cyber-criminals as masters of their craft, most of what's out there is stuff just like this. Sure, the venerable 419 scams live on, with people claiming to be bankers in Africa saying that they're looking for someone to help them smuggle millions off the continent, with only a few up-front fees to be paid, but they seem to have been long overtaken by messages that just seem random.

I supposed that there stereotype of the wealthy, but easily gulled, westerner persists in other parts of the world. And it likely doesn't take all that many people flashing money siphoned from scam targets to entice the world's poor into trying it out for themselves. After all, they only need that one big score, right? And with modern automation able to blast e-mails around the globe in short order, it's not a lot of work. I suppose that everyone likes a get-rich-quick scheme.

Oh, Go Away

Experts I spoke to also noted that removing bad actors from a platform can help prevent users who aren’t yet down the rabbit hole from being radicalized.

“We need to protect those normies, the normal users who don’t want to be radicalized into neo-nazism or whatever it may be. We need to protect them from being harassed and recruited,” said Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who studies online extremism.
Kaleigh Rogers "What Kicking Trump Off Twitter Can — And Can’t — Do" FiveThirtyEight

Okay, I'm going to admit to being dubious about the idea that anyone who can't manage to protect themselves from unwillingly being radicalized into neo-Nazism has any business being on the Internet at all, let alone social media. Then again, I'm not 100% certain that they should be allowed out of the house, either.

But the whole idea of making the social media platforms safe from harassment and recruiting is that it's not going to be a blanket policy. And that raises the thorny question of who decides. It's easy to call out neo-Nazis. They're everyone's favorite whipping boys, precisely because they're considered morally unambiguous villains by nearly everyone who isn't themselves a neo-Nazi. The fact that it's considered somewhere between gauche and sacrilegious to defend them allows for calls to censor them (or have them shot, for that matter) to be easily rolled out without fear of pushback. But as with any low-hanging fruit, it conveniently leaves the difficult work for later.

Should, for instance, people who grew up atheist be allowed to call for the deplatforming of adherents of proselytizing religions? After all, it's not as if there is some magical force that disallows the religious from harassing and recruiting others who might at first find their attentions unwanted. And there are religious communities who argue that they should have a right to be free from missionaries spreading their messages among them, something that missionary groups say would be an unacceptable infringement on their freedom of religion.

The question regarding the freedom of proselytism, however, is still unsettled. This question, as elaborated above, involves two distinct freedoms: the freedom of the proselytizer to conduct proselytizing activities (the "positive" sense of freedom) and the freedom of the potential convert/proselyte not to be interfered in his faith by proselytizing activities (the "negative" sense of freedom).
Moshe Hirsch, The Freedom of Proselytism Under the Fundamental Agreement and International Law, 47 Cath. U. L. Rev. 407 (1998).

And sure, one could make the point that there is a fundamental difference between a neo-Nazi and an annoying Evangelical Christian. But what really matters in this context is the fact that fear of being lead into conversion to Christianity is considered too trivial to be taken seriously, while neo-Nazis are considered too dangerous to be allowed to speak to anyone. But these sorts of social agreements can change, and quickly. While neo-Nazis are likely to be consigned to the wilderness for just about any value of the foreseeable future, I don't know if it's wise for other groups to presume that they won't also find themselves there.

All Aboard

So I was watching this video on YouTube, posted by Wired, about this young woman who does indoor skydiving, and competes at it. I had not realized the remarkable things that people can do in wind tunnels. Then I made the mistake of reading the comments. While many of them were positive, there were quite a number of them slamming Wired for showcasing a young, attractive, White woman, many of them dismissing her because her family was "obviously" quite wealthy. (This, it seems, was based on the fact that indoor skydiving is fairly expensive.)

It struck me as an illustration of how perceived inequality erodes social trust, and how that erosion can quickly become self-sustaining. Nothing was said in the video about the young woman's finances, those of her family or how she funds her training and competitions. So people simply assumed a certain level of wealth, and proceeded to publicly (although mostly anonymously) look down on her for being born into it.

Signalling like this is a form of status seeking. It's a way that people seek approval from others whose esteem they value. And reading some of the comments on this YouTube video reminded me of the fact that being disdainful of others, if a way of seeking approval, and thus, status. And then, like any echo chamber, there forms a race to demonstrate to everyone else one's worthiness of approval by being the most trident. And so you wind up with a bunch of people taking pot-shots at a fourteen-year-old for having the temerity to be featured on YouTube for being good at something unusual.

Supposing I Gamble...

I've been doing some reading on Reddit recently and discovered r/Scams. It's an interesting forum, mainly populated, it seems, with people pointing out attempts (sometimes successful, usually not) to scam them or asking if some or another message or the like is a scam attempt.

There are, unsurprisingly, a wide array of different scams out there, making the rounds of the internet. While the ever-popular 419 scam is still alive and well, and run-of-the-mill phishing scams are common, human cleverness in seeking to defraud their fellow man is eternal, and this poses a problem for even the wary internet denizen. I am, I will admit, something of the suspicious sort. If something strikes me as being off about something, I simply delete or report it, and go about my business. But I realize, especially now that I've been exposed to some of the stories that r/Scams has to offer, that my willingness to always simply walk away is something of a luxury. In many cases, what the scammers are preying on is the poverty of their marks. For someone in need of a better paying job, an offer of an executive assistant role may seem like a stroke of good fortune. For someone low on funds, finding a virtual reality setup or a smartwatch at a significant markdown from MSRP appears to be a simple matter of finding a fortuitous sale.

But, having the sneaking suspicion that something isn't right, they turn to Reddit, and ask: "Am I being scammed?" Often, it's because they don't know how the scam would work. And if they can't understand how they would be cheated, they're more likely to hold out hope that they've stumbled onto something good. Triangulation scams, which I'd never heard of before, work on this model. A criminal offers an item for sale at a good price. When someone offers to purchase the item, the criminal buys it from an online vendor, using compromised credit card credentials, and stipulates the purchaser as the recipient. The purchaser receives the item they paid for, and it's not unless or until someone flags the payment to the vendor as fraudulent that anyone is any the wiser.

But the most interesting aspect of the "Am I being scammed?" posts is the number of them where it's fairly clear that they're hoping (against hope, as it turns out) that the community will tell them that whatever they've come across is, in this one case, legitimate. The number of posts that ask, at some point, "Should I risk it?" is somewhat surprising. To me, anyway. As I noted before, I'm not in a position where something that seems sketchy turning out to be on the level would be a significant benefit to me. It leaves me with the feeling that I should be doing more to ensure that more people can be in that position with me.

Off the Cuff

While it's been years since I first noticed the phenomenon, I'm always kind of surprised at the level of Spontaneous Dickery that's endemic to the Internet. If you're lucky, you don't know the type: the comment on a post that's tangential or even completely off-topic that seems to have no reason for existence than allowing someone to let random stranger know just how much some other random person hurt their feelings.

So someone will share a post like: "Hey, check out the new super-cute puppy I bought!"

And in the stream of comments will be something like: "I had a gerbil once. But it was run over by a car. Must have been a (insert name of political, religious or professional group here) behind the wheel, because they all suck."

My first reaction is always: "WTF? Where the Crack did that come from?" Then, I start reading carefully. Half the time, there's no real clue as to what could possibly link the post to the comment. Sometimes, you can see how, with some serious effort, you could make a logical connection between the original post and the comment. But there's a sizable minority of times there will be a line in the original post or some other comment that if you squint just right and angle the monitor a certain way, you could possibly take as some weird sort of provocation. Something like (to continue my example): "Have you checked out my buddy Jack's Puppy Page? He's really good with animals. He's also a (insert name of political, religious or professional group here) activist, rock climber, bass guitarist, brain surgeon and all-around great guy!"

I'd say that it's something about the Internet that brings out the Vitriolic in people, but I suspect that there have always been random bitter people who plan their lives around plotting petty acts of pseudo-revenge for some slight that was dealt them back in the lunch line in second grade. The internet, and social media in particular, allow them to think that they're striking back against the world (or at least those people in it with the temerity to not be like them) from the safety of their kitchen table.

On the Hook

Mike Pesca has an interesting article in Slate about the outrage-baiting that was prompted by a MarketWatch article that portrayed a hypothetical family of four as struggling on a pre-tax income of $350,000.

Personally, to describe the situation as outrage-baiting seems too tame. "Hate-baiting" would perhaps be a more apt description.

At the conclusion of the piece, Mr. Pesca notes: "Our (manipulated) outrage is unempathetic, adding to the anger in the world while doing nothing to achieve a solution."

Adding to the anger in the world, though, is what generates click-through rates. Empathy doesn't raise advertising revenue.

But perhaps where things go wrong is when giving people the opportunity to add to the anger in the world not only allows themselves to express themselves (and virtue signal), but also to feel as if they're doing something constructive. I know a number of people who feel that the first step in solving a problem is to become emotional about it, and if the emotion needed is a burning class resentment, then so be it.

In my experience, though, our resentments are less effective at inspiring people to solve problems than they are at stoking further resentments. People come to resent what they perceive to be unfair resentment, and it starts to become a vicious cycle.

But the most interesting thing about this is that it isn't new. Sam Dogen, who put together the budget that had people so up in arms, had done the same thing back in 2015 or thereabouts (judging from dates on the comments). At that time, the income being looked at was $200,000 dollars and a lot of the same outrage was generated (it popped up on Google+, which was still active at the time). I recall being a but dubious about the idea that the family in question was "just getting by." After all, from where I sat, they seemed to be doing pretty well for themselves, considering. But I could understand how they felt that they were more precarious than it may have first appeared; a stance that cut no ice with a number of people.

Of course, it's unlikely that it's all the same people commenting now who were commenting then. After all, the initial piece didn't seem to have that broad a reach.

In the end, it doesn't make sense to expect societies to learn from past experiences. That simply isn't way the world works. But I'm curious to see, if Mr. Dogen repeats this exercise again in 2023, if a new, fresh round of outrage is triggered. Or, rather, what that round of resentment will look like.

Secrets

So I found the following thread on Reddit: "China has Tienanmen Square. What historical event does your government not want you to talk about?" Cue any number of people going on about this or that thing that some nation had done. But one commenter noted that most of the examples given were: "bad shit that countries did but openly admit." And I mostly agree with that. None of the examples I read that were raised for the United States dealt with items that I'd never heard of, or seemed to have been scrubbed from search engines. And this is common with discussions like this. People take incidents that they are personally very invested in and treat a failure to aggressively broadcast them as evidence of a coverup and/or official censorship. I have yet to find an situation where someone says: "The mainstream media won't talk about this, but..." that couldn't be found in the mainstream media. It was never front page news, but it was there nonetheless.

But in thinking about what an American version of Tienanmen Square might be, I started to wonder what sort of event would the United States government effectively attempt to render classified, such that speaking of it could be construed as revealing state secrets. For the most part, I couldn't really think of anything. But I don't have a security clearance, so if there are such events, I wouldn't know about them. And that's what makes the question not really work in this context. There are probably any number of covert operations that, if someone knew anything about them, they'd be sanctioned for speaking up about. Take the NSA's looking into metadata from cellular calls, for instance. But that wasn't a public event that took place within a major metropolitan area. It was behind closed doors from the start.

When it comes to historical events, it's not the government that wants the role of censor; it's some or another segment of the populace, instead. In other words, at least in the United States, it's not the government that has staked some important aspect of its identity on a particular understanding of historical particulars. Segments of the citizenry, however, may be a different story. So what tends to keep events out of the major "official" channels isn't the threat of prosecution, but a combination of limited space and limited attention. But to people who understand that a given event should have received more air time than it did, that's not a particularly satisfying conclusion. And so we end up with an idea that the government is strangely incompetent, gamely attempting to hide events that even cursory research quickly surface.

Where'd They Go?

Facebook, according to the BBC, is banning several people that it has labelled as "dangerous individuals." Ho hum. The names on the list to be banned belong to people that those outside of their follower communities tend to have little respect or use for. In this, Facebook is simply kicking out of the service a number of people that most Facebook users don't appear to want to be bothered with anyway.

But I did find this statement in the piece to be interesting:

However, Facebook has been criticized for giving forewarning of the bans, giving those affected a chance to redirect their followers to other services.

Part of this is a nod to the perceived power and reach of Facebook; an assumption that if the banned individuals were to simply go dark without warning, their audiences would have difficulty tracking them down. And hopefully, at least some of them would grow discouraged and give up the search, perhaps to return to the rest of the world. For my part, I'm dubious that abruptly banning people would do anything but cement the idea that Facebook is capricious in people's minds. After all, it's not like people don't know how to search for any of these people online. And it seems that it would be difficult to police all of the blog postings, internet memes and chat-room discussions that could point someone to their idols' new homes.

Also lurking in that criticism of Facebook, however, is the idea that the company has some role to play in making it difficult for people to find the content that they wish to partake of, if that content is deemed harmful. And one can presume that there is a strain of thought that says that other companies have a similar responsibility. Again this seems to be a nod to the idea that these companies effectively control what people see, and therefore what information they can have legitimate access to.

Which is, of course, a double-edged sword. Because someone who can disappear information that one doesn't want others to have can disappear the information that one does want them to...

The New Thing

But many Americans are bereft of people to lean on. The demise of tight-knit communities has had a profound effect on us. We’re increasingly living our lives on the Internet, alone amid vast digital crowds. Social media have replaced socializing. We’re all guilty of staring too often at our phones. We curl up at night with the latest Chrome browser.

The loneliness is killing us.
Soaring suicides are another sign of our toxic social disconnect (By the way, I'm not sure I recommend following this link. Some of the ads this site serves up a pretty sketchy.)

But this individual, isolated experience of church is the poorer one for those of us who are able to go. (Live-streaming services are of course important for the homebound.)  In an era when everything from dates to grocery delivery can be scheduled and near instant, church attendance shouldn’t be one more thing to get from an app. We can be members of a body best when we are all together — we can mourn when we observe and wipe away tears, just as we can rejoice when we can share smiles and have face-to-face conversations. Studies show that regular attendance at religious services correlates with better sleep, lower blood pressure in older adults and a reduced risk of suicide. I doubt these same phenomena occur when online church is substituted for the real thing, because the truth is that community is good for us. We need one another.
Internet Church Isn’t Really Church

I admit to being an old man. After all, I'm a Gen Xer, and the last of us rolled off the assembly line when Jimmy Carter was still President of the United States (depending on how you slice your age cohorts, anyway). But hopefully, I'll never grow so old that I can't appreciate the fact that things can be done in a whole new way, and that can still be the right way.

Technology allows change. The tight-knit communities and in-person-only church services of the past didn't suit everyone's needs. And the technology of social media and streaming events allows people to get something they want without having to pay at least some of the price that those older structures demanded. People don't invent new ways of doing things simply because they have nothing better to do with themselves. They do it in order to solve problems. And those problems don't have to be relevant, or even visible, to everyone else.

Making friends remotely via social media or meeting spiritual needs via streaming webcast allow people to have a different experience than the one I grew up with, where meeting new people required encountering them in person, and most community churches had no way of granting access to more people than could fit in the pews at one time. And I can understand how someone whose life had only ever included direct interactions with the people they called friends
or going to a specific building to worship their deity of choice would understand these as lesser options.

But when I was a child, I didn't go hunting around the neighborhood for new children to meet because I'd done some sort of cost-benefit analysis version a dozen other options. It was simply the only way I knew to go about it. Logging onto a social media site and "following" someone who seemed interesting simply wasn't a thing when I was high-school student in the 1980s. And so I made that work, and I spent years honing the efficiencies of it, until I'd gotten to the point where it was a well-oiled machine. And so is it easier for me to socialize in person than via social media? Sure. But I'm pretty sure that the more or less 30 years of practice that I'd had before Facebook and company came along have something to do with that.

We are not the end of history. Just like our grandparents weren't. The world will continue to change and grow, and people will create new ways of doing things that other people believe have already been perfected, up until the day that they pass from the world. There was a time when the only way to see a movie was to go to the theater. And before then, the only way to see the performance of a story was to see it enacted live on stage. You can make the point that for each transition, something was lost. And yeah, I like to go to the show with friends, and when I watch movies on my couch, it's not quite the same. But the moviegoing experience of my childhood is different, rather than better.

Technology doesn't mean that we have to be lonely, or cut off from vibrant faith communities. The epidemic of suicide can be solved, and people can attain better sleep with the new tools at their disposal. People will create the means to obtain the benefits that they want in their lives.

The New York Post article concludes with "Let’s be the people who step in when someone is hurting or in trouble. Let’s put down our phones and laptops and make connections on our blocks and in our neighborhoods."

I have a better idea. Let's find ways to allow us to have the same connections, via phone and laptop, with someone a nation away just as easily as we can make a connection across the street or around the corner. Being there for someone doesn't have to mean being there with someone. Let's support the ways in which new technologies can create the richness and depth that we understood that our old ways of doing things did.

The Truth of Lies

About a week and a half or so ago. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was being interviewed and along the way, he said the following:

I find that [Holocaust denial] deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think-

At which point, interviewer Kara Swisher interrupted to say:

In the case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead.

The next day, there was an article, Mark Zuckerberg Is Doubly Wrong About Holocaust Denial, on The Atlantic. In it, Yair Rosenberg says the following:

For one, surely spreading hateful misinformation about the Holocaust—designed to mislead the masses and undermine societal awareness of historic anti-Semitic prejudice—constitutes “trying to organize harm.” Moreover, even if we accept Zuckerberg’s questionable claim that some deny the Holocaust out of ignorance rather than malice, this does not absolve Facebook of responsibility for uncritically hosting and spreading that content.

Both of these appear to be based on an idea that has become so widely held that neither Ms. Swisher or Mr. Rosenberg bother to offer any support of it: That none of the people who promote Holocaust denial on the Web genuinely believe what they are saying. For me, this flies in the face of something that I believe is generally understood to be true: That a lie gains widespread (or even limited, actually) social currency only to the degree that it is inobvious that it is, in fact, a lie.

Given the fact that Mr. Rosenberg specifically describes the act of denying the reality of the Holocaust as "designed to mislead the masses," it might seem odd that he's apparently convinced that no one on Facebook has actually been mislead. But it strikes me that one could understand there to be a phenomenon that I'll call Holocaust Denial Skepticism, and that it has taken on characteristics of other purported conspiracies, such as Birtherism, Trutherism and Climate Skepticism; the understanding that the group of people who are actively involved in promoting the conspiracy and the group of people who are sincerely taken in by the conspiracy are mutually exclusive. It's as if, once someone becomes convinced that the Holocaust is actually a historical hoax, they are informed that no, it actually DID happen. Then, and only then, are they allowed to try to convince others that it was a hoax.

Part of this, I believe, comes from the idea that there is no rational reason to honestly disbelieve the Holocaust. And so all disbelief is really a form of motivated skepticism; someone who is free of any hint of antisemitism would simply realize the truth of the accepted historical narrative, and that would be the end of it. Holocaust denial, therefore, is an invention of the antisemitic mind, and an intentionally malicious one, at that.

But from an epistemological standpoint, that fails to take into account the degree to which most human understanding of the world is matter of faith. It is rarely, if ever, unambiguously obvious that any given event took place to a person who was not there to witness it themselves. It is our general belief in the truthfulness of other people that renders most of human history fact, rather than a random series of assertions that may, or may not, have any relationship to actual events. I am unable to say, with any certainty, that the world I currently inhabit is one that flows directly from the consequences of the events of, and surrounding, the Second World War, and thus, provides irrefutable proof that it happened, because there isn't an accessible parallel world, in which there was no Second World War, to compare it to.

But it's worth noting that this is a stance of epistemological skepticism, and is far from universal. What makes it interesting in this circumstance is how Mr. Zuckerberg's own skepticism concerning the origins of Holocaust denial translates into a kind of compassion for Holocaust deniers, even as it intersects with an important business consideration; namely that Mr. Zuckerberg does not was Facebook to be in the business of being an arbiter and protector of Honesty, given that he doesn't understand either himself or his organization as capable of knowing someone's inner world to a degree that would allow them to effectively police that.

Ms. Swisher and Mr. Rosenberg, on the other hand, inhabit a world in which the link between Holocaust denial and malicious antisemitism (presuming they see any other sort) is clear and present. This allows varying (but high) degrees of certainty of the latter to be deduced from the simple presence of the former.

And in the end, I think that this becomes the issue. There seems to be a consensus, one that Mr Zuckerberg may even share, that it is permissible to banish bad people from the public square. The disagreement comes in how one understands that someone qualifies.