I’m trying to get back into the habit of actually writing again (as opposed to visiting friends and relatives for Christmas), so I might as well do another Tumblr post about Tumblr itself.

Sometimes I read debates on Tumblr and see people get pretty viciously attacked for expressing their opinion. This makes me sad, since I’m a firm believer that anyone should be able to express their opinion without facing retribution for it - even if that opinion is something completely terrible that I disagree with.

My reasons for advocating this are admittedly pretty selfish: it’s already a pain in the ass to get people to express their actual opinions, and I don’t like seeing it made any more difficult. As someone with an interest in marketing, debate, and other people-centric activities, I need to know people’s opinions - the opinions they actually have, not just what they are intimidated into saying.

The classic example of this is people saying they like dark, sophisticated coffee when responding to surveys, while their actual buying habits tend to lean toward lighter brews. You see similar patterns everywhere, though. The link eludes me right now, but I recall there was some recent study showing that people express more homophobic views when completely certain the information is being submitted anonymously. That’s not a good thing - it means people are expressing an opinion out of fear of punishment rather than actually believing it. Once they’re away from the public eye, they’re still going to buy their light coffee - it’ll just be that much harder to actually address the issue. 

And really, when it comes to any sort of disagreement, addressing the issue is the whole point. You can show respect to someone and their beliefs while still vehemently disagreeing with them. I mean, my background is in psychology. I have a friend who thinks the floor is poisonous and they will die if they touch it with their hands. I disagree with them about floor toxicity, but I know if I try to make them feel bad about it then they’re just going to close up about it entirely. I want them to be open about this issue, because I’m hoping someday I can convince them that their perceptions do not match reality. I’m sure anyone here can show the same level of respect toward homophobes, racists, or whatever. 

I’ve said things to this effect to people before and gotten replies like “you can’t solve problems by being nice”. I should clarify that I'm not advocating the idea that people should be nice and passive and eventually problems will go away. I am advocating the idea of being a manipulative bastard. I am advocating luring people into a sense of security wherein they openly put their most vulnerable thoughts and feelings forward for your perusal and modification. This is traditionally called “being nice and understanding”, and it’s how you control people. Or help them, if you’re into that sort of thing. 

What it really comes down to, though, is that being mean to anyone is usually counterproductive. If you can get them to legitimately respect and agree with you, that’s worth more than intimidating them into compliance and/or silence. I mean, I guess you’re free to approach things however you want, but if we ever end up on opposite sides of something I suspect my tactics are going to completely steamroll yours.

toxoglossa:

The Art of Being Right All Along

kazerad:

Earlier today I spent some time posting in a aspiring webcomic creator thread on 4chan’s /co/ board, and a kind of interesting exchange came up between me and another writer. She had a really, really neat concept for a character, but she felt it was too much like a “lionized version” of herself…

[…]

Samurai Jack could certainly be considered a mary sue, and some episodes focus on him facing a challenge by overcoming a personal shortcoming, but at the end of the day the Aku/Jack dynamic always remains unchanged. He is an extremely dynamic character, yet is remarkably static, and his resolve to face Aku is the cornerstone of the whole series.

[…]

I’m a little surprised I didn’t think of Samurai Jack myself, since he’s a pretty neat example. It’s one of the few series I can think of that opens with the main character traveling the world and learning every skill, and despite taking place in the future the show is basically about him prevailing through his use of 1200’s-era knowledge. It’s a neat concept, and at least in my case left me excited to see how he handled situations, rather than how he grew from them. And like you said, it also makes him a Mary Sue by most definitions of the phrase.

Reading through that webcomicing /co/ thread, one of the things that really surprised me was how many people were worried about their protagonists being labeled as Mary Sues or self inserts. One of the things I’ve always liked about 4chan is that under the veil of anonymity people are more comfortable admitting their fears and feelings, and it paints interesting pictures of how poisonous some elements of our writing/criticism culture are to actual writers. 

Mary Sues and self inserts, as concepts, are completely irrelevant and can work fine if you pay attention to other aspects of writing. Nonetheless, people still accuse others of it as though it is a horrible sin, and the fear of this accusation is apparently enough to drive people away from even trying things. In laymen’s terms, that’s called bullying. 

Hey, remember that time Tumblr’s social justice community almost killed a guy?

I’m talking about the author of Gunnerkrigg Court, Tom Siddell. If you haven’t been keeping up with it, he was watching the movie Man of Steel yesterday and heard the following quote:

Lois Lane: Look, lets get one thing straight, guys, okay? The only reason I’m here is because we’re on Canadian soil and the appellate court overruled your injunction to keep me away. So, if we’re done measuring dicks, can you have your people show me what you found?

In response, he tweeted:

That’s it! That’s how you write a female girl lady character! If she had a dick, it would be larger than the person she was talking to!!

In context, the “she” refers to Lois Lane, who presumably does not have a dick (though it was a reboot, so who knows). Out of context, it sounds like “she” refers to all possible female characters, implying none of them can have penises, triggering a wave of people to attack him for perceived transphobia. This backlash came while he was going through a major depressive swing, and he openly admitted that the fear of losing his audience - and thus livelihood - had almost pushed him to suicide.

I don’t really care whether you think his statement was good or bad, since that is your choice. Instead, I want to talk about the more interesting aspect here: using fear to control people. In particular, I want to talk about this because it’s something a lot of people deal with - if you remember the 4chan thread on webcomicing fears I talked about last week, one of the most common fears people expressed in there was “I’m afraid I will say something that angers the social justice community and they will attack me” - a fear that Tom Siddell ended up living. 

I guess first off, I should say that fear as a manipulation tactic has its applications. I mean, everything has its applications; even if I disapprove of a tactic on moral grounds, I’m not going to lie to you and say that it doesn’t exist. However, using fear is complicated. It’s dangerous and easily backfires, and you have to understand the nuances of it. 

There’s really two parts to it. First are the effects. Fear will make the target think less of you, but it can be used to temporarily control them. It’s not a permanent solution; if subjected to fear for long enough, people will just cease to care, or they will find some way to adjust for it. The manipulator using fear needs to act quickly to push an alternate goal during this stall.

Law enforcement uses a fear of punishment to dissuade people from crime, but is complemented with programs that provide alternatives to law-breaking and get would-be criminals back on their feet. A starving person who has no alternatives is still going to steal, even with a fear of punishment, so we seek to get them out of that position as soon as possible. On the social justice side of things, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was designed to create a fear that the bus businesses would fail without black passengers, and during that brief period of fear activists scored a major civil rights victory that greatly raised morale. Neither of these, however, were designed to make the target like or agree with the person creating the fear. 

Second are the requirements. To use fear against someone, the target actually has to believe they have something to fear. They need to think - or know from experience - that they can be harmed. When threatening someone with a gun, for example, they need to believe that it is loaded. If you pull the trigger and they just hear the clicking of an empty chamber, your entire illusion falls apart. 

Now consider how fear is being applied in the case of Tom Siddell. He's afraid he’s going to lose his readers, and thus his livelihood, because he said the wrong thing. He’s encouraged to watch his his words out of fear of retribution. Not only does this not actually change any harmful views he may have (see my earlier post on how people’s views become much less socially acceptable when anonymity is guaranteed) but it requires constant maintenance. If the threat of punishment ever goes away, the behavior inhibition will as well if it is being solely maintained by fear. Not only that, but he’s not likely to do much to actually promote beliefs if he is being coerced into supporting them. 

But more importantly, there is the question of whether or not he has anything to fear. Like I said up at the top of this post, the fear of a Tumblr social justice attack was apparently something that a lot of prospective webcomic authors worried about. There have been times that such issues have gotten a lot of attention, such as when Gabe from Penny Arcade made some transphobic comments on his Twitter a while back and people said they were boycotting the comic or withdrawing from PAX. However, there is one very, very dangerous difference between Penny Arcade and Gunnerkrigg Court: the Project Wonderful ad.

By clicking the PW ad, you can get complete statistics on Gunnerkrigg Court’s day-by-day viewership. Everyone will be able to see if Tom Siddell’s actions have a meaningful impact on his readership. And if they don’t, and the people who nearly drove him to sucide turn out to be nothing more than a very vocal minority… well, that's bad for Tumblr-style social justice. They’ve relied heavily on instilling fear, and seeing Gunnerkrigg’s statistics remain unchanged would suggest to everyone watching that they can’t actually do much to back it up. This started with a few people attacking a comment for being transphobic, but the numerical outcomes here run the risk of affecting whether or not people even take transphobia seriously. 

I don’t know, this is all speculation for the time being. Creators are going to be watching this, though, and it’s likely to have some impact on whether or not “fear of social justice” remains a legitimate concern for them. You can decide yourself whether that is a good or bad thing.

The one thing I am confident in saying, however, is that using fear is complicated and easily backfires. It needs very good tactics behind it to be effective, and if you instill fear in the name of a larger movement then failure risks not only damaging your own credibility, but that of the movement as a whole. If you are going to play with fear, please consider practicing on something that will only affect you if it goes wrong. 

I realized today while autographing dozens of shitty crayon drawings that I might be a celebrity.

I’m not actually sure. I mean, I’m definitely not paid like one, and at present there are probably less than 20 thousand people interested in my work, but at some point I apparently crossed that threshold where the mere fact that I made something was sufficient reason for it to have value. Most of the things I make money off of these days revolve around me wielding popularity in some way, and at present it looks like my future will involve more of the same. On top of that, I’ve already encountered most of the “bad” celebrity things too, right down to reading thrilling yet fictitious tales about relationships I have apparently been in, sadly written by sub-par slanderers who couldn’t even go so far as to track down my sexual orientation. It’s been an interesting experience, to say the least.

It’s also a little confusing, though, because I almost never see people talking about this stuff. Like, you frequently see stories about someone who accidentally gains celebrity status after they saved a bunch of people, or won some big competition, and the stories usually end in bankruptcy and a horrible drug addition. However, I’ve seen very few people discussing the gradual pursuit of a career path that revolves around personal renown/popularity. Like, analyzing the magnitude/meaningfulness of what you have, safely accruing more, or dealing with potential backlash. It’s something most creators aspire toward, yet I see very few of them actually discussing or analyzing it openly while they are working to achieve it. A lot of the more successful ones seem somewhat elusive or outright removed in their interactions with “non-famous” people.

I guess sometimes I feel like that’s something that separates me from a lot of other creators: I like people. I mean, every creator is going to have some people they like, but most of you know that in my case I’m pretty indiscriminate about it. I respect my favorite writers almost exactly as much as I respect that weird guy who exclusively produces fanart of my characters eating eachother. People are just interesting. I love them. I try to go out of my way to watch what people are saying, make myself approachable, and treat fans and critics alike as equals. 

One of the things I’ve noticed while endeavoring to treat people as equals is that people basically seem to fall into three categories. For simplicity, let’s call them “Group A”, “Group B”, and “Group C”. In Group A, you have the people who are really honored to be treated as your equal. They’re usually people who have faced (or do face) some kind of discrimination or social ostracization, and are often completely floored by the fact that anyone would speak to them as though they were on the same level. In Group B, you have the people who just don’t give a shit about comparative status, and for whom people are people. And then in Group C, you have people who are outright offended at the idea of being held on equal footing with others, especially people they view as “below” them. The sort of people who would unfacetiously post an image like this. (no offense to anyone who posted that. Reblogs happen)

It’s been years, and I still haven’t entirely figured out how to deal with Group C. Like, I don’t mean to imply they are bad people, but there is a certain difficulty in responding to them because making intelligent decisions often entails holding them on par with the other two groups. These are the people who will say, like, “this scene was poorly paced, you should redo it” when you got a positive response on it from 90% of your readers. I have yet to find a sufficiently tactful way to say “I respect your opinion, but I can’t let it guide me because it is in direct opposition to opinions that are more numerous or situationally relevant” because Group C doesn’t take well to having their wisdom ignored, or the idea that you have some obligation to serve the lesser individuals comprising Groups A or B. Groups A and B are generally comfortable presenting their opinions as just that - one person’s opinion - and recognizing (or even expecting) that it may be ignored in favor of the majority, but with Group C there is a real hostility to the idea of serving others over them. Ironically, Group C also seems to be the smallest of the three.

Of course, my data may be biased in that last observation, because let’s be honest: I write a comic about alcoholism, depression, self-loathing, and saying the wrong thing, and I do it in a setting based off a video game. There no prestige in liking my comic. No sense of elitist superiority or social status is imparted by being a fan. After Skyrim was released to critical acclaim, you can’t even take the Indie Hipster angle and say “it’s based off the Elder Scrolls games; you’ve probably never heard of them”.  But on the converse, the central themes and main character are going to appeal to other people in Group A. A lot of them are going to be able to empathize with the thoughts and feelings presented, and I occasionally get some really touching fanmail from people professing how much it spoke to them. Group B is also going to be overrepresented simply by virtue of liking things independently of what they are or what social status is imparted. I am probably seeing less of Group C than actually exists, though. 

I guess from a tactical perspective I should feel bad for utterly ignoring a potential (if elitist) audience in Group C, but from what I’ve seen of the group dynamic between the three I can’t actually feel that disappointed about it. On a fundamental level, Group C revolves around repressing Groups A and B. When holding a minority opinion, Group C takes it upon themselves to enforce their tastes and values on what they perceive to be the less-informed masses. They are well-intentioned, but often willing to resort to threats or outright hurting people who defy their vision. They need to maintain control and superiority, lest they be put on the level of those other people. Think, like, the people who viciously attack and belittle work with static characters, thus depriving us of an entire class of character arc. When its their word against someone else’s, they need to be supported or else. 

And, you know, I can’t do that. I wish I could say I was opposing it on principle, but it really ties back to a much more hedonistic motivation: I like people. I interact with them and try to get to know as many as I can. I can’t really look upon the masses as inferiors because they’re pretty cool, pretty weird people, and most of them are probably better informed and carry more interesting experiences than the Group C individuals who seek to define taste. I end up targeting a lot of what I make toward these less vocal individuals and it really does seem to work out for the best. It accrues more criticism from Group C due to often circumventing their definitions of what constitutes quality, but I feel like the net benefit comes out in my favor. 

I don’t know, it’s confusing. In a nutshell, my biggest observation at present about “being popular” is that you often have to choose between acting in favor of a majority that thirsts for content that speaks to them directly, or in favor of a minority that will attempt to harm you or your reputation if you don’t cater to them instead. Which is scary, or exciting, depending how you look at it; Right now I’m inclined to say that it is better to serve the statistical majority, but I’m still exploring this. I just wanted to get my present thoughts and feelings on the matter out there. 

Basically, I think the most important thing to do is remain informed. You need to keep an eye on what people think, what you’re doing that works/doesn’t work, and so on. At times, you will have to make design calls that disappoint someone, and those people may attempt to cause you harm for ignoring them. It’s up to you to let yourself be guided by statistics or personal beliefs rather than threats.

If it’s not clear, I’ve been using the tag “lightcoffeephobia” on things as a reference back to this post and the ideas contained in it. 

I should probably reiterate that post’s point since it comes up a lot: punishing someone for saying something does not change what they believe. It only changes what they express around you. It creates the illusion that you are changing people’s opinions when in actuality you are just invalidating your measurement tool. It’s like losing weight by covering up the last digit on your scale. 

If you actually want people’s beliefs to change, don’t do this. You’ll only make it harder for people who actually want to create change to get accurate data. 

If you want to make it look like you caused a change someone’s beliefs… well, what the hell, go nuts. Most people watching will fall for it, and it will make you look good. It’s a dark tactic, but you can use this to damage causes while reaping praise for supporting them. I’m not encouraging this. I’m just acknowledging that it works, hopefully so you can recognize when others are doing it.

I am pretty easy to get in touch with. Like, on the side of my blog, you will notice there are three different messengers and an email address. You can contact me using those, and I will reply to it. You can ask me questions and I’ll answer them, you can criticize my choices and I will hear you out, and you can even ask me to read your obscure fanfics and I will at least get as far as putting them on my iPod and forgetting about them (sorry Quin. I really am planning to get to them someday).

As far as I know, this isn’t a particularly weird thing. Like, most authors and creators I’ve known are fairly accessible. I’ve sent people compliments before when I liked their work and usually gotten a “thank you”, and I’ve even sent criticisms when I found something uncomfortable and usually got a prompt and interested reply stating that they hadn’t thought of it that way. I think the only time I haven’t gotten a reply was when I sent Tracy Butler a image comparing Mordecai to an anatomical diagram and proving that he does have stumpy little arms, though I suspect I was one of dozens of readers to do this. 

After I started doing Prequel, though - and began acquiring something akin to popularity - I began to notice an interesting shift in how people contacted me directly. Compliments remained pretty unchanged, but criticism became something no longer given to me directly. 

On a functional level, this is kind of neat. Like, artists talk about how they need criticism to improve, and by all accounts being able to look at the internet and see hundreds of people talking about your work is a straight upgrade over showing people your pictures and asking “what do you think?”. However, it also leads to this interesting shift where criticism - and your responses to it - become something of a spectacle. You’re a public figure (perhaps even celebrity?) and your actions are something people will dig into as deep as your work. 

My first inclination when dealing with thing like this is usually to seek motive. Unless they are simply unaware how their approach compares to others, the public critic’s motivation is probably not to institute actual change. Like I mentioned up above, most creators I have known were incredibly receptive to listening to criticism or learning about new angles when contacted privately about it, and I don't think I’m particularly different in that regard. By all accounts if someone is more popular than you then you would have the overall biggest impact on the world by affecting their views as efficiently as possible. The optimal offensive strategy, I would argue, is to deliver criticism privately. 

This overlooks an important element, though: the optimal defensive strategy. When you’re contacting a well-known figure, they do have social power and there is this risk that they will use that against you - you know, put you up for ridicule or call you out for something publicly, or even just outright ignore you with the knowledge that you are too small to carry an impact on your own. As a defense against this, we make things public. We deliver criticism on a stage in which others will see if we are mistreated or ignored, and we do this knowing it will likely hinder the effectiveness of our message. We trade offensive power that would make our campaign more likely to actually work in favor of defensive power that will protect us from having things turned around on us. We are put in a Prisoner’s Dilemma-type situation where a fear of betrayal makes both sides worse off. 

While it’s easily explained from a game theory standpoint, the bigger question is how to circumvent it and make everyone better off. My part in this is that I try to emphasize that you can contact me without negative social ramifications, as well as trying to support the idea that this is a useful belief others should emulate. The challenge, of course, is convincing others that there is nothing to fear; that they can use the pure offense strategy without concern for their own emotional or physical safety. You want to convince critics that they can confront you personally without fearing it will be turned against them.

It’s interesting because the more I think about it, the more it’s equally difficult from my position. Like, there are always people out there saying things about me that make me want to contact them and ask “dude, where did you even hear that?”, but my experience with it is that contacting a critic in such a way usually ends with the conversation online, and usually edited somehow. This practice is probably not large-scale or spreadable enough that I should actually care about it, but when your career path depends on renown it is easy to find slander concerning. Back when I wrote that post Weaponizing Fear, the core question behind it was whether rumors were actually something a creator should worry about, and as best as I can tell the answer was “probably not”. In a way, I guess that means I have something of a moral obligation to try and confront critics privately and bring down the general wall of communication fear that exists there, but it’s still an uncomfortable idea because you know it’s going to backfire a little at the very least. It’s a question of how much risk you are willing to take for the sake of a better and more informed tomorrow. Someday, I’ll suck it up and start contacting people more, shyness and ramifications be damned, but I can see why a lot of creators choose to remain quiet and removed. There is a very real fear that you will get hurt.

The moral, I guess, is the same one that comes from most of the posts here: get people to talk. Whether you agree with them or not, you are more powerful if you can get others to speak freely and without fear. The more people you speak to and the more angles you get, the more informed (and, probably, weird) you will be, and if you put people in a position where they are afraid to speak to you, you only hurt yourself. 

But really, those arms are tiny.

I write a lot of posts here about anonymity.

One one level, it’s because I just really enjoy the concepts and ramifications anonymity - which by extension makes me one of the disconcertingly small number of creators who can maintain a positive relationship with 4chan and the other Anon Cultures. On another level, though, it’s a professional interest: anonymity is very important to anyone who deals with crowds, public opinion, and data gathering. Statistically speaking, the responses people give when others are watching and judging them tend to be very different than the responses people give under the veil of anonymity. 

However, the other thing I like to talk about on this blog is social manipulation. In all my discussions of anonymity, there’s still one topic I haven’t really touched on very much: how do you control anonymous people?

Anonymity as a data gathering tool is well and fine, but one of the big fears people have of 4chan and similar cultures is their seemingly uncontrollable, chaotic nature. With 4chan in particular, popular culture knows them largely by their external actions - 4chan raids, 4chan harassment, 4chan hacktivists, etc. Content creators especially seem pretty clueless when it comes to actually exhibiting control over anonymous figures - which is strange because, like I’ve said before, it's not complicated. It’s really kind of confusing how people can be so bad at it.

So, in this post I’m going to more or less just talk about how to control anons. To understand the techniques, though, we have to get into a bit of psychology and history.

Put on your psychologist scarves, kids. We’re gonna talk about brains.

Crime and Punishment

Before I get into the thick of this, the first thing you have to understand is the difference between reinforcement and punishment.

The concept is pretty simple. The idea behind reinforcement is that someone receives a reward for behaving in a certain way, which encourages them to behave that way more frequently. It can be a positive reinforcement (giving them something they want, like a cupcake) or a negative reinforcement (taking away something they dislike, like an annoying singer), but in both cases it leaves them better off than they were. 

Punishment is the opposite. Someone faces consequences for behaving a certain way, and this discourages them from doing it again. Like with reinforcement, punishment can be either positive (someone sings annoyingly until you leave) or negative (they take away your cupcake). The common trend is simply that it leaves you worse off than you were before. You fear the punishment happening to you, and this causes you to act a certain way.

Our culture has a very large emphasis on punishment. On some level, this is an institutionalized thing we recognize and accept - we know and approve of the fact that people get charged money for driving recklessly, or will be locked away from people if they physically harm someone else. There are a lot of other types of punishment that are used to control behavior, though, which we tend to overlook.

For instance: social ostracization. We have very strict and complicated rules governing everything from eye contact to the appropriate progression of discussion topics. If someone violates these rules, it’s not a crime, but we still try to make them get hurt a little. For things like inappropriate conversation progression or eye contact, they’ll be accused of obsession with a topic, or their sexuality will be called into question in a way that makes them uncomfortable. In more serious cases of someone violating norms in a way we disapprove of, we will inflict viral misinformation against them - this is where you see stuff like slander and decontextualized quotes used to harm someone’s reputation or career. At this point, you’re usually not trying to discourage that person’s behavior - you’re trying to make an example out of them, and show others the cost of violating your beliefs of how people should act. 

Rape is another punishment that is pretty widely accepted in our culture. If you go to prison, for example, it’s taken for granted that you’re going to get raped. People don’t complain about this a lot, probably because they recognize that prison on its own looks like a pretty good deal for a lot of people - it’s a warm place to sleep and three state-funded meals a day. The fear of rape is regarded as one of the things that makes prison an effective punishment. You also see this fear of rape used in politics - any time a conservative politician uses the classic “it was her fault for dressing that way” line, he’s establishing rape as a de-facto punishment someone incurs for violating what he sees as an appropriate dress code. It’s effectively an attempt to weaponize rape as punishment.

Even death is a pretty common punishment in our culture. Like, even outside arguments of capital punishment, we are taught that you simply don’t walk certain places at night, or reach into your pockets in the wrong way, or make any sudden movements when a cop pulls you over, or things like that. We recognize that, yes, if you do these things then you're probably going to die. Like rape, it’s also something that’s been politicized in the past - if you’ve ever read the beautifully dated “Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle”, the comic’s whole premise is that if you’re gay you will die. It’s not used as a statement of “we should do something about HIV”, but instead as a political statement that you really shouldn’t be gay. In general, our culture is pretty okay with death as long as the person was doing something we disapprove of.

And like… sometimes, I just like to think about how fucked up and dangerous our entire culture would seem to an alien visitor. 

Anyway, the point here is that our culture is utterly terrifying. Outside of the written rules, we have a complex web of social standards and personal beliefs that are enforced through vigilante justice. Good and bad are irrelevant - you just can’t piss off the wrong people, or they’ll come and get you. However, there’s always been one defense to this: anonymity.

One of the earlier forms of this was confessionals in the Catholic church. People who committed a mortal sin would confidentially tell it to a clergyman who offered them ways to seek absolution without the clergyman judging or hating them. Later on, you also saw the concept of anonymous crime tipping emerge - letting people report a crime in a way that the criminals could not trace it back to them. In both cases, anonymity was being used as a way to encourage positive behavior by inhibiting problematic people who would enforce punishments on it. The tipper or confessor could still be rewarded with the positive feelings of making amends for their wrongdoing or inhibiting a crime, but they were less likely to be punished for it. 

In some ways, this had a dark side: it’s where we got things like the magazine-clipping ransom letter. In other ways, it got romanticized: we saw fiction stories of superheroes concealing their identity so that criminals could not attack them or their families at home. In all cases, though, anonymity came about as a defense against punishment. 

With the advent of the internet, it became easier than ever to conceal your identity. You might be a lowly fry cook by day, but by night you were just a name on a forum like everyone else. At school you might get beat up for being a nerd, but at home you were a Level 50 Paladin in your MMO guild. Nobody could hurt you for what you were or did while wearing a mask.

On top of this, people discovered that they could have their identity completely concealed to the point of not even having a persistent online name, and it would still be psychologically rewarding to interact with people. Under complete anonymity, people could act and take chances without even the fear that their beloved Level 50 Paladin would be punished for it in their stead. 

In a hostile and punishment-driven world where you could have all your career aspirations permanently destroyed by holding a conversation topic for a sentence too long, people realized that they could be invincible. They just needed to put on a mask.

Fighting Faceless

As long as there is punishment, there will be anonymity. The very act of punishment gives people two options: they can meet the punisher’s demands, or they can learn to defend against it. Anonymity represents the latter: people weakening the effectiveness of punishment. For better or for worse, an anonymous individual can act without personally suffering negative consequences.  

This, I think, is where most people falter in their attempts to fight anons. Anonymity is a defense against punishment. They are still susceptible to everything else. 

For a lot of people, this can be a kind of disconcerting experience as they realize exactly how much they rely on threats and coercion to control others. Sometimes, this is a very big sign you are doing something wrong - if you rely on bullying or slander to control others, you will have a very hard time controlling an anon culture. Other times, it’s a bit more innocuous - if you rely on institutional laws like DMCA, the inability to punish people in an anon culture who violate it can be frustrating. 

External punishments still affect them. You can threaten to hurt someone an anon cares about, or destroy something they love - all the standard villain tactics that work against masked superheroes also carry over here pretty well. Of course, this is also a really stupid thing to do, since it provides them with positive reinforcement in the form of moral justification. 

This highlights an important point, though: moral justification does affect them. Feeling like they made a positive difference affects them. Heck, any kind of positivity or reward affect them.

Like I mentioned above, anonymity is a defense against punishment, and everything that isn’t punishment is fair game. You can reinforce positive behavior, evoke feelings of righteousness, reward them with things they want, and even influence them with empathy and camaraderie. You can control them or stop them or anything like that, and it’s really not that hard. Most people outside of me wouldn’t even call this “manipulation”. It's kindness. They’re incredibly susceptible to it. 

The Big Twist

So, you know all that stuff I just wrote about controlling anons? It also works on normal people. In fact, it works better than coercion.

Like I mentioned earlier, we often don’t recognize the degree to which we rely on fear and punishment as a culture. We’re accustomed to it, and those of us lucky enough to be born with social aptitude can navigate these complex interpersonal relationships with relative comfort. Someone’s reactions and strategies in their first encounter with an anon culture can be a telling indicator of how much said person relies on punishment - or even the ways in which they rely on punishment. It can be a humbling experience, having a branch of manipulation tactics suddenly cut off from you, but you become more powerful because of it.

Anonymity and similar defenses against punishment are an ingrained part of our culture that will not be going away any time soon, and your success these days will largely depend on your ability to adapt to them. Services like Steam, for example, are viable in the modern age because they try to combat the unpunishable forces of piracy by providing better service than the pirates can. They rely on reinforcement rather than punishment, and it works. Meanwhile, companies that try to enforce punishments slowly dry up and die. 

And not only is it economically non-viable, but a reliance on coercion can be dangerous and self-deceptive. As I said at the very beginning, the opinions people present around others differ from the opinions they present under the veil of anonymity, and their actual habits are better reflected by the latter. Someone might share your political beliefs when they see how you treat people who disagree with you, for example, but you have no idea what that person is doing when they enter a voting booth and gain their anonymity. If they are siding with you out of fear, you can bet they’re secretly fighting you when consequences are removed. Thanks to the very existence of anonymity, all coercion does is obscure your knowledge of who’s on your side and who isn’t. When the masks are on, the rules are different.

I think that’s what makes anon cultures so interesting to me. For all their depravedness and hostility, they largely represent a place in which punishment is less effective. The cultural differences that emerge from that are neat - not entirely positive, nor entirely negative, but certainly different. I think the world would benefit from more people learning the techniques to effectively control anons, because they carry over into about everything. People in an anon culture are no different from normal people, other than being more resistant to the cheapest of manipulation strategies. 

That’s not to say I think anonymity creates the end-all perfect culture or anything like that, but it’s definitely an interesting step that is worth learning from. In particular it’s important to know how to respond to it, since elements and effects of of anonymity are only becoming more prevalent as time goes on. 

Anonymity and the idea of consequence-free social interaction might be be scary, but as long as you understand how it works, it’s relatively harmless and there’s nothing to be afraid of. If nothing else, it’s simpler and safer than the world you’re living in now.

A week or so ago, I made a post about how words can mean different things to different people, and the importance of learning what definition the user intended. While it’s on my mind, I want to make a quick followup illustrating how this can be used offensively.

Imagine you have six shapes. The Yellow Star is objectively good. Everyshape loves the Yellow Star. Meanwhile, the Red Square is pretty much the worst shape ever. Everyshape hates the Red Square. 

Here’s the interesting part: depending how you categorize things, you can justify any of the shapes in the center as being good or bad.

Like, let’s say you hate Blue Square. She skipped out on your birthday party or something. Rather than saying Red Square is bad (something everyone would agree with), you can make the generalization that squares are bad, using Red Square as proof. Now, Blue Square looks bad too.

Or, let’s say Yellow Triangle is in a bind. He killed his roommate, and the police are getting nosier than he’d like. He can make himself look good, though, with a generalized statement: yellow shapes are good, and Yellow Star is proof of this. This is actually the tactic I wrote about in an essay called Defensive Generalization.

You can even make more complicated generalizations based on the exact people you are trying to discredit. Let’s say you have a problem with both Blue Star and Blue Square. You simply say that shapes with symmetry based off an even number are bad, and point to Red Square as evidence of this. You can even do a two-step: let’s say Red Pentagon and Blue Square get along great and call themselves the “Top-Row-Of-Shapes Club”. If you want to break that club up, you can warn Red Pentagon that even-number-symmetry-shapes are bad (see: Red Square) and that her association with Blue Square could be harmful. And just like that, their relationships are yours to control.

Despite the prevalence of this tactic, seeing through it as a listener is relatively easy: you just need to pay attention to who is categorizing things for you. Blue Square is going to deny having any association with Red Square. People who want to attack Blue Square, though, will take every angle possible to associate them. They’re both squares, they both have even symmetry, they both have one facial feature, they’re both on the right side of the image, whatever. If you question who is grouping things together for you, ulterior motives can become more obvious.

Countering it from the target’s perspective, however, is more difficult. As easy as it is, most people won’t question who is categorizing things for them. Blue Square either has to deny her associations with Red Square, or come up with a whole bunch of groupings that associate her with Yellow Star, who we all know is good. It’s a stressful position and, ultimately, favors whoever has the most people listening. If someone gets shot, it’s the loudest voices that will decide whether he was a student or a thug. 

As listeners, though, we have the most power to counter this. We can be aware that harmful manipulators will use this tactic, and by extension skeptical of people who try to sort things into categories for us. Ultimately, your goal is to look past manipulative categorization and judge parties by their actions, not their grouping. Anyone who tries to keep you from doing this is usually an enemy. 

As usual, though, the best thing you can do is simply be skeptical. Recognize that everyone has an agenda. Even I have an agenda - if you look at the sort of things I write, it’s obvious that I’m trying to reduce the value of deception so that I can outcompete people who rely on it. It’s important to note these things and factor it into the credibility of information. Nothing is more dangerous than taking things at face value.

If you didn’t pick up from the title, this is another post about GamerGate. The normal disclaimers apply: if you disagree with what I say, you are free to talk to me about it. My contact info is in the sidebar. Every time I make this offer, I get a bunch of emails and Skype messages agreeing with me and thanking me for what I said, and then like one or two people on Twitter talking about how wrong I am. I want them to know that I’ll still hear them out, and if it seems like I’m holding onto an opinion you disagree with it’s because literally nobody is countering it. 

Anyway, this time I’m particularly interested in people’s thoughts, because I want to write about something a little different. A friend was talking with me about my last blog post, and she began to bring up parallels between it and GamerGate - including a few I didn’t actually think of. It made me think of it in a slightly different light, and I’d like to propose a potential alternate interpretation to why this thing called “GamerGate” exists.

Throughout its life, GamerGate has been claiming it is about ethics in gaming journalism - and, I think a lot of people associated with it do believe that. However, I have a theory that its core goals and actions are better described as a focus on something else: individual accountability.

Think back to the very beginning, when this whole thing started. You had a game developer who had sex with a games journalist. People discovered this, and (wrongly) thought that the journalist had written a positive review of her game because of it.

Right there, any creator with a lick of common sense could have ended this whole issue with the simple words “I had sex with people in the industry, but I made sure it was nobody who would review my work or otherwise help me get ahead”. Just like that, she would have taken accountability for the actions while emphasizing that they were harmless, and no one would care. 

Instead, you saw something different: rather than addressing this as though it were an attack on the developer specifically, she (and the journalists she was apparently associated with) addressed it as an attack on female developers as a group. People who had legitimate concerns about favors in journalism were publicly dismissed as being against female developers. Gaming media pushed the narrative that the attack had nothing to do with the developer’s actions, and everything to do with the groups she identified as a part of. To proto-Gamergate, though, it wasn’t about the group - it was about the individual, and no one seemed to see that.

You see this pattern continue into GamerGate’s more recent behavior. In almost all of their actions, GamerGate tends to target individuals in the game industry. They’ll send in a whole bunch of complaints about a particular writer who said something discriminatory, or try to persuade advertisers to pull from the specific news publication that employs that writer. Rather than targeting a group, GamerGate tends to very, very specifically go after people they interpret as doing something wrong. 

And honestly, most of the people GamerGate attacks are being pretty horrible. Like, I think the latest one is some writer who said that GamerGate was proof that nerds needed to be bullied into submission. GamerGate retaliated by getting some advertisers to pull from the website that employs him, as well as donating a bunch of money to anti-bullying charities to make a statement. It’s largely a targeted call-out campaign, which is something I actually think is pretty awesome if executed with the right amount of skepticism.

In response, though, you see GamerGate’s targets try to make it about groups. They’ll claim that GamerGate is attacking journalists, or attacking independent developers. They’ll push a narrative that the attacks are purely based off group membership - that nobody in these groups is safe - and thus everyone in them should stand against GamerGate. Even the opponents who try to engage GamerGate diplomatically do it in a very removed and group-oriented way, asking what specific changes GG would like to see to their policies, all while refusing to talk about individuals. Anyone who tries to draw attention to them is a harasser. 

You see the same thing when GamerGate’s opponents characterize GamerGate. They’re an angry mob, or a bunch of straight white cisgender men who are upset that their industry has diversity. Any individual voices or diversity inside GamerGate gets erased in favor of characterizing them as a homogeneous group. 

Portraying a group as homogeneous means you can characterize them by any single member. If someone who claims association with GamerGate sends a developer a death threat, it’s not from an individual, it’s from GamerGate. GamerGate’s members, for their part, usually make an effort to track these harassers down and hold them personally accountable for their wrongdoing, but meanwhile their opposition holds up the harassment as proof that GamerGate is an unsalvageable cause full of harassment and everyone involved should abandon it. Interestingly, TotalBiscuit wrote an excellent essay on how publicizing death threats only encourages copycats, logic by which GamerGate’s opposition is causing more death threats to happen with their response. You don’t see them taking any personal accountability for that - it’s just GamerGate’s fault for sending the death threats to begin with. Anything to avoid acknowledging individuals.

I’ve even noticed this trend of anti-individuality in my own experiences. I’ve written things about GamerGate before and had its opponents immediately dismiss me on the basis that I’ve “drank the kool-aid” and been manipulated into supporting a bad cause that harms game developers and minorities.

But like… that’s me! That’s me you’re defending, on both counts. Can we talk about how GamerGate really does benefit the sort of business tactics I use? Or how my emphasis on word-of-mouth popularity and positive audience regard means I’ll be even more powerful if the journalism scene utterly crumbles? Heck, can we talk about how consumer-focused tactics like mine actually remove entry barriers, and how increasing their comparative power would probably bolster the number of women and minorities in the industry? I don’t want to be dismissed as part of a group - want to be acknowledged as an individual who has actual experiences and motivations that drive my actions. 

That’s actually another thing I really like about GamerGate, and which also plays into the theorized emphasis on individuality. GamerGate’s opposition is mostly straight, white, cisgender men who claim they are bravely protecting innocent minorities from, apparently, GamerGate’s straight, white, cisgender men. GamerGate, on the other hand, tends to actually push their minority voices to the forefront. Maybe it’s just a response to the accusations of homogeneity, but any time a woman or minority speaks out in GamerGate’s defense there is an effort to really get her side heard and draw attention to it. They want to actually get the minorities themselves in positions where they can visibly speak, rather than just consigning them to an offhand mention as “my gay friend”. I’ve met more female, non-white, and LGBTQIA gaming writers and Youtubers through GamerGate than I have through at least four years of seeing gaming news sites talk about the importance of diversity in the industry. There are enough minority voices in one place that erasure has become a joke, with things like TallBlackNerd changing his Twitter name to “Cis White Gamer”. It’s hard to express how oddly meaningful that is.

And this all seems to tie back to that one core idea: individual accountability. GamerGate tends to push for things to be viewed in terms of people, whereas their opponents tend to push for things to be viewed in terms of groups, stereotypes and labels. Maybe this is intentionally malicious and they’re trying to cover up active wrongdoing, or maybe they just naturally think in a very privileged and discriminatory way. Whatever the case, just imagine how much smoother things would go if the industry at large shared GamerGate’s dedication to individual accountability:

I guess what I’m really getting at in all of this is that I’m not sure GamerGate is doing itself a service by saying that it’s about “ethics in journalism”. At its core, I think the central idea is really about people in the game industry being held individually accountable for wrongdoing. That’s not an issue of ethics - it’s an issue of letting people defend themselves without dragging a group into it. If an employee of yours did something so bad that people are able to present evidence that gets advertisers to stop supporting you, then you need to treat that employee as a liability. And beyond that, you need to thank the people who called him out for doing you a service. 

Is the theory accurate? Would such an angle better summarize GamerGate’s motives and give it a stronger arguing point? I don’t know. I’m one person, and most of what I focus on is my own goals and ideals. I do think it is an interesting idea to consider, though - and puts a better emphasis on what I find generally agreeable about GamerGate as a whole.

I’m not following GamerGate as closely as I used to, but I am still interested. Analyzing its advocates and opposition is beginning to give me those same feelings I get when playing an Elder Scrolls game or reading a story. I like the ideas, but beneath it there is a brooding realization: I could do it better. 

(EDIT: Since this post is still going around, I’d like to add that Social Darwin Awards talked to me after this was published and convinced me that I was wrong to suggest doxxing harassers is how it “should” work. He made a decent point that such information should be delivered to law enforcement, not to the general public for vigilante retribution, and I can’t really argue with that. I still think journalists have a responsibility to stand against individuals who are wronging others, but they shouldn’t be encouraging illegal actions against them.)

I’m beginning to realize that a lot of the problems I have with modern Social Justice culture have to do with its economic structure.

I don’t mean “economic” in the monetary sense, but in the more general sense of drawbacks/incentives. Once upon a time, advocating for the visibility and fair representation of marginalized groups was a bad thing. It came at a social cost: many people were openly racist/sexist/homophobic and saw nothing wrong with it, and pushing for these groups’ rights was seen as naive or futile. You had to legitimately care deeply about these issues if you wanted to press them, since fighting for them came at a personal detriment.

As social justice issues began to gain visibility and acceptance, however, entrepreneurs began to see it as a opportunity. New voices started to enter social justice, ones whose goal was not to change minds and laws but to cater to this newfound-yet-significant demographic of majority individuals who wanted to be progressive. These entrepreneurs took moderate, palatable positions that idolized the most progressive ideas their audience already accepted, and silenced their competition through the sheer scale of their reach. Social justice advocacy became a business: they could no longer focus on giving voice to all marginalized people, but instead had to focus on specifically giving voice to the minorities who best fit the image they were trying to sell, or best justified the need for such advocacy. 

A more harmful consequence of this structuring, however, was that it changed why people got involved with social justice. Unlike its earlier years when it came at a detriment to its members, social justice now carried power. People who advocated social justice issues or showed support to notable social justice groups could be rewarded with special benefits or support, or rendered exempt from attacks and criticism. More and more people got involved in social justice despite many of them being apathetic toward (or even outright disliking) the marginalized groups it purported to support. They were in it for special considerations from the (often privileged, majority) people at the top of the totem pole, and the issues they advocated were nothing more than a tool to appease those in power.

I write a lot about anon cultures, something many self-identified social justice advocates vehemently oppose or speak out against, and I think this theory gives an interesting angle to that conflict. Like, I don’t think anyone can deny that minorities are incredibly over-represented on places like 4chan. I don’t mean the cool minorities that society accepts and praises people for defending, but the ones that are still kind of taboo: people with autism, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, or sexual deviancies outside of vanilla-enough-for-straight-people-to-like homosexuality. Anon culture, by its design, provides them with an environment in which their identity is irrelevant and they have as much voice as anyone else. 

And I think this really peeves the more mercenary social justice advocates. They can’t brag to their SJ-superiors about helping these people, since there is no way to tell which anon is and isn’t in a marginalized group. They won’t receive special treatment in an anon environment for their beliefs or positions, since they would get ridiculed for the very act of wearing an identity. And not just that, but everyone there is free to criticize or attack them - even the minorities they could usually silence - and it will carry just as much weight as anyone else. It terrifies them: the whole reason they got into social justice was to have more rights than other people, and they want their privilege back.

They lash out, claiming that anon culture only enables problematic behavior and bullying without consequence, not realizing that their privilege already lets them get away with these things. They demand new leaders and regulations on what can and can’t be said, doing everything they can to try to create an environment where they are still above others. They don’t even care that they have the ability to interact with the culture first-hand, understand it, earn its favor, and shape it from the inside, but rather they just want to receive special rights directly from someone in power. This is what they care about.

The problem is, these people defend their actions as “social justice” and there’s not really a good way to call them out. There’s not a word for exactly what they are, nor any accusation for them to try and refute. 

So, I’m going to make one!

Ivory Noser

This is a silly term, and for these purposes I like that. It’s a play on “brown noser” - someone who kisses ass to gain favor. Only, this refers to someone who prefers to fellate an entire ivory tower. 

Specifically, I’m going to say that this refers to someone who engages in behaviors to gain the approval of a clique or leader-group, disregarding or attacking the masses. A director makes a pretentious movie meant only to appeal to film reviewers? Ivory noser. Writer says nice things about some more popular writer while attacking their own audience as being savages who don’t “get it”? Ivory noser. Artist puts all their effort into mingling with and defending other artists while showing complete apathy toward their fans? Ivory noser. 

It’s an accusation that someone only cares about the top of the totem pole and the benefits it can give them. Unlike a “brown noser”, it’s not even personalized - they just want to show the general behaviors that will gain them favor with those above them.

In some places, like the pretentious movie made specifically for reviewers, that might occasionally be acceptable. Against a social justice advocate, though, it is a dire accusation. The very nature of social justice means they are advocating for the rights and visibility of people society views as being “beneath” them, and to call them an “ivory noser” suggests they are perfectly willing to step on these people to gain favor with the higher-ups. It’s the one industry where it is completely unacceptable to be someone who serves those on top, and this term is meant to call that out.

Social justice should be leaderless. Those with the most influence should not establish themselves to the point that they can bestow favor with a single word, but rather as transient allies who make a difference by giving a critical speech or refusing to move from their bus seat. Their goal should not be to control the conversation from a place of privilege, but rather to bring all others up to their level. A true proponent of social justice should strive to create an environment where they are no more special or entitled to attention than anyone else. 

The best way to stop these leaders is to call out the ivory nosers who support them. Make people remember that they’re fighting for the ones beneath, not on top, and that supporting those who already have power and voice is the very antithesis of social justice. Stuff like #NotYourShield is a decent step in at least letting minorities stand up to the people appropriating their causes, but it’s too broad, rallying people to lash out against social justice advocacy as a whole.

Social justice doesn’t need to be destroyed, it needs to be cleaned. An economic problem needs an economic solution, and in this case I believe that entails adding a social cost/stigma to the social justice advocates who focus their efforts on pleasing those with more power. If we can call these people out, stigmatize their actions, and make it so advocacy is no longer a good deal for power-hungry bigots who just want even more ability to speak over others, we can retake social justice. It can be a movement driven by minorities and other marginalized groups, with allies who will indiscriminately hold us up to speak for ourselves, rather than speak in our name or “for our own good”. 

Chances are there will at least one reply to this like “that’s a pointless idea. Most people are fine with social justice as it is now; you’re just a minority.” To which I would like to pre-emptively reply… yes, yes I am, and the fact that that invalidates my feelings is exactly why a term like “ivory noser” is necessary. Because if you’re in social justice, you’re supposed to be looking out for the weird people like me, not the majority.