Internet Rage and Being Human

I was interacting with a friend on Facebook about rage and misogyny in the gaming community while waiting for a call from a creative who often discusses transhumanism and the singularity with me.

Yeah, this is a little too long, and it's rambling. But I'm not getting paid for it, so there.

-- It's not just gaming

Rage, trolling, hate, etc, exist everywhere there is on the internet. Sports forums, political forums, even forums for art criticism or motherhood.

I have come to believe that this is one of the symptoms of the lag between our very old, slow-evolving human brains, and our very new, fast-evolving technologies.

I don't want to make light of rape threats, hacking and doxing. Those are serious acts that cause serious harm.

But I now think that the vast majority of the people engaging in these online behaviors are very, very different "in real life."

Doesn't that phrase, IRL, say it all? It's as if what is online isn't real, even though it can do real harm.

I mean, not to undercut the concepts of white/male/western privilege, but "in real life," face to face, most of the time, privilege results in microagressions and unconscious, unintentional offensiveness--a far cry from the massive outpouring of hostility and sheer hatred that can dominate any online community that does not have active moderators.

This suggests to me that there is an asymmetric response in the human brain to online interactions.

Most humans have a hard time thinking of the abstract as real. It's why steadily smaller proportions of the human population are comfortable with steadily more abstract fields of thought like quantum physics and number theory. 1+1, we can teach to kids with just our fingers. Calculus takes years of background before we can teach it. And so forth.

Abstract people? Our brains just aren't wired to treat people online as real people.

Our instinctive empathy has a biological component hardwired into our heads. It works with things we can see and touch and sympathize with (which is why, when we watch real war footage or victims of natural disasters, the better part of human nature rises to want to help others). Our empathy triggers at the sight of a starving dog, and that's not even the same species!

So why are we so quick to lash out at other, real people online?

When it's just text comments on reddit or status updates on facebook or tweets, human empathy does not auto-trigger in the same way.

While our rational minds "know" that there's a real person behind every online account and comment, our instinctive brains don't see them as real. They are abstractions, like npcs in an rpg.

However, while online interactions limit our empathic response, we as individuals still feel hurt when we are insulted with words or see something we strongly disagree with. So the part of the brain that handles aggression *does fire up* and trigger instinctively.

Remember the "Voight-Kampff" test from BladeRunner? On the internet, everybody's a Replicant.

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Abstraction is also used as a tool in conflicts. In real life, people engaged in war are often encouraged not to see their opponents as real people, because empathy slows down and diminishes the aggressive response to kill. In that context, objectification is a deliberate tool.

This is also the danger of extremist media reporting and disinformation that promotes hate. Part of their strategy is to create an abstract 'enemy'--the opposite of the strategy that the LGBT movement has successfully used to shift US opinion on gay marriage (by humanizing the concept of a gay person--making what was a hazy fear into a concrete human being). To put it another way, gay marriage foes want to frame the debate as an attack on an easily hateable, abstract foe attacking the institution of marriage, while gay marriage supporters frame the debate in terms of, "we're the same as you."

It's easier to hate people when they're things.

We don't scream at random people on the street (unless maybe they almost hit your car), but in a sporting arena, watching a basketball or football game, we abstract away the harm and it's easy to call out for the blood of the other team. Until, of course, a serious injury happens, then most people wince and are sympathetic, especially if there's a close-up like someone's leg being folded the wrong way.

Then, suddenly, we're all human again. Mostly.

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I believe this asymmetric response to abstraction is the cause of much of the disproportionate hate that happens online.

This is just one of those symptoms of technology outpacing biology. Our brains don't naturally extend positive emotion and empathy to the abstract--these are difficult, learned behaviors that don't come naturally. Negative emotion though, oy, it pops to life and burns with the fire of a million suns with just the tiniest spark.

I'm not trying to excuse misogyny and racism online. Those are very real, and in meatspace, result in situations like Ferguson, and rape and murder and war, etc. Definitely still too much of all of that happening, racism is real, racial profiling is the norm for traffic stops instead of the exception, sexism is real, women get harassed at cons, get belittled in games and comics stores, etc. A grocery pulls kosher goods off its shelves in fear of an anti-Israel rally happening outside.

Very real problems I'm not trying to diminish, both IRL and on the net.

What I'm saying is that the internet, by the very nature of human response to it, amplifies these tendencies and magnifies the proportion and severity of bad behaviors. The people that would already rape/kill IRL don't have any farther in severity to go on the net, but those who are mostly decent and are only the way they are because of ignorance sound way worse on the net. Small hatreds become big hatreds on the net, small resentments become intense anger, etc.

It's a process of distortion. The internet shifts anger upward, including the continuum of prejudice.

It's unfortunately part of human nature. Just as we need police and laws in the physical realm, we need policing and laws online. Possibly, we need *more* policing online.

And more than this, I think cultural outrage on media sites and blogs, while constructive and important, are not sufficient for changing human behavior online on a large scale.

I think we need to change the way we teach our youth. We teach kids to share toys when they play and not to be mean to each other on playgrounds and in school. This doesn't naturally extend to online interactions because humans just don't handle abstraction well, so we need to teach our kids and habituate them to being polite to others online and to have emotional response and empathy with others in an online context, as entirely separate activities from teaching them these things "in real life."

On a less conflict-oriented tangent--this would also be why humans want to meet face to face when discussing important matters. Our brains are wired for the visible and the tangible. We prefer face to face discussions to phone conversations and phone conversations to sms messages. Unless we're trying to avoid those people, of course.

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This is also why many of the most successful writers are those who can make abstract collections of descriptions and dialogue perceived as real persons to their readers.

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I've been saying for a while now that humans change the world and develop technology faster than our biology can evolve to adapt to it.

By no means am I suggesting a cap on tech, or pulling on the reins.

As time has gone on, violence, crime, etc, have trended down on long time scales. It's no coincidence that this has gone alongside our improving technologies.

While we should acknowledge that tech isn't an automatic solution for things and often creates problems as well as solves them, technology has steadily allowed us as a species to surpass our biology and better our own natures.

I write here that the internet itself interacts with our minds in a way that predisposes a large segment of the population to worse "virtual" (as opposed to "real") behaviors, but the internet and all forms of improvements in the dissemination of thought and communication have only led us to step beyond ourselves more and more, to use the abstract to change the concrete, to accomplish things our ancestors could not remotely imagine.

We're going to work this out, eventually.

Until then, well, while it doesn't reduce the harm internet hate causes, it's important to consider that it has other causes alongside personal biases. It's not about assholes on 4chan, it's about the full range of human hate and what happens when the internet happens to hate.