An Internet of Scolds

We are on a date.

I want to split the bill but you disagree.

“Why are we splitting the bill?”

I could explain why I think that’s right. I could say we obviously aren’t compatible. But I have another cunning plan.

Surreptitiously, I start recording our conversation.

“It’s our first date so I thought maybe we could go half.”

Keep complaining, babe. I’m going to put this online. I’m going to have 10,000 people calling you selfish and entitled. 

“I can’t believe you made us split the bill.”

Believe this, lady. I’m going to have this posted by countless engagement baiters desperately seeking Elon bucks. I’m going to have this posted by Ian Miles Cheong. I’m going to have all kinds of red pill influencers calling you a vapid slut.

At home, I race to get my video online. But what the hell? Looking out from my Twitter timeline is my photo — attached to my online dating profile.

“Can you believe a guy with this hairline wanted to split the bill?”

10,000 people are calling me a pathetical balding incel.

How could she do this to me?

Listen, I am not the world’s least judgemental person. Anyone who knows, reads or hears me would grasp that much. I think cheats probably deserve a week in the stocks (though the practicalities make it a bit too complicated). I believe that litterers should be made to pick cigarette butts out of the drains with their bare fingertips. I struggle to believe that anybody actually likes the band Imagine Dragons.

Yet somehow online discourse has made me feel like a paragon of tolerance.

In his essay Planet of Cops, Freddie deBoer wrote:

The idea of the panopticon is one of the most tired and clichéd bits of theory talk you’ll find, one that reliably makes its way into every undergraduate paper and TV recap. It’s also wrong. See, the panopticon says we all get watched all the time, but there’s still a division between the guards and the prisoners. There’s still people who do the watching separate from the watched. And that’s not real life. No, in real life we’re all guards and prisoners at the same time. We are all informants on each other.

There is some extent to which this is inevitable. We’re a species of scolds and gossipmongers. In medieval villages, we traded rumours about how Alaric had been sneaking off with Celestina behind the tithe barn. Of course we’re going to judge people on the Internet.

But here’s a neat rule that I think should be uncontroversial — don’t secretly document non-criminal incidents.

Boom. Gone are the videos of people being somewhat obnoxious in restaurants. Boom. Gone are the screenshots of faintly embarrassing online dating profiles. Boom. Gone are the images of young women on nights out in clothes that might be considered unflattering.

Blam. Goodbye to videos of “Karens” being presumptuous. Kaboom. Farewell to screenshots of relatives being weird. PSSSHH. So long to half the content of my two least favourite (non-criminal) factions on the Internet — bitter anti-white male malcontents and bitter anti-women weirdos.

But it isn’t just bitter weirdos who like this sort of content. Most of us do (granted, most of us have at least an element of bitter weirdness in our souls). We like controversy — and we like judging people. Hell, I’m enjoying judging people who post this kind of stuff even as I write this. The absolute bastards.

Still, we have to break the habit.

To be clear — I’m generally okay with people recording actual crimes. If you had a really efficient police force you could send the footage to the authorities, but you probably don’t so it is helpful that the public be aware of assailants, thieves and frauds.

But there is a big difference between recording someone who stole your watch and recording someone you think was a bit rude on a date. There is a big difference between screenshotting a death threat and screenshooting a post from someone who has “red flags”. Actually, the overbearing earnestness with which traits and actions that are at worst disagreeable are debated diminishes the seriousness of real sins.

That the leaking of local, private events into the global public sphere is invasive is so obvious that it should not have to be mentioned. Have you ever been a bit obnoxious? Would you like it to be witnessed by a million strangers? QED.

But there are more subtle harms to this phenomenon. Our public chest beating masks and enables our private cowardice. We act like judges, juries and executioners online while being less and less willing to risk public awkwardness with real human beings. We have innumerable perspectives on behavioural codes for human interaction while interacting less than ever. Online, we are like the spiteful pensioner on an estate who gossips about everyone to veil their own bitterness over their isolation.

Say what you like about “Karens” — Ellen Pasternack has written in praise of telling off the antisocial (which of course does not excuse telling off the harmless) — but at least they tell you what their problem is. They don’t rush to tell everyone else.

Not everything is content. Actually, I take that back — not everything should be content. “Content” is that which a minority of people live and a majority of people witness. Making fairly harmless, unconsenting people into content is cruel enough. But reducing ourselves to mindless, spiteful consumers of content compounds the sin.

Let’s stand up to the mindless content-mongerers. There is a place for shaming online and it is here.