Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 229 02/08/2013
I've been reading a lot of anthropology recently. Not sure why, something about the current state of the world makes me want to know more about the workings of the pre-civilised mind. David Graeber's excellent paper "Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value" has a fascinating section about the ancient Maori and their worldview, in which I found one item particularly provocative. That Maori custom of sticking the tongue out during their haka war dance, so familiar to all Rugby fans, always strikes us as a gesture of cheekiness or insult, because that's what it now means in most European cultures. That isn't what it originally meant to the Maori though: when aimed at an enemy during a battle it meant "You are meat, and I'm going to eat you", and true to their word, if they defeated you they might well have done so. For some reason this put me in mind of internet trolls.
There's recently been a surge of outrage about trolling on Twitter, sparked initially by rape threats against Labour MP Stella Creasy and feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, then amplified by bomb threats against various female journalists including the Guardian's Hadley Freeman. This stuff plays directly into those debates about internet censorship (Cameron's anti-porn filters) and freedom of speech, all of which constitute such a moral quagmire that one enters it very cautiously indeed. I've always been largely in favour of the freedom to robustly criticise, in any medium at all, since to take the opposite view would mean to shut up and toe the line, to accept things the way they are.
However in recent years this issue has become very much more complicated after various laws against "hate-speech" have been enacted. These laws make certain kinds of speech, most often racial insults, into prosecutable crimes, and that raises two very difficult points: firstly is it permissible to ban any form of speech, as opposed to action, at all (the pure freedom-of-speech argument); secondly, how do you gauge the degree of offensiveness of a speech act (necessary in order to decide whether it's prosecutable or not)?
The pro freedom-of-speech argument can be defended in abstract philosophical terms, but in effect it always depends upon the old adage that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me": that is, that verbal threats are not the same as the actions which they threaten, and do not cause the same damage. That's certainly true: the threat of rape is not as harmful as the act of rape and the threat to bomb doesn't kill or demolish buildings. However that's not to say that they cause no damage at all. One result of the recent revolution in neuroscience is confirmation that fear and anxiety do indeed cause physical damage to people. These primitive emotions are very useful from an evolutionary point of view: fear keeps you from stepping off cliffs or picking up rattlesnakes, while anxiety forms part of the necessary binding force between mammals and their highly-dependent offspring. However both operate by releasing corticosteroid hormones that have all kinds of nasty long-term effects if repeated too often, high blood pressure, hardening of arteries and much more. Like fire-extinguishers they're necessary and welcome during an emergency (putting out a fire) but they make a mess of the furniture and are not to be played with.
Trolling is precisely playing with the fire extinguishers. It's meant to induce anxiety, fear or confusion in order to dissuade the victim from some attitude or action of which the troll disapproves. To that extent it's a form of politics and to that same extent is of a kind with terrorism, since both seek to achieve political ends by inducing fear. The crucial difference is that terrorists don't just speak but act: they don't just stick out their tongues but really do eat you. None of this is news of course, because bandits, tyrants, robber barons and military officers have known for millenia that you can bend a population to your will by terrorising them.
In fact there's now a whole new discipline that views our efforts to manipulate each others' emotions as the driving force of history. We manipulate our own emotions with music, dance, art and drugs: why else would alcohol, tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, opium figure so highly in the history of trade? We manipulate others' emotions with scary stories (religion), clever rhetoric and the threat of violence. Democratic governments insist that we delegate the actual use of force to our police and army - and whether or not they can demand we also give up the threat of force remains a very fraught question - but never believe that threats do *no* harm.
No comments:
Post a Comment