Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Three Amigos, Internet Trolls and the death of freedom

Huh?  What?  That's the sort of headline I write that can only make sense to me.  So let me 'splain.  

I'm sure we've all been watching with jaws on the floor as a growing number of our nation's leaders make it clear they wish to eliminate the right to oppose them.  Furthermore, we've watched as billionaires in the tech world took it upon themselves to control speech and thought crimes by banning people who disagree with them.  And if that wasn't enough - and by golly it ought to be  -  I'm sure I'm not the only one who stared in disbelief at so many who seem perfectly fine with this and are sure such measures would only be applied to those type of people over there.  As one who has spent my life reading, teaching, studying and lecturing on history, that's the equivalent of an astronomer stumbling across a flat earth conspiracy theorist.  How could we be this stupid?  How could we be this historically illiterate? 

Well, let's start with my blogpost title. Back during my purgatory at the Patheos site, I learned all about internet trolls.  I'm sure I had seen a few in my time before that, but since at Patheos we were expected to keep watch on each others' blogs, I had plenty identity the trolls on my site and what I should do about it.  One incident leapt to mind the other day when I saw an advertisement for the old 1980s comedy The Three Amigos, and it got me thinking of a couple others and the subject at hand.

One frequent troll at Patheos commented under the name Andre B.  He wasn't your typical troll.  He was obviously smart, and when he wasn't trolling he had interesting things to say. But when he trolled, he trolled. I had several readers tell me over the year that he had really nailed them.  They thought he was an insightful, good faith commenter, and he ended up being a troll!  One once wrote in capital letters he was so frustrated.   And Andre could frustrate.   It was nothing to see him gobble up hundreds of comments as people took a long time to figure out they were being trolled by him.

Like all trolls, the point is to hijack debate, derail conversations, and argue ad nauseum to no ultimate point.  So once I posted on something I remembered back when I was in college.  It was an early example I witnessed of 'water cooler talk' on a news cast after a previous night's television program.  Not that I had never experienced talking about television programs.  But this was different because not only did people talk about it the next day, but I actually saw it discussed on the news.  This was in the 80s before news broadcasts were as much about promoting pop culture agendas and corporate interestse as talking about news.

The topic involved an episode of Johnny Carson.  Carson had Chevy Chase on as he was touring about, promoting his latest movie The Three Amigos.  Carson also had film critics Siskel and Ebert on.  At one point Carson asked them what were the best and worst movies they had seen recently.  Roger Ebert, in keeping with his somewhat abrasive personality, said the worst movie he had seen recently was The Three Amigos.  The audience gasped.  And then Carson did something very un-Carson.  He rebuked Ebert.  He said if he had known that would be the answer, he wouldn't have asked the question.

Anyone who grew up with Carson or had spent any time watching him knew that was the equivalent of Carson standing up and smacking Ebert with a medieval mace.  I can't remember the context, but I posted about that at Patheos.  Andre, ever the troll, stepped up to inform me how wrong I was.  He found the clip on Youtube and, to him, it was a love fest.  Nothing to see at all.  Respect and love and admiration from Carson.  Ebert and Carson a love story.  I was obviously wrong.  

I said he was nuts, that Carson was not only upset, but it was talked about the next day.  They even mentioned it on the morning news!  And then Andre said something he had said before.  He said he couldn't trust my memory.  I was possibly lying.  Or maybe mistaken.  But my recollection was entirely irrelevant.  I became frustrated because I remembered the talk that occurred the next day.  It's just one of those things in a person's life that makes an impression.  I had watched Carson for years.  Everyone could tell he was unhappy.  Carson was the king of lifting people up, but on the rarest of occasions, he would put people in their place, and this was such an occasion.

By his own admission, Andre is a millennial.  At best he would have been an infant or young child around this time, if he had been born at all.  How could he tell me what went on when there is no way he could have experienced any of it? 

And then I got to thinking of other trolls I bumped into at my time on Patheos.  Another was a fellow named Rob Lot (IIRC).  Rob's shtick was very simple.  The past is irrelevant.  Bring up what Democrats said in the past or that the Left had once dismissed Bill Clinton's behavior as the irrelevant part of his personal morals, and I was constantly told it was of no value.  Bring up what LGBTQ activists promised would never happen about punishing people over gay marriage, and again it's the past.  It doesn't matter.  That was almost always his response to the references about the past or history in general.

Another individual commented under the name 'Neko.'  She was a regular on M. Shea's blog.  I believe she stopped by mine a couple times.  Once she made a claim about religious people being religious because that's what they've been told by mommy and daddy.  I responded that not only was I quite liberal in my youth, I was also an agnostic.  I became a Christian as an adult, having been seeking the Truth for quite a few years.

Not to be dismayed, she fired back that I was a boldfaced liar.  I was never an agnostic, nor was I a liberal.  What?  I told her I had no reason to doubt she was a mother or an atheist.  Why so difficult accepting my testimony?  Who would call someone a liar on the internet when they're merely posting about themselves?  That would be like calling me a liar for saying I like pepperoni on my pizzas.  But she stuck to it, and what's more, when I pushed back at her, other readers got - on me, rather than her for calling me a liar.

All of this came to my mind when I saw that advertisement.  And it got me to thinking, as I am wont to do.  In each of these cases, we have things that I've discovered are quite common in modern (postmodern) discourse.  Especially on the internet, but I wonder how exclusively on the internet.  In each case an appeal is made to the past, and in each case in different ways, the appeal is smacked down.

In one case, I'm told by someone who wasn't there that just because I was there is irrelevant.   I am told by another that the past itself is entirely irrelevant.  And when all else fails, a third just called me a liar when my own personal experience didn't conform to her broad stereotypes. 

Now we might think this is all just internet trolling. Again, the point of a troll isn't to defend the helpless or aid the starving or seek justice in the world.  The point is to wreck online debate.  To that end they'll write anything.  For quite some time I assumed that such arguments, as annoying as they were, just happened to be tools of the trolling trade.  They didn't believe these things.  They merely wrote them online because they could.  

But what if I'm wrong?  What if they weren't writing these things just to troll?  What if they really believed them?   What if in their real lives in the real world this is how they approach reality?  They will look at someone from the 1940s and say that person knows nothing about growing up in the 1940s, or they will call someone a liar for experiencing or seeing things that stand against their social media informed opinions.  Or, in the end, they just say the past doesn't matter anyway, no history, no anything - anything before yesterday isn't worth worrying about.  What if they really believe these things?  What if we've raised an entire generation - and I believe they were all millennials or younger - who think this about history and the people and events of the past? 

When you see the growing number of 'communists rock', or 'censorship might work', or 'what's wrong with digging into people's teen years to destroy them', or 'America invented racism in 1619', or 'the only way to defeat racism is with new racism', or most recently 'I'm sure they'll just ban them, but never me' comments, editorials and articles, you wonder how the most educated generation in history could actually believe these things.  But then, if the above examples are the rule today, and a general disdain for anything before yesterday is now dogma in terms of buttressing our own righteous superiority over those who came before, it shouldn't be surprising.  Terrifying perhaps, but not surprising. 

3 comments:

  1. Consider rye. Originally rye was just a weed that grew among the wheat, much like the tares in the proverb. For centuries, the rye that was more like wheat consistently survived longer than the rye that was less like wheat Over time, rye went from a weed to being itself a valuable grain by imitating a better grain. Back in the context of the parable, this is why we are called to imitate saints. Habits of long duration change us.

    They can change us for the worse, too. This is especially true since the devil almost never starts out by tempting someone to mortal sin. Usually the sin starts out not quite so grave, or without full understanding, or without full consent; and only once the sin is more familiar and comfortable, it is cranked up to mortal sin.

    If you act like a jerk on the Internet long enough, even because you think it is a joke, you still actually become a jerk.

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    1. That's true. As for the jerk part, it's something I struggle to avoid. It's easy to be over the internet ways you never would be face to face. As they say, internet trolls are simply people too scared to be bullies face to face. The temptation is always there.

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