Social Media Made Me an Asshole, part 2

A humbling discovery. How digital facelessness and disembodiment warps society and ethics. Touching grass.

Part 2

Part 1 of this essay concluded with this anecdote about a conversation I had early on in the writing of Quibble:

As I got into what would become the novel’s abandoned first version, realizing a theme I was trying to tackle was tech-induced social isolation, I called my father to talk it over with him. Dad isn’t much of an abstract thinker — he’s worked all his life with his hands and needs concreteness to wrap his mind fully around ideas — so I gave real-world examples. At some point, I said, “People are basically faceless to each other on social media, so it’s turning them into assholes.”

There followed a pause. “Son,” my father said, “it’s turning you into an asshole.”

Had that pronouncement on my character come from anyone else, I might have gotten defensive. But coming from my father, who knew me better than anyone? No. Despite our many differences of opinion — over politics, most of all — I took his judgment quite seriously.

Over the year, almost, since I graduated from my master’s program and began to feel like a ghost where I was living, I’d conducted a lot of my social life over Facebook. Now, I revisited and reviewed my interactions with people. I left aside the questions of whether I was right in a given exchange, which principles I felt I was defending, and which vulnerable people I’d taken my stands for. Instead, I looked simply at how I had treated people online, regardless of what I thought they deserved. Was I spreading love in the world? In that light, I saw grotesque patterns in my prior behavior.

When people disagreed with me, I discovered, I’d let myself follow my emotions about the topic, not my reason.

I turned disagreements into personal spats. I pinned my interlocutors’ wrongness on assumed flaws in their character and ethics. If they showed ignorance on a topic, I informed them — oh, did I ever! — but I did it condescendingly, not patiently. I took it as read that loudmouths voiced their wrong opinions out of total incuriosity about the world. I forgot altogether that, just like my opinions, other people’s opinions were the products of their experience, not just ideas they’d stumbled into. Your dumbass opinion just goes to show one more way the world’s going straight to hell, I seemed to think, and though I never said that, I telegraphed it loud and clear.

No surprise, provoking people angers them. When someone got angry, did I try to calm things down? No, I escalated my rhetoric. Sometimes, I acted as if they had no right to their anger. When reasonable people tried to cool the room, I resisted, as if their cool and not my heat was the problem. And, no stranger to the “block” and “unfriend” buttons, I pushed a few well-meaning people out of my life.

Ironically, I thought I’d been the good guy taking important moral and ethical stands. When people use “social justice warrior” or “SJW” as a derogatory epithet, some mean any activist whose politics they disdain — of course, that’s just closed-minded, a way to avoid dealing with what the activist is saying. More levelheaded folks, when they use the epithet, only mean the sort of person I could be. A habitual scold. The thought police, out on patrol.

I’d fallen far down the cybernetic totalist rabbit hole and let myself come to think of people online as mere icons sitting beside strings of text, deserving of no forbearance, no forgiveness, no kindness. They were only ciphers.

So I acted like an asshole online, and if I was honest with myself, that meant I was an asshole. The social environment didn’t matter. The way I treated people did.

And here’s the kicker:

Now, I know all of this about my online proclivities. I’m therefore responsible for keeping those proclivities in check.

I believe in the intrinsic dignity of the individual. To respect it, I must care about treating people fairly. Even when I know for a fact they’re wrong as all get-out and, by virtue of it, they are treating other people unfairly, I know I must endeavor to be fair. It’s hard work, holding yourself to standards when others don’t. But principles don’t mean a thing if you don’t stick to them when they’re inconvenient to you. So I’m duty-bound to look for the high road.

At least, all that is what I tell myself.

Yet I can still be that very same asshole today.

I suspect both my story and my realization about who I was being may in some way already be familiar to some readers. Have you ever had similar discoveries about your behavior on the Internet?

The dream of the pitch-black cavern and the facelessness of its people launched me into writing Quibble, and though I tried different world-building ideas as I wrote — frankly, I didn’t think I was up to writing scenes set in pitch blackness — by the fifth draft I returned to the dream’s elements and tried to mine them for all they were worth in the novel’s first six chapters.

Yet from draft to draft, in all the iterations of Quibble’s world, one thing about the world-building remained constant: Ones couldn’t see each other. Always, they lived at least one sensory step removed from our understanding of human embodiment. And because of that one step of removal, Ones do not fully understand each other — and thus themselves — as human beings.

If that’s one potential outcome of the Singularity — humanistic regression, the loss of a shared essential humanity and of our capacities for self-reflection and empathy — how might it happen? How might it already be happening?