I believe the World Wide Web is largely positive, but the results like this is truly inevitable.
> Or more simply, we’re experiencing the “disruption” of computing that was promised. This is not a value judgment: there are tons of good outcomes of this and there are bad outcomes as well. And what’s a “good” outcome vs a “bad” one is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum. - an HN user previously told me.
The computing pioneers dreamed the Internet would enable the free and fast flow of information, create decentralization, promote democracy, freedom of speech, and liberate us from all the old forms of political control. In the beginning, things were great. The emergent of the Free Software Movement, the Cypherpunk Movement, and early online commmunities such as The WELL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL) or Usenet all seemed to prove the idealism of the Net. Even today, it still keeps unleashing human creativity. And even when the tech is increasingly used as tools of oppression, arguablly, the Net still significant improved the autonomy of individuals and encouraged free thinking.
One core tenet of personal computing and the Net is empowering individuals, "we the people". The pioneers of the Net were revolutionary, they wanted to make the world a better place by digitizing the human society. Unfortunately, whoever was playing with computers and the Internet in the 1980s-1990s were elites. They have received extensive academic trainings, and/or came from the middle class. So the element of populism in the hacker culture played a positive role. And crucially, the development of the Internet was done in parallel of globalization and the economic boom of 80s neoliberalism, so there was no major social conflicts as well.
But after 2008-2010, this populist idea started to show its dark side - after (1) all the people and all their dogs have been connected to the web, (2) a tendency of disintegration of the global economic and political order is coming - the same populism stopped playing the original very-positive role. It has became clear that, any idea can by popularized and supported by a free Internet, or propagated more easily (e.g. flat-Earth, anti-vax, extremism). David Perell called it "the disappearance of the Overton window". Also, all individuals are empowered, including marginalized groups, malicious attackers and psychopaths.
I've been observing various online trolling culture and fringe reactionary political movements for a few years. Mostly 4chan, but I think it applies to the web in general. While I don't agree with their intentions or motivations, but I found it's an extremely interesting phenomenon and pretty post-modernist in itself.
* The cyclist behind an anti-cyclist Facebook group
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731220
* Recommended comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731914
Here's a story: a biking hobbyist used his spare time and launched an influential anti-bike movement on Facebook. He posted numerous sensationalized commentaries, posters and memes to demonize bikers, including the various "data" and "charts" for the "bikes are a great threat of traffic order" propaganda, and occasionally advocated violence towards bikers in forms of half-jokes. He also proposed political reforms to introduce restrictive and/or discriminatory traffic laws for bikers. Soon, his campaign has gone viral and attracted a large number of supporters who drive cars. Well, not all bikers follow the traffic rules and some problems surely exist, but they are only as bad as the average day-to-day traffic and usually not seen as something people need to act upon, but this campaign exaggerates it, radicalized it and polarized the issue and created lot of hate. What is his intention then? His only intention is laughing at this fact: he was able to manipulate the car drivers easily and even create a raged populist political movement with a mere keyboard.
We hardly know who's behind the populist political movements online, but this is a well-documented case, and I believe it can be a representative sample which largely reflects the origin, emotions and motivation of the 4chan-like "for-the-lulz" trolling culture. Also, I can immediately point out the similarities to the populist reactionary political movements: the nationalism propaganda used many of the tactics the biking troll has used. Also, Russia is accused by the media to create an army of bots on social media, such as pro-LGBT, anti-LGBT, pro-life, pro-choice, religion fundamentalism, atheism, nationalistic, liberal, etc, with the intention of creating polarized argument and social conflicts in the United State.
On the other hand, the "for-the-lulz" trolling culture itself, even can be used as propaganda, is not propaganda in itself. It is a form of complicated web culture. It's basic definition is "doing some pointless activities to make others to suffer, and laugh at it", but it stands for a lot of things. It has a reactionary, or anti-establishment element, as previously mentioned, but it also includes: (1) cultural jamming, similar to the 70s counter-cultural movement (see those hoaxes in Fight Club), (2) It understands the art of exploiting a vulnerability in the system for one's own advantage, similar to parts of the hacker culture, (3) Also, it has a somewhat nihilist, post-modernist component, sometimes artistic (The Game was popular on early 4chan: once you remember playing it, you lose it), and (4), it reflects the worrying, helplessness and alienating aspects of modern life, and as an entertainment against them using humor and hate, then finally (5) a populist movement. It's core logic is: everyone, look how evil/degenerate this thing/person is, the justice needs to be done! Sometimes, it can be a legitimate popular movement and serve the right purpose, e.g. Occupy Movement, but other times, it's just a bunch of angry mobs lynching people. For example, a list of people on Encyclopedia Dramatica.
Especially, when I grasped these points, I found things went pretty stupid when, for example, the mainstream media started reporting Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol in 2016. Yes, it has connections to reactionary political movements, but itself is only a symbol of the trolling cultural. When the media reports it, it actually gives it a platform of exposure, and encouraged trolls to use it as a genuinely political symbol, and personally I think it makes the issue worse.
What I'm trying to say is, to solve problems like this, we must study and understand the entire machinery of it, including the underlying social-economical basis of this conflict using sociology and psychology, and to provide social solutions to the problem. However, the only proposal the mainstream media (or us, as online members of online communities) has right now is "Twitter and Facebook should ban hate speech", or "we should not feed the trolls", which hardly touches deeper problems.
Also, when the important argument for Internet freedom is that they bring democracy and equality no longer works, should the Internet be free and open? Should we still protect and promote the freedom speech? I firmly believe the answer must be YES. However, if we left these problems unaddressed and only "ban them", the answer is going to be "no" soon.
Furthermore, I think that stochastic terrorism can not be 100% eliminated without creating a police state, which is more harmful than a few terrorists. Lone-wolf terrorism is a feature in modern life, we can only enhance our understanding of sociology to partially reduce the harm.
P.S: Watch Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, its plot has a surprising deep discussion of the consequences of a hyperconnected humanity, meme culture and random terrorism is an important theme in the show, and contains great inspirations.
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Appendix:
David Perell's excellent 13,000 word essay, "What the Hell is Going On?" [1], examines and analyzes the current chaos in politics, business and education, and concluded that it was caused by the transformation from a information-deficient to a information-rich society, and has a similar argument just like mine.
Also, if you want to understand more about the trolling culture and its mechanism, I recommend "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture", by Whitney Phillips, published by The MIT Press.
[1] https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on