One thing that makes modern internet campaigning so intense is the widely held belief in “micro-aggressions”. According to Wikipedia, this term was coined by a Harvard psychiatry professor, Chester M Pierce, way back in 1970, but it has really flourished in popular discourse over the last few years. My 2003 print edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t have an entry for it. However, Oxford now defines Micro-aggressions as “indirect, subtle or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalised group.” I’ve just found a download from a private Christian University in Pennsylvania, called Messiah University (so one would imagine it would be quite conservative in its attitudes). The document is called “Examples of Micro-aggressions in the Classroom”. It quotes a Dr Derald Wing Sue’s (PhD) definition of 

“Microaggressions: everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.”

It then goes on to list over 30 examples, including “using heteronormative metaphors or examples in class” and “failing to pronounce or continuing to mispronounce the names of students after they have corrected you” It’s enough to make any anxious teaching student weep! How can they possibly remember all these things?!

In fact, Messiah.edu’s list is perfectly reasonable. All the activities it highlights are best avoided.  A single occurrence would do no harm – we all have to put up with being slighted^[1].However, a constant experience of slights would become degrading – not excruciatingly humiliating, just subtly undermining of somebody’s security and sense of self-worth.

Micro-aggressions are a subject for discussion, a critique of The System, and the types of behaviour it fosters: something to be wary of. They are problematic when they become personal accusations, levelled by one individual at another to win an argument, to dismiss and condemn somebody, and thus to dominate and crush them. 

If micro-aggressions can be unintentional, the use of the term is entirely at the discretion of the person who is feeling sensitive. If they are feeling happy with you, you’ll get away with it, if not, they’ll fuck you up. If they’re arguing with you, it becomes another weapon in their arsenal. You are at the mercy of their whim. Which is a definition of tyranny. 

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^[1] Although, understandably, minority or marginalised people would be more vulnerable to feeling excluded.

Online-life, whatever its capacity to connect people and foster positive relationships, is characterised by tribal hostility and conflict. Campaigns seem to rise up out of the collective unconscious, then spread through the online communities like viruses (or memes) before being replaced by the next. Almost all of these projects are seen as struggles against an enemy. 

Since the killing of George Floyd, the most vigorous campaigning has clustered around the issue of racial equality, but before that, trans rights were in the ascendant. By contrast, old-school feminism, and traditional Marxist class-struggle, are in decline, presumably because they pre-date the internet and nobody wants to support the same causes as their dear old mum. Meanwhile, down in the sewers, the id-monsters of the far-right seem to be cultivating some truly crazy shit (and then smoking it.^[1])

Activism associated with Black Lives Matter seems particularly energised. Its aims seem entirely in line with the core principles of most internet users and so its campaigners feed on the energy of mass support. They sense victory. They can feel the old order weakening; one last push, and they’ll break through: they’ll have achieved Utopia (or at least substantive, positive change): Hurrah!

All of society, for them, is underpinned by egalitarian principles, which have been hijacked and subverted by a sort of corrupting white establishment. If they can dismantle this system, they’ll return to a state of humanist virtue, inherent in human consciousness, but smothered by White Capitalism. It’s typical, Classical Liberalism, seasoned with a bit of Marxist, class-consciousness stuff. 

This seems naïve to me, and I wonder if it is a mind-set that has been fostered by the internet, where all programmes are founded on basic computer operation protocols. We never think about them, but we rely on them to function, so that it’s actually pretty difficult, these days, to crash the whole system and lose everything. There’s always back up on the cloud or somewhere. 

But what if society is more fragile, has no back up, can’t be rebooted or off-and-on-again-ed? We should proceed with caution, I think. It’s not enough just to protest and destroy things, then wait for someone else to clear up: “move fast and break things”. You must come up with robust working alternatives and be ready to implement them.  Nation or world-wide structural change can’t be done by grassroots organisation. It must, by necessity, be top-down. It would need to be created and administered by people with expertise and experience of government and social administration, not clueless, amateur vanguard-party ideologues. And that suggests incremental change and no revolution. Sorry, folks. I know all that score-settling would’ve been fun (and justifiable), but…

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^[1] I’m not going to discuss the far-right because I don’t go down there, and once you’ve said their ideas are completely irrational and baseless, there’s nothing more to say.

Online-life, whatever its capacity to connect people and foster positive relationships, is characterised by tribal hostility and conflict. A succession of campaigns seem to rise up out of the collective unconscious resentments of some of its users, then spread through the online communities like a virus (or meme). Since the killing of George Floyd, the most vigorous campaigning has clustered around the issue of racial equality, but before that trans rights were in the ascendant. By contrast, old-school feminism, and traditional Marxist class-struggle are in decline, presumably because they pre-date the internet and nobody wants to support the same campaigns as their old mum. 

Online activists, especially those associated with Black Lives Matter, seem particularly energised, at the moment. They feed on the energy of mass support. They think they can see the old order weakening; they hope they’re about to break through: one last push, then they will have achieved Utopia. 

Society, for them, seem to be underpinned by egalitarian principles, which have been hijacked and subverted by a sort of corrupting white establishment. If they can dismantle this system, they hope to return to a state of natural humanist virtue, inherent in human consciousness, but smothered by White capitalist society. It’s typical, Classical Liberalism, blended with a bit of classical, Marxist, class-consciousness stuff. 

This seems naïve to me, and I wonder if it is a mind-set that has been fostered by the internet, where all programmes are founded on basic computer operation protocols: it’s actually pretty difficult, these days, to crash the whole system and lose everything. There’s always back up on the cloud or somewhere. But what if society is more fragile, has no back up, can’t be rebooted or off-and-on-again-ed? We should proceed with caution, I think. It’s not enough just to protest and destroy things. You must come up with robust working alternatives and be ready to implement them.  These would need to be created and administered by people with expertise and experience of government and social administration, not clueless ideologues. And that suggests incremental change and no revolution. Sorry, folks. I know all that score-settling would’ve been fun, but…

Angry condemnation seems empowering; addictively so. The most articulate members of the Social Justice movements can gain (inter)national prominence. Their anger and hurt is validating. They gain respect for their courage and moral strength and their insights on The State of Nation. Their opinions are sought by news outlets. There are reputations and livings to be made, books to be published to acclaim. Of course, the activists themselves are passionately sincere and have genuine grievances to air, but disadvantage, skin-colour and anger is being monetised, is being leveraged, and not just by the far-right. It is in some people’s interest to emphasise conflict, rather than boring old reconciliation, discrimination rather than attempts to be friends, social dysfunction rather than community.

Karen Carney has deleted her Twitter account. She became the target of trolls after Leeds fans took exception to her analysis of their team’s performance.  Their comments included “silly bitch”, “get back in the kitchen”, “put your mic down and get yourself home there’s dishes to wash and clothes to iron” and “women’s lives matter but come on, women and football? Get kettle on love!”^[1]

No doubt the trolls’ desire to slap her down is driven by threatened masculinity and inherent sexism, but they can’t possibly think that a former England player, who appeared 144 times for her country, is more suited to housework than football analysis. Instead, they have made comments calculated to wound her, because they suspect she is vulnerable to them. They did this in defence of their team, which they felt had been insulted. These are not statements of sincere belief; they are weapons: you say what hurts. 

As I KEEP SAYING, the purpose of language isn’t the stating of scientific facts, it is how self communicates to self, and influences them, has an impact on them. 

The rise in Black activism online seems to have provoked a similar, racist reaction from some people. I don’t think it has revealed a widespread and sincerely held belief in the inferiority of BAME people. In fact, I think the British establishment has made quite a good attempt at making “Racist” a bad word. But they’ve obviously been less good at tackling the root causes of racism, or educating people as to what it really is. 

When black activists have pointed out what appear to be racial inequalities, therefore, and labelled these “racist” (as they are) some members of the majority group have been deeply insulted by what has become a highly charged word. They feel they are being attacked and so they reach for the weapons to hand: words. And the Activists have told them exactly which words will be most effective. In Lord of the Flies, when Piggy tells Ralph he doesn’t mind what people call him, “so long as they don’t call me what they used to call me at school”^[2], he guarantees that he’ll be called “Piggy” for the rest of the book.

This mutual offended-ness has exacerbated and widened tribal, rather than purely racial, divisions. Perhaps these are the necessary birth-pangs of a new, fairer society, but I don’t think there is any guarantee that it will be better or permanently fairer if it grows out of antagonism and confrontation. 

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^[1] The Guardian, 02/01/21

^[2] William Golding, 1954 (1996) Lord of The Flies, London: Faber and Faber, p16

Of course, it’s natural for the outraged and oppressed to be fierce in their accusations. Of course, they are going to be angry and use strong language. 

On the internet, dissidents from oppressive regimes can be outspoken with a greater chance of avoiding persecution, and we, in quieter countries, can copy their style, recast our vitriol as courage, our abuse as “speaking truth to power”, thus demonstrating our pious loyalty to the liberal principles that underpin the platforms we use. Sincerity is the only truth, online, and is defined by articulacy and passion, by strength of expression.

Unfortunately, online words, cast adrift from referents, are highly weaponised. So much so that gangs of irresponsible little gremlins, often boy-band fandoms, have adopted the language of the culture wars, and are roaming the internet firing scurrilous and wholly unfounded accusations at each other, of racism, white privilege, cultural appropriation, homophobia, transphobia. They are like bands of leaderless child soldiers in a war zone who’ve scavenged weapons from the battlefield and are blazing away at anything that moves, and at each other, just for fun^[1]. 

Perhaps these war-bands recognise an infantile quality to even the most serious of online disagreements. There’s a childish glee to the roastings that has nothing to do with subject under debate. Discussions of putative “intersectionality” are often little more than games of playground one-upmanship (“You think you’ve got it bad? Well, I’m not only a woman, I’m a BLACK woman!”) – a sort of Under-Privilege Top-Trumps.

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^[1] Jo’s cousin was kidnapped, while working for the UN in East Africa, by a group of leaderless child soldiers who had taken against people on bicycles and white pigs. Literally pigs, Sus scrofa domesticus, not a derogatory term for policemen or people of European descent. I guess it was just an excuse for shooting at something. Luckily, the cousin was neither of these things and was released. 

How do you regulate the internet? No team of human moderators would be large enough or have enough time to deal with the volume of traffic. Coders can build bots and programmes that identify and block dodgy content, but these are crude instruments that are simply triggered by taboo words and phrases or by unfortunate correspondences of the two. They risk removing perfectly innocent content, even content that is challenging hatred and intolerance. This amounts to censorship and the stifling of free speech and debate. Certain topics can’t be discussed.  

Bots lack understanding and so presumably can’t deal with nuance or context. Fat-shaming and calling out unconscious bias, for example, must look confusingly similar to them: both draw attention to an individual’s flaws and errors with sanctimonious disapproval. The tone of stern disappointment, of telling hard truths, of exhorting the degraded to improve themselves, must seem almost identical.

Which begs the question: what is the difference? I mean, clearly there is a difference between the objects of these diatribes, but what is the difference, in words, attitude and behaviour, between a fat-shaming troll and a moralist?

The true, unaffiliated trolls consider “shaming” and “calling out” just to be trolling without the courage to admit what it is; trolling with a hypocritical, veneer of self-righteousness and self-pitying grievance. Trolls are perfectly happy to masquerade as the righteous to wreak their havoc, because they realise that all statements on the internet are performances. The sincerity of any online statement is (literally) questionable: it can’t be properly corroborated. 

True trolls, like the Alt-Right, think of themselves as free-thinking philosophers, cutting through cant and hypocrisy. (Actually, I imagine trolls largely ARE the Alt-Right.) Though we know they are lonely psychopaths, so lacking in empathy that they need extreme reactions to recognise a human connection. 

Still, I suspect scientists, tyrants, trolls and fascists have the most healthy and robust attitude to the digital world. They see the internet as a tool, not a habitable universe.  Even if they spend all their time online and are addicted to it, their concept of existence is firmly rooted in the physical world outside the flickering screens. That’s where their goals lie, ultimately. (Getting a real, live girlfriend is the cliché!) 

Trolls enjoy the power of hurting people. They know you are never going to actually change minds by abusive, verbal pitched-battles. The only people activists can reach, on whom they can see their blows fall, are those of us who already, fundamentally, share their values. We also believe in free-speech. We are willing to engage with them because we believe in dialogue.This leads to the strange phenomena of the Internet Warriors and Activists all turning on each other, while (presumably) the fascists laugh at us from the side-lines.

“We should be rising up against the common enemy.”

“The Judean People’s Front!”

“No, no, the Romans!”

The Internet gives a patina of Liberal-Democratic virtue to its discourses and campaigns. It’s all about liberation, free speech and self-development, as if these would naturally devolve from a state of deregulation. Around 2011, during the Arab Spring, a lot of Western commentators felt that the felicities of Western democracy were spreading to the benighted heathen through the wonders of Western technologies, allowing “The Arab Peoples” not only to become enlightened, but also providing them with the tools to liberate themselves. In other words, westerners were, from the comfort of their arm-chairs, claiming ownership of the dangerous, courageous, spirited rebellions of the truly oppressed. Proper cultural appropriation, that is! Assuming we were the cause and the centre of it all.

This atmosphere of self-congratulation disappeared abruptly, when the price to be paid became clear, especially in Syria. Once again, we began asking, sorrowfully, how Arab leaders could do such dreadful things “To Their Own People”. Suddenly, it had nothing to do with us^[1]. 

Revolutions tend to degenerate into games of chicken played with the lives of ordinary citizens: the first to flinch at the human cost loses; the most ruthless win – not a recipe for compassionate governance: Kerensky comes before Lenin, Lenin before Stalin: first come Utopian Fantasies, then comes The Guillotine: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. 

In socio-political conflict, outright victory is probably neither achievable nor desirable. We are flawed and fallible creatures and the things we create are imperfect. The products of our negotiations and compromises will be improvements on the megalomaniac dreams of individuals. 

In other words, we need to show a bit of self-control – aim to constantly improve the old order, not completely overthrow it all at once. Because Evil loves Anarchy. Out of complete destruction, tyrants rise. No political dogma has a monopoly on virtue. Nobody adopts a malign ideology or project from a pure and inexplicable commitment to Evil. All belief systems are incomplete and not entirely fit for purpose. So, some sort of reluctant agreement, is almost certainly the closest we’ll get to Doing The Right Thing. After all, we have to live with these people: we can’t kill them all. 

But this will mean always, always fighting to chart a middle course, holding extremities in tension, remaining vigilant to make sure we aren’t veering towards an absolutist position, bearing alternatives in mind, tolerating dissent. 

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^[1] A Guardian-YouGov poll recently found that “A majority of people in nine Arab countries feel they are living in significantly more unequal societies today than before the Arab Spring.” (The Guardian, 18/12/20)

I think this belief in a benign, ordered universe also encourages our belief in “Natural, Inalienable Rights”: the idea that rights exist as part of ourselves, and are as real and undeniable, as necessary for existence, as a vital organ – your liver or your kidneys. A world constructed so reliably to our benefit would naturally hold our rights in place, as we are products of the same natural laws. A failure to respect those rights would be a monstrous aberration.  

And if rights were as safe as guttiwutts, we wouldn’t need laws to protect them. We could live in a neo-libertarian’s paradise – like the internet!^[1]

To me, it seems self-evident that rights do not exist inherently in an individual, although human value^[2] might. Rights are far too easily, and frequently, ignored. 

A lone consciousness floating in an empty universe, with no memory of society, would have no concept of rights. But we don’t live alone and we need to tolerate and co-operate with each other to survive. In this atomistic, egotistical existence, our singular consciousness is both a blessing and a curse. It allows us not only to be, and develop, ourselves, but also to totally ignore the self in others. We are sealed into our own individuality, but compelled to make contact with each other.

Life is naturally unfair. People are not biologically identical, or equal in abilities, so what is to stop someone claiming that naturally occurring rights, also, are unequally distributed? Should more able groups have greater rights and freedoms to exercise their greater abilities simply because they can, or for the good of man – sorry, human – kind: men, say, or white people or Christians…? 

This unequal distribution would turn rights into privileges. Objecting to such privileges demands an acceptance of a universal moral system.  Otherwise we’d merely have conflicts of interests resolved by brute force. In an unregulated society, you aren’t going to get a reassertion of human autonomy and thus human dignity, you’re going to get exploitation and oppression. 

Luckily, no-one has a monopoly on the shared spaces of existence.  There, we can make a pact to try and make life fairer. A discussion of “rights” is an attempt to come to an agreement on the basic ground-rules of co-operation. It’s an acknowledgement that, if society is to function, we must all agree to treat each other with equal care. Otherwise, we’d descend into all-out war, as we battled for scant resources and the security that only total victory would bring.  

So, thinking of “Rights” as “belonging” to people is an unhelpful way of talking about a sort of social contract, an obligation. Rights are an invention. But a good one. It’s a promise we make to each other.

And the opportunities derived from this promise are particularly precious because they are so fragile. They are not even gifts; they are liberties that have been lent to you by the those with the power to grant them, and they can be withdrawn, permanently, with a gesture, or the flexing of a trigger finger, or an off-hand command. They could be subtracted from whole societies just as easily. 

We must protect them. 

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^[1] I once read an article by Tanya Gold, suggesting that we would have to put up with even the most repugnant trolling because “The internet has changed everything”. I don’t see why this should be true. Social media platforms are publishers, in exactly the same way as the publishers of books, only more prolific and without editors. They produce and disseminate texts. This has been clear and undeniable since the earliest days of the internet. They have the same responsibilities to their society. They should have exactly the same legislation applied to them as book publishers do, and should have had it applied since the earliest days of the internet. We wouldn’t say that, because you’ve produced the world’s fastest car, the rules of the road shouldn’t apply to it. The failure to apply the law; the resistance to it, seems to demonstrate older lawmakers’ inability to intellectually process new things, and thus their mystified awe of them. Unfortunately, older people rule the world (and adore youth.)

^[2] which, for me, means “human consciousness”

It’s intriguing, this idea that injustice is perverting or transgressing a natural, higher order, so that all you need to do is stand up and bear witness and it will somehow be automatically sorted out by “The Powers that Be” or by “The People”. Everything will naturally fall back into its just and philanthropic place, without further effort from you. 

Ours is such a highly organised and managed world. I think we’ve become used to being served, spoon fed, complaining to the management and demanding that they do something: “Siri, dim the lights”, “Alexa, end racism, now!”

It all has echoes of Deism or Free-market Capitalism, both of which believe that beneath social conventions and human behaviours, there’s a fundamental, beneficial framework that would naturally sustain and protect you, if you could just get back to it^[1]. (“The market will provide.”) 

I think this is reinforced by our experience of the internet. We believe our freedom is somehow underwritten by a sustaining, foundational framework. This is echoed by the computer platforms that serve us. They are pre-constructed by the Great Coders in the Sky (well, Silicon Valley) for our benefit. They constrain our choices, allowing only activities for which there is a button, but they won’t let us down.

It’s true that hackers can introduce viruses and malware and occasionally crash platforms but, so far, nothing catastrophic has occurred. Coders and hackers themselves work with infallible systems, and seem to believe in a nurturing and protective universe. Why else would Facebook think that, “Move Fast and Break Things” was a good slogan? Of all the slogans language would allow them, they opted for the most reckless and complacent^[2]. If you break everything, all you are left with is fire, darkness and the knife.

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^[1] It also reminds me of deluded communists hoping that, if they could just get word to “Uncle Joe” Stalin, he would stop their persecution by his underlings, which he must not know about, or he wouldn’t allow it.

^[2] Humankind’s great ability is creativity. We should celebrate what we have made. It is a consumerist fraud that the new is always better and everything must be dismantled and remade so it can be resold. But then, Silicon Valley has always been deeply capitalist and, for all its swagger, deeply conventional.