Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

If you’ve ever bothered to read any of the comment threads on this site which extend over, say, 30 comments you’ll realize the internet is full of idiots. And not just idiots, but all the kinds of truly disgusting people you would rather not know exist. Take the recent highly-publicized example of blogger Kathy Sierra who claims to have been harassed by death threats (we’ll set aside the legal considerations of whether the material showed sufficient intent, even though she repeatedly claims without proof that the material broke “federal law”). She articulately makes the point that the mere creation of material this offensive shows a perversion of bloggers:

It really doesn’t make much difference whether the person intends to act on the threat… it’s the threat itself that inflicts the damage. It’s the threat that makes you question whether that “anonymous” person is as disturbed as their comments and pictures suggest.

The Wrong Reaction

We should be tempted to fall into despair, for human nature is evil. This is exactly what Robert Scoble has done, turning to blogo-Solipsism and taking a week off. Both strong emotional reactions and withdrawing from the blogosphere produce more harm than good. After all, if you’re affected by the cruelty present on the internet, hiding will only make it worse.

The Right Reaction

I usually read Shelly and wince, but she’s right on here:

Frankly, calmer heads are needed when responding to this event. Webloggers are not very good at maintaining perspective. I know, I’ve been one for too long.

This is not something new. People are irresponsible and rude in real life, and the situation is only exacerbated by the internet and the so-called shield of anonymity. We are living in the world of that metaphorical question “if you were invisible would you steal?”

The Irony

Seth Godin suggests that “Anonymity hasn’t made the web a better place. Instead, it has allowed some of the worst ideas ever to get published.” He’s almost right. While the Internet surely allows anonymous slanderers to publish the worst ideas that exist, those ideas are powerless without an audience. And, Kathy Sierra’s public tantrum today gave her attackers more audience than they could have ever hoped for. It’s interesting that by specifically decrying offensive material we draw more attention to it. Creators of hate speech don’t mind bad publicity.

Take It All Away

Still, taking away anonymity (Discouraging Anonymity is Key to Protecting Visibility) is not going to solve any of these problems. First, there is the wee technical problem that it’s totally impossible. Second, and more importantly, people will always exist for whom hate speech is a normal way of life. Only the broadest social reforms can decrease the incident of this kind of thought. You cannot police what people feel in their hearts, but over time you can mold it.

The Only Solution

Remember the racism of the 60s? I don’t, but having heard the stories, it’s quite obvious that incredible leaps have been made to bring black Americans to the same social acceptance level as their white counterparts. Even so, there still remains work to be done wherever racism, sexism, nepotism, ageism, etc are found.

That work will not be accomplished by stifling speech (that means you, Wordpress), but rather by changing the way we are educated, and therefore the way we think.

This the programming wtf of the day, a USA Today page that gives me three different responses:

1) A visible “404 Object Not Found” error messages, along with debug text “HTTP/1.1 404 Object Not Found Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 22:10:33 GMT p3p: CP=”CAO CUR ADM DEVa TAIi PSAa PSDa CONi OUR OTRi IND PHY ONL UNI COM NAV DEM” Connection: close Content-Type: text/html”

2) The header “403 Access Forbidden” served up by Microsoft IIS 5.0

3) The actual content, “Journalists under pressure Covering war, mayhem did not prepare them for horror…”

Here’s a hint to anyone developing web applications. If you can find the content, and I can see it, you can’t give me either a 404 or a 403 error.