re: Shit about how an internet community should be run, autocracies, etc.
Personally, I think it's a bit of a mistake to draw any comparisons at all between internet moderators and national governments. The purpose of governance is different, the stakes are different, the mechanics of human interaction are different, the general hostility level of everybody involved is different. Governments exist (in their ideal form) to keep society productive and peaceful while removing genuinely bad people from society on a strictly case-by-case basis; internet moderators exist (in almost every case) to cultivate their community's image by immediately removing anybody who causes any disruption. You can't run an internet forum like you run a country, because an internet forum is not a fucking country.
It's a difficult discussion to have, because the internet and the way people use it has changed so much even in just the past decade. I'll start by talking about 2000s-era internet. Everything about onlining in the aughts can be summarized by a single meme that was very popular during those years:
The old internet was known by every user to be a den of misinformation, faggotry, and the rotating wireframe skull gif. There were no girls on the internet. Nothing was meant to be taken seriously. Anonymity was strongly encouraged and very often enforced. People would DoS each other and each other's websites as a prank rather than as an actual attack. Shitposting was a universal pastime. The "
e/n" thread tag was created on Something Awful to denote a matter that was of
every importance to the OP and of
no importance to anybody else on the internet. Y'know, serious real-life business, like teenage relationship drama. Whenever people asked the internet for advice on these life-or-death matters, the discussion went like this:
- OP: "Help my girlfriend isn't answering my calls this morning and I've tried a dozen times so she definitely knows it's important, what should I do?????"
- Replies: "Kill her, then yourself"
- OP: "My best friend molested me and he's fucking my 15 year old sister right now, what should I do?????"
- Replies: "Kill them, then yourself"
- OP: "My mom walked in on me right as I climaxed and I think I tagged her face and now she's gone to her room and I can hear her crying, what should I do?????"
- Replies: "Kill her, then yourself, but leave the front door unlocked so I can come bang her one last time"
- OP: "I'm trying to weigh the stopping power of these two different lines of black-market flechette shells against the risk of damaging my shotgun's choke tube next time I have to go out and scare off the puckin thieves, any advice?????"
- Replies: "Kill them, then yourse-- holy shit he actually did it"
On the old internet, it wasn't a coincidence that Something Awful was run by a mercurial screaming asshole. It was expected.
It made sense. If you wanted fairness or transparency or accountability, you were encouraged to try going outside for a change.
There were no actual communities on the old internet -- or at least, no neurotypical ones. The old internet was a stupid toy that you played with when you were alone in your dorm room and wanted to be an anonymous asshole to other anonymous assholes with no real-life consequences to yourself or to anybody else. iexplore.exe was a big dumb video game like every other program on your computer. There were people who lived on the internet and took it completely seriously -- such as furries, hackers, and conspiracy theorists -- but we either ignored those people or trolled the shit out of them at every chance.
That was the old internet. If you went back in time to the mid-2000s and told any of us how incredibly gay the internet was going to become in 15 years, none of us would have believed you. This the new internet:
The people who live on the internet are still complete fuckups, but there are more of them. They've also developed some shared cultural norms and beliefs that have fucked them up even further:
- Contrary to external appearance they are not spoiled white manchildren; they are oppressed minorities and the entire world is against them.
- They live on the internet because the "Outside" is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, capitalist and fascist, and the internet is the only place where they can have a safe space. Telling a minority to go outside is denial of their oppression; banning a minority is literal murder.
- As oppressed minorities, they have a right and a duty to fight back using any means that they happen to come up with. Oppressive person. Fair game. May be tricked, sued, lied to, or destroyed.
- Questioning any of the above is oppression and bigotry.
Also, you're not allowed to laugh at them anymore because their friends and sympathizers work for the megacorporations that run huge swaths of the internet.
There are still no girls on the internet; you're just not allowed to say so anymore. Anything you post is at risk of being glued to your forehead for eternity both on the internet and in real life, whether or not you think you're posting anonymously. Oversharing is not simply encouraged; in many communities it is a requirement before anybody will listen to you. Posting about somebody else, whether in the same internet community or in another, is violence and thus warrants a violent response. Every shitposter plies his craft under the sword of Damocles, ever in fear of that inevitable moment when the horsehair snaps and that particular social network's "Trust and Safety Team" silently descends -- always final in its judgment, with no prior warning or notice given whatsoever.
On the new internet, it's no wonder that people -- specifically, those people who spend their every waking hour on the internet -- demand a different kind of leader than the kind that thrived on the old internet. The internet isn't where they have fun like normal people did back in the olden days; the internet is where they exist. So they need their rulers to be fair, transparent, and accountable. Most importantly -- and most fatally, since they're literally fucking insane -- they need to feel like they're safe, loved, and in control.
And I just don't feel like there's any real-world governmental model that works for that. None that hasn't ended in horror, anyway.
en.wikipedia.org
