(zz from New York Times, an interesting read!)
A PART-TIME delivery driver named Peter Nunn was recently sentenced to 18
weeks in a British prison for tweeting and retweeting violent messages to
Stella Creasy, a member of Parliament. He never saw his victim but the
consequences of his virtual crime were real enough. In a statement, Ms.
Creasy described fears for her physical safety, going so far as to install a
panic button in her home. Mr. Nunn has been physically separated from the
rest of society for posting abusive words on a social media site.
The fact that the case ended up in court is rare; the viciousness it
represents is not. Everyone in the digital space is, at one point or another
, exposed to online monstrosity, one of the consequences of the uniquely
contemporary condition of facelessness.
Every month brings fresh figuration to the sprawling, shifting Hieronymus
Bosch canvas of faceless 21st-century contempt. Faceless contempt is not
merely topical. It is increasingly the defining trait of topicality itself.
Every day online provides its measure of empty outrage.
When the police come to the doors of the young men and women who send notes
telling strangers that they want to rape them, they and their parents are
almost always shocked, genuinely surprised that anyone would take what they
said seriously, that anyone would take anything said online seriously. There
is a vast dissonance between virtual communication and an actual police
officer at the door. It is a dissonance we are all running up against more
and more, the dissonance between the world of faces and the world without
faces. And the world without faces is coming to dominate.
Recently Dick Costolo, chief executive of Twitter, lamented his company’s
failures to deal with the trolls that infested it: “I’m frankly ashamed of
how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO,” he said
in a leaked memo. It’s commendable of him to admit the torrents of abuse,
but it’s also no mere technical error on the part of Twitter; faceless rage
is inherent to its technology.
It’s not Twitter’s fault that human beings use it. But the faceless
communication social media creates, the linked distances between people,
both provokes and mitigates the inherent capacity for monstrosity.
The Gyges effect, the well-noted disinhibition created by communications
over the distances of the Internet, in which all speech and image are muted
and at arm’s reach, produces an inevitable reaction — the desire for
impact at any cost, the desire to reach through the screen, to make somebody
feel something, anything. A simple comment can so easily be ignored. Rape
threat? Not so much. Or, as Mr. Nunn so succinctly put it on Twitter: “If
you can’t threaten to rape a celebrity, what is the point in having them?”
The challenge of our moment is that the face has been at the root of justice
and ethics for 2,000 years. The right to face an accuser is one of the very
first principles of the law, described in the “confrontation clause” of
the Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution, but reaching back
through English common law to ancient Rome. In Roman courts no man could be
sentenced to death without first seeing his accuser. The precondition of any
trial, of any attempt to reconcile competing claims, is that the victim and
the accused look each other in the face.
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For the great French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the encounter with
another’s face was the origin of identity — the reality of the other
preceding the formation of the self. The face is the substance, not just the
reflection, of the infinity of another person. And from the infinity of the
face comes the sense of inevitable obligation, the possibility of discourse
, the origin of the ethical impulse.
The connection between the face and ethical behavior is one of the
exceedingly rare instances in which French phenomenology and contemporary
neuroscience coincide in their conclusions. A 2009 study by Marco Iacoboni,
a neuroscientist at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the
University of California, Los Angeles, explained the connection: “Through
imitation and mimicry, we are able to feel what other people feel. By being
able to feel what other people feel, we are also able to respond
compassionately to other people’s emotional states.” The face is the key
to the sense of intersubjectivity, linking mimicry and empathy through
mirror neurons — the brain mechanism that creates imitation even in
nonhuman primates.
The connection goes the other way, too. Inability to see a face is, in the
most direct way, inability to recognize shared humanity with another. In a
metastudy of antisocial populations, the inability to sense the emotions on
other people’s faces was a key correlation. There is “a consistent, robust
link between antisocial behavior and impaired recognition of fearful facial
affect. Relative to comparison groups, antisocial populations showed
significant impairments in recognizing fearful, sad and surprised
expressions.” A recent study in the Journal of Vision showed that babies
between the ages of 4 months and 6 months recognized human faces at the same
level as grown adults, an ability which they did not possess for other
objects.
Without a face, the self can form only with the rejection of all otherness,
with a generalized, all-purpose contempt — a contempt that is so vacuous
because it is so vague, and so ferocious because it is so vacuous. A world
stripped of faces is a world stripped, not merely of ethics, but of the
biological and cultural foundations of ethics.
For the great existentialist Martin Heidegger, the spirit of homelessness
defined the 20th century, a disconnected drifting in a world of groundless
artificiality. The spirit of facelessness is coming to define the 21st.
Facelessness is not a trend; it is a social phase we are entering that we
have not yet figured out how to navigate.
As exchange and communication come at a remove, the flight back to the face
takes on new urgency. Google recently reported that on Android alone, which
has more than a billion active users, people take 93 million selfies a day.
The selfie has become not a single act but a continuous process of self-
portraiture. On the phones that are so much of our lives, no individual self
-image is adequate; instead a rapid progression of self-images mimics the
changeability and the variety of real human presence.
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Emojis are an explicit attempt to replicate the emotional context that
facial expression provides. Intriguingly, emojis express emotion, often
negative emotions, but you cannot troll with them. You cannot send a message
of faceless contempt with icons of faces. The mere desire to imitate a face
humanizes.
But all these attempts to provide a digital face run counter to the main
current of our era’s essential facelessness. The volume of digital threats
appears to be too large for police forces to adequately deal with. But cases
of trolls’ following through on their online threat of murder and rape are
extremely rare. The closest most trolling comes to actual violence is “
swatting,” or sending ambulances or SWAT teams to an enemy’s house. Again,
neither victim nor perpetrator sees the other.
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RECENT COMMENTS
Nan Socolow 7 hours ago
The Epidemic of Facelessness can be fearlessly faced by separating yourself
from Google, Twitter, FaceBook and all the malign cyberwidget...
Mike Smoth 7 hours ago
This is nothing new. Before the digital age there was regular mail. As a
matter of fact, sending a threatening letter via regular mail can...
AC 7 hours ago
Having received phone calls in my home from extremists threatening me harm
after having letters to the editor published once in the national...
SEE ALL COMMENTS
What do we do with the trolls? It is one of the questions of the age. There
are those who argue that we have a social responsibility to confront them.
Mary Beard, the British historian, not only confronted a troll who sent her
misogynistic messages, she befriended him and ended up writing him letters
of reference. One young video game reviewer, Alanah Pearce, sent Facebook
messages to the mothers of young boys who had sent her rape threats. These
stories have the flavor of the heroic, a resistance to an assumed condition:
giving face to the faceless.
The more established wisdom about trolls, at this point, is to disengage.
Obviously, in many cases, actual crimes are being committed, crimes that
demand confrontation, by victims and by law enforcement officials, but in
everyday digital life engaging with the trolls “is like trying to drown a
vampire with your own blood,” as the comedian Andy Richter put it.
Ironically, the Anonymous collective, a pioneer of facelessness, has offered
more or less the same advice.
Rule 14 of their “Rules of the Internet” is, “Do not argue with trolls —
it means that they win.
Rule 19 is, “The more you hate it the stronger it gets.”
Ultimately, neither solution — confrontation or avoidance — satisfies.
Even if confrontation were the correct strategy, those who are hounded by
trolls do not have the time to confront them. To leave the faceless to their
facelessness is also unacceptable — why should they own the digital space
simply because of the anonymity of their cruelty?
There is a third way, distinct from confrontation or avoidance: compassion.
The original trolls, Scandinavian monsters who haunted the Vikings,
inhabited graveyards or mountains, which is why adventurers would always run
into them on the road or at night. They were dull. They possessed monstrous
force but only a dim sense of the reality of others. They were mystical
nature-forces that lived in the distant, dark places between human
habitations. The problem of contemporary trolls is a subset of a larger
crisis, which is itself a consequence of the transformation of our modes of
communication. Trolls breed under the shadows of the bridges we build.
In a world without faces, compassion is a practice that requires discipline,
even imagination. Social media seems so easy; the whole point of its
pleasure is its sense of casual familiarity. But we need a new art of
conversation for the new conversations we are having — and the first rule
of that art must be to remember that we are talking to human beings: “Never
say anything online that you wouldn’t say to somebody’s face.” But also:
“Don’t listen to what people wouldn’t say to your face.”
The neurological research demonstrates that empathy, far from being an
artificial construct of civilization, is integral to our biology. And when
biological intersubjectivity disappears, when the face is removed from life,
empathy and compassion can no longer be taken for granted.
The new facelessness hides the humanity of monsters and of victims both.
Behind the angry tangles of wires, the question is, how do we see their
faces again?
Stephen Marche is an Esquire columnist and the author, most recently, of “
The Hunger of the Wolf.”
