{"id":24136,"date":"2020-11-29T19:57:58","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T00:57:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=24136"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:42:45","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:42:45","slug":"denizens-of-deplorability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2020\/11\/denizens-of-deplorability\/","title":{"rendered":"Denizens of Deplorability"},"content":{"rendered":"

As you all can tell (after living in North Carolina 15 years, I have come to not only accept but embrace you all<\/em> and how well it fills its linguistic niche), I haven’t posted much lately, not that this is important to you all.\u00a0 Rather, I’ve spent our tedious post-election days thus: waiting for the grown-ups to stop reading The Baby his favorite stories and put him to bed; avoiding the maskless; trying to keep my weight in check; putting the finishing touches on a recording; and reading a disheartening book.<\/p>\n

Said book, published late last year, is Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation<\/em> by New Yorker<\/em> writer Andrew Marantz.\u00a0 I learned of it via a late-night listen to the Making Sense <\/em>podcast<\/a> by author\/philosopher\u00a0 Sam Harris<\/a>.\u00a0 Antisocial<\/em><\/a> is a first-person dive into a subject that has bothered me for years: where did all the trolls come from?\u00a0 And why does it feel like there are so many of them?*<\/p>\n

Marantz’s account starts at the “DeploraBall<\/a>” [sic<\/em>] event held in Washington, D.C., on the eve of Trump’s 2017 inauguration.\u00a0 The event serves to introduce the reader to the various alt-right characters who staged and\/or attended the DeploraBall not so much to celebrate Trump’s victory but to take measure of their own strength and congratulate themselves.<\/p>\n

Alt-right<\/em> is probably the wrong, or at least off-target, word to characterize the subjects of Marantz’s book.\u00a0 The self-styled leaders of this haphazard “movement” grappled with what to call themselves and how to distinguish themselves from Nazis — not because of some philosophical disagreement they have with Nazis but because Nazism is a “toxic brand.”\u00a0 Me, I would call them social arsonists<\/em>.\u00a0 I thought about social anarchists<\/em>, but that would imply that these abject self-promoters have something like a philosophy.\u00a0 No, today’s trolls just enjoy making and\/or watching society burn, winning attention points along the way.\u00a0 At least that’s my take from reading Antisocial.<\/em><\/p>\n

The recurrent theme of Antisocial <\/em>is this: conflict is attention and attention is influence. <\/em>This is why those who believe that influence signifies self-worth are led to create conflict.<\/p>\n

Like most books, the first third of\u00a0Antisocial<\/em> conveys two-thirds of its message.\u00a0 But it is an important message — if you read just the first third of the book and return it to the library, you will have insights you didn’t have before.\u00a0 You might be inspired to quit Facebook and treat most meme-posts on social media sites as craven attempts to trigger you, by trolls who only care about elevating and monetizing themselves and take pride in doing so.<\/p>\n

Antisocial<\/em> is both sad and scary.\u00a0 Sad because it shows how it isn’t “your father’s internet” anymore (let alone your father’s Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians) and how blind we’ve been to the rise of social arson.\u00a0 And scary, because it reminds us that shared values are like mountains: great things, but once eroded require tectonic forces to rebuild.<\/p>\n

________<\/p>\n

* Among the posts in which I railed about trolls: Whence Angry Perturbations<\/em><\/a>, Every Tech Forum Ever<\/em><\/a>, and Indifference to Truth<\/em><\/a>.<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As you all can tell (after living in North Carolina 15 years, I have come to not only accept but embrace you all and how well it fills its linguistic niche), I haven’t posted much lately, not that this is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24136"}],"version-history":[{"count":39,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24179,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24136\/revisions\/24179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}