Probably all of us have sat at tables where we did not belong; and precisely the most spiritual among us, being hardest to nourish, know that dangerous dyspepsia which comes of a sudden insight and disappointment about our food and our neighbors at the table – the after-dinner nausea.
Ben Abraham, one of the organizers behind Critical Distance (which has been extremely kind and generous with its links to this blog), had an extremely interesting critique the other day. In a nutshell, he argues that the “srs games community” (IE the “talking about videogames like adults” community) has focused more on analytical approaches, rather than persuasive ones. Not long after, he tweeted a link to this comment.
Stay with me here. This isn’t about twitter drama, I swear.
Anyway, it sparked a bit of a razzing session against this “JONNY” troll. I’m going to just come out and say it: JONNY is entirely justified in his comments and his approach.
When we think of “trolls” we all think of different things, so let me scope something out before I get into my defense. I think 4chan’s idea of trolling (disgusting pictures, racial/sexual slurs, etc) is pretty fucking stupid and indefensible. I think making threats towards people IRL, especially around contacting their parents/employers/professors etc, is completely disgraceful and cowardly. I don’t agree with any of that and that’s not what I’m going to be defending.
With that said: Trolls serve a useful purpose in internet discourse. Politeness is a poison. I understand people want to put themselves above disputes and have every argument become a gentleman’s disagreement full of apologies and good faith, but sometimes people are just plain fuckin’ wrong. When people are wrong, and I’m not talking like “oh he used the wrong spelling of AERITH” wrong, I take no small amount of pleasure in watching another human being rip their argument to shreds with extreme prejudice.
Look at Matt Tabbi’s incredible review of “The World is Flat”:
On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there.
Intellectualism is sometimes a veil for sloppy thought. That isn’t a populist “liberal elites think they’re better than us normal Americans” trap, it’s a truth. For whatever reason, if you can dress up your inane argument that Dead Space is secretly about neoliberal economics in fancy academic language, people don’t want to give you the JONNY treatment no matter how richly you deserve it. There’s this huge, completely natural tendency to not want to upset the motion of the waters. We’re a small, kind of insular community – you don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. I understand that, and I empathize with that. But a good troll is not concerned with community, or your feelings. A good troll is concerned with dropping the zippiest, harshest critique possible on your work. A good troll is, in short, an essential part of a healthy, self-critical community.
But couldn’t you be nicer when making a critique? Sure. It’s a possibility. But if you can’t defend yourself from the harshest possible attack, you will never really challenge yourself. Your core premises will go completely unexamined. Go back and re-read Ben’s post that I linked up top, specifically:
‘logical’ does not equate to ‘persuasive’
Trolls are not “logical”. They are emotional. They make emotional arguments that aren’t necessarily backed up by a opening-sentence,body,closing-sentence structure. Yet a good troll is still persuasive. If you want to ignore the points they’re making because you don’t like their emotion, then hey! you’re just a tone troll. You’re trying to control the discourse around you in an artificial and deadening way. You don’t want to be attacked unless it’s on your own terms, so you never have to defend yourself on anything except your own terms.
From JONNY: "at least idiot ass frat boys make their point fucking clear, you are a complete dumbass". As a critique, I prefer this to "well it seems like you don't really substantiate your claims could you clarify please" because it goes after the core of the matter - vague pretentious bullshit is vague, pretentious, bullshit. the polite option articulates "vague" but not "pretentious" or "bullshit" in anything but the most passing, ephemeral manner. The polite option lends legitimacy to the discussion – but legitimacy is earned, not given.
Any supportive, well-intentioned community inevitably becomes an insular love-in where the biggest taboo is disagreeing with someone. Sometimes there’s a really good reason for having that sort of community, like when it is specifically a support community for people who are looking for support and safe places for discussion – I would never suggest that what Border House Blog needs is more trolls, especially since the continued existence of Kotaku is trying enough. But there’s a difference between a support community and a critical engagement community. As critical writers, we are expected to, you know, be critical. We should sharpen our swords on each other. We should be nailing each other on our core premises, and not hesitating to say “You’re completely wrong” without diluting it in politeness and excuses and cruft. I wish my blog got trolls like JONNY, because I write to challenge myself – to expose myself – and to explore all the paths that haven’t yet bloomed in my mind. If we are committed to just “showing respect” and “getting along”, we will end up, as Harman warns us, “boring” and “false”.
Here's the thing(s): you're working with very narrow definitions of trolling and politeness; your assertion that intellectualism shields an argument from harsh, direct criticism is incorrect; and you spend 900-ish words dancing around your point with concepts like persuasiveness, emotion, and discursive control before you finally say what you came to say: let's stop feeling bad about being critical.
ReplyDeleteIt's a good point, but your attempt to define a critical engagement community is itself a form of the discursive control that you're arguing against.
Am I trolling you?
I don't think so. I'm being critical, and the two aren't the same thing. They can certainly overlap, but it's important to avoid conflating their respective concepts.
It's a good start. Keep it coming.
If you think intellectualism stifles criticism, I don't think you've ever been in a productive intellectual environment. All the best intellectual communities make room for direct criticism while simultaneously protecting its researchers and writers from unproductive discussion environments and from emotional abuse.
ReplyDeleteThe current state of internet trolling does neither of those things.
I'm with the above commenter.
ReplyDeleteMeh I'm the pretentious dumbarse who wrote the original article.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty cool with crazy rants on my blog, I'm pretty cool with commenters hating my guts. After all, I approved the guy's comment in the first place. I responded to it cause I felt given that 'Jonny' took the time out of his day to tell me how he felt about one of my pieces of writing then I should show him the courtesy of a reply. I'd probably prefer if he'd been less of a dick about it but whatever I really don't hold any ill feeling towards the guy (I can get crazy worked up about videogames too).
It's interesting, Ben actually made similar points in the same comment thread without being a massive douchebag, and I basically agreed that he was probably right. So it's not like this was some new critique I was unaware of.
Paths don't "bloom".
ReplyDeleteTroll: "at least idiot ass frat boys make their point fucking clear"
ReplyDeleteToo polite: "well it seems like you don't really substantiate your claims could you clarify please"
Awesome middle ground: "You don't substantiate any of your claims, and it actually appears that you don't really know anything about the subject. I can find (article1, article2, well-known blog) that talk about this subject and approach it from both sides, none of which you reference or even plagarize from."
I don't ignore/dislike trolls because I don't like their emotion. Emotion is good. It shows passion. I ignore/dislike trolls because they use "easy" or perhaps "underhanded" tricks to make their point. They often resort to name-calling, cursing, and stretched-out metaphors that only half-support their point but evoke very emotional responses. If your point isn't persuasive without any of that, than perhaps your point just isn't good.
these are all really great responses. at its core though this is really a question of ideology. if you think that intellectualism and empiricism are high forms of human thought and expression then no you're probably not going to agree with me that being rude and crass and insincere and facetious is a functional way to make a point while amusing onlookers. i understand people who like rigorously intellectual, yet civil discussions. i just always yearn for a little chaos, for a little of the ignorant invader to come in and throw some mud. maybe it's a little sociopathic of me, so I don't really expect to change anyone else's mind about that.
ReplyDeletei can't tell if that's a copout or not. i tried responding to people individually but it just became unwieldy and another 900 words. i am starting to think this would have been a better post if it were short and sweet rather than attempting to preempt what i anticipated the counter-arguments to be. at least i am relatively sure people are willing to hold my feet to the fire on this one :)
ReplyDeletePerhaps it would have been a more persuasive argument if were shorter and sweeter. ;)
ReplyDeleteI do think Zach has a point here.
ReplyDeleteWithout railing against intellectual discourse, young and insular communities can fall into a pattern of niceties and hero worship. An outside force -- whether "trolling" or not -- can burst that bubble and ultimately help those it criticizes.
That's not to say that it's always needed; Ben's response prior to JONNY's got at the heart of the criticism much more succinctly and without any pejoratives. However, a little bluntness and chaos that upsets the status quo can be a good thing as well.
i think rather than railing against "intellectual" discourse specifically, my point was a bit more broad - there is room for voices that aren't entirely "intellectual" in criticism. for example: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/burkas-and-birkins/Content?oid=4132715 is not "intellectual". it is not "traditional analytical criticism". it is a screed. it is designed and written to provoke people's reactions. it is also fucking hilarious and entertaining.
ReplyDeletei have no problem with intellectual discourse. i just think, like all forms of discourse, it has its problems and its strengths - i am against BAD intellectualism (how we seperate good from bad is its own mess), and intellectualism for its own sake.
i also don't think we should reflexively close out anything that's non-intellectual for the sole reason that it's non-intellectual.
these are all points i probably could have made more clearly in the original post but fuck it, this discussion is way more fun (despite blogger's fucking terrible commenting system) :)
JONNY was chosen as an example more because of his temporal proximity to ben's questions about how we approach criticisms than because that situation was literally the perfect, instructive example.
Giving criticism is good and all, but when you are just using slurs to vent your anger, the extrinsic benefit of proving your point is overridden by the intrinsic benefit of simply pleasing yourself by pointlessly insulting the other person. People who make these sort of comments are simply halting progress of an argument that isn't going their way.
ReplyDeleteright, but not every argument needs to be had. again i'm not saying this would fly in a purely academic setting but in a social setting (like, say a community of bloggers discussing videogames) it's perfectly acceptable to cut off a tedious, well-worn debate with a bit of sass. i also disagree cutting off the debate comes from a place of anger: it can just as easily be boredom or mild bemusement or simply a desire to sprinkle some chaos around.
ReplyDeleteit's worth noting that I'm working on a one-year retrospective for the blog and this post is unequivocally in my "didn't go well" category. Not that the debate is illegitimate or that I've really changed my stance, but I definitely could have made my point in about 900 less words which might have made my position a lot more clear.
Giving criticism is good and all, but when you are just using slurs to vent your anger, the extrinsic benefit of proving your point is overridden by the intrinsic benefit of simply pleasing yourself by pointlessly insulting the other person. People who make these sort of comments are simply halting progress of an argument that isn't going their way.
ReplyDeletePerhaps it would have been a more persuasive argument if were shorter and sweeter. ;)
ReplyDeleteMeh I'm the pretentious dumbarse who wrote the original article.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty cool with crazy rants on my blog, I'm pretty cool with commenters hating my guts. After all, I approved the guy's comment in the first place. I responded to it cause I felt given that 'Jonny' took the time out of his day to tell me how he felt about one of my pieces of writing then I should show him the courtesy of a reply. I'd probably prefer if he'd been less of a dick about it but whatever I really don't hold any ill feeling towards the guy (I can get crazy worked up about videogames too).
It's interesting, Ben actually made similar points in the same comment thread without being a massive douchebag, and I basically agreed that he was probably right. So it's not like this was some new critique I was unaware of.