"I Sure Don't Mean Nothing By It"
Friday's Child Is Repeating Himself About Problems of Scale Once Again
There’s a moment in the New York Times profile of the Iowa meteorologist Chris Gloninger that really got to me, even though I’ve seen that moment before in stories about anonymous online harassment and threats.
Gloninger set out to engage his Iowa audience with the scientific reality of climate change. While he had supporters, initially including the executives who hired him, over time he began to attract a lot of negative attention. At first he shrugged that off, and then it started to eat away at him, at the same time that it began to unnerve his employers. When he received a death threat, it pushed him into a new space of fear and anxiety.
The interesting moment for me in the story was that the police actually caught up with the person who made the threat. He was a 63-year old man who told the police, “I sure don’t mean nothing by it. I guess I just express my opinion. I apologize sincerely, and he’s—he’s doing his job.” He was charged with third-degree harassment, leading to a fine of $180.
As many people have discovered, it can be hard to get law enforcement to chase down an anonymous online threat, despite the fact that it’s often not that difficult to do. I understand that you’d have to have a small dedicated task force that did nothing but, and in at least some cases, you’d be in a legal grey area in charging someone. However, it might be a good shift in resources in the sense that when there is an effort to track someone down, at least some of the time, they’re like the person in this case, almost surprised by what they wrote, almost surprised to realize that they threatened someone with death or harm simply because the other person said something they didn’t want to hear.
Not always, of course. There’s no contrition when you trace that back to someone who is quite consciously making money off of authoring threatening invective. Ann Coulter isn’t going to sincerely apologize for wishing that Timothy McVeigh had blown up the New York Times, or stop doing that kind of thing. There’s no contrition when you trace back to someone—usually an isolated white man with guns—who is actually bristling with violent rage at any number of imagined enemies.
But at least sometimes, it feels as if the knock on the door wakens someone from spirit possession, that the question “Why did you say this?” feels as pressingly mysterious to the sender as the recipient of such a message.
Conventionally, we blame the consumption of a steady stream of misinformation and partisan hatred, often by audiences that have almost nothing else to occupy their time, where Fox News or endless streams of tailored channels pouring through social media platforms serve almost as surrogate friends, a way to give them something to focus on.
That is a big part of what’s going on. But I also think we don’t spend enough time talking about the fundamental problem of scale indexed against time within the current world-system. All of us are living in a world that’s literally unimaginable in its size that is also simultaneously materially real and potent in its effects at the intimate scale of our daily lives.
For at least four millennia, human beings have been connected to large-scale regional and then global systems of trade that were beyond the ability of any individual in any locality to fully envision, where the desires of rulers or wealthy social classes or the military and administrative needs of centralized states and empires might drive the labor of thousands of people halfway around the planet, pushing people up volcanoes to gather sulfur, down into pit mines for copper, silver, gold and other metals, or into hunts for elephant tusks.
The feedback loops of that kind of large-scale trade often had significant impacts on human life all along the circuit from initial production to final use. But the end buyers often had no idea what was happening at the site of production and little idea about how commodities were carried across the distances in-between. The merchants and caravan operators often knew only as much as they needed to about the point where they entered the circuit and the point where they turned back to where they started. The people involved in getting or making the valuable goods lived under any number of dispensations from enslavement to lucrative mutual investment in a secretive guild or cartel.
Even when someone tried to imagine the whole thing at scale, they knew they were imagining something where the numbers of people involved were actually quite small and the impacts relatively limited.
In the last 500 years, that started to change, slowly at first and then in a tumultuous, sudden lurch into a new magnitude of linkages and effects. Today we are all enmeshed in innumerable circuits that can have enormous effects on us as individuals in almost the blink of an eye. We are relating in some meaningful sense to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people who might do something to us, for us, with us, sometimes with our foreknowledge but often unexpectedly. More and more, we have absolutely no information about who those people are, where they are, or why they are doing what they are doing. More and more, we accurately suspect that some of them aren’t even people but are instead bots, algorithms, machines.
I don’t quite fully buy the anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s specific proposition that there’s a hard cognitive limit of around 150 people that any individual person can keep meaningful track of, but even if we think of that limit as fuzzy and extensible, the basic point is valid. We’re forced to accept that large numbers of human beings and large numbers of their institutions can reach into our own lives, can know us, but we can’t imagine all of them, keep all their faces and names in front of us. The most humane, loving, sensitive person in all the world hits a point where they go from substantial kindness towards one individual to a sort of abstract love for all of humanity. There is a middle that is necessarily excluded.
Way back at the dawn on online culture, new participants often found that they were for a short time overwhelmed by a sense of unexpected intimacy. Their social networks were reshuffled, and people who felt quite real despite being immaterial became part of their under-Dunbar world of specific people they knew well. Often that reality progressed to physical acquaintance—a lot of those early networks led people to meet up, form friendships and business partnerships, or even to become romantically connected. But that was partly because the numbers were still small. On a Usenet group I used to frequent, there were maybe thirty to forty regular posters. In another asynchronous virtual community, it was about the same, forty or so people who interacted.
And in all those early networks, eventually a snake entered the garden. There were spectacular early cases of catfishing or other deceptions. There were spammers. And then a vast world flooded in. It was, in some sense, as if in a single decade the early conversationalists of online culture went from being the Republic of Letters in the immediate decades after the early modern print revolution to living in the world of large-scale capitalist publication and mass readership at the end of the 19th Century. The early participants were still trying to have a conversation with ten other readers of The Spectator in an Augustan coffee-house while actually being in the middle of a Spitalfields weekend market crowd.
So I do understand how Mr. Gloninger’s harasser found himself blinking at a policeman and saying, “I sure don’t mean nothing by it” when confronted by his record of numerous ugly and threatening emails to Gloninger. Many of us don’t drift into being that kind of cyborg menace, to letting ourselves become enmeshed in the most hateful gears of a vast machine, but we are all of us overwhelmed by the scale of relationships that we can’t disinvest from but also have no agency within. That’s especially true when it comes to climate change, where both the problem and many possible solutions intrude powerfully into everyday life and are deeply anthropogenic. Real individuals are making real decisions that matter, particular institutions and systems are controlling the scale and scope of the problem, but most of us can’t do more than buy some green products, write letters to political representatives who profess helplessness in turn. Or write emails to a person who appears on television within our house telling us things we don’t want to hear. Or spray orange powder paint on Stonehenge and some private jets.
I think out of all the solutions to our global moment that we discuss, we don’t give enough attention to the thought of radically and deliberately reducing the scale of our social, political and economic worlds. Perhaps because that seems impossible, because it is impossible in a fully globalized system. But I think it is just as impossible that we can find a way to successfully expand our minds to become meaningfully, sustainably human in networks that put tens of thousands or millions of people in direct causal and emotional relations to one another. Some people are cracking badly under the strain of having to try, but nobody’s really up to the challenge.
Yes, yes, yes. I actually think this is a significant contributor to why liberal women in particular are so distressed - we’ve accepted a moral model (care about everyone) that is incompatible with the amount of information we have about tragedies and injustices that inevitably happen with 8 billion human beings. We need an adjustment to a structural philosophical model that lets us feel moral and good while being able to enjoy our own lives, while feeling like we’re doing enough to move toward justice for all.
Thanks for bringing up Stonehenge. I get what the protesters want to say, but defacing (however temporarily) something that has survived from the Neolithic isn’t making me feel very solidary with those who think that’s their best publicity.