Jia Tolentino - Trick Mirror

But the appearance of a more level playing field is not the fact of it, and everything that happens on the internet bounces and refracts. At the same time that ideologies that lead toward equality and freedom have gained power through the internet’s open discourse, existing power structures have solidified through a vicious (and very online) opposition to this encroachment. In her 2017 book, Kill All Normies— a project of accounting for the “online battles that may otherwise be forgotten but have nevertheless shaped culture and ideas in a profound way”—the writer Angela Nagle argues that the alt-right coalesced in response to increasing cultural power on the left. Gamergate, she writes, brought together a “strange vanguard of teenage gamers, pseudonymous swastika-posting anime lovers, ironic South Park conservatives, anti-feminist pranksters, nerdish harassers and meme-making trolls” to form a united front against the “earnestness and moral self-flattery of what felt like a tired liberal intellectual conformity.” The obvious hole in the argument is the fact that what Nagle identifies as the center of this liberal conformity—college activist movements, obscure Tumblr accounts about mental health and arcane sexualities—are frequently derided by liberals, and have never been nearly as powerful as those who detest them would like to think. The Gamergaters’ worldview was not actually endangered; they just had to believe it was—or to pretend it was, and wait for a purportedly leftist writer to affirm them—in order to lash out and remind everyone what they could do.

Many Gamergaters cut their expressive teeth on 4chan, a message board that adopted as one of its mottos the phrase “There are no girls on the internet.” “This rule does not mean what you think it means,” wrote one 4chan poster, who went, as most of them did, by the username Anonymous. “In real life, people like you for being a girl. They want to fuck you, so they pay attention to you and they pretend what you have to say is interesting, or that you are smart or clever. On the Internet, we don’t have the chance to fuck you. This means the advantage of being a ‘girl’ does not exist. You don’t get a bonus to conversation just because I’d like to put my cock in you.” He explained that women could get their unfair social advantage back by posting photos of their tits on the message board: “This is, and should be, degrading for you.”

Here was the opposition principle in action. Through identifying the effects of women’s systemic objectification as some sort of vagina-supremacist witchcraft, the men that congregated on 4chan gained an identity, and a useful common enemy. Many of these men had, likely, experienced consequences related to the “liberal intellectual conformity” that is popular feminism: as the sexual marketplace began to equalize, they suddenly found themselves unable to obtain sex by default. Rather than work toward other forms of self-actualization—or attempt to make themselves genuinely desirable, in the same way that women have been socialized to do at great expense and with great sincerity for all time—they established a group identity that centered on anti-woman virulence, on telling women who happened to stumble across 4chan that “the only interesting thing about you is your naked body. tl;dr: tits or GET THE FUCK OUT.”

In the same way that it behooved these trolls to credit women with a maximum of power that they did not actually possess, it sometimes behooved women, on the internet, to do the same when they spoke about trolls. At some points while I worked at Jezebel, it would have been easy to enter into one of these situations myself. Let’s say a bunch of trolls sent me threatening emails—an experience that wasn’t exactly common, as I have been “lucky,” but wasn’t rare enough to surprise me. The economy of online attention would suggest that I write a column about those trolls, quote their emails, talk about how the experience of being threatened constitutes a definitive situation of being a woman in the world. (It would be acceptable for me to do this even though I have never been hacked or swatted or Gamergated, never had to move out of my house to a secure location, as so many other women have.) My column about trolling would, of course, attract an influx of trolling. Then, having proved my point, maybe I’d go on TV and talk about the situation, and then I would get trolled even more, and then I could go on defining myself in reference to trolls forever, positioning them as inexorable and monstrous, and they would return the favor in the interest of their own ideological advancement, and this whole situation could continue until we all died.

There is a version of this mutual escalation that applies to any belief system, which brings me back to Bari Weiss and all the other writers who have fashioned themselves as brave contrarians, building entire arguments on random protests and harsh tweets, making themselves deeply dependent on the people who hate them, the people they hate. It’s ridiculous, and at the same time, here I am writing this essay, doing the same thing. It is nearly impossible, today, to separate engagement from magnification. (Even declining to engage can turn into magnification: when people targeted in Pizzagate as Satanist pedophiles took their social media accounts private, the Pizzagaters took this as proof that they had been right.) Trolls and bad writers and the president know better than anyone: when you call someone terrible, you just end up promoting their work.

The political philosopher Sally Scholz separates solidarity into three categories. There’s social solidarity, which is based on common experience; civic solidarity, which is based on moral obligation to a community; and political solidarity, which is based on a shared commitment to a cause. These forms of solidarity overlap, but they’re distinct from one another. What’s political, in other words, doesn’t also have to be personal, at least not in the sense of firsthand experience. You don’t need to step in shit to understand what stepping in shit feels like. You don’t need to have directly suffered at the hands of some injustice in order to be invested in bringing that injustice to an end.

But the internet brings the “I” into everything. The internet can make it seem that supporting someone means literally sharing in their experience—that solidarity is a matter of identity rather than politics or morality, and that it’s best established at a point of maximum mutual vulnerability in everyday life. Under these terms, instead of expressing morally obvious solidarity with the struggle of black Americans under the police state or the plight of fat women who must roam the earth to purchase stylish and thoughtful clothing, the internet would encourage me to express solidarity through inserting my own identity. Of course I support the black struggle because I, myself, as a woman of Asian heritage, have personally been injured by white supremacy. (In fact, as an Asian woman, part of a minority group often deemed white-adjacent, I have benefited from American anti-blackness on just as many occasions.) Of course I understand the difficulty of shopping as a woman who is overlooked by the fashion industry because I, myself, have also somehow been marginalized by this industry. This framework, which centers the self in an expression of support for others, is not ideal.

The phenomenon in which people take more comfort in a sense of injury than a sense of freedom governs many situations where people are objectively not being victimized on a systematic basis. For example, men’s rights activists have developed a sense of solidarity around the absurd claim that men are second-class citizens. White nationalists have brought white people together through the idea that white people are endangered, specifically white men—this at a time when 91 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are white men, when white people make up 90 percent of elected American officials and an overwhelming majority of top decision-makers in music, publishing, television, movies, and sports.