Good Fences

Amy Wright

There are several words, in our grand old language of English that evoke quite a deep and negative reaction. Most of the time this is understandable. In other cases this reaction is based on a gross misunderstanding of the word's meaning and intent. The word “prejudice”, for example, is entirely neutral, simply meaning to pre-judge which can be done positively just as easily as negatively. The word “segregation”, likewise, simply means to keep things separate. When the separation in question is between peoples, particularly by government diktat, this is problematic. It is not only people who are segregated and there are instances in which segregation is actually a preferable condition to a limitless free-for-all.

One of the cases in which segregation was preferable to its alternative was the early days of the internet. It might be difficult to fathom now that the development of the internet was a fairly slow and gradual process. There were websites in the late 1990s but not nearly as many as there are today and they were for the most part, independent entities that needed to be sought out individually. There was all the wondrous, wacky, weird, pointless and awful things than that there are now but the self-selecting nature of the web-surfing audience of the day kept the less positive aspects of the net small and localized.

Then came net democratization. A move criticized by Tech. Industry pioneers from Silicon Valley inside Jaron Lanier to Tim Berners-Lee who literally created the architecture of the modern-day, Linux-based world-wide web, as misguided and potentially dangerous. One need only look at the critical mass being cultivated on Social Media to see they have a point. What platforms like YouTube and Twitter have done, as unintentional side effect of their push for and open internet, is breakdown the arguably necessary walls between various internet communities. There were certainly white supremacists online before 2005 but they were restricted to ghettoized fringe sites like StormFront. What YouTube has done is give them a place to meet, socialize and plan, for the most part unnoticed, while also giving their ideas a modicum of mainstream visibility and respectability. If you suspect I am exaggerating go to YouTube and type the words “Ian Stuart” into the search bar. This is but one example of the Neo-Nazi propaganda openly available.

This is not to lay the blame for things such as the rise of the Alt-Right or what happened in Charlottesville squarely on the door-step of the Social Media. Those on the extreme fringes have used the media of the day to their own devices, going back to the self-publishing and pamphleteering boom of late 17^th century Europe, during which anyone with a room and a printing-press was considered a legitimate source of information. A system which gave the good things like Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man and most of the work of Jonathan Swift as well as the rebirth of 'Flat-Earth Theory' and the sort of racial blood myths that would later inspire the Third Reich. There is no way to completely control what people do with the information technology given to them, but that does not mean the situation is hopeless. We need simply to recognize the potential risks of what is going on and do what we can to limit and counter its impact.