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Notes -
"Did you lock it?"
A common trait among my social circle used to be that everyone shared an obsession with bicycles. Few of us had or even wanted a car in the city, and having everyone on two wheels made it much easier to roam down our house party itinerary. Between all of us we had a deep well of metis to draw from; everything from which wheels to buy to the easiest way to make derailleur adjustments. We were naturally attached to our steeds and none of us wanted our bicycles to pull a disappearing act, and so we discussed ways to keep safe.
U-locks were ubiquitous and we'd warn each other of the brands that were still susceptible to the infamous pen trick. Some of us of the more paranoid variety installed locking skewers to keep expensive saddles or wheels latched in place. We'd even caution each other to check bolts anchoring bike racks to the ground, since the U-lock was useless if the whole setup could be lifted away. It wasn't possible to reach full immunity but you never need to be the fastest gazelle to escape the cheetah, just faster than the slowest one.
Naturally, if anyone ever suffered the ultimate calamity of having their ride stolen, we would ask if it was locked and how. There was nothing sadistic about our inquiries. Our questions were problem-solving endeavors saturated with sympathy; we wanted to know what went wrong precisely to help others avoid the same fate. Maybe the local thieves discovered some new exploit in our standard security apparatus, or maybe this was just an opportunistic snatch while they left their bike unlocked outside during a quick peek inside.
"If you do X, you're likely to get Y" is the format to an unremarkable factual observation. "If you leave your bike outside unlocked, you're likely to have it stolen" is just reality and, on its own, is a statement that carries no moral judgment. If the victim wasn't previously aware of this correlation, they are now, and are better equipped to evade a rerun.
The parallels to my actual point are probably getting obvious by now.
Kathleen Stock charges right into deconstructing the surprisingly enduring ritual of affixing the "victim-blaming" reprimand to any advice aimed at reducing the risk of sexual assault. Now, in case anyone needs the clarification: I believe that rape is way worse than bicycle theft. Nevertheless the principles at play here remain the same:
Consider the victim of the unattended bike snatch again. Imparting wisdom on the implacable chain of consequences is about the most compassionate thing you could do. They can choose to accept that advice, and if it is sound then they'll be met with the disastrous outcome of...not having their bike stolen. Or they can choose to reject that advice and adhere to the mantra that instead of putting the onus on cyclists not to have their bikes stolen, we should teach thieves not to thieve. In which case, best of luck with completely overhauling the nature of man; here's hoping their bicycle budget rivals the GDP of a small country to withstand the inevitable and wholly predictable hits.
If your dad or friend tells you to cover your drink at parties to avoid being raped, they are looking out for you and are a good ally.
If the chief of police responds to questions about a rise in sexual assault rates in the city and says 'women should be covering their drinks at bars' and then does nothing else to address the problem through their office, they are blaming victims instead of doing their job.
The difference, as often happens in culture war issues, is between individual-level advice and society-levels policies.
The types of accusations of 'victim blaming' that you are talking about here, tend to happen when one person thinks it's their responsibility to give individual-level advice, and someone else thinks they had a duty to make societal-level policy proposals (or implementations) instead.
I agree, and if the accusations of victim blaming I saw on this topic were directed at officials like the Chief of Police I would agree that it's victim blaming. But the overwhelming majority of times I've seen someone accused of victim blaming they were just other regular joes and jos on twitter or reddit or some forum. And in those cases, the way I see it, the very fact someone is talking and thinking about this in terms of policy proposals is how we can tell they are the mistaken party.
Policies apply to populations, and populations are abstracts. It's terrible when any% of women are sexually assaulted for sure, but there are much better ways to affect policy than arguing with strangers on the internet. What really matters to people is when women they know get sexually assaulted - thanks to Dunbar's number that is pretty much the only time we really care. So of course people offer individual level advice, why would they offer more?
Well, I sort of precisely disagree about the purpose of publicly visible social media, which probably demonstrates why people react so differently to these types of posts.
To my mind, there's little point in a random individual posting safety tips on their social media. Anyone who wants those tips can get an actual guide from an expert source with a 3 second google, and it's much more likely to be accurate and helpful. And women get bombarded with those sentiments all the time, it's not like they aren't already aware.
To me, public-facing social media is much more a process of expressing/creating the public cultural consensus on topics of interest.
If every social media post in existence says that Trump is a corrupt criminal, his political career is probably over. If half the posts say he's a corrupt criminal and half say he's a saintly god-emperor, he probably has a good chance of being president again.
And, yes, those posts are in large sense a reflection of what people already believe. But they also get read by people and pundits and aggregated into stats and that affect what everyone else believes, both about Trump and about how to report on and talk about him and whether it's worthwhile to contribute to his campaign and etc. No individual post has a huge influence on the realty of the culture, but they have a massive determinative influence in aggregate.
Same thing here.
If 100% of posts on social media about sexual assault are saying to teach men not to rape and to reform and enhance police interventions and etc., then that's going to strongly influence us towards a world where men are scrutinized and given the burden of responsibility to address this issue rather than women, where police and politicians are held responsible for addressing the problem materially rather than rhetorically, and where victims are not criticized for their legal behaviors before an assault and there complaints are much harder to dismiss as 'regrets' or 'asking for it' or w/e.
Alternately, if 100% of posts on social media about sexual assault are telling women how to protect themselves and what precautions to take, then that's going to strongly influence us towards a world where women are constantly scrutinized for all their legal reasonable behaviors that are deemed incautious or slutty or w/e, where there is very little scrutiny or pressure on men to police each other or be good allies in these situations, where victims are blamed for their behaviors in ways that make it easier for criminals to stay unprosecuted, that applies no pressure on politicians or police to materially address the problem with the powers of their office, etc.
And then in between those two extremes there's a sliding continuum that influences how much of each of those categories of things happen, and an eternal battle for the soul of the culture between people who prefer one world over the other.
And unfortunately, that battle is fought through the medium of flame wars on social media, because we live in a hell world where recommendation engines and trending topics and the articles written about them influence much of what people believe about reality, and for social/cultural norms what people believe about reality often becomes reality.
(Also, disclaimer- I made the two sides there sound very uneven there to show one side's perspective, but obviously there are strong arguments on both sides or it wouldn't be a divisive issue.)
The thing is though, that this -
Is because of this -
This hell world of algorithms and trending topics didn't exist before social media because it was caused by social media, and more specifically it came about when people discovered they could use social media to influence public consensus and affect policy. Fortunately the tool for dismantling your hell world is in everyone's hands - stop putting any faith in social media, stop allowing it to influence you. While you might only be a drop in the bucket, so is everyone else - the more people who opt out, the less influence it has. Conversely if you refuse to stop playing the social media game, this hell world is your choice.
Also "for social/cultural norms what people believe about reality often becomes reality" is true, but if objective reality disagrees it always wins out. That's why teaching men not to rape doesn't work - men already know not to rape, those who do anyway don't care what twitter says.
Also also this is kind of nuts -
People aren't Schroedinger's rapists based on how many tweets there are saying don't dress like a slut vs keep your dick in your pants. There is also zero evidence that people saying teach men not to rape on Facebook have any influence at all on the rate of sexual assault. This is exactly the kind of unrealistic expectation that I was talking about. If complaining about it on social media was an effective strategy, the number of perpetrators of sexual assault wouldn't have climbed every year since 2012.
If there is a correlation between social media and policy decisions, it flows the other way. People in positions of power and influence determine how they would like the world to look, that seeps out into social media and then social media is used to justify what the influential wanted.
I strongly disagree about the order of events here. I've somewhat followed the development of these algorithms casually and my strong impression is that they were just made by corporate interests to maximize their profits by keeping people on their platform longer, not with any social engineering in mind. There are cases of trying to use them for social engineering but this generally happens like a decade or two after they're put into place, after everyone notices how much influence they're having.
I think if you looked at the expected impact of your actions by fighting for your side in the currently most influential arena, vs ignoring that arena entirely in an effort to make it go away, the individual activist has much higher EI by fighting. This is one of those coordination problems, everyone would be happier without the hellworld but no individual can voluntarily leave it alone without hurting their interests. Tellingi ndividuals to hurt themselves to influence coordination problems generally doesn't work, that's why they're such big problems, and it's why we form governments to solve them.
Tricking people into doing something that makes them miserable is social engineering. But it isn't the algorithms or platforms themselves that are to blame, their social engineering is relatively tame compared to the kind humans inflict on other humans when given this potemkin community and influence. It was humans who did the Arab spring, who did gamergate and metoo, who turn the internet into a war zone every four years during campaign season - deploying sock puppets and playing double agents, spreading malicious rumours and photoshopping evidence, these are the kinds of social engineering I am talking about. Back before social media these things happened pretty frequently, but without the outsized influence people ascribe to events on social media there was no sense of the arms race, and no reason to get so worked up (well, for most people).
Here's how the timeline goes imo -
1.) First there were forums, nobody gave a shit.
2.) Then came social media, and everyone wanted in.
3.) But then some shitty arguer got into an argument with a person who was better at arguing than them and they got upset, but couldn't admit they'd lost the argument for one reason or another, and they said "people shouldn't be allowed to argue things I don't like." Old internet still outweighed the new internet at this point though, so he was thoroughly mocked into silence.
4.) After time passes however, the shitty arguers who want to ban arguments they don't like outnumber the other people. Internet policies are changed to reflect this change in values from 'people should be responsible for themselves' to 'we have to save everybody from themselves!' But the only thing that unites the shitty arguers is their fragile egos, they don't have a coherent platform. So there's no logic to the way they censor arguments except who whom.
5.) Hell world.
So it's not about making it go away - I agree that is a futile waste of time. What I am saying is that the hell world you live in - your hell world - is one of your own design, and one you can leave by dropping social media. This will have the effect of lessening social media's influence, but that is ancillary to the point, which is making you less miserable. If you decide you would rather be more meat for the great political machine to grind into paste, that's your choice. Because that's the choice here, it's not a coordination problem, it's a duplicity problem - you won't hurt your interests by opting out, you will hurt the interests of Bidens and Trumps and Clintons of the world. You have been tricked into thinking you are fighting for your life when in reality they are just stealing your happiness to fuel their ambitions.
It gets worse though, because of course it does, that's the social media slogan: "It gets worse!" Because while they have harnessed the language of war - everything is a battle, there are two sides duking it out and if you miss a tweet you are letting your side down, how dare you put your happiness before your people, people's lives are at stake here! - the stakes are actually significantly diminished. Don't get me wrong - it is an utter travesty when someone commits suicide or loses their livelihood over social media bullshit, but it's a different category of fucked up to actually killing each other.
And the influence goes the other way too - we talk in these grandiose cataclysmic terms, and it affects the way we think about the issues too, so when you said "Tellingi ndividuals to hurt themselves to influence coordination problems generally doesn't work" I nodded in agreement, but actually when I think about it, that's not right is it? Martyrs have had huge impacts all throughout history, and rightly so - they can reset prisoner's dilemmas. It's never easy being a martyr, because nobody wants to suffer and there's no guarantee you'll even have an effect, but there is no denying they can have an effect. But we are conditioned to think there's no escaping social media so that we continue to sacrifice our happiness to it.
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