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When We're All the Same Nobody Gets Hurt: [Technological Utopianism and Minority Erasure]
Astaereth
In the belly of the beastRegistered User regular
In the belly of the beastRegistered User regular
This isn't about Ready Player One, a book/movie I haven't read/seen at this point, but it was the start of this discussion for me:
(Beth Elderkin is a staff writer for i09.)
Reading and discussing this passage of the book with friends led to an interesting and wide-ranging discussion and I'm curious to know what y'all think.
Specifically there seems to be kind of two sides to the underlying issue.
On the one hand there's this idea of what I referred to in the thread title, a technological utopianism that says the internet and other virtual spaces are or can be good for minorities and non-dominant cultures who face oppression, because they're spaces that can be designed to erase cultural, racial, gender, etc signifiers. I am Astaereth and that doesn't tell you whether I'm male or female, black or white, straight or gay, Christian or Muslim, etc.
This theory says you can do this on anything from web sites that don't require real names or photographs, to online games like League of Legends, which doesn't allow voice chat in part so that female players cannot be discerned from male players and therefore don't draw extra harassment, to job interviews in (for example) the tech world where for example your code and skills matter and your name, ethnic background, or gender can be removed from the hiring process.
This is supposed to be an exciting step forward, or at least a pragmatic opportunity, since it's easier to remove people's ability to discriminate in these spaces than it is to get them to stop discriminating.
On the other hand there's the counter-argument that you can never reach that utopia, and trying leads to lots of problems as a result. Like people online assuming everyone else is a white cis het male, because the default isn't a blank slate. Like hiring somebody with no name means failing to recognize the systemic social issues that may impact one anonymized resume over another (maybe the more impressive candidate is the one who made it to the low end of the Ivy League on merit versus the one who went to the best school in the country on an alumni legacy). Like believing that your virtual space isn't constructed with assumptions borne of social, cultural, racial, and gender distinctions that might be invisible to you, or not understanding that users will inevitably find a way to import both their differences and their prejudices (somebody eventually figures out how to use any video game to draw a dick).
And beyond that, the argument here is that erasing our differences just leads to a society where those differences are misunderstood and demonized. And that it's fucked up to tell oppressed minorities to hide themselves, rather than put the onus on oppressors to stop discriminating.
I know where I stand on this, but it's a complicated question. Certainly many people have decided on their own that being closeted or anonymous was better for them and their lives, and I wouldn't judge them for that. For example this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enH3xA4mYcY
What do you think? Is this blank slate utopia achievable or not? If it is, do we want it? If it's not, should we try anyway?
"I'm writing an essay about Art3mis in Ready Player One, but this passage (about Aech's mom) is undoubtedly the worst in the entire book."
(Beth Elderkin is a staff writer for i09.)
Reading and discussing this passage of the book with friends led to an interesting and wide-ranging discussion and I'm curious to know what y'all think.
Specifically there seems to be kind of two sides to the underlying issue.
On the one hand there's this idea of what I referred to in the thread title, a technological utopianism that says the internet and other virtual spaces are or can be good for minorities and non-dominant cultures who face oppression, because they're spaces that can be designed to erase cultural, racial, gender, etc signifiers. I am Astaereth and that doesn't tell you whether I'm male or female, black or white, straight or gay, Christian or Muslim, etc.
This theory says you can do this on anything from web sites that don't require real names or photographs, to online games like League of Legends, which doesn't allow voice chat in part so that female players cannot be discerned from male players and therefore don't draw extra harassment, to job interviews in (for example) the tech world where for example your code and skills matter and your name, ethnic background, or gender can be removed from the hiring process.
This is supposed to be an exciting step forward, or at least a pragmatic opportunity, since it's easier to remove people's ability to discriminate in these spaces than it is to get them to stop discriminating.
On the other hand there's the counter-argument that you can never reach that utopia, and trying leads to lots of problems as a result. Like people online assuming everyone else is a white cis het male, because the default isn't a blank slate. Like hiring somebody with no name means failing to recognize the systemic social issues that may impact one anonymized resume over another (maybe the more impressive candidate is the one who made it to the low end of the Ivy League on merit versus the one who went to the best school in the country on an alumni legacy). Like believing that your virtual space isn't constructed with assumptions borne of social, cultural, racial, and gender distinctions that might be invisible to you, or not understanding that users will inevitably find a way to import both their differences and their prejudices (somebody eventually figures out how to use any video game to draw a dick).
And beyond that, the argument here is that erasing our differences just leads to a society where those differences are misunderstood and demonized. And that it's fucked up to tell oppressed minorities to hide themselves, rather than put the onus on oppressors to stop discriminating.
I know where I stand on this, but it's a complicated question. Certainly many people have decided on their own that being closeted or anonymous was better for them and their lives, and I wouldn't judge them for that. For example this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enH3xA4mYcYWhat do you think? Is this blank slate utopia achievable or not? If it is, do we want it? If it's not, should we try anyway?
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As you pointed out, the whole idea of "on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" breaks down because it turns out that to a lot of people the canine status of any given individual is really important. And so what happens is, as you pointed out, is that you get an assumption of the status quo - that is, identity isn't actually erased, but just defaulted to the "cishet white male" default until proven otherwise. The problem, unfortunately, is that there are a LOT of geese who take that "until proven otherwise" as license to find out exactly who someone is. This also means that people who don't meet that standard can wind up with an utterly unfair choice - remain default and surrender one's voice, or voice one's opinion and reveal who they are. And that's not even getting into how important identity is to people, and the damage it does forcing people to hide who they are.
To put it simply, it's not enough for people to not know you're a dog - we need a system where it doesn't matter in terms of how one is treated in being a member of the community.
(As for that quote from RP1 (and hey, yet another example of why I'm not interested in either the book or the movie), that sort of thing happens in the real world. It came up in one of the other threads about a woman-founded startup pulling a Remington Steele and creating a fictional male founder just to get taken seriously. There's another example where a male and female coworker swapped emails for about a month, and the way their clients treated them was eye-opening to both. It's a horrible thing to say people have to pretend to be cishet white men to actually be able to compete in the workplace.)
Just because everyone looks the same does not mean you've eliminated bigotry.
You will still be judged by the cliques you associate with (or don't), and your ideas (which get you into cliques in the first place), even if there is otherwise no difference in your avatar.
And this all ties into RP1s fantasy; it doesn't matter who you are, or what you think, so long as you're good at the vidya games.
That's not true.
That's never going to be true.
I mean the whole plot is the shadow corp is bad at vidya games, and so loses to a guy with no resources.
The shadow corp would have reverse-engineered the creators code long before the ten years or whatever passed before the protag got a handle on things.
Anyway, whitewashing everyone doesn't remove bigotry.
I see no reason why it would even if the whitewashing itself caused no other harm and completely prevented people from directly attacking people online.
If anyone claims anything impressive or interesting about themselves on the internet my default assumption is they are either lying or exaggerating. Im not going to develop a personal relationship and especially not a business relationship with someone i meet online. I like the anonymity of the internet and the only assumption i make about people is if they spend a lot of time on the internet is there personal life is sad.
Its probably better if i think im mostly interacting with white straight males. If every time someone gloated in an online video game and started cussing you out that instead of an immature 23 year old white cis male, the assumption was that it was an adult black woman of color i think we would all be a lot more racist.
Could actually be true. The kind of dweebs who were unnaturally obsessed with FF7 20 years ago are probably 35 year old IT professionals these days.
I don't see a need to assume anything about a person's IRL identity at all. I view internet people completely in the abstract, just names and profile pics. Admittedly gender pronouns do make that awkward, the shift towards neutral pronouns still hasn't really happened but it's worth making the effort.
That's a rather privileged view. Maybe you have a myopic view of online communities, but from what I've seen, they're very much just as much a part of real life as anything physical.
This says more about you than anything else. Just knowing that your opponent was a WoC shouldn't have you reaching for bigoted invective to hurl at them. Then again, I never got the draw of smack talk in the first place.
I'm sad to say that I pretty much have a mental picture in my head of everyone in the forum based on their posts, avatar and name. I think if I ever met people in person I'd probably be shocked at how wrong I was in what I thought about everyone!
Which of course then makes a mockery of the idea of the 'avatars' in Ready Player One (or any similar system) and their ability to make people anonymous by just having them dress up as white dudes. If everyone is a white dude, and I know that in life not everyone is, I'm going to try to guess what everyone's actual background is using contextual clues in the way they talk, respond and act. And people are actually pretty decent at the 'which of these anonymous posters is a woman' game. However, they become awful at the game if people place 'obvious' hints into their profiles (like having their profile picture be a womans face, or similar) which then makes people assume that the obvious hint is true regardless of whatever else they say. But then a lot of people dont LIKE giving fake clues in their pictures or Avatars and so people just end up dressing as themselves and being judged as themselves.
To be more concise. If you make a system truly uniform in what people present themselves to be, people will spend their time guessing and behave based on that. If you allow variations in presentation, people will assume the obvious things are the truest but most people prefer to dress up as themselves. So having avatars doesn't really help anyone, other than people who for some reason like to dress up as white men.
Not really. If you applied that same line of thinking to gender/race based on similar anecdotal experience, that would be bigoted.
cis-het-white-males don't need another venue where they indulge in their privilege.
I can see value in a place where you don't have to worry about having your identity respected, and maybe hiding it could work, but... fuck... the internet? gaming? if you can find a place where you aren't being bombarded with racism, sexism and other bigotry that constantly remind you of it, maybe there's not a lot of value in hiding your identity and if you can't find such a place does it really matter if you hid it?
and I don't think we can fight those things without forcing bigots to confront their beliefs and bias, and the best way to confront those is to force those bigots to be exposed to the people who defies them. That doesn't happen when they get to assume everyone is like them.
at the same time, it's isn't the job women, brown or queer people or whoever to educate bigots. If they want just play a game that's fine. If they want to not reveal their race when working online, people are currently shitty will be less likely to hire you if they think you are black, and that's a dumb reason to not get a job. it's garbage that hiding one's identity is even an idea worth considering in any venue, but we do live in this world now.
I can't really say that I agree with the last part of this statement. It's everyone's job to advocate for themselves and for the improvement of society. You don't have to do that job, but it is still everyone's job. Bigots aren't just going to suddenly stand up and say "I'm going to behave better now" and if you just let white people try to fix bigots without telling them what might actually be useful then you'll end up with the solution being "We're just going to have everyone dress up as white people!"
It's not that difficult to figure out how not to be bigoted without doing goosey things like pretending race, gender, orientation, etc. don't exist - so no, it's not the responsibility of minorities to always do the heavy lifting when it comes to combating bigotry. We need to be cleaning our own messes. And the fact that we don't is why this particular mess keeps sticking.
Do you believe there to be no commonality among 13 year olds boys that play counterstrike?
Many stereotypes are built on real commonality. That doesn't make it okay to use them to label people you don't know.
Could the internet at large become non-toxic? Yeah, but it would take moderation on a scale that may be impossible to do. You'd probably have a better shot at changing society at large so moderation isn't needed. It's a worthy goal to work towards, but what the quote in the OP talks about is not something to be worked towards. To me, it feels no different than a battered housewife putting on makeup to cover up the abuse.
I have no free will to do otherwise. I dont think others do either.
OK. The way 'white men' are going to clean up this mess is going to be immensely skewed by the fact that they are white men. Privilege skews your beliefs and experiences do the same. So yes, it is 'that difficult'. Saying its not 'difficult' is exactly the same as saying why don't minorities just act and behave exactly like white people to avoid issues.
White men do not have some magical ability to understand the precise problems of black women, and so minorities cannot pretend that they don't need to help fix the system if they want it to be fixed. White people CANNOT fix it. They will just break it in a new way, since the system is broken because it was built entirely by white men with no input from anyone else. White men need to contribute to fix the system, because they need to live in the system too, but it is completely ridiculous to say that they are the only ones responsible for fixing it. Because they can't fix it. Because they haven't experienced the other side of privilege and racism.
Hell, you can literally see this at the start. Ask a group of well meaning white men, "What have you experienced in your life that you feel was the closest to racism? And how would you go about fixing that? Can you apply it to society?" and most of them will go down this path...
1) My worst experience of exclusion was that which I experienced for holding some different belief which I could not keep secret from my peers. I could not stop having this feeling or belief. As such, it feels a bit like 'race' to me.
2) I have been trained over decades as a man that social conformity is good. I feel guilt, even if it is unknowing, for HOLDING that different belief
3) As such, I wish I had been better able to hide my opinions and feelings
4) QED, to prevent racism and sexism, we should make it easier to hide your race and sex
5) This will benefit me on another level, as I have been trained to be uncomfortable with emotion, and this 'blending' into anonymity will help more people be forced to be reserved in all their interactions
I'm a cishet white male, and that line of thought reads as gooseshit to me. All it takes for us to learn what the problems are is to listen for once - something we don't do. And yes, we have to do the heavy lifting because we're the ones with the power.
I guess I should just let it be. We've had this discussion before recently.
black people who chose to have written and spoken at length about their experiences.
It is not the job of any black individual to read and listen to things for you or to spend their time explaining their experience to you or to constantly act as a representative of their group when that is met with agression and prejudice.
As the old saw goes, "the first step is admitting you have a problem." It's actually not that difficult to confront your privilege - once you acknowledge that it exists.
Also, I said it's not the responsibility of minorities to do the heavy lifting in fixing our society. This is in part because they don't have the power, and in part that demanding they serve as educators for the majority takes away from their being able to devote time and effort to their communities and themselves.
Can you point to the black person that wrote about the black experience and that speaks for all black people? I dont want to read the wrong account of the black experience.
Stop arguing in bad faith. No, there is no "one size fits all" account - but there are a ton of perspectives and accounts out there for you to read. You just have to be open to them.
I'm not certain how much power the people who benefit from racial/sexual/gender privilege who do care to try and make a difference actually have. We haven't been able to convince large swathes of America that climate change is real, we haven't be able to convince them evolution is real, we haven't made much progress de-stigmatizing mental illness, etc. For some people I think it's certainly true that they are blind to injustice because it's in their best interest to be, but I think for most it's probably a combination of anti-intellectualism and an inability to empathize with experiences and thoughts alien to them.
Plus the most exposure conservatives usually get to feminism, anti-racism, etc is when they're sharing an article with a headline like "Liberals Organize Cry-Ins After Trump's Presidential Win", so they're already pre-disposed to consider people espousing these ideas as little more than conspiracy theorists.
My counterpoint to Hedgie would be more along the lines that, if you think confronting your privilege and understanding what minorities want and need from you is easy, then you haven't actually done it. And, if you think that minorities have the perfect solution in their own writing and opinions then you have failed to understand why we have such a real problem. People are trained from birth to think and feel and act a certain way. If you let any one person speak alone on what is best for society, that person will be wrong and fail to understand. From the most privileged white guy, to the most under-privileged trans woman. Its only once they actually have a real conversation with each other, and are honest about what the hell is going on with each of them then you can start to move forward.
If confronting privilege and excising it from your thought process was easy, then more people would do it!
This continues to be a bad faith argument, especially given that you used Farrakhan, whom is an especially divisive figure even within the community. It's much like arguing for understanding feminism by reading Andrea Dworkin (and yes, I've seen that particular argument used as well.)
I dont think as a white man i can read a few books and understand the black experience. It also assumes the black experience is not unique with respect to things like geography.
A famous writer explained the issue with confronting privilege:
Confronting one's privilege is easy to do, but requires accepting some hard truths about yourself and society - and that's the part that people stumble with.
Problem is that there are tons of ways to impede open and honest conversation.
People who are marginalized don't often care to explain things to others because too often those questions will come from someone interested in arguing in bad faith.
Even privileged people can suffer from things that in part give them privilege, such as how many men do under toxic masculinity. I totally believe in toxic masculinity and think it's a major problem behind male suicide, drug abuse, violence, mental illness, etc. However, it's so ingrained in society that men who don't subscribe to it become victims of it. This can lead both to men hiding their feelings and being mocked for showing them. That's why it's so pervasive.
I've had to back out of discussing these things online because I can't deal with people who argue in bad faith. I have an enormous amount of privilege from certain parts of my history with disadvantages in other areas, I'm fully cognizant of how they tend to balance out however. Most people seem to refuse to do this. While intentionally make perfect the minimum before they'll put any effort in.
Absolutely, but all of that means that this issue is very hard to address, and that white men aren't going to get anywhere trying to solve the problems by themselves. The most 'woke' man you know still has been affected by toxic masculinity. It's either shaped his personality and he can't change that even though he is aware of it or he has been affected by having to take a personal stand against it and how it would have hurt him if he hadn't. Either of those groups have been affected by their own experiences and their own solutions, enacted with the best of intentions, won't be what will work well for the other group. let alone women or minorities who have completely different life experiences.
Hey, maybe don't leave the douche quotient cranked all the way up to 11. You are not providing productive discourse.
Obfuscation for the sake of study or privacy doesn't solve anything though. Humans are just gross messy social creatures in my opinion. We don't function well on the scale we're at now and it will only get worse. Resolving equality issues for real is important so that moving forward we can at least tend the rest of our shitty hard coded biases unburdened. There's plenty of awful things we do for no good reason. While I'd understand someone at an individual level wanting a more fair life, at a species sort of level we really need to unfuck how we interact with people who are different from ourselves.
Less: "I'm interacting with a cis white man, who is normal."
More: "I'm interacting with a fellow human who is a person."
Both give the same result for the individual but the second one comes from a much better place for society.
I'm not sure how not being anonymous makes a difference in this case. Do people put 'legacy' or 'merit-based' on their resumes?
It does bring up an interesting point, though. The person deciding what goes in the rejection pile makes inferences whether they want to or not--do they assume the person with a white-sounding name is more likely to be a legacy? Is correcting for society-wide imbalances based on inferences like that helpful at an individual level? What happens when it backfires and casts a shadow on everyone considered in this manner, as with the case of the white poet who won an award with work he submitted using a Chinese pseudonym?
A White Poet Borrows a Chinese Name and Sets Off Fireworks
Yes, though not in so many words. Things like one's name, activities, etc. can easily serve as social markers. Look at what happened to hiring at symphonies when they went to blind auditions - the number of women hired increased.
But then, you have counterexamples like this...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888
Where anonymous recruiting actually decreased the number of women and minorities who were shortlisted for positions in the Australian government.