toxicity
--------
note: I was having a good day the day I wrote this, I promise!
but a certain techbro made me really annoyed and I needed some
way to vent. this essay kind of gets hyperbolic at times and
I end up making a fool of myself in my anger, so you shouldn't
even bother reading this unless you want a worse opinion of me.
enjoy!
toxicity is a big thing in this plane of existence. like any
good (or bad) social construct, toxicity is everywhere
around us. lately I'm online too much, so this "essay" (ha)
will cover toxicity as it exists on the internet.
I was only ever taught to write stiff, formal essays in school,
and never taught to moderate my self-conscious fears, so this
essay will be *ahem* graced with a clumsy tone and too
many meta-inserts. it's time to dissect toxicity with my usual
tool: a metaphorical blunt spoon.
i n t e r n e t
what's special about the internet when it comes to toxicity?
all the sanctimonious sayings like "on the internet, nobody knows
you're a dog" and other variations of "internet socializing isn't
quite like the normal socializing that humans have done since they
evolved" carry a little bit of relevance. while these phrases may have
been used to fearmonger about the internet (this was the case when
I was a child, anyway), their points are still valid. unmoderated by
body language and tone of voice, internet interactions can go a little
farther than normal meatspace ones.
what
this essay's definition for toxicity on the internet is as follows:
trolling, but unironic
because that's basically what it boils down to. toxicity in this sense is
behavior that's inciteful, but the person doing it isn't doing it just because
they want to incite things (as trolls tend to do). it's difficult to describe,
honestly, because it's an amorphous behavior (actually it's because I'm a
fool who needs to learn how to think and write better).
who
lots of people can be toxic, even me. even you, dear reader. but I'll
further narrow down the focus of this essay to center around one main
group: techbros (and techbro-adjacent people).
but what is a techbro? The Social Network (one of my favorite
movies btw), opens with mark zuckerberg talking to a girl named erica, and
the scene ends with erica saying this to mark:
Listen, You're going to be successful and
rich. But you're going to go through life
thinking that girls don't like you
because you're a tech geek. And I want
you to know, from the bottom of my heart,
that that won't be true. It'll be because
you're an asshole.
techbros do the same thing, when it comes down to it. they were the
kids who grew up as social outsiders because they were nerds, and then
grew a false sense of superiority when their nerdiness payed off and they
ended up rich. they exalt science while neglecting the finer parts of
human life, and poison their non-scientific hobbies (photography, mountain
climbing, etc) with the same scientistic and competitive mindset they use
with programming. every matter of taste has to be defensible, and even
philosophy is twisted into another source of anecdotes for self-aggrandizing
blog posts about efficiency and yak-shaving. they're the ones who can't
stop talking about plan 9, think using suckless-tools makes them cool, and
jettison their toxic negativity out into the internet for other techbros to
lap up. [as an aside on the last link, this post made me so angry when
I saw it. the amount of entitlement and lack of gratitude here may suggest that
techbros shouldn't deserve to even be called programmers, regardless of how many
conferences they've spoken at. what kind of craftsperson hates their tools?
aaaaaaaaaargh, I just, it's hard for me to get over this post for some reason]
where
as you've seen, some techbros flock to the fediverse. most of these techbros
are referred to as "fossbros" on fedi, because there's a tendency among them
to ignore social issues and latch onto the dogmatic view that free software
will inherently solve issues.
the nice thing about the fediverse is that you can block these kinds of servers.
techbros are also known to live on reddit (a whole other essay on its own) and,
infamously, hacker news. the funny part of hacker news is that nobody who uses
it is a hacker. if you want a distilled sense of what a techbro is, go to hn
for a taste.
any techbro is also likely to have a blog, which tends to have articles about
programming and hobbies and so forth, but very little genuine philosophizing,
no "thinking outside the box" (ie no creative writing styles, no fun language,
etc), and most importantly, no signs of weakness or self-doubt. the
latter has many explanations, including fragile masculinity and the fact that
techbro blogs get posted on hacker news and subjected to review by the harsh
jury of commenters -- after all, what better way to demonstrate your superior
intellect by commenting on a blogpost with an explanation of where it was wrong?
why
here are my theories as to why techbros are so toxic:
1. it's a product of the online environment
2. it's a product of the offline environment
regarding point #1, there's a general pattern on threaded forums where discourse
decays into a toxic mess of arguments. take reddit, for example, or hacker news.
even twitter could be classified as a threaded forum if you interpret the definition
generously. I'm not sure why exactly this pattern arises, but it may be because
this format of discussion allows polarized, argumentative styles of discourse due
to the blunt heuristics humans apply when inferring the intent of written messages
within a second or two. systems of karma also may factor in, because they can train
people (since there's an incentive) to speak in favor of certain views or be more
extreme in their comments.
point #2 was covered in the who section already. whoops
~the future~
how can techbro toxicity be reduced? it's hard if major technology companies are
headed by techbros, but the following changes to websites could occur:
- no more threaded forums
- better karma systems
and as far as offline influences, techbros need to stop being glamorized. just
because someone's good at technology doesn't mean they're experts at everything
else, and just because people are skilled doesn't mean they're good people or their
subjective opinions ought to be treated as facts. we live in a world where technology
is crucial and ever-present, so I don't think techbros will go away anytime soon.