Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2016-04-21 10:46 am
azurelunatic) wrote2016-04-21 10:46 am
Entry tags:
A not-so-brief note about assholes
Once upon a time there was a popular hashtag where women-and-those-who-caucus-with-them had real talk about some of the bullshit they face in regular life. And inevitably, that hashtag attracted the attention of some of the little shits who think that such things are like a conveyor belt of new victims to bully endless lols.
I have a conference on Saturday. This is Wednesday night, and at the time when I poke my face back into my mentions because I see the tab has lit up, and I need to take about 30 seconds between Doing Things and get my brain back a little, it is a half-hour until the "omg it's 3 days ARE WE READY" phone call with my boss on this project. I am a little daunted by the volume of remaining work, but it's Wednesday night and we got this; I'll be working my ass off for the rest of the night and the two subsequent weekdays in order to make it happen.
I poke my face into my mentions, and I see that some little asshole who thinks he's clever has said something he thinks is funny and hopes is hurtful in reply to my tweet.
My response is maybe 5% hurt and 95% murderous rage. I don't own firearms because I don't trust my impulse control, and in that moment I was honestly feeling like there is no possible redemption for the sort of person who thinks that going into a hashtag like that and saying that sort of thing is a fun form of entertainment. If the guy had been in front of me I might have straight-up punched him. Instead, I blockreported him on Twitter.
Street harassment is something that can escalate quickly. They always seem to zoom in on when you've just had an ass of a day, maybe your pain levels are through the roof, and some guy decides that you need to spend more of your attention on HIM, and if things don't go the way he wants them to, he may escalate in weird and unfortunate ways, including actual assault, following you home or until he gets bored, or more extended stalking. It does often end with no assault and no stalking, but the ways in which it could go suddenly and deeply bad with no warning mean that it's appropriate to prepare to respond to a threat to your life when you receive street harassment.
Certain kinds of online harassment have enough in common with street harassment that it rings the same bells, and the now (very sadly) common escalation of SWATing means that online harassment that escalates is a very real physical risk. I didn't think this guy would actually notice that I'd blocked him, and he was harassing enough people that I doubt he'd have been able to trace any consequences-from-Twitter back to me, but it was an unfriendly reminder that like it or not, I live in a society where I'm considered an acceptable target if I call attention to myself in public, or sometimes even if I don't.
As adrenaline spikes go, this one was moderate. It wasn't nearly as significant as the time I didn't inspect the cord of a small bedside appliance before plugging it in, and sparks shot everywhere and I killed the power strip (rest in peace, power strip, you performed your job adequately!) and then I stripped my bed and stayed awake for two hours before putting it back together and going to sleep because I didn't want to literally die in a fire. It wasn't as significant as the time when I enjoined a guy in the middle of a domestic row to go take a walk. I knew I had about 30 minutes to an hour of unpleasant activation in front of me, and that normally I would deal with this by doing something physical, like doing the laundry or other involved housework, to burn off the adrenaline in a safe, relatively comfortable, and productive way.
Instead, I was editing MS Publisher files with an annoying lag because the images were a little too large for my under-powered computer to be happy about shoving around in real time, and in a mindset of write the other fifty-one!. With a phone call in half an hour.
I was also pessimistic about my chances of blockreporting him on Twitter even doing anything. I have heard that Twitter is making some changes to how it handles reporting of bad actors. But based on the experiences of some people who have been getting some Really Not Okay things on Twitter and Twitter saying that it was totally okay -- an account that appears to be 100% trolling that ought to get you suspended from high school and a conference with your mom, but not actually making death threats or rape threats? PESSIMISTIC. That made my reporting feel futile, and the bad UX of the Twitter reporting workflow made me go out of my way to look at shit that I didn't want to be looking at. (Possibly more on that separately.) So instead of the Twitter reporting serving as an outlet for my rage and a point of closure, it amplified it in a way where I wound up more globally despairing of anyone ever being able to do anything about active shitwheels like this dude. Because it's never just one asshole, it's the culture of impunity where one asshole feels like yeah, he can spend a couple hours each day being a dick online and nothing bad will ever happen to him for it. One bad apple puts the rest of the barrel in danger. (That's what that saying means. If you have one bad apple, you had better remove it immediately and completely, or the rest of the apples in the barrel will think that decay is a SUPER GREAT idea, and they should try it too. It does not mean "don't worry about him, it's just an isolated incident.") I'd guess that the Twitter barrel is about 25% rotten at this point.
So combine adrenaline, rage-turned-to-despair, and a very large task in front of me, and now I'm feeling jittery and miserable, and the feelings attach themselves to the conference and the work in front of me. Totally normal physiological reaction. I just don't have the time for it right now, and yet I've got to deal with it. It's not fair, and [insert violent revenge fantasy here].
The other party to the call was running late, and bumped it out half an hour or so, which did give me the time to recover. So by the time we actually got on the call, I was feeling okay and we compared notes and checklists. I still won't get that half-hour back, and the fact that some people will say "oh, it's just a message online, what's the big deal, turn off your computer if you're that sensitive" makes me want to punch the whole world.
I have a conference on Saturday. This is Wednesday night, and at the time when I poke my face back into my mentions because I see the tab has lit up, and I need to take about 30 seconds between Doing Things and get my brain back a little, it is a half-hour until the "omg it's 3 days ARE WE READY" phone call with my boss on this project. I am a little daunted by the volume of remaining work, but it's Wednesday night and we got this; I'll be working my ass off for the rest of the night and the two subsequent weekdays in order to make it happen.
I poke my face into my mentions, and I see that some little asshole who thinks he's clever has said something he thinks is funny and hopes is hurtful in reply to my tweet.
My response is maybe 5% hurt and 95% murderous rage. I don't own firearms because I don't trust my impulse control, and in that moment I was honestly feeling like there is no possible redemption for the sort of person who thinks that going into a hashtag like that and saying that sort of thing is a fun form of entertainment. If the guy had been in front of me I might have straight-up punched him. Instead, I blockreported him on Twitter.
Street harassment is something that can escalate quickly. They always seem to zoom in on when you've just had an ass of a day, maybe your pain levels are through the roof, and some guy decides that you need to spend more of your attention on HIM, and if things don't go the way he wants them to, he may escalate in weird and unfortunate ways, including actual assault, following you home or until he gets bored, or more extended stalking. It does often end with no assault and no stalking, but the ways in which it could go suddenly and deeply bad with no warning mean that it's appropriate to prepare to respond to a threat to your life when you receive street harassment.
Certain kinds of online harassment have enough in common with street harassment that it rings the same bells, and the now (very sadly) common escalation of SWATing means that online harassment that escalates is a very real physical risk. I didn't think this guy would actually notice that I'd blocked him, and he was harassing enough people that I doubt he'd have been able to trace any consequences-from-Twitter back to me, but it was an unfriendly reminder that like it or not, I live in a society where I'm considered an acceptable target if I call attention to myself in public, or sometimes even if I don't.
As adrenaline spikes go, this one was moderate. It wasn't nearly as significant as the time I didn't inspect the cord of a small bedside appliance before plugging it in, and sparks shot everywhere and I killed the power strip (rest in peace, power strip, you performed your job adequately!) and then I stripped my bed and stayed awake for two hours before putting it back together and going to sleep because I didn't want to literally die in a fire. It wasn't as significant as the time when I enjoined a guy in the middle of a domestic row to go take a walk. I knew I had about 30 minutes to an hour of unpleasant activation in front of me, and that normally I would deal with this by doing something physical, like doing the laundry or other involved housework, to burn off the adrenaline in a safe, relatively comfortable, and productive way.
Instead, I was editing MS Publisher files with an annoying lag because the images were a little too large for my under-powered computer to be happy about shoving around in real time, and in a mindset of write the other fifty-one!. With a phone call in half an hour.
I was also pessimistic about my chances of blockreporting him on Twitter even doing anything. I have heard that Twitter is making some changes to how it handles reporting of bad actors. But based on the experiences of some people who have been getting some Really Not Okay things on Twitter and Twitter saying that it was totally okay -- an account that appears to be 100% trolling that ought to get you suspended from high school and a conference with your mom, but not actually making death threats or rape threats? PESSIMISTIC. That made my reporting feel futile, and the bad UX of the Twitter reporting workflow made me go out of my way to look at shit that I didn't want to be looking at. (Possibly more on that separately.) So instead of the Twitter reporting serving as an outlet for my rage and a point of closure, it amplified it in a way where I wound up more globally despairing of anyone ever being able to do anything about active shitwheels like this dude. Because it's never just one asshole, it's the culture of impunity where one asshole feels like yeah, he can spend a couple hours each day being a dick online and nothing bad will ever happen to him for it. One bad apple puts the rest of the barrel in danger. (That's what that saying means. If you have one bad apple, you had better remove it immediately and completely, or the rest of the apples in the barrel will think that decay is a SUPER GREAT idea, and they should try it too. It does not mean "don't worry about him, it's just an isolated incident.") I'd guess that the Twitter barrel is about 25% rotten at this point.
So combine adrenaline, rage-turned-to-despair, and a very large task in front of me, and now I'm feeling jittery and miserable, and the feelings attach themselves to the conference and the work in front of me. Totally normal physiological reaction. I just don't have the time for it right now, and yet I've got to deal with it. It's not fair, and [insert violent revenge fantasy here].
The other party to the call was running late, and bumped it out half an hour or so, which did give me the time to recover. So by the time we actually got on the call, I was feeling okay and we compared notes and checklists. I still won't get that half-hour back, and the fact that some people will say "oh, it's just a message online, what's the big deal, turn off your computer if you're that sensitive" makes me want to punch the whole world.
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It's not "just one asshole". It's how many of them there are, and that people seem more invested in being dismissive of the people they're targeting, and the way that while it may be a 30 second interaction on both sides, one party gets to go on blithely afterwards, and the other party can be dealing with aftereffects for 60+ times as long.
And, you know, say I do learn to brush off the assholes in 30 seconds, and Twitter improves their reporting process so it doesn't take 5-20 minutes to hunt down the evidence that this guy is acting in bad faith. Say I get super good at doing this. If I'm getting that much asshattery that I'm actually able to practice it enough to learn that I'm probably in no danger from it ... that means the attack surface is broad enough that my odds of getting one of the really bad ones is a lot higher. So say I get a really bad one and dismiss it out of hand, and then BAM, something super bad happens and if I'm lucky I'm alive and talking to the police. And one of the first questions is going to be, why didn't you take this one seriously. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.
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I think the first person who works out how to deliver a punch to the face via TCP/IP is going to make themselves a million...
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Probably!
And yet I think that violence is probably not going to help anything in this case, as tempting as it is. I think part of the solution is for angry men in tech to start jumping down the throats of anyone who starts rolling their eyes about 'oversensitive pussies complaining about online bullying, that's not even a thing' and similar.
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Hmm... pity there's no way to positively I.D and ban for life certain people. And as you say, zero-tolerance towards the usual excuses Bullies use.
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Proportional response to this guy would probably be telling his mom and letting her deal with him, plus losing that entire account.
After that, the graduated series of banning-under-every-identity, escalating from a day to potentially forever.
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It's the "I want you to stop complaining that you're hurt because you're making me feel bad" thing, as Purple so bluntly put it. 💜💜💜
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In case somebody ever tries to use this as an argument against treating it as a problem, I wish to point out that people 'often' get Ebola and don't die. In fact, the average EBV mortality rate is 'only' 50%, and there have been outbreaks where it was as low as 25%. This isn't just a hyperbolic comparison for shock value. When something is not caused by vocal humans with a political interest, we treat a 50% or even 75% 'everything turning out OK' rate as pretty terrible. It's only when humans get in and start arguing that "oh, look at all these people who were FINE" that people start thinking "maybe it's not as bad as I think!"
(In case it's not obvious, I sincerely do not think anyone reading this would go "oh, people are often OK, so it's fine." I'm talking about sea lions you might have to deal with.)
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50-75% OK is not a super great grade in school! Most academic counselors would be like "hey something needs to be done here" at that point! And, er, the direct outcome of a bad grade is generally not dying or being raped or assaulted.
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Adrenalin spikes are HARD. Feeling under threat is HARD. The fact that there is a *genuine*, real-world level of threat involved is HARD.
and, if you had a near-miss almost-car accident, everyone would understand and sympathize. But a near-miss with a street harasser... so many people don't understand.
<3
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So fucking shitty.
There are reasons I have a locked Twitter account, even though that's a shitty solution and I miss being more public.
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I sincerely hope that someone who actually knows him tells his mother, or some other figure of respect in his life who can tell him what a poopsmear on the couch he's being.
A follow-up, this morning
Well hey!
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Booze and hugs, if you want them.
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Definitely hugs. Maybe booze.
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This resonates for me and is well-said.
I'm glad they suspended the guy in this case.
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I used to have a very similar response to adrenaline-from-online-sources, and then 9/11 happened, and in response to it I sought out constant news from all sources (because it made me feel more prepared for more potential disasters). This made my adrenaline go berserk on a regular basis, which made me much more sensitive to adrenaline-producing events, including the kind of assholes you encountered here. Vicious circle extreme.
All of which is to say that at this point, I am in no way in control of my adrenaline/rage response to stuff that happens to me online - even a fairly innocuous interaction can get me going for days, and I still have flashbacks to stuff that happened more than a year ago, so I completely relate.
I am sorry for the ramble - I am headachey today and having trouble focusing and articulating, but felt compelled to get in here with a me too! and offer of sympathy/hugs/virtual cookies/good vibes to help give you good!energy to replace the nasty adrenaline.
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I was pointed in the right direction again in about 45 minutes, and I doubt I'll have flashbacks or recurring anger at how it turned out. So I think I am feeling better now.
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