All Roads Lead to Hellsites

I'm quite disillusioned with the way things went, all in all. I mean, back in the day, when people weren't really sure whether this newfangled thing was going to stay being called The Internet. The press seemed to like The Information Superhighway, but that was and is a stupid name. It seemed amazing back then. And it really was. Early adopters are a different crowd. It was a few years before the digital cognitive decline set in. The places we loved – LiveJournal, Usenet, even just the fact that people really used good oldfashioned email in long form – started to die as average attention spans shrank and UX became a game of how can we make this thing so braindead that a drunken sleep deprived toddler could use it at 3am. (No folks, don't feed alchohol to toddlers, even though my grandmother thought it was a neat idea)

Yeahnope. That's not how it happened.

It's easy to blame the dumbing down of the internet for the current state of things, but it's absolutely not the reason why hellsites happened. For this, the blame cannon needs to be pointed squarely at the dudebros (and, I think they pretty much were all bros, but do correct me if a sister missed out on the opprobrium) who wanted to get rich. VERY rich, off this Internet thing.

Back in the late 90s Internet bubble, everything with a dot com up its jacksie was listing on stock markets and getting insane valuations. But the bubble popped, and market caps with lots of zeros ended up with hilariously few. There were, however, survivors. Most of the dot bombs were based on really quite idiotic business plans – no revenue, not even a plan for revenue. Bah, that was 20th Century thinking. In the new financial world, all you needed was a wing, a prayer, and sufficiently many funding rounds that hopefully nobody would notice the Ponzi scheme. I have stories, like most of us who were around the industry then.

But, a few of the dudebros got really quite astonishingly lucky. They would like us to think that it was skill, but um... we're still watching you... and nope, the only plausible explanations are divine intervention from a universe with a bad sense of humour or a combination of psychopathic ruthelessness and blind luck.

Business is harder than most people think. If you've not tried to actually run a business, and had yourself be where the buck stops, it's easy to be sucked into thinking that there is some magical property, CEOness, Chairmanity, call it what you will, that creates success. This is really absolutely untrue. The hardest fact to swallow is that you can't make a business successful – that's impossible. There's a saying in the music industry, "nobody ever knows what's going to hit." This holds true for business of all kinds. Of course, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is a common skill, shared by most of us. You can defintely, without doubt make a business fail. When they do, it can almost always be traced back to a decision that someone made, or failed to make, or failed to make soon enough. These bad decisions have a few etiologies: inability (or lack of will) to predict the future, sheer bad luck, cowardice, hubris, inexperience, inadequate information, or quite commonly due to the consequences of some kind of major personality disorder. CEO is a shitty job. You'd have to be insane to want to do it. (Join the dots. I'll wait.)

This is just scene-setting. What I really wanted to write here was why I think that almost every social media site ultimately ended up a hellsite. First, a definition: by hellsite, I mean a platform that is dominated by trolls, bigots, and other sundry scum of the earth who mostly live to cause harm to their perceived 'lib' enemies.

Here's a bit of Karl Popper for you, from The Open Society and its Enemies:

"Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."

It's seductive to altruistically want to create a neutral platform for discussion, where the weight of the arguments hold sway, where people can talk things out and rightness will prevail.

Unfortunately, this is like a candle in the wind against a deliberate aggressor who cares nothing of truth, who wants to flood the zone with their own bullshit, dis- and misinformation, and who will not stop. These aggressors are typically on the extreme political right, though not absolutely exclusively. They know how to play the game. Tolerance of their views is expected, even when the views are something along the lines of:

Them: I think that all people like you should be genocided.

Me: Um, no, and bugger off.

Them: [waily waily pearly clutchy] See? See how meeeeeeeean they are to poor us? They are always staining our shiny jackboots with their facebloodses!

So taken literally, I wasn't tolerant of their views. Boo hoo. But they certainly were not tolerant of mine, and moreover they wanted to cause me considerable direct harm. Not the same.

It's easier to figure this out, as quite a few philosophers have pointed out, by regarding this as a social contract, not a mutually agreed tolerance policy. If the deal is, don't cause harm to other people, rather than agreeing to be blindly tolerant, the outcome is far clearer. Where nobody is allowed to harm others, and this is enforceable, this intersects with free speech in a way that some find uncomfortable. But, even in its most unprotected form, a right to free speech is not a right to be absolved of the consequences of speech.

Hellsites are what happens, therefore, when free speech is accepted without consequences, and algorithms optimize for engagement rather than social good. This happens regardless of politics – the early slide of several of the larger platforms were examples of this. But the intersection with fascist extreme right wing ideology wasn't pretty, and right off the cliff they went.

It's fair to say that the owners of our favourite hellsites were absolutely down with it, but I'll admit that they were also subject to a bit of the old Mafioso 'nice company you got there, shame if the DOJ happened to it...' implied or literal threat. Don't bend the knee by the approved angle in degrees, or fail to adequately kiss the sphincter with the expected enthusiasm and expect a trip directly to antitrustsville, population you.

Hellsites have levels of hell, accelerated by thirst for money and political power, and we haven't seen the worst of them yet.