In 2013, I wrote a paper strenuously arguing that the internet was a real place, where words and actions were consequential, that the "online/IRL" distinction was a deadly myth.
academia.edu/11099012/Ethic…
academia.edu/11099012/Ethic…
As with all papers of this sort, it took a long time to publish. I'd been knocking these ideas around for quite a while before. Here's a republication of a @BitchMedia essay I wrote back in 2012. bitchmedia.org/article/game-c…
There is a lot I would change and update. Even rereading Ethics for Cyborgs now, I know there are ways my prose could be more limpid and supple. Meanwhile, League of Legends no longer offers as much hope on the issue as I thought five years ago.
But the core argument remains the same, and was one I desperately wish people had taken seriously (and I wasn't the only one making it). What happens online is, in every way that matters, real. The fiction that it somehow isn't is what licences abuse.
This, even more than anonymity, makes abuse possible. Abuse is free from consequence, even when identities are known, because it is seen as inherently unreal. As less authentic than, say, threats spoken in person.
In the paper I discussed what I called the "mobius-strip of reality and unreality" that governs ethical decisions about online behaviour, where the same act or space can be seen as simultaneously real and unreal. Real when it's convenient, unreal when it's not.
That two step is enormously popular, and lurks behind every "it's just a game!" rejoinder to, say, abuse over voice chat in an online game. It's also behind Yiannopoulos' "I was just trolling" defence of his statements calling for journalists to be gunned down.
Troll culture dwells in that netherspace between real and unreal. Something is real enough to, say, get worked up about online, but your actions--however aggressive--are sufficiently unreal as to all just be a lighthearted joke everyone can walk off.
Sometimes that actually is true. Many times it isn't. A few times, people actually get hurt and their lives are forever altered. And some will die, as happened today, or when gamers swatted an innocent man earlier this year.
