A response to Rodney's video about online harassment of a woman with physical deformities. The speaker argues that offline societies have evolved norms to suppress cruelty, but the internet lacks these guardrails, leaving the vulnerable exposed. He calls for building better tools and practices to create more civil digital spaces.
So my video buddy Hello Rodney made a video that I watched yesterday about cruelty that I wanted to just briefly say some things about. Rodney was, he was pretty disturbed about having seen a woman who had serious physical deformities make a video in which she was— I didn't see the video, but apparently she was singing joyfully and really in a way that we should have come to anticipate by now. In a world where anonymous hatred is rewarded, was hounded off of YouTube. And Rodney was, he was kind of speechless a little bit that people could be so cruel. And in a comment to that video, I I pointed out to him that cruelty and love live in all of our hearts. None of us is unfamiliar with cruelty and none of us is unfamiliar with love. There are the unfortunate few who are by virtue of some kind of freak of nature wiring disability, unable to experience emotion. But that's a very, very small percentage of us. Each of us is connected to the experience of each of the others of us if we pay attention to our own experience closely enough. I learned that Many years ago when I was studying, when I was working in institutions for severely mentally ill people, I learned that a lot of what they thought, I thought, just not as much. But I think the difference between what happens in the day-to-day world and what happens here in the online world is that in the day-to-day world, we can use the social tools that have evolved over the history of civilization to maintain civility in our relationships. But here in the online world, we have not yet developed the kind of tools that we can reliably use to maintain that civility. Now, that's not going to last for very long. It's not going to last for very long because, because we want relationships to be civilized. We want to live in civilized connections with one another. Not all of us. Some of us don't want to live in civilized connections with one another. Outlaws live in outlaw communities. We have them all over the world, and people who want to live together in outlaw communities live in outlaw communities, and the people who want to live in civil relationships with one another are able to do that in the real world because that's the way we've established these connections. Now, I, I know that we all have to deal with people that we're unhappy having to deal with, But that's, that's, that's not exactly what Rodney was talking about in his video, and it's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about here is the kind of gratuitous cruelty that we see, um, that we see often in young children, as Rodney pointed out. And then as they— as children begin to be socialized, as we begin to make children into adults who will be living together in social interaction, then those cruel, uh, instincts, if you will, those parts of us that are predatory, uh, get put into the broader social con— um, context. And so we don't have those kinds of behaviors predominating in our day-to-day relationships. And if we do have them predominate in our day-to-day relationships, We don't have to stay in those kind of relationships. But so far, here in the online world of interaction, we haven't yet developed those tools. I was just talking to Peter Geriatric and we were, we were talking about the fact that, you know, we're so early in the development of these kinds of interactions and relationships with one another that we still haven't yet gotten around to figuring out how to have this world be more closely, um, to more closely resemble the way we're able to handle relationships in the day-to-day world. But we're going to get there. But so far we're not. And so we see what we've seen forever, which is the weakest amongst us those least able to defend themselves are the ones who are victimized the most cruelly. And, you know, that's where those of us who have seen injustice and cruelty and seen it as unacceptable want to do everything we can to make it clear that that's not going to be— that we want to be part of the development of new ways of relating to one another in this context, just as others before us have been part of creating tools and structures to make the everyday world as civil as it is possible for it to be. So that's our story thus far. And Rodney, hang in there. You're one of the good spirits, and for the most part, just like I'm one of the good spirits for the most part, not entirely, because we all know about cruelty because it lives in our own hearts as well as in the hearts of the people who gratuitously hound off the weak. Here. And as I said in my comment to your video, the Sicilian part of me just wishes that the people who treat others in that way, that they and their children get to experience exactly the kind of behavior that they are exhibiting towards others. I heard a line the other— when I was at TED, and it really resonated with me, and the line was, um, uh, hoping that each of us could make it possible that anything that we do could stand as the last thing that we ever did. Uh, that's quite a, uh, that's quite an aspiration, but I think it's a noble one. So take care and see you again soon. Bye-bye.
