Category: Bibliography

How to deal with Trump, trolls and aggressively emotive untruths online

It seems like the author put “Trump” in the title to attract attention.  It’s not all that much about Trump.  Paradoxically, he seems to be using Trump’s name as clickbait as he defines it.

www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/aug/02/how-to-deal-with-trump-trolls-online?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Email

As the past few decades have shown, the trolling mindset is awesomely well adapted to a digital age. It ignores rational argument. It ignores evidence. It misreads, deliberately. It uses anything and everything somebody says against them. To argue with trolls is to lose – to give them what they want. A troll is interested in impact to the exclusion of all else.

Trolls themselves are hairy Nordic creatures who live under bridges, but trolling doesn’t take its name from them. It comes from the Old French verb troller, meaning to hunt by wandering around in the hope of stumbling upon prey. The word made its way into English as a description of similar fishing tactics: slowly towing a lure in hope of a bite.

Then, in the early 1990s, a Usenet group took up the term to describe some users’ gleeful baiting of the naive: posting provocative comments in hope of attracting an outraged “bite”, then winding up their unwitting victim as thoroughly as possible.

In this, trolling is a form of bullshit art. “The essence of bullshit,” argues the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his 2005 book of the same name, “is not that it is false but that it is phony”.

Both a liar and an honest person are interested in the truth – they’re playing on opposite sides in the same game. A bullshitter, however, has no such constraint. As Frankfurt puts it, a bullshitter “is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false … He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose”.

Once again, impact is all. The total absence of knowledge or expertise is no barrier to bullshit. In fact, it helps. The artistry lies in knowing your audience, and saying whatever is needed in order to achieve a desired effect.

‘Clickbait’

Here’s another neat neologism: clickbait. In use since 2011, it brings trolling’s fishing metaphor into explicit play. Online media thrives on clicks. More is always better. Headlines drive clicks – meaning the data-driven optimization of linguistic click-enticement is now one of journalism’s finest arts. You Won’t Believe How Little Many Stories Have To Do With Their Headlines.

Content itself is beside the point – as the very use of words like content suggests. The moment you start labelling every single piece of writing in the world “content”, you have conceded its interchangeability: its primary purpose as mere grist to the metrical mill. Dangle the tasty lure, and wait for the fish to bite.

We live in an age of ever-increasing bullshit. Whenever someone, somewhere decides to pass a passionate comment on something they know nothing about, the whiff of bullshit is in the air – mingled, if their comments are engineered to provoke, with the stink of troll.

‘Trollshitting’

We need a new phrase for this kind of aggressively emotive untruth; though hardly a new human phenomenon, it wields particular power in an age of endlessly recycled outrage.

Then again, shutting up about Trump and all other professional trollshitters (a potty-mouthed portmanteau is the best I can do for now) might be a better tactic. Bullshit is a kind of conjurer’s incantation. Breaking its spell is a matter not so much of truth – however much we might like to believe it – as of disenchantment.

Like trolling, attention is its lifeblood: without a consenting audience, each withers. And the less time we waste on headlines and hand waving, the more we can focus on what’s actually going on.

In the end, bullshit itself is bullshit – someone else’s wishes for your thoughts. Don’t take the bait. Step back. Pick your words and your battles carefully – and never trust a headline that could have been written by satirical algorithm.

• Tom Chatfield is a British author. His book ‘Netymology: a linguistic celebration of the digital world’ is published by Quercus US on 2 August

Also:

NYTimes: Web People vs. Wall People

Here’s a story from The New York Times I thought you’d find interesting:

Voters have a choice of candidates who embrace change and those who try to stop it.

Read More: nyti.ms/2atkiza

Get The New York Times on your mobile device

Web People vs. Wall People

Thomas L. Friedman

Yes, we’re having a national election right now. Yes, there are two parties running. But no, they are not the two parties that you think. It’s not “Democrats” versus “Republicans.” This election is really between “Wall People” and “Web People.”

The primary focus of Wall People is finding a president who will turn off the fan — the violent winds of change that are now buffeting every family — in their workplace, where machines are threatening white-collar and blue-collar jobs; in their neighborhoods, where so many more immigrants of different religions, races and cultures are moving in; and globally, where super-empowered angry people are now killing innocents with disturbing regularity. They want a wall to stop it all.

Wall People’s desire to stop change may be unrealistic, but, in fairness, it’s not just about race and class. It is also about a yearning for community — about “home” in the deepest sense — a feeling that the things that anchor us in the world and provide meaning are being swept away, and so they are looking for someone to stop that erosion.

Wall People have two candidates catering to them: Donald Trump, who boasts that he is “The Man” who can stop the winds with a wall, and Bernie Sanders, who promises to stop the winds by ending our big global trade deals and by taking down “The Man” — the millionaires, billionaires and big banks. I don’t see how the country could afford either man’s plans, but they have a simple gut appeal, and there is overlap between them.

Web People instinctively understand that Democrats and Republicans both built their platforms largely in response to the Industrial Revolution, the New Deal and the Cold War, but that today, a 21st-century party needs to build its platform in response to the accelerations in technology, globalization and climate change, which are the forces transforming the workplace, geopolitics and the very planet.

As such, the instinct of Web People is to embrace the change in the pace of change and focus on empowering more people to be able to compete and collaborate in a world without walls. In particular, Web People understand that in times of rapid change, open systems are always more flexible, resilient and propulsive; they offer the chance to feel and respond first to change. So Web People favor more trade expansion, along the lines of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and more managed immigration that attracts the most energetic and smartest minds, and more vehicles for lifelong learning.

Web People also understand that while we want to prevent another bout of recklessness on Wall Street, we don’t want to choke off risk-taking, which is the engine of growth and entrepreneurship.

Because the G.O.P. was out of the White House for the last eight years, the party’s base and leadership are the least understanding of the world in which we’re living. That is why the G.O.P. fractured first and why some Republican Web People, particularly from the business world, are either sitting this election out or voting for Hillary Clinton.

Having been secretary of state, Clinton has been touching the world. She knows America has to build its future on a Web People’s platform, which was first articulated by Bill Clinton, and, to this day, is best articulated by him. But Hillary has not always shown the courage of her own, or her husband’s, convictions.

So, rather than take on Wall People in her party — and saying to Sanders, “Socialism was the wrong answer for the industrial age, so it sure isn’t the right answer for the information age” — she is tacking toward Wall People. She is opposing things she helped to negotiate, like the Pacific trade deal, and offering more benefits from government but refraining from telling people the hardest truth: that to be in the middle class, just working hard and playing by the rules doesn’t cut it anymore. To have a lifelong job, you need to be a lifelong learner, constantly raising your game.

To her credit, though, she chose a great running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, a Web Person with a soul.

My hope is that, for the good of the country, Republican Web People will, over time, join the Democratic Party and tilt it into a compassionate, center-left Web party for the 21st century. That would be a party that is sensitive to the needs of working people, appreciative of the anchoring power of healthy communities, but committed to capitalism, free markets and open trade as the vital engines of growth for a modern society and to providing every American with the learning tools to realize their potential.

I don’t see any chance of the G.O.P. becoming a center-right party again soon. The Tea Party, Trump and Fox News have made its base too angry and disconnected from reality.

So everything rides on the coalition that Clinton assembles. If America is to thrive in the 21st century, we desperately need a coalition that can govern smartly in this era of rapid change. Clinton has a chance to break not only the glass ceiling for women, but also the rigid walls that have divided our two parties. If she can pull that off, it will make being the first woman president the second most important thing she does.