In Control

So many people aren’t. It’s apparent anywhere on the Internet. Any half-decent comment thread, on any subject at all, descends into ridiculous chaos if it’s not moderated. Which really just goes to show that no one’s reading these posts here on my blog, because no one’s insulting me about them. Either that, or everyone who reads my opinions agrees with them, and I know better than to hope for that.

Why is it that people on the Internet seem to have no self-control in randomly insulting people for their honest opinions? Well, the most obvious answer is that people in general have issues with impulse control. I remember one memorable incident: I was waiting for the next train at a Boston commuter rail station, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the symbol of Brandeis University. Apparently, that T-shirt inspired someone to come up and tell me that they seriously disapproved of the university.

Open such a declaration of affiliation or opinion to the entire world, as one necessarily does when they post something to the Internet by any means, and the entire world full of people gets to find something to disagree with. No surprise, perhaps, that the kind of flaming or trolling behavior that practically characterizes many forums/comment threads is as common as it is.

Blizzard Entertainment, the company responsible for the ridiculously popular World of Warcraft and the highly-anticipated StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, have apparently decided that they want to do something about it. How are they going to do that? By making everyone accountable for the things that they say on the forums: forcing everyone to use their real names, through the RealID system, on the World of Warcraft and StarCraft II forums.

... I don’t quite know how to respond to that. I first learned about it from this post on the Shakesville blog, a blog I had started reading probably less than 12 hours ago by sheer random chance. Coming from the perspective that it does, the opinion there is openly hostile; by making people use their real names, it opens the door to stalking and similar privacy violations. I have to say, I see the point there. There is a reason why my full name isn’t displayed anywhere on this blog, after all.

Of course, however, there is a “but”. But what about accountability? Couldn’t I say whatever I like in this space, without any fear of retribution? As it stands, someone randomly wandering the Internet that came across this blog wouldn’t have much of an idea who I am. Which may not matter when I’m just randomly yapping about how I like StarCraft II, but if I was encouraging people to actually do something, I think it would matter a little bit more.

As the Internet is now, there is no accountability. And I think there’s something lost as a result. On the 24th of June, the Supreme Court of the U.S. decided the case of Doe v. Reed (link to Supreme Court website), a case in which the Court ruled that the names and addresses of people that sign referendums can be made public. The people that brought the case in the first place argued that they were being harassed as a result of the release of information about themselves, and tried to get the Court to block the public release of the referendum so as to prevent this harassment.

The Court refused. Eight to one, they held that in a broad sense, the disclosure of such information does not violate any First Amendment rights of the plaintiff. (They acknowledged that this specific release may be blocked on narrower grounds; that issue is still pending.) And for me, the most direct and convincing argument came from Justice Scalia. Which was somewhat of a shock for me considering that I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with him in the past.

As quoted by the Washington Post article on the case:

“There are laws against threats and intimidation; and harsh criticism, short of unlawful action, is a price our people have traditionally been willing to pay for self-governance,” Scalia wrote in a separate concurrence. “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.”

Now, I admit I’m an idealist. I admit I am from the height of privilege, an upper-middle-class white male. And I admit I’ve never had anyone stalking me before. I can’t change who I am or what I’ve experienced. But I can’t disagree with Scalia here. If you wouldn’t be willing to publicly admit to your beliefs and opinions, why do you even hold them in the first place?

Internet trolling still functions because it’s anonymous. If I post an anonymous comment to a blog saying “you’re an idiot” no one will ever know that I posted it, and so I will never see any consequences for my action. I can hold and express that opinion without any recrimination from society.

Now, with what Blizzard plans to do with their forums, that won’t work anymore. Now, if someone wants to inform someone else on their forums that they think they’re an idiot, the troll will have to stand by that opinion publicly. If someone wants to repeatedly annoy someone else on the Blizzard forums, it’ll be plainly obvious who is doing it. If someone wants to ignore the consequences of those actions, including possible legal recourse... well, that won’t be possible anymore.

Different Realities

Conventional wisdom holds that this concept of “reality” is a monolithic, unchanging constant: reality for me is no different than reality for anyone else, and the only time the concept of an overarching reality comes up is when it is differentiated from those things that are clearly not real. Such as, you know, video games. Say what you will about the realistic graphics or the actual scientific concepts shown, but it won’t change the obvious fact that Halo is not “reality”.

I have to wonder if that’s actually the case, though. And no, I don’t mean the bit about Halo. But I do have to think that this concept of reality as presented there may not be the way the world actually works.

I’m not going to go so far as to say there are physical alternate realities... but then, there are people that would. After all, what is the Christian afterlife, but two alternate realities separate from the world most of us are familiar with? Advancements in scientific research and exploration have all but proven that a heaven or a hell do not exist in any place we could physically travel to.

Perhaps I stole that from Dungeons and Dragons. I still remember the many different world systems of the D&D campaign settings. The Prime Material Plane was the “real” world as we would call it, and then there were multitudes of other planes, heaven and hell in all the colors of D&D’s oft-maligned alignment system. There were even rules for finding other Material Planes; that paragraph set me to imagining that maybe we were one of those Material Planes, and that the world of Faerûn could actually be found one day.

... Maybe that doesn’t count though. After all, if they do exist, then they would be part of this thing we call “reality”, wouldn’t they? The fact that someone believes they might exist doesn’t make his/her reality different from mine, it just means we have different sets of beliefs. And if those beliefs conflict in an irreconcilable fashion, then in “reality”, one of us has to be wrong. Right?

Well, for one, seeing the world in that fashion is a good way not to make friends. It really matters very little what you believe exists after death: whether a cycle of reincarnation followed eventually by absolutely nothing, or an eternal reward in a paradisiacal realm of God, we can’t know for sure until we die, and perhaps not even then. Trying to “prove” that one is “right” does nothing beyond annoying people, most of the time.

While the debate wasn’t over something as difficult as life after death, perhaps the recently-aired anime Strike Witches can illustrate what I mean. Near the end of the season, the main character was confronted with an enemy that was acting... strangely. And by that, I mean the enemy flyer wasn’t shooting at Yoshika, which was a change from the norm.

I’ll get into what exactly happened a little later. For the moment, the important detail is this: Yoshika became convinced that the enemy could, perhaps, be reasoned with. And over the next episode, she spent her time trying to convince her fellow Strike Witches that maybe they didn’t have to fight them. Unsurprisingly, her squadron mates... disagreed. Angrily, most of the time. All Yoshika really accomplished by pushing her case was pissing off her friends, to be honest. So perhaps it’s better to let different realities coexist.

There’s only one problem. That is very much a different example than the theological disputes I presented earlier. It absolutely matters whether or not an enemy can be reasoned with, because being able to end a war peacefully means not having more people die. So doesn’t it matter which of those differing realities is an accurate picture of the true “reality”?

Actually... maybe not. What actually happened: Yoshika tried to fire on the enemy, found that her safety was on. While she was turning her safety off, the enemy turned into a replica of a Witch and began flying in circles around Yoshika, who chased the enemy “Witch” without trying to fire on it. The enemy revealed its weak point to Yoshika, and Yoshika was about to touch it before the rest of the squadron arrived.

And that’s it. Yoshika was convinced that the enemy was playing with her, not trying to fight. The rest of the Strike Witches were convinced that it was a trap. How do two wildly different pictures of the same events come about?

To put it simply, we all view reality a little bit differently to begin with. There is no such thing as “reality” that is the same for two people; starting with their observations and carrying on through their analyses of those observations, “reality” is colored by those biases and perceptions that we all inevitably carry.

Yoshika didn’t really want to fight in the first place. Sure, she joined the Strike Witches when she learned of her father’s work and felt she had to help protect people, but her first memories of war was the loss of her dad to that war. Many of the other Strike Witches, on the other hand, have personally observed the devastation wrought by the enemy and aren’t inclined to settle for anything less than the eradication of the enemy.

And this isn’t just limited to anime. In the Washington Post today, June 3, 2010, there are letters responding to the recent events in Israel, off the Gaza Strip. A letter arguing that the people of the flotilla that was attacked knew what they were getting into and were attempting to provoke violence is printed right above a letter presenting the flotilla as a peaceful, multinational aid group.

... Different realities. In the real world, it’s all too easy to see what you want to see, painting a picture of reality that supports your biases. I won’t even argue that we should try to avoid that: it’s impossible. All we can do is acknowledge it: “reality” does not exist. I can present what is to me the clear and unvarnished Truth, and someone else can still logically and in good faith disagree with it. Perhaps, then, we need to do less presenting of Truths and more acknowledgement that different realities can exist, even in our world.