The golden age of the bully
An old battle, fought on a new front
Well, this resonated, not least as a bullied kid in my youth. Jeffrey Zeldman:
Not like bullies, racists, and homophobes everywhere have been set free to revert to their ugliest selves by a mentally deficient ringleader who knows how to whip up a crowd and feed their hunger for violence as a screen behind which he robs us all. Of our money, of course. But more importantly of our rights, our dignity, our ability to accept one another and celebrate our differences instead of masking them. Most of all, the bullying crowd is robbing us of the more perfect union many of us hoped America was beginning to achieve.
Zeldman is talking, of course, in the context of Trump. But the orange tyrant is just the biggest manifestation of what seems to be a global trend.
In the earliest days of the internet, many of us were struck by how amazing it was that this tool allowed us to find other people like us. We could find our tribe online, even if we had struggled to do so in the real world.
With decades more of experience, I can safely say that both of these are true:
- The wonderful thing about the internet is that it lets us find people like us
- The terrible thing about the internet is that it lets us find people like us
The internet is the bully’s finest tool
The internet in general – and Facebook in particular – has unleashed a golden ages of bullies. They can find fellow bullies and potential acolytes easily. They can spread their toxins with no regard to little things like “facts”, “truth” and “common decency”. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the autocrat in the Oval Office or petty bully ruling a local neighbourhood through fear, lies and intimidation, the same basic mechanism is at work.
The story of civilisation is largely the story of clawing power back from people like this, and distributing it more fairly. And of constructing rules and laws to preserve those gains. And now, in ways big and small, the internet its allowing those gains to be lost again. Power transfers back to the unscrupulous, the selfish, the violent.
And so the battle to maintain civilisation, to be more than animals, continues.
