"Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory" was a special sort of :brainworms: that not many seem to remember let alone think about anymore, but I believe that it did lasting cultural damage at an ideological level. For younger comrades unfamiliar with the concept, here's a link.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theory
It seemed cute and funny and all that when it first came out, and it was for me too once upon a time, but in application, it was just another layer of lubrication for the internet fascist pipeline in my experience, both online and offline. I'm sure I'm not the only one here who remembers the smokescreen tactic of "it's the internet" with the belief of "if someone is screaming slurs and calling for genocides, it's just Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory in practice, teehee" and the implication attached to that was "the person is just being ironic and joking, surely he is a decent human being that is kind to people in real life and is a good and wholesome family man" or something.
I've had the displeasure of experiencing "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory" in real life, offline, on multiple occasions that included dismissing hate speech from coworkers on company online correspondence to outright knowing people's online handles and seeing the fascist hate they were vomiting when under the cover of relative anonymity.
They all had something in common: they were hateful and obnoxious people offline as well, often while making the "it's the internet" excuse themselves for anything "ironic" or "trolling" that they said, but then when offline they were also horrible to coworkers, family members, or just random strangers, especially service workers.
When the tiki torch rally happened in Charlottesville, I knew one such torch wielder that went there. When Jan 6 happened and all of the MAGA clowns came to DC town, I knew a few that went. They had that in common: "it's the internet!" said in real life when called out on their chanlord posting, as if to pretend they weren't also fascists offline.
It's been a little while since I've heard "it's the internet" to justify fascist manifestos on the internet, fortunately. I suppose it's been a few too many school shootings for most people to really buy into the idea that it's desirable, normal, or even possible to spend hours a day frothing with bigoted rage and then log off and magically become an upstanding wholesome citizen.
That is all. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. :blob-no-thoughts:
This relies principally on the notion that the internet is just imagination land.
The language "real life" is the real problem here as it implies what happens online is not real life and should not be taken seriously.
The internet is real life, offline is offline and online is online but both are as real as one another, have real effects an real outcomes on those interacting and sharing information through it. The people on the internet are real, the relationships we form through it are real, the hate the love and the struggle are real. Different but still very much real.
When you make it pretend you dismiss the consequences of everything that happens on it and allow fascists to do as they please.
I wholeheartedly agree, but I had to be the Cassandra about that because any time I or anyone else called out a fascist saying fascist things on the internet, it was all about "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory!" and "he just wanted to get a reaction!" and other :freeze-peach: :brainworms: that went unchallenged for decades.
The theory provided cover to point to in order to defer attempts to address the problem.
Godwin's law provided a similar cover to a lesser degree. I can point to this theory that says you're wrong and ridiculous and that's that, dismissed.
Greater internet fuckwad theory made it much harder to address that period of the internet where everyone said f**got endlessly and "tits or gtfo" and other things. When we successfully started to affect this behaviour we saw the rise of red pill communities, MRAs and later gamergate. Rather than address this behaviour in people what occurred was that all the people that wouldn't change found places where they could behave in the radically awful ways they wanted to behave.
Godwin himself eventually came to hate what he was named for, condemning its use as a thought-terminating cliche that provided cover for actual fascists.
The latter part about MRA/redpill/gamergate cryptofascist pipelines is reminiscent of the "white flight" to the suburbs that happened because :lmayo: were that enraged and terrified of desegregated public schools and received a fortune in bigotry-driven subsidies to create the worst possible civic planning means to keep :lmayo: "safe" from you-know-who. :us-foreign-policy:
Oh wow, the white flight comparison is a good one, their "decline" from the mainstream internet since around 2016-2018 is because they fucked off to their own safe spaces. Hell, the righties in a forum I frequent, when they felt threatened by lefties in the site who are starting to stand up against them, straight up made an alternative forum named "Safe Space".
Good thing that unlike the historical white flight, cryptofash and g*mers are generally uninteresting uncreative shitheads who's contribution to their community mostly consisted of their toxicity, so the non-fascist internet didn't lose much when they self-segregates.
Right. And it highlights the fact you need to actually do something with these people to change their behaviour. Bullying them off into other spaces feels like progress but also creates entirely new problems because we just moved the problem somewhere else. If we don't physically change the people things can in fact get worse when that happens.
I know this is criticising a success we had but part of the wider movements it has contributed its own small part to where we are now.
If the same happens again and again it won't be real change, not in our lifetimes anyway.
Exactly what I came here to say :I-was-saying:
Called out someone for being fash? You must be losing the debate :expert-shapiro:
How dare you compare the guy who said all immigrants should be sterilized to a nazi?
Let's put it this way: if we considers written word; letters, journals, articles, essays, notes, research; to be truthful representation of their author's real life intentions of their writer, then why don't the internet? What makes the internet special that posting horrible things there shouldn't be taken seriously, but if you writes it down in a diary it can be used as evidence in court?
The court told me this too. Court doesn't give a fuck writing is writing whether it's published online or in print, the legal system considers it all "publishing" here.
Yeah, but not only internet speech is considered not real, people seems to also think that they have an expiration date. Reactionaries are still bringing up Marx's more uninformed opinions on race and his certain choices of word nearly two centuries later, but bringing up something racist a someone tweeted just two years ago is considered bad taste.