Are people generally aware that authority figures do pretty much everything based on vibes? I’m not sure how to say this without sounding like I’m justifying it because I don’t think it’s justified. Maybe way to say it is that the incentives make this process make sense to people in authority.

Let’s take being a forum moderator as an example. It’s a low consequence position, almost always taken on a volunteer basis, but it requires maintaining some kind of order for a large number of people by sifting through large amounts of information. Literally the first thing that happens when a community realizes they’re being moderated is that the more disruptive people in that community (disruptive being value-neutral in this context) try to make it more difficult to tell the difference between their behavior and the behavior of less disruptive users. In the context of this community to give an example, someone coming in to troll for an extended period of time will make their account last a couple days or sometimes weeks before starting in on agitating. Because it’s generally known here that new accounts are quicker to be seen as sus.

So basically, the people who, according to the internal logic of your power structure, are deserving of punishment, do everything in their power to make you require more context to make an informed decision. It’s out of self preservation. Of course they do that. So it’s a common refrain in the security world and in moderation to look for clusters of disruptive behaviors.

If you’re TSA, you’re not looking for the guy who looks nervous. You’re looking for the guy who looks nervous and sets off the metal detector and “forgets” to put his bag on the belt, etc. And if you’re a forum moderator, you’re not looking for someone who’s being hostile because they’ve had a bad day. You’re looking for someone who repeatedly walks right up to the line and makes a big show of not crossing it and then feigns ignorance when people point this out. Your ability to recognize the difference as an authority figure basically just comes down to a vibe check. You don’t have the resources to conclusively prove and justify every single interaction you have. It’s just vibes.

And of course we know that for pigs, they exist to protect white supremacy and serve capital. So the “disruptive” behavior that they look for already puts large swaths of minorities in that “clustered behavior” category just by existing. Because being poor or desperate (both common outcomes of oppression) is disruptive to affluent people who don’t want to think about you or have you interact with them.

I dunno, kinda of a weird rant, but I think this pattern is pretty ubiquitous. I could write for a while about how this affects teachers, too.