I got to thinking about Arthur Miller's The Crucible as a parallel for the red scare in the United States in the 1950's. In a modern context, I feel like the hunt for terrorists is, in my opinion the closest thing. However, I'm interested to hear what any of you think is the modern equivalent to the sexist aspect of witch hunting, or any thoughts on the topic in general.
The thing that immediately springs to my mind is making someone who has committed a perceived offense "go viral." I've seen lots of Facebook posts and Tumblr posts saying "this person did something to me that was wrong, share it and make them famous" (aka it's time for death threats and to call their employers and suggest that unsavory things happen to their mothers and children because there's no such thing as polite internet outrage.) Bonus points if you include loaded buzzwords that may or may not apply to the situation at all but will evoke strong emotions: racism, misogyny, pedophile, etc. There's lots of problems with this obviously: people act on one person's account of the story and often don't ask for the other person's - they just jump on the righteous crusade bandwagon with their pitchforks and torches. Also sometimes the person on the receiving end of the witch hunt didn't do or say anything of the sort and it's an unfortunate case of mistaken identity, revenge, or a straight up urban legend. And then there's the larger problem of mob justice. There's few to no occasions in history when a mob of angry people being judge, jury and executioner has positive outcomes.
I read this on Hubski but I can't be arsed to find it here so it looks pretty http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?_r=0
I read that awhile ago. Sacco is definitely one of the cases I think about in this context. (I hadn't noticed before that Sam Biddle was one of the people that pushed her into the limelight. With that in mind I will admit that I indulged in a bit of schadenfreude thinking of him dealing with the blowback of his "bring back bullying" tweet.) It seems like it's so frequently a stupid joke among friends, but people don't realize that it just takes one person to take it beyond that list of friends to the shark tank.
My first comment on Hubski, and it's to link to something you've probably heard of already: Jon Ronson's book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed". http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/15/publicly-shamed-jon-ronson-is-shame-necessary-jennifer-jacquet-review-think-before-you-tweet The guy meets and speaks with Justine Sacco, as well as the people involved in Donglegate a few years ago, among others. Some really interesting stuff in there.
I hadn't seen that but it was an interesting read. Thanks for sharing!
I hadn't even considered internet trolling as an option. That's totally true. I've seen it happen as well where a certain person, politicians and celebrities included, will become targeted. On websites where people can be largely anonymous, death threats and calls for violence can be quick to surface, and bandwagoning is common. Online spamming is definitely equivalent to a mob mentality. I hadn't considered that before. With modern resources, it takes about 3 clicks for you to ruin someone's life, and I think a lot of people forget that the internet is still very much real life.
Tying into this, I think that basically all of gamergate is a witch hunt to some degree, going all the way back to when it started out as the 'quinspiracy'.
Fair enough but it's probably a topic we'll have to agree to disagree on. There's been a reasonable sized avalanche of bad behavior on both sides.
From both sides it hasn't exactly been polite, and the reasonable people noped out almost immediately.
I'd say pedophiles, if nothing else, because most people are not nearly as paranoid about terrorists as they are about pedos. Even looking or talking to a child is enough to make you the object of suspicion in some people's eyes, at least if you're a man. Slightly off-topic, I'd like to note that the victims of witch hunting were predominately women, but men could also be victims, and in some places they were the majority.
Agree with this completely. I'm a man and I'm pretty good with kids, but I wouldn't let that show out of fear that it would be mistaken for something far more nefarious. I have a ton of awesome younger cousins, and it sucks that I can't play a game/interact with them without fear of suspicion from a passing bystander.
Unfortunately I've seen many men share similar feelings. Fathers who feel uncomfortable when they go pick up their children at school, brothers who won't take their little sisters to the mall for fear of being questioned and publicly embarrassed by some nosy mom... I even remember reading a story about a child who got lost and ended up being found dead a few days later. A man had seen the child walking by himself on the side of a road, but after considering his options, he had decided not to approach him. The hysteria about pedophiles probably hurts children more than it helps them.
Didn't the Google CEO at the time say that? Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it's important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities." ~Wiki
Men's Rights, to a smaller degree. As an XY chromosome human, it hurts to see the pervasive biases against the XX gender. Pedophilia bias, custody battle biases, bad strains of feminism attacking the opposite sex, how accusations of abuse is viewed based on gender... May not be necessarily witch-hunt-ey, but I see so many tirades against the male demographic that are reactionary, accusative, hostile, and so forth, vitriolic. It worries me that men reading this kind of stuff might think all women think this way. Also, conversely: anytime a hostile male demographics ridicules a single female, mob frenzy, almost like online lynching. Astonishes me that in this day and age we still have such vitriolic battles waged about sex and gender. Oh, also: Fat Shaming. "It's okay to make fun of overweight people because it's about health." No, you're being solipsistic, preachy, small-minded, judgmental and cruel. Live and let live, I say instead. Eugenics much?
People just like to make people who are different to them feel bad about themselves. > There's nothing remarkable or special about me, so I'm going to project my inadequacies on you, because I've determined that your weight makes you inferior to me. I will then rationalise this behaviour to myself by framing it as a public service for your own personal health. You should be thanking me.
Want to watch a sexist witch-hunt? Check out how reddit is flipping their collective shit over the perceived infractions of Ellen Pao. Nobody raged this hard against Kevin Rose when Digg fucked up; he just became another an over-the-hill Silicon Valley bazillionaire. And Pao's TOS changes don't have anywhere near the impact on the average user that Digg's overhaul had.
Anytime someone famous does something the general public disagrees with can turn into one. For example, Joss Whedon getting attacked and painted as a woman-hater and eventually chased off of twitter. People saying he was dehumanizing Black Widow in AoU for (spoilers) not being able to have children and calling herself a monster when that wasn't the case at all, but it didn't matter. Just any mob mentality when it comes to famous people not living exactly the way their fans and critics want them too. Drake Bell also comes to mind when he tweeted that he was still going to call Caitlyn Jenner Bruce. They wrote articles about that. Stuff doesn't go away on the internet. Granted, it was not a cool thing to say, but holy crap people can be SO hateful when someone says or does something unfavorable.
Sometimes technology can sometimes be considered witchcraft. The average person has no idea, I mean no idea how most technology works. When our gadgets don't connect to wifi or our cars/appliances stop working, people kick, curse and threaten their tech. Misunderstanding/fear of the unknown is a powerful emotional force.
- Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month" [edit] Also : http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.htmlThe magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.