Who pays these people?

Ten or twelve years ago, I used to hang with Yahoo because I liked the interface. Today, I'm thinking of leaving because I don't care for the company I have to keep.

Most thoughtful people would agree that the vision of the the Internet's founders, of a forum for the thoughtful exchange of well-considered ideas, has fallen hilariously short of expectations.  Anonymity has not enhanced the calibre of discourse: it has lowered it. Those newspapers which have given up anonymity on their online pages seem to have discovered that they have retained the volume of feedback but increased the quality.

Yahoo hasn't had this satori. It may also be cursed by the law of unintended consequences. The name may or may not hark back to Gulliver's Travels, but Yahoo outdoes itself in attracting yahoos of the Gulliverian stripe. In doing so, it illustrates another weakness of anonymous discourse.

It isn't just that anonymity brings out the worst in people. It is also that Internet anonymity enables the worst people to control any debate they enter. Despite the best efforts of portals to limit the number of user names a person may have, it isn't difficult for one person to have dozens, perhaps hundreds, of handles in use on a given portal's comment pages.

When this kind of fun is just verbal masturbation by trolls, it's bad enough. Gresham's law applies just as well to online discourse as to money.  But the trolls open the way to people with political agendas,  who get to use loudmouthed boorishness to drive dissenting opinion away from any topic and give the impression that they represent majority opinion. Those fond of defending Internet trolls with the First Amendment might pause to reflect that the outcome is exactly the opposite of free speech. When one person can masquerade as a hundred, drowning out dissenting voices and, on occasion, threatening people naive enough to speak under their own user names, we have a definition of the First Amendment as perverted as many definitions applied to the Second Amendment.

It is no accident that defenders of Second Amendment rights have lately been hyperactive little trolls. Yesterday, I left a social media arm  of Gabby Gifford and Mark Kelly's Americans for Responsible Solutions. This good idea had been swamped by Second Amendment pros, Second Amendment antis and generic trolls, to the point where one genuinely responsible statement would be drowned by fifty rants. This is a Web site, however, not a portal. There is nothing but convention to prevent commentary from being responsibly moderated.

It is said, and truly enough, that the United States is a young country. More to the point, it is an immature country. Its immaturity is so pronounced that it may pass from national childhood to national senility without a pause in the middle for national maturity.

Tripe

 The visions of the naifs who opened the Internet to the world must, at times, be classified as hallucinations. Against the good done during the Arab Spring, for example, against the increasing--at times excessive--transparency of nearly every facet of public life, we must set news comment pages of every stripe and kidney. Where the founders envisioned a high-minded level of civil discourse, we get a forum which requires a degree in Stupid just to take part.

Take a recent piece of discourse about the security of the Titanic wrecksite. The facts are disturbing: indiscriminate looting, foolish actions by tourists who surely represent the 1%, and garbage. Certainly explorer Robert Ballard's idea that the remains should be coated with anti-fouling paint and preserved seems a little off the wall, but it doesn't justify the sheer imbecility of the comment thread. We had the Teabag types  who jumped to the conclusion that Ballard was proposing that the US government paint the wreck. There were a large number of commenters who felt compelled to share their lack of interest by posting variations on "who cares?" The best of that genre was the genius who said that the dead of the Andrea Doria were more important than the dead of the Titanic. I leave the reader to ponder the nature of that hairsplitting.

My personal favourite is the denier who said that since only the US gummint and a few universities have submersibles capable of reaching the Titanic, then either the whole thing was a plot (objective very unclear) or the damage was done by the aforementioned.

It took me about 30 seconds to construct a Google search that revealed sales pitches (pre-kerfluffle) for submersible tours to the Titanic: not government, not academic, just plain old tourist hustling. It is the disconnect between Mr. Denier and the facts that leads me to present him the Gold Medal for the Internet comment Stupid competition.

Alas for the hopes of the Interwebz founders! However, the non-stop parade of public idiocy on comment threads  is much more hilarious than the original vision, which sounds something like cyber C-Span.