In maths in high school, we would sometimes get an answer back marked RAWW – right answer, wrong working. It happened when you applied the wrong formula but ended up with the correct answer. There’s a cognate thing that happens with certain articles sometimes – you read it and think well, you’re onto something, but that’s a terrible way of expressing it. David Farrier is a New Zealand investigative journalist and documentarian. He’s been kicking round for a while – at his website webworm.co he’s got a bunch of great work, including a special interest in megachurches (nice), breaking allegations on Arise Church (hate those guys), and even an essay on Brooke Fraser (nice again). A friend sent me a recent webworm article where Farrier hosts a piece from LA writer and photographer Eric Langberg – ‘The Meaning of the Photograph’. Langberg had been posting photos of the LA ICE protests on Reddit, people were being disagreeable in the comments, and Langberg had some thoughts on what that said about the state of the nation: “I’m convinced we have Nazis again because this Internet-brainrot discourse style escaped into the real world.”

I should say, in the first instance, I think there’s something in that idea. At the very least, it’s raising serious issues. The US is in a crisis of meaning – it’s an incredibly partisan environment where words increasingly don’t seem to have any weight or substance beyond indicating faction. Journalists asking critical questions of the administration are labeled as bad people – terrible people (“Quiet, piggy”). Goodness is aligned with allegiance, with a polite disinclination to ask adversarial or probing questions. It’s a corrosive environment for the rule of law, the democratic process, the development of science, and the common factual foundations that underpin the fabric of society. It’s catastrophic. But is the best example people on Reddit? Langberg treats Reddit as prompting his logic – not the root of the problem but a recognisable symptom. “Reddit made it click for me, but lest you think I’m spiraling over three dumb Reddit comments (there were many, many more) – I can point this out to you everywhere.” On balance, I think it does seem like spiralling over Reddit comments – or rather, Reddit as an example feels unqualified to bear the weight of this line of thinking.

The thing is, right, Reddit is a low-trust environment where users are incentivised to start fights with each other. The structure of upvotes and downvotes means that the highest-ranked comments are not necessarily the most useful or informational, but the most popular. Reddit rewards the social performance of knowingness: it rewards you for looking like you know something. Often that means going in and correcting another person, emphasizing your own credentials by dismantling somebody else’s. You don’t even have to be right: you can perform the aesthetic of correction without actually being correct. Being correct is only helpful insofar as it makes the performance more convincing. There’s variation across the site, of course, but the overall structure incentivises these hostile, mistrustful relationships. It also creates a second layer of distrust where certain types of post are labelled as karma farming, as transparent attempts to gain sympathy or approval. It’s a vile little breeding ground for suspicion and paranoia.

And that’s more or less the whole story. Langberg posted some stuff on Reddit, and felt dismayed by the low-trust hostile response. He wrote an article arguing with anonymous commenters and complaining about Reddit’s culture, and used it as a jumping-off point to honestly sort of grandstand a little about the impending collapse of civilisation. I agree with the big picture concerns, but I don’t know that Reddit is the appropriate social barometer. Langberg makes those sorts of inferential jumps very readily, moving between his experience on Reddit and his vision of the world at large. When Redditors are disagreeable or disingenuous about his photos, it’s because of deeper social ills: “we don’t trust each other anymore, and so we’ve started to view everything in isolation, denying that things are connected to one another and that meaning is fundamentally made through this kind of juxtaposition.” That jump feels a little too easy. I’m not sure I’d go that far – or rather, if I did go that far, it wouldn’t be with this example, which doesn’t feel sturdy enough to sustain the point. It feels overextended. It feels like the more proportionate conclusion would be ‘man, I should stop posting on Reddit’.

Sort of the underlying question for me, or the curiosity, is how we build trust in a digital environment. It’s something I think about as part of running a blog. I tend to be quite strict on comments – I get reasonable readership, but there don’t appear to be many comments. That’s because I delete most of them. Comments go through a review stage, and if I don’t think they’re productive, I don’t publish them. I get a lot of trash – I got more when I was writing actively about religion – and I’m just not willing to give them any presence. That’s not what this place is. I’ve actually drafted a couple of essays analyzing junked comments and explaining my stance on the whole thing. I’ve never published them, because it felt too much like stooping to their level. I’ve been writing this blog for ten years now. I’m here every week, writing about games or digital culture or other art or fiction, and I’ve slowly built up a certain level of credibility. I’ll sometimes get cited by outlets like Critical Distance (they liked my essay on Deathloop), or there are universities that have incorporated my essays into their curriculum (every year the article on video game manifestos gets a little rush of students from the University of Delaware’s Canvas instance). There’s simply no space here for people to come in and behave disrespectfully, or to say stupid things. This is a workplace. I don’t want people to come here and see a bunch of silly nonsense.

Here’s some of the essay I drafted around one recent comment:

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I had one guy pop up recently on a 2020 essay about Basil the Great, titled ‘Eat the Rich‘, which – it wasn’t even an essay, really, it was reading through one of the homilies of the fourth century bishop Basil the Great, and exploring what it said and how it interpreted the Bible. It was presented as a fairly factual recounting of how the homily was put together. For instance, when Jesus says to the rich young man that he should sell all he owns and give his money to the poor, that’s obviously not meant to be a foundational principle for society. If everybody gives their money to the poor, the poor will have all the money, and then they’ll probably have to give it all back, creating this tidal motion of constantly returning money to the newly impoverished. Basil’s argument appears to be more of an economic comment on how people get rich in the first place. He suggests that wealth is built on poverty – and that behaviour, that collection of wealth at the expense of everybody else, is the behaviour that, in Basil’s view, needs to be challenged.

So I reported all of that, and offered some context, and some time later someone turned up to complain about it. They disagreed with the content without really understanding the form – for instance, they accused me of ignoring a bunch of supposed counter-examples, as if I was making an argument rather than describing an existing text. “You also don’t say that Jesus gave the rich young man the option to live his life of wealth.” Like – no, I didn’t say that, because it’s not part of St Basil’s argument. I was describing his homily. I necessarily explored his point of view. The commenter also didn’t really engage with any of the texts in a meaningful way – either with Basil’s text or the Bible. For instance, he said “Wealth doesn’t prevent someone from following God or being holy, and being poor doesn’t guarantee heaven.” In fact, Christ says – in Matthew 19, the very chapter under discussion – that it’s harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter heaven. I quoted that verse in my original essay. Similarly, in Luke 6, in a variant of the Beatitudes, Christ says very explicitly that the poor will inherit the kingdom of God:

“Blessed are you who are poor
For yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now,
For you will be filled.”

Christ pairs that blessing with a warning against the rich, who, by extension, will not inherit the kingdom of God:

“But woe to you who are rich,
For you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now,
For you will be hungry.”

So the comment failed on three levels. It failed as an engagement with the Biblical text, it failed as a response to Basil the Great, and it failed to understand the form of my essay. It was contemptible gutter commentary. I read it a couple times and deleted it.

And this is something I’ve been doing quite happily for years, right. I do it for a bunch of different reasons – sometimes the comments are offensive, and sometimes they’re just not productive. There was an essay on atheism that I knew might attract a couple comments when I was writing it – it was about how the concept of atheism was understood and theorised from a Christian perspective, specifically that of Paul Tillich. I discussed some of the problems of Tillich’s framing, and explicitly said that many atheists would probably reject it outright. Even so, I had some atheism blogger drop by to give the whole thing a lashing – oh, the Christian lens is stupid, and Christians are stupid, and that’s not atheism at all – which was sort of the upshot of what I’d already said, but angrier. It wasn’t productive, so I deleted it. Alternately, and perhaps a little more sombrely, I had a separated mother leave a comment on my no contact article. She seemed a bit sad, really – she left this spiel about how she just wanted to get back in touch with her daughter, and she railed against the so-called epidemic of no contact – that’s the first time I thought about writing this essay, honestly. I was struck by how she associated her personal situation with an epidemic, framing it as part of some sort of societal infection or disease – as if to suggest it’s something that’s affected her by accident, at random, rather than through a concrete sequence of choices and consequences. I figured the context was maybe a little too sensitive for the argument – in that sense, I’m quite grateful to the guy defending billionaires. That’s a much better vehicle for this idea.

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And you can see why I parked that essay. Even reading it now, it feels like lowering my gaze – like a distraction from better work. But I certainly understand the impulse. When I saw Langberg’s article, explaining in straining detail how his photos were misread and misinterpreted and maligned, and despairing of being understood, I laughed – because I recognised myself in it. Then I thought – wait, I could use this, and talk about why I haven’t written my own version of that essay, and I could use excerpts as an example, and then finally I could roast those fuckers – you know, I’ve clearly not resolved these impulses in myself either. What’s evident is that we’re both negotiating how to exist in online spaces. We’re trying to figure out the best way to communicate. Context matters. If you put these pictures in a museum, or in an art gallery, or in the newsletter of a respected journalist, they’re more likely to be taken seriously. If you put them on Reddit, you’ll get Redditors. The comments under this article on David Farrier’s blog are miles away from the type of comments the article explores – because the structure of each digital space incentivises certain behaviours and reinforces an existing culture of trust or distrust. It communicates social values – not universal values, not values shared by the whole of society, but values specific and limited to that digital domain. I’m sure some behaviours move around, but the different structures of sites police and reinforce different types of interaction. The problems on Reddit are demonstrably not the same as the problems on, say, YouTube. That’s also I think the limit of this analogy between Reddit and broader American society: there are superficial similarities, but at the end of the day, it’s Reddit. Might as well stick your head in a sewer and complain that it stinks.

Part of the tension here is the common assumption that online spaces should function as a sort of public square. There’s this sense – and we were sold this vision – that the internet would be the digital commons, where people from all over the world could come together and discourse and share and mutually develop. And that’s often not what these spaces are. They’re not designed to be the public square, and I think we have to be careful about extrapolating from individual websites back into society at large. I think it’s natural to try and do that, but I think it’s often an error. If anything it would be best to extrapolate from the internet as a whole. In that context, what we see is a sort of fracturing – social dispersal hardening into tribalism. Where once we had half a dozen newspapers and three television channels, now we have billions of YouTube channels, micro-influencers, special interest niche blogs (hello). You can spend your whole life on websites that other people might not ever go to. And you can get caught in that bubble – you can come to think that the behaviour you see on your one website is emblematic of the world at large. Maybe in some instances there are legitimate parallels. But I wouldn’t want to start from a single site – even when it’s Reddit.