In a brief but doomed attempt to dance around a looming deadline earlier this week I found myself playing an online game called Town of Idiots. The idea of the game itself is very neat – you and 16 other players have to all figure out which roles have been assigned to you before either the devil or the mafia murder you in the night, and some people are lying and some are not – but it is near instantly ruined because the only way you can communicate with other players is through a completely uncensored, unmoderated chat room, like the ones of the internet of yore, and that means what should be a wholesome whodunnit swiftly devolves into a load of 15-year-old American children competing with each other to see who can send the most shocking slurs. It reminded me of the first iteration of the internet – Geocities and Newgrounds and anonymity and Star Wars Kid – and how truly bad it all was.
At the turn of the century, to shock people online, you had to copy and paste an all-caps missive about hell into an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chatroom until you were banned by a sleepy moderator. With filters, it’s harder to be obnoxious in the same way today, so the goalposts have shifted: now you simply go on Twitter and say “I think we should let immigrants into the country” with your real name, and people with poppies superimposed over their profile picture year-round tell you what an idiot you are, for weeks and weeks and weeks, and find your family on Facebook and tell them, for weeks and weeks and weeks, until you delete all traces of yourself from ever existing in the digital space and throw your phone into a body of water. It doesn’t feel like progress, but it is.
It’s been an interesting week for The Internet, because it’s been learning things that I learned when I was somewhere between four and five years old. So: this week, in the wake of the coronavirus epidemic, The Internet has learned about washing your hands after going on the Tube or using the toilet; viral tweets in gentle, self-care tones have been going round reminding people to, you know, use soap and water to wash your hands every time you go to the bathroom. Who was not already doing this? How many of them have I shaken hands with in my lifetime?
The second thing The Internet has learned about is the performative empathy movement “be kind”, which in the two weeks since it started being chanted like a mantra has quickly become a strangely weaponised thing wielded by both the left (who traditionally lean kinder anyway, but now are making more of a concerted effort at kindness, because it means they can police other people for not being kind enough, a sort of kindness hall monitor kink that taps into a lot of the things the left enjoys – chiding, moral superiority, a feeling of authority without the actual power of it) and the right (who only invoke it when someone swears at them on the internet, at which point they say, “Wow! So much for kindness!”).
It’s in this way that even typing the word “kindness” has become a sort of cheat code for trial-by-social-media, where disagreeable opinions that are couched in tones deemed either too kind or not kind enough are attacked for their kindness content and not for the actual opinion behind them. It’s been a confusing fortnight and you can see why I have sought solace in methodical hand-washing and text-based mystery games.
If you want a decent illustration of this, look no further than the Yorkshire Tea debacle, which we’ll look back on fondly from our post-Covid-19-climate-disaster-apocalypse world, laughing to each other about the things we used to care about before we had to forage for food while dodging diesel-powered murder wagons motoring across the sand-blasted desert plains that used to make up Sussex. It went like this: the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, posed with a bumper pack of Yorkshire Tea tea bags; because Yorkshire Tea didn’t immediately distance itself from this, people accused the teabag of being a rightwing terror cell, or something; the Yorkshire Tea Twitter account spent a number of days explaining that its tea had no political alignment, finishing with a heartfelt anonymous note from the social media manager responsible (“please remember there’s a human on the other end of it, and try to be kind”) before answering one cynical reply with: “Sue, you’re shouting at tea.” Thousands then took the chance to pile on to Sue for not being kind enough to a tea brand. Kindness as defence, and kindness as attack. The range!
Kindness has a sense of doom about it, though, as illustrated neatly by the nominees for the Civility in Politics awards (CPA), announced this week. The award – launched in September by members of the House of Lords and campaigners – seeks to fight the “crisis of trust and crisis of civility” in British politics, but managed to step on a rake straight out of the gates by nominating leftwing Twitter icon “Simon Hedges” for its inaugural award. Slight issue: Simon Hedges doesn’t exist – he’s an entirely fictional character created to parody media commentators who decry a loss of civility while supporting Tory governments who endorse austerity, as if forced poverty isn’t as uncivil as it gets.
It does make you wonder that, if kindness had enough real traction to it, there’d be more actual humans engaging in it in an award-winning way, so that sly parody accounts doing kindness as a joke would have less of a look-in. But they don’t, and it didn’t, and the CPA had to quickly form a new Best Parody account category to accommodate the blunder. In shitposting circles, Hedges’ kindness award achievement is up there with the moon landing.
I should mention, before you attack me online and find my family on Facebook, that kindness and civility having a moment is for the broader good. It is, however, a complex thing to make work. Think of it like this: the more we “Do Politics” online, and the more those players in politics are not politicians but ordinary people dabbling in a discourse that has previously been cloistered away from them, the more we become preoccupied by the manners and behaviours of those people participating in the discussion instead of the discussion itself, which neatly acts as an additional layer of gatekeeping (Be Nice Or We’ll Stop Letting You Play Politics With Us).
There’s a reason Westminster still has all those old-fashioned laws and rods and speakers and stuff: the fusty old rules keep it from descending into the nose-bloodying fistfight that online has become. In short, I’m not sure how sustainable an online urge for kindness really is. Some wickedness inside these machines makes it impossible for us truly, ever, to be kind online.
• Joel Golby is the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant
