I haven't really thought this out completely, but could the same pattern be applied in IRL communities absent of any visible minorities?
I'm thinking small towns that have been exclusively/massively majority white/cis/het. It's not anonymity per se, but it does allow for space to say taboo/shitty things about Others, which can start as 'off color' jokes and then becomes a reality tunnel.
Both of these are situations where the individual is protected from blowback. But the shit-talk comes from a different place in each case.
In a homogeneous face-to-face community, people have a safe space to express things that they're
really thinking, but might not vocalize in mixed company.
with the anonymous imageboard shitposter, I think most of them don't start off expressing anything that's real to them, it's more about trying to out-edge each other. And you remain in that space, doing an impression of a racist, and eventually you have built walls around those behaviors, you start to feel it sincerely.
I had a chantard explain some of the culture to me - a lot of people are attracted to the anon imageboard format because it's very hard for people to engage in linguistic turf wars there. You can't really police other people. Your judgments roll right off them. Because a lot of people are just doing a shtick, so all statements could be ironic. And if you read the irony too sincerely, you're the moron that doesn't get the joke. When they enter an IRC channel, they will often just try to say the shittiest thing possible right off the bat, as a litmus test - is this the kind of room where people get easily offended? If someone flips out, that's an easy target for trolling. If everybody is cool, and not easily upset by words, we can have a real conversation. That's the idea, at least.
For those of us that have been on the oldschool PD forum-boardings, you kinda know what I'm talking about. We would approach a forum with the intent of provoking the moderators' territorial impulses, to draw the controlling behavior out of them and then rally the locals against them. Like at wicca.com, we would shitpost in their wand threads - people would be posting pictures of their wands, we would be posting pix of bongs. And then we'd get to have an argument about the definition of a wand. The intent was to jar some of these people out of their uptight patterns, or to bring the anal-retentive behaviors to the surface, where they could be confronted. It's actually an altruistic, playful impulse, albeit a contentious one. But on a long enough timeline, a lot of us started to feel a real annoyance towards these people. You start to lose track of where the act is vs where your real feelings are. (This is why I quit trollin' and got on board with
the New Sincerity)
Cause when you're playing the shitbag character (like the Pterodactyl Handler), your brain is coming up with what defenses you'll use, how you'll dismiss the criticism of what you're doing - I mean, it's only a game! But those rationalizations are real.
Recent Posts
