My husband and I were discussing the gloomy possibility of another Bush vs. Clinton campaign, the outcome of which would mean the presidency was held by a member of those two families from 1988-2020, with an 8 year intermission by Obama. This is undemocratic, in opposition to everything intended in Article II of the Constitution, and unhealthy. We might as well have a constitutional monarchy.

So then we were trying to figure out how else to choose a president. We thought of single combat, a Hunger Games arena, drawing lots, and other such things. Then I suggested a test. It was a joke, but the more I thought about it the better of an idea it seemed. (It would of course be extremely difficult to find the judges.) So I came up with a test that I would like my president to have been awesome on.

It measures the following things: critical thinking and analysis, knowledge of basic economics and political theory, creative thinking, ability to deal with hostile people, perception/observation, and persuasiveness.

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Analyze the Supreme Court’s decision in Windsor through the lens of 1) at least 5 different Federalist Papers; and 2) the writings of John Locke. Cite to primary sources only. Explain your reasoning clearly.

Prepare a monthly budget and an annual federal tax return for the following families. Each family has a combined income of 10% less than the county’s median household income. None of the families has a mortgage interest deduction.

A) A married lesbian couple in Contra Costa County, California with three teenaged children. One spouse commutes to San Francisco daily.

B) A widowed woman supporting children aged 2,4, and 7, and her 52 year old disabled mother in Lake County, Indiana.

C) A “traditional” family of 4 with 2 school-aged children in Randolph County, Georgia.

D) A young married couple with an infant in Indiana County, Pennsylvania. One spouse has a student loan debt of $402.78 per month and is a small business owner.

Spend 1 week working the customer service line for a major cable provider. Don’t get fired.

Write a love sonnet to a person you are courting.

Take the train from Washington D.C. to New York City and identify as many infrastructure and economic problems as you can. Write a speech that sells to Congress your ideas about how to fix these problems. Think broadly, but be detailed.

Aaaaaaand – the latest round of blogger issues leads me to throw on my attorney hat and expound upon the First Amendment, because that’s what always gets thrown around when there is disagreement on the Internet. Here’s the context:

This week began with the blogger who ran “Requires Hate” being uncloaked as Benjanun Sriduangkaew, who has been publishing stories to acclaim within the SFF community. The week ended with the Guardian running a piece by YA author Kathleen Hale in which she described stalking someone who gave her a one-star review on Goodreads. In between, Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist critic of video games, canceled an appearance because she thought Utah State University was responding insufficiently to a horrific terrorist threat against her. It was, in short, an ugly week on the Internet.

There has been a lot of discussion, argument, and hurt feelings about all three of these incidents. I have no personal stake in any of them – I don’t even follow the actors on twitter.

Do I approve of “doxxing” (the practice of putting out personal information about an enemy online via documents)? Not generally. I suppose there might be a situation in which I did, but the Requires Hate and the Kathleen Hale incidents are not among them.

Do I approve of stalking? Absolutely not.

Do I think bloggers should be able to write what they want to about a book (even if it’s hateful and vitriolic)? Yes. Criticism and dissent are important to a healthy society.

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The text of the First Amendment is this:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” (Emphasis mine.)

Later the Amendment was expanded to cover all government entities (i.e. state and local governments), not just Congress. The First Amendment was written to protect people from getting thrown in jail for criticizing the government. It has expanded to include lots of other forms of speech and even non-verbal forms of expression (dance, art, film). It is why we are allowed to say that the President is wrong or Congress is full of bone-headed goof-offs.

First Amendment cases that go to court are usually about whether or not the government has the right to prohibit a particular form of speech, such as picketing or heckling the city council. Cases often go to court when a town makes an ordinance forbidding pornography or hate speech, and the question for the court is whether the regulation has a “chilling effect” on free speech. These cases often get muddy because multiple issues are involved and have to be disentangled. It is not an easy issue.

Anita Sarkeesian’s First Amendment rights were trumped by the Second Amendment because Utah State University, a governmental entity, was unable to provide security for her to speak due to Utah’s gun laws. What’s important for this argument is that the person who threatened Sarkeesian did not violate her First Amendment rights by suppressing speech; the threatener was a private person. The threat was horrible and criminal, but has nothing to do with Sarkeesian’s constitutional rights. The University, on the other hand, did facilitate a “chilling effect” on her speech by not providing a safe place, and the Utah gun laws in effect suppressed her free speech rights. So violation of the First Amendment by the state is potentially implicated in the situation. (It would be a tough case.)

However, writing a review panning someone’s book is not protected by the First Amendment. Calling someone a racist is not protected by the First Amendment. Neither is being a racist. Shutting off comments to a blog or deleting an account from a social media network are perfectly legal things to do and infringe upon no one’s First Amendment rights.

Sometimes speech is dangerous or hurtful to a person. The legal system is set up to handle that through civil tort law – injury law – pertaining to defamation of character and libel or slander. As an additional check, some states have anti-SLAPP laws, which keep a plaintiff from being able to use the legal system itself to coerce a particular form of speech or behavior. The criminal system also has ways for harmful speech to be dealt with. Threatening someone online is a violation of federal law. Stalking is a criminal offense. The victim in these situations is protected by the justice system.

But not by the First Amendment.

A person who has made seemingly defamatory statements has the right to be free of threats or harassment from the subject, because those are criminal activities. A person who has been defamed has the right to sue, because defamation is an actionable injury under the American tort system.

When people cite to the First Amendment as the reason person X should be allowed to write mean things about person Y on the Internet, or when they say their free speech rights are being violated by other people arguing with them, or claim that censorship is being imposed because they got kicked off Facebook, or whatever, they are inaccurate. The First Amendment has nothing to do with what people say online provided that there is no law telling them what they can say or not say. Citing to the First Amendment to protect the right to call someone a social justice warrior or to claim a book is full of racism is meaningless.

What protects private speech among individuals is something called a “social contract” – an unspoken agreement that people make with each other in order to keep society functional. If you write something that is outside the bounds of the established social norm for speech, you’re going to get pushback. On the other hand, if people try to restrict criticism too much, they will get pushback. Factionalization in favor of one party or the other arises when there is disagreement about what the limits of the norm are. Social norms evolve over time. Law exists to step in when the social contract is insufficient to resolve a dispute.

Are hate reviews okay? I think they are a pretty vile thing to do (and if you are a person who gets your jollies by savaging other people you might ask yourself what you are afraid of and why you feel powerless), but they are not illegal. On the other hand, if a community as a whole decides it has had enough and wants to ostracize the hate reviewer, the community is allowed to do that. Speech has consequences. Sometimes the consequences are unpleasant. And the First Amendment is not a shield for the violation of the social contract.

My son and his friends used to play a variation of freeze tag where an extra variable was the “hot lava”; if you stepped on the playlot woodchips, you “fell into hot lava” and were frozen until someone could untag you. This was in addition to the chance of being frozen in the ordinary way by getting tagged by “It” no matter where you were. If the person who was It stepped on the woodchips, she or he was frozen for five seconds and everyone else had a chance to escape. The kids put down pieces of wood, jackets, other toys, whatever they could find to make islands of safety in the “lava.”

This seems to me like a really useful metaphor for social media and online harassment of people, particularly (but not exclusively) women and minorities. You think you’re come to play ordinary freeze tag and then, once you’re in, you learn about the hot lava and the many many many place where you aren’t actually safe. Meanwhile if It steps in the wrong place, It only has to wait a while a few seconds. It will claim that being frozen for a few seconds is fair because the game couldn’t continue if It is frozen. It will claim that the other players have lots of places to go and friends to help them and they just have to avoid the lava. Of course, It is still allowed to tag them if they’re on an island.

It’s hard to know where to start talking about online harassment and hostility. Do I talk about the vile racist tweets made on a Muslim-American writer? Do I talk about women game designers receiving rape and death threats that they fear enough to leave their homes? Do I talk about the woman whose anonymous book reviews have been called toxic and vicious and who is now getting blowback since she’s been outed? Do I talk about misogyny and racism issued from people in many subcultures? Do I talk about the vitriol exchanged on any topic (you name it)?

There will always be some people who harass, threaten, stalk, or otherwise intentionally hurt others online. Nature abhors a vacuum – someone will always be there to fill a vacated spot and continue to spew hate and venom. We can only work to reduce it. Some harassers are probably genuine sociopaths under DSM-V criteria, incapable of feeling empathy. Some of them are young risk-takers, still experimenting with being in the world, who will grow out of it when they realize that there is actual pain on the other end and it’s not just a game. But I think most of the determined harassers are people who are very very frightened. They are so frightened they don’t even know it and have internalized it. It comes out as hate.

Acknowledgment of this fear is what I see lacking in most discussions about online harassment. The conversation turns into what to do about the trolls, not why are they trolls in the first place. They are objectified as soulless hate-mongers who need to be eradicated or barricaded off. There’s little talk about what (besides actual mental illness) leads people to be so angry in the first place.

I should say clearly here that I am not intending to diminish a victim’s sense of powerlessness and defilement. I am not saying harassment is okay. I am not saying people should not take social and legal means to stop harassers.

But solving the problem of one individual harasser, whether by blocking accounts or by sending him or her to jail, doesn’t solve the problem of harassment overall.

The world is full of instability and danger. Norms are constantly changing, leaving nothing to grab hold of. There’s no easy way to get off the spinning carousel.

The world is full of loneliness. Humans are social animals gifted and cursed with self-awareness, with an “I” that is fundamentally single. This is scary.

Online, you don’t have to wait for a reaction, which is an interaction, a strike against loneliness. You know you aren’t solitary. In real life, you go to a shitty, stressful job where you have to work work work fast fast fast for hours at a time, but when you leave you can get online and have power yourself. It’s heady. The insane speed at which American life is lived, in physical life and on the internet, also provides instant gratification and a sense of efficacy.

The world is full of noise. Noise covers up the terrifying silence, the sense of being alone. It hides the danger.

But speed and noise and constant interaction keep you from experiencing yourself. Coping mechanisms address symptoms, not root causes. There’s a reason prophets go out wandering in the wilderness: in stillness and silence and solitude, they gain self-knowledge and authenticity that is difficult if not impossible to learn in daily life. And self-knowledge is usually uncomfortable.

It’s also a crucial part of what makes us human.

We have created a culture that helps us hide from ourselves. Is it any wonder that this internal contradiction sometimes expresses itself in hatred of anything that threatens to strip away that protection? Harassing someone is just one way of holding down the fort that has been built with so much effort. It’s much easier and more comfortable to deride the people who make you start to question your beliefs or who in their otherness make you aware of your singularity than it is to listen to them and go down that difficult path. Hate is safety.

This isn’t where I expected this blog post to go. It certainly doesn’t have any practical applications for people who are being harassed online. I’m not expecting victims of harassment to suddenly turn the other cheek and love their enemy, nor am I expecting harassers to go to a meditation retreat. Most of us are not saints or prophets; we have our breaking points. Further, online harassment should not be ignored. It should be taken seriously and treated as the assault crime that it is. Remedies for victims need to be more immediate, more accessible, and more permanent.

But yelling “These assholes need to stop!” isn’t having much effect either, because social and cultural forces much larger than social media are in play. The only way we’re going to reduce hate in the world is by making the world safer for self-discovery and self-knowledge. This is a group effort, and a long-tem effort, and a difficult effort. Changes need to be made in how human beings grow up perceiving the world, in how we listen and relate to each other, in how we exercise our own agency, in how we rank what we value. When we can, we should forgive more, shame less, and try to be truer to our own best selves.