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    Astroturf and Masturbation

    I keep stumbling across today's boring competition over which dag commenter can be more offensive, and Georges Monbiot and Barry Eisler have me wondering whether I am reading astroturfers or masturbators, or both.

    First Monbiot, in the Guardian:

    There's a wider cyberwar being fought, of which you hear much less. And in most cases the landlords, with the help of a mercenary army, are winning. ... I'm talking about the daily attempts to control and influence content in the interests of the state and corporations: attempts in which money talks. ... The weapon used by both state and corporate players is a technique known as astroturfing.
    Reading comment threads on the Guardian's sites and elsewhere on the web, two patterns jump out at me. The first is that discussions of issues in which there's little money at stake tend to be a lot more civilised than debates about issues where companies stand to lose or gain billions: such as climate change, public health and corporate tax avoidance. These are often characterised by amazing levels of abuse and disruption.

    Articles about the environment are hit harder by such tactics than any others. I love debate, and I often wade into the threads beneath my columns. But it's a depressing experience, as instead of contesting the issues I raise, many of those who disagree bombard me with infantile abuse, or just keep repeating a fiction, however often you discredit it. This ensures that an intelligent discussion is almost impossible – which appears to be the point.

    Abuse, disruption ... does any of that sound familiar?

    The internet is a remarkable gift, which has granted us one of the greatest democratic opportunities since universal suffrage. We're in danger of losing this global commons as it comes under assault from an army of trolls and flacks, many of them covertly organised or trained. The question for all of us – the Guardian, other websites, and everyone who benefits from this resource – is what we intend to do about it. It's time we fought back and reclaimed the internet for what it does best: exploring issues, testing ideas, opening the debate.


    On his own blog, Eisler asserts in How To Argue that even the non-astroturfers are too busy stroking their egos to actually put forth a convincing argument:

    I have a feeling most people who suck at argument believe they're actually good at it. They're not, and in fact they're not even arguing -- they're masturbating. Good argument is intended to persuade another. Masturbation is intended to pleasure the self. It's the people who can't tell the difference who mistakenly think they're good at argument. I hope this article will improve the effectiveness of people who are interested in good argument. And I hope it will help people who until now have been masturbating to recognize what they've been doing, and to stop doing it in public.
    When someone addresses you with sarcasm, or otherwise insults you, has it ever -- even once -- changed your mind? I doubt it. ... you should be able to realize that an insult is a useless tool of persuasion. In fact, it's been my experience and observation that insults not only fail to persuade, but have the opposite effect, because they engage the recipient's ego and consequently cause him to cling more tightly to his position (see the section below on Your Ego is Your Enemy).
    Because even the most elementary common sense demonstrates the futility and counterproductivity of insults as tools of persuasion, we have to ask why so many people choose to employ them. I see two possibilities: (i) the people who are doing so are shockingly stupid; (ii) the people who are doing so aren't actually interested in persuasion, but instead insult others primarily to pleasure themselves. Neither of these possibilities is attractive.


    It's a long article, worth reading. And it occurs to me that the techniques of rational argument Eisler recommends are the perfect antidote to the astroturfers that Monbiot complains about. If both sides are engaging in "infantile abuse," the astroturfers have the perfect cover, even justification to derail arguments and draw all attention to themselves, just as is happening on dag today. If we force ourselves to argue rationally, however, then it will be very clear who should be ignored.

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    Good write up donal. Disney has this campaign to teach kids appropriate use on the internet and one of their sayings is, "If you wouldn't do it in person don't do it online." I try to have conversations with people using that rule.


    It's anonymous name-handles....like mine...that encourages people to let their inner meaness loose on other anonymous name-handles. After all, a name is nothing more than an assortment of letters arranged in a coherent, recognizable pattern...they're not real because you'll never see the real person behind the anonymous name-handle. And if there's no way you could be reprimanded for your actions on line what's to stop you? If you get banned, you can always create another anonymous name-handle and go back and give them more. You see a lot of this behavior with on-line gaming. There's no Polite Police monitoring the internet...yet.


    Yes aninimity often breeds contemptible behavior. That is why I like to  limit my online interactions with people who are respectful. There is no polite police offline but most people manage just fine because there is an expected level of respect required.  I wouldn't continue having a discussion with someone engaging in the puerile habit of name calling. I don't see the point.

    All  in all my experience has been that overwhelmingly most people are polite. The ones who aren't just get noticed more.


    Great points brought up here, Donal.  Thanks for posting about it.


    In other words, too many arguments come off like the above image. Fractals that simply repeat themselves over and over. Getting smaller and smaller while adding nothing additional. They look interesting on paper, but contain no new information.


    Great visual.  It looks to me like one big mouth with lots of small eyes all around it, looking at it and looking elsewhere all at once.  Which, of course, isn't what it's supposed to represent, and yet...somehow it fits. 


    I think I'm not the only one who first thinks of Mandelbrot when he hears the name Monbiot. Wink


    Me too!


    Well I must confess...my approach is a casual discussion with an occasional and unintentional zinger every now and again coupled with a subtle change or two in a subject kinda related, but not too closely to the subject under discussion. You know, the same type of discussion you'd find in a local coffee shop with casual acquaintances you only see there. 


    Tickle Fairy says.... Watch out for those unintentional zingers.  They sometimes turn around and bite ya.  Or tickle ya.  Or both.


    Bite is more appropriate. His ticklishness is approaching terrible twos...only wants to eat candy, food is for play, and throws himself down and has a hissy fit if he can't get his way.


    I wish these people wouldn't always attack sarcasm though.  Good sarcasm, which is rare, is also an art.  That said, Donal, I've always had cheery relations around here.  Dag seems mostly quite civil.


    I appreciate this post because I had it all backwards. I thought the contest was about who could be the most defensive.

    I figured I could be a contender because I almost published a lot of things I wrote after quinn nearly called me a leotard the other day. For that matter, the title of this post really snapped my elastic because I thought for a vertiginous moment that Assange had dumped records of my High School soccer team into public view.

    In regards to the conversation killers Monbiot refers to, I am pretty sure there were a few participants at the old tpm cafe that were using the site as a training gym for their sport. While I see hurt feelings happening at dag, I haven't seen the culture jamming that proliferates in many other comment sections in the intrawebs.


    Oh moat, you crack me up big time! Thank you for that, it made my day!!!


    You will know a leotard by those spots on the astroturf. No dag isn't all that bad, but eternal vigilance, blah, blah, blah ...


    What you are saying about personal insults is important and I didn't mean to blow it off.

    As happened with your, Let Me Entertain You, post, you've got me thinking about what kind of conversations am I looking for. That question gets me wondering about what kind of conversations other people are looking for. 


    Donal, both articles are excellent thanks. God I've had more than my share of on-line tangles with Libertarians over the years, and they are perhaps some of the more strident, angry folks around. They remind me of the folks I used to tangle with when I participated in the hellish usenet wars, and yeah, they were a bunch of libertarians too, for the most part. So things haven't changed much since then. The best virtual discussion I've ever had were at The Well, and at Salon long ago when it was behind a paywall. Alt The Well, no one is anonymous and it you pay a monthly fee. It seems to allow folks to foster excellent on-line discussion. In fact I've gone back to The Well, because it really is fun.  There seem to be no hi-jacked discussions.  Flame wars never break out there, never. So those strategies seem to change the discussions.  But other than that, the usenet wars survive, and they always will.

    Flame on baby is the cry of the Libertarian Horde!!!

    Hey didn't Wolfy do an excellent "Interview with the Troll"! That one never fails to make me laugh hard.


    Seriously? It's all the Libertarians? ROTFLMAO. The only time I've ever had someone initiate conversation by flat-out calling me a "cocksucker" for voicing an online opinion about a politician was an Obama-loyalist Democrat. The tactic was hardly isolated to myself.

    Being shitty online is probably one of the few truly bipartisan endeavors left to Americans. Don't sell Democrats short ... some of the biggest assholes on the tubez are Democrats.


    The article in the Guardian cited by Donal is about Libertarians. 

    Ahh mean people, they certainly are everywhere and it is easy to call names on the internet. But I was drawing a connection between the article and my own little experience. Let me tell you my story:

    At one time during the usenet wars of the 1990's, I had two jobs and was in Grad School at the time, one job was working for a BBS (20 hours a week), and the other was working for the Ballet, I designed their database and of course ran the database and the office (20 hours a week). At the same time while in school I did some work for a local state Senator (internship), so I participated in several usenet political discussion groups. I was one of the only folks on the Senators Staff at the time who knew anything about electronic communication, I'd just given a big presenation at SER's yearly conference, it was 1994 - 1995. I was stalked by an on-line horde (not really a horde but it was to me, although there were just two of them)  I was almost  33,  as they found me, came to my place of work, followed me home, stalked me, attempted to intimidate me, threatened my life, followed me daily to the ferry, and the coup d'gras, was the day I walked out of a night class and they were both there,  they didn't say a word, but they followed me to my car, and really just seemed to try to intimidate me to no end, to make sure I would just stop. As I left class, my friend Jeff was with me, and I asked him to walk with me as they followed me, "It's them," I whispered to him, his eyebrow shot up.  They said nothing as we walked to the parking lot, but they trailed behind us, not too far. It was scary and it was weird. The State Senator I was interning for, called the authorities, the very next day, as I told her what had happened the evening prior, and for two months I had security every time  I went to the Senators office, everywhere. Finally they gave up, they tried everything to get me to shut up,  they called the Senators office, trying to get me fired, they called the Ballet, trying to get me fired, my thesis committee head received a phone call about me. They called my house at all hours, one time waking answer the phone around 3 AM and someone telling me to be careful when I went to work the next day. I seriously have no respect or regard for libertarians as in my life they have had no boundaries to speak of, no limits on how they will stop people from disagreeing with them. I've never had anyone else do that to me, not ever, not a democrat, not a republican, no one else.   To me that article exemplifies exactly what I went through. You and I will have to agree to disagree, because we will never see eye to eye on this subject. But I believe my experiences are valid.  You never will, so how about we agree to disagree, because we are never going to see eye to eye on this subject.


    Well said (and civilly, too), Donal. I'll try harder to watch my own responses to those who push my buttons. It's difficult to know whether to reply or not when assertions are wrapped in insults. Leave the assertions unopposed? Get tangled up in the insults? All I can say is, I'l be more selective about my replies. Thanks, Donal.

    Thanks also to cmaukonen for the nice fractal. I think it was "Nova" that did a show on it just last night. I learned a lot.


    Talk about bait and switch! I thought we were going to talk about having fun at the ballpark!


    I wince whenever I scroll past that headline. Have you ever felt Astroturf, stilli? I'm open to novel perversions, but that's just not my idea of fun. Not at all!


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