An exploration of internet harassment and hate campaigns, looking at mob mentality, how those who respond aggressively may feel they are being attacked and how to deal with these angry people. Produced by Ian Danskin it is divided into 6 parts as follows:
Part 1: A Short History of Anita Sarkeesian
Part 2: Angry Jack
Part 3: Perception is Everything
Part 4: An Autopsy on GamerGate
Part 5: "The Good Guy"
Part 6: Talking to Angry Jack
Following the release of the films Danskin has responded to specific critisims of some of the content:
Regadring part 3, spooky-scaryfeminist asked:
So I was liking yr "Why Are You So Angry" series ok until you started throwing neurodivergent people under the bus. Privileged group members not having empathy for people over whom they have privilege is certainly not uncommon. While taking that to the extreme of wanting to threaten and kill Anita Sarkeesian is very uncommon, it does not automatically make those people mentally ill. Characterizing all violent people as ND makes the world very unsafe for us! Please don't do it.
Danskin repsonds:
Shit, this is a totally fair point. When saying that some of the most extreme offenders may exhibit symptoms of psychopathy, I didn’t mean to imply that all psychopathic or sociopathic people are hateful or dangerous, or that every harasser is a psychopath. I don’t believe either of those things. And I realize that saying “Jack is not a psychopath” essentially allows “psychopath” to function as a shorthand for “extreme harasser.” That’s not what I intended, but intentions are bullshit - I should’ve used better language. It’s super easy to see behavior that, on the surface, resembles a medical classification and just use that classification to describe the behavior, but that’s ableist and disrespectful. Wish I’d caught it sooner.
Part 6 provoked another dicsussion, as detalied below:
I ended up in a very enlightening conversation with Lindsay Ellis and Zoe Quinn on Twitter, which someone’s shown the kindness of Storifying. It’s made me re-evaluate the back half of Why Are You So Angry Part 6.
The thrust of Part 6, the point that the entire series is building up to, is that Jack - the person privileged people become when they want to dismiss realities that make them uncomfortable - is a problem that communities have to take responsibility for. I feel that, too often, people who are not the victims of abuse don’t take that responsibility, which leaves the people who arebeing abused to deal with it. The actionable advice I gave was that we, privileged people who have most certainly been Angry Jack at various times in our lives, need to engage with him when he shows his face. His rhetoric is an enticing narrative that tells people feminism and racial politics and social issues aren’t worth thinking about. When people are figuring themselves out online, they come across this rhetoric, and I think it’s dangerous for them to see it go unchallenged - it leaves the internet a training ground for proto-Angry Jacks.
What I tried to stress in the videos is that challenging Jack is not about convincing him, but about mitigating the damage his words can have on communities.
My feeling was that I, as a privileged person, can get away with kicking a hornets’ nest. The angle I’d never considered, likely because I and the people who helped me make the video have never been on the receiving end of this kind of backlash, is splash damage. That when you engage with Jack, there are often bystanders. That privilege may protect me, but it doesn’t protect everyone in the blast radius. That if I engage with Jack about Anita, he might just go attack Anita in retaliation. The thing about hornets is they don’t only sting the person who kicks the hive.
Zoe says a lot of harassed people she’s worked with through Crash Override are suffering from this kind of attack. Lindsay says that she got shit from people when Tauriq Moosa left Twitter, which she had nothing to do with. This is an angle I sincerely wish I’d considered while I was still making the video.
Based on their advice, I suggest asking the following questions if you want to engage with Jack:
Are you trying to convince him? If so, you need to be someone he’s willing to be convinced by. Zoe mentions you’d either have to be a friend he has some investment in or an authority figure he respects. If you’re a rando on the internet, it likely won’t happen.
Are you trying to reach proto-Jack before this rhetoric takes hold? Then perhaps Jack need not be part of the equation. Maybe write something on a different platform, try to reach that audience on your own turf, and perhaps offer them links to what you write. Siphon them away from Jack. Cultivate your own space and your own audience.
Where is the conversation taking place? If you’re on a forum with good moderation that will clamp down on anything that starts to get threatening, then maybe engaging can yield a fruitful discussion. But, then, that’s not using Jack to reach his audience, that’s once again talking to someone who might still be salvageable - if he were beyond reason he’d already be banned. If people are going full-on Angry Jack and no authority is intervening, maybe that community is already lost. Either volunteer as a mod, advocate for a change in policy, or invite people to a different community.
Be advised, these thoughts are off the top of my head based on one conversation. I take as long as I do to make videos because I want them to be thorough and well-researched. Zoe offers a good resource for debunking misinformation constructively which I’ll be reading shortly, and I’m still working my way through Civility in the Digital Age. I’ll make a proper video update when I can quote more authorities on the subject. The main takeaway for now is that engaging with Jack for purely educational purposes is likely going to cause harm for others. As Lindsay says, it is valuable to talk aboutJack or around Jack, and perhaps in certain instances you can speak privately to Jack, but by and large it is safest to model a constructive conversation while leaving Jack himself out of it. And, even then, you need to be hyper-aware of what kind of effect that may have on the people being discussed.
I do recommend reading the entire Storify, and I thank Zoe and Lindsay for taking the time to have that conversation with me.