https://calacanis.com/?s=We+Live+in+...+of+empathy%29

We Live in Public (and the end of empathy)
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I’ve been thinking about empathy and the Internet non-stop for the past week. If you, the jury, will give me some room to operate, I think I’ve got a couple of important, if imperfect, points to share. It might take me some time to get there; two or three thousand words to be exact.

This past week, I camped out at the Sundance Film Festival for the premiere of a documentary film about my friend Josh Harris titled “We Live in Public.” It’s a cautionary tale about the dehumanizing effects of technology, a somber topic that we all need to consider in the age ofFacebook, blogging, linkbaiting, and, sadly, the MySpace and JustinTV suicides.

On Saturday night, I sat between director Ondi Timoner and Josh Harris while the film was given the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary. Winning at Sundance is the highest honor in documentary filmmaking according to most–even more so than the Oscar. It was one of the most epic and cathartic moments to which I’ve ever been witness. After ten years of work,Ondi had been given the ultimate recognition and after a lifetime of, well, living, Josh had his story told.

It was heavy.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself… Perhaps we should start at the beginning: Early 2001, New York City.

The Breakdown

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Back in the late ’90s, one of my best friends was a guy named Josh Harris. He formed a company called Jupiter Communications which wrote all those crazy research reports in the Web 1.0 days that said Internet advertising, broadband and e-commerce would shoot to the moon like a rocket over the first decade of the Internet. And they were right.

Josh had a front row seat to the Internet Revolution writing those reports, and he made around $80 million when Jupiter went public. He lost it just as quickly when he started experimenting with technology.

One day, he came to my office and couldn’t look me in the eye.

It was one of those horrible, ugly New York City winter days. The ones where it’s not cold enough for the dirty snow to completely melt from the pounding sleet, making the walk to get a cup of coffee feel like theIditarod . Josh rocked back and forth in a chair and repeated a couple of random phrases to me: “The jig’s up, can’t do it, jig’s up, can’t do it–gotta get off the grid.”

I tried to comfort him. I explained that he used to be one of my favorite people to break bread with, that he had inspired me to try and do great things, and that I’d learned more from his outlandish failures than I ever did from my modest successes. However, he had become boring and obsessed with his press clippings. “Did you see Vanity Fair? We’re in the Post tomorrow!,” he would tell me toward the end. I’d ask what the press was for, and the answer placed him directly between Andy and Paris on the unknown-but-famous-anyway spectrum: “For being me!”

Later that slushy day, Josh took a couple of bags and the last of his dwindling fortune to his newly acquired apple farm in upstate New York. He had literally–two beats, please–bought the farm.

The Background

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Josh had spent the last couple of months working on two art projects examining what happens when you put yourself under non-stop Internet surveillance.

One was called Quiet and one was called “We Live in Public.” The first, Quiet, was an art project that was famous in New York City’s downtown circles around the turning of the millennium. Josh had a couple dozen folks in a bunker for 30 days living in “pods” (bunks) that included cameras watching their every move. He tried to get me to move into the “hotel,” but I knew it wasn’t a good idea when I saw the people running around naked on psychoactive drugs, firingsubmachine guns. That’s not an exaggeration–that was happening in the basement of this Tribeca building.

You’ll see all this footage if you see the movie. It was madness.

Quiet was shut down by Giuliani’s nightclub task force as a millennial cult 18 months before 9/11–the milestone by which most New Yorkers, including myself, mark our lives. For me, everything in my memory is eitherpre- or post-9/11. Quiet, Silicon Alley Reporter and my adolescence are all pre-9/11. Adulthood, gravitas and the fallout from the undiagnosed PTSD are all post-9/11. (But that’s for another medium, perhaps one with covers as opposed to headers).

In the second experiment, “We Live in Public,” Josh put a couple dozen cameras all over his loft and recorded the inevitable breakdown of his life with the love of his life, Tanya. It was after “We Live in Public” that Josh came to see me, a character witness to his nervous breakdown, before heading to the farm.

People in the chat rooms for “We Live in Public” were vicious to Josh and his then-girlfriend Tanya. They lost their empathy for the people living under video surveillance, and what had started as a fun time playing with technology turned into a nightmare. The audience tortured the subjects in the box–Milgram would have been proud.

It took Josh five years to recover from the “We Live in Public” experiment. I’m wondering how long it will take the rest of us to hit rock bottom and recover.

Godwin’s Law Meets Harris’ Law

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Josh’s experiments in 2000, during which he and his cohorts became obsessed with their view counts, parallels today’s blogging, social media and YouTube “arms race.” In his experiment, the technology robbed the subjects–and their audience–of every last ounce of empathy.

Digital communications is a wonderful thing–at least at the start. Everyone participating in digital communities is eventually introduced to Godwin’s Law: At some point, a participant, or more typically his or her thinking, will be compared to the Nazis. But that’s only part of the breakdown. Eventually, you see the effect of what I’ll call Harris’ Law: At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person.

Harris’ Law took effect last year when Abraham Biggs killed himself in front of a live webcam audience on life-streaming service JustinTV. The audience’s role? They encouraged him to do it.

Harris’ law took effect in October of 2006, when Lori Drew, a grown woman, created a fake alias on MySpace (”Josh Evans”) in order to psychologically torture 14-year-old Megan Meier. Drew started a online love affair with Megan as “Evans” before pulling the rug out and viciously turning on her victim. This “cyber-bullying,” as the press likes to call it, resulted in Megan killing herself.

Harris’ Law took effect in October of last year when Choi Jin-sil killed herself, reportedly over the fallout from Internet rumors. The bullying in Korea has become so intense that you’re now required to use your Social Security Number to sign up for a social network. This lack of anonymity is one of the most enlightened things I’ve heard of from one of the most advanced–if not the most advanced–Internet communities in the world.

Ownership of one’s behavior? Who knew?!?!?

I’m sure some of the wacky Internet contingents will flame me for saying that anonymity is a bad thing, but the fact is that anonymous environments create the environments in which Godwin’s and Harris’ Laws apply. What’s the point of starting these communities if they eventually end in pain and suffering? Anonymity is overrated in my book. (Whistle-blowers are an exception, and last time I checked, anyone can anonymously drop an envelope in a mailbox, so it’s not like the Internet needs to be there for that).

Internet Asperger’s Syndrome (IAS)

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I’ve come to recognize a new disorder, the underlying cause of Harris’ Law. This disease affects people when their communication moves to digital, and the emotional cues of face-to-face interaction–including tone, facial expression and the so called “blush response”–are lost (More: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FxwHfoWdS8 ).

In this syndrome, the afflicted stops seeing the humanity in other people. They view individuals as objects, not individuals. The focus on repetitive behaviors–checking email, blogging, twittering and retiring andys–combines with an inability to feel empathy and connect with people.

Now, I’m not using this new term to make light of Asperger’s Syndrome. Far from it, I jsut can’t deny the fact that the evolution of people’s behavior online eventually parallels Asperger’s. I feel I’m within my rights as pundit to reconstitute the idea of Asperger’s to explain my own experiences and thoughts. Although I’ll understand it if you, as someone affected in some way by Asperger’s, claim your right to flame me for “hijacking” the disease. Such is the life of linguists in the age of sound-bites over debate, and skimming over reading.

If you do choose to flame me, I’d ask that you attempt to throttle back your IAS and see me not as an email-producing object, but rather as a 38-year-old searching for answers at the mid-way point in his life, when his collective experience equals his remaining time to experience life. That’s really who I am–just another kid on verge of being old who spends a lot of time thinking about the half-way mark. Be gentle with me.

Back to the point: In IAS, screen names and avatars shift from representing people to representing characters in a video game. Our 2600’s and 64’s have trained us to pound these characters into submission in order to level up. We look at bloggers, people on Twitter andpodcasters not as individuals, but as challenges–in some cases, “bosses”–that we must crush to make it to the next phase.

The dual nature of Asperger’s, from my understanding, is that it makes the individual focused on very specific behaviors–obsessively so in many cases–while decreasing their capacity for basic empathy and communication. It’s almost as if you trade off intensity in one area for common decency and communications in another area–not that the person has a choice.

Well, trading off people’s feelings for page views and Twitter followers sounds familiar to me.

cont. at https://calacanis.com/?s=We+Live+in+...+of+empathy%29