Ah, the joys of someone with power who just encountered their first bonkers comments section. Via Wired:

Did you hear the one about the New York state lawmakers who forgot about the First Amendment in the name of combating cyberbullying and “baseless political attacks”? Proposed legislation in both chambers would require New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.” No votes on the measures have been taken. But unless the First Amendment is repealed, they stand no chance of surviving any constitutional scrutiny even if they were approved. Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte said the legislation would cut down on “mean-spirited and baseless political attacks” and “turns the spotlight on cyberbullies by forcing them to reveal their identity.”

It’s easy to make fun of the late Sen. Ted Stevens’ for his description of the internet as “a series of tubes,” or to get irritated with legislators who aren’t particularly tech-savvy. But this kind of inexperience has consequences: as ludicrous as this legislation is, and even if it would be struck down immediately, a bill like this eats up the energy of people who have to explain that it’s a bad idea, unimplementable, and ultimately unconstitutional.

But even beyond the bill itself, this is an interesting illustration of how inexplicable internet culture is to people who don’t actively participate it. I imagine it’s hard for Assemblyman Conte to imagine the incredibly dreadful things people are willing to say under their real names, and in forms that show up on their social networks. Maybe he doesn’t have things that he urgently needs to tell someone but that he can’t risk saying under his own name. And perhaps he’s never encountered a forum that he urgently feels the need to participate in, but doesn’t feel that he can join the conversation as himself, and by participating learned how self-policing works. There’s no lost age of internet civility that can be restored with legally unenforceable accountability requirements. There are just different kinds of intimacy that, if you haven’t experienced them, are hard to fathom and embrace.

Meghan Daum’s essay in the Believer on internet commenting is, I think, a fairly even-handed example of the species. She acknowledges that our discourse has always had its share of venemousness, that she isn’t actually required to read these comments. But I think she’s a bit too quick to dismiss comment moderation and community building:

But there is a world of difference between the traditional notion of public participation in a newspaper or magazine and the cacophonous, sometimes libelous free-for-all that passes for it today. Whereas the old-fashioned letter to the editor involved crafting a letter, figuring out where to send it, springing for a stamp, and knowing that its publication-worthiness would be determined by an actual editor who might even call and suggest some actual edits, today’s readers are invited to “join the conversation” as if the work of professional reporters and columnists carries no more authority than small-talk at a cocktail party. And although some sites are making efforts to weed out the trolls by disabling anonymous posting, filtering comments through Facebook, or letting readers essentially monitor themselves by flagging or promoting comments at their own discretion, most are so desperate to catch eyeballs wherever and however possible that they’re loathe to turn down any form of free content.

Obviously it’s not easy to moderate comments and to foster a community where a health conversation can actually happen. It’s something that takes a lot of your writers’ time if, like me or Ta-Nehisi, you read and moderate comments yourself. And if you don’t want to do that, you have to hire a community manager or managers. But I certainly think there are examples out there of successful efforts. And I think it’s probably worth interrogating the idea that moderation kills traffic or commenting communities: I think it’s much more likely that people don’t moderate because they don’t make the effort. I’m unpersuaded that the people who occasionally show up here to decry liberals or inform me about the evils of Muslims are carrying more traffic with them than they drive away. It’s a much more fruitful pursuit to figure out how we can create civilized spaces than to lament some sort of collective loss of civility. I think we should be open to a whole gradient of walled gardens, from moderated comments sections, to places like Metafilter where you have to pay to join the conversation as a demonstration of seriousness.

The most interesting question Daum raises, I think, is whether commenting and the internet have changed the way we write. She says she never would have published an essay she wrote in the mid-nineties about sex and HIV if she had to publish it in the environment writers face today. But Emily Gould did write a long essay about her own self-absorption in the New York Times Magazine when she knew she’d likely get dismantled in the comments section. And if web publishing existed in the same form then that it does now, Daum might not have had to cut down her essay to the point of unrecognizability to get it published by a respectable outlet. The way she describes it makes it sound like a perfect fit for The Awl. But even if you lose some ability to be personally revelatory, the huge benefit of blogging in particular is the ability to try out ideas, to play with different parts of arguments, and to test-drive different pieces of evidence, and to refine your ideas into a final product. We might be able to be less personally vulnerable on the internet, but I think it’s probably worth it in exchange for being able to do intellectual growth in public and with the benefit of feedback and allies.

The bridge is yours.

-For the distinguished meth or television connoisseur in your life, Walter White sneakers.

-The cultural exchange that made the Tintin story The Blue Lotus so good.

-Watchmen 2 is a thing. Everything is terrible.

-Sounds like Valentine Wiggin’s going to have true grit.

-Are we on our way to usage-based billing?

This post contains spoilers through the first two sections of Neuromancer. For next week, we’ll read section three.

When Conan O’Brien spoke at Harvard’s commencement in 2000, he joked about a number of predictions he’d made in a (presumably fake) high school graduation speech 15 years earlier:

I would like to make several predictions about what the future will hold: “I believe that one day a simple Governor from a small Southern state will rise to the highest office in the land. He will lack political skill, but will lead on the sheer strength of his moral authority. I believe that Justice will prevail and, one day, the Berlin Wall will crumble, uniting East and West Berlin forever under Communist rule. I believe that one day, a high speed network of interconnected computers will spring up world-wide, so enriching people that they will lose their interest in idle chit chat and pornography.

I start our discussion of William Gibson’s Neuromancer because it’s impossible to read this novel, published the year I was born, without thinking about what he thought the internet might look like and what it actually does—for most of us, anyway. I’m intrigued by the novel’s description of the internet as like”

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .

I think for some people, that’s true. But I think for most folks, the internet just makes their world a little bigger instead of a lot larger, it makes their world easier to handle rather than turning it surreal. On the other hand, most of us aren’t actually innovators, we’re not plugged in actively testing the limits of what our enabling technologies can do and what societal rules suggest we ought to want to do. Our personal geography is not like Ninsei, where, as Case tells us, “burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.” Reading a novel’s a form of tourism.
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