Terrible Idea (.net)

This is going to be a long one…

A couple days ago I wrote about “internet justice” and its possible ill effect.  Jay replied in a comment, countering a few of my assumptions.  He made me realize that I hadn’t fully expressed what really bothered me about the story, and as I tried to fully express it, I realized that I didn’t fully agree with what I had written.  So, this post will be a two-parter.  Part I will be a re-working of the thoughts I was trying to express in the first post.  Then, in Part II, I’ll talk about my thoughts after having taken Jay’s comment into account.

I.

First, that article was poorly chosen to illustrate the worries I have — it is about a criminal case, and it is much more about the search than the carrying out of justice.  When the internet community found the car thief, they turned it over to the police, where it was prosecuted in the normal fashion.  I’m worried more about the situations where the criminal justice system won’t take over, because the perceived transgression isn’t a real crime.

The book I linked to in the original post, The Future of Reputation, has a perfect example in the first few pages of its introduction.  (As before, a disclaimer: I haven’t read the full book.)  In the example, a college student in South Korea who was caught on camera letting her dog poop on a subway train, and not cleaning it up.  As disgusting, rude, and even illegal as this may be, she didn’t deserve the backlash she got — information about her family was published online, and she was publicly shamed, and eventually forced to drop out of school.

This worries me.  It looks very much like Girard’s scapegoat mechanism.  I won’t go into all of the details of the scapegoat mechanism (which I studied in undergrad, and has shaped a lot of my thought), but the basic idea is that tensions in society build, until a point where they are released by the scapegoating of a single sacrificial individual.  All that is wrong with society is placed on one entity, and that entity is cast out, providing a cathartic release to the tensions.

This mechanism makes bearable the natural tensions and high tempers that are bound to flare whenever people live with one another in a society, but it is unjust to those who become the scapegoats.  From a Girardean perspective, our system of laws has developed as a way to resolve disputes and ease social tensions without resorting to the scapegoat mechanism.  But it is always lurking in the background.

Today, you don’t need to search too hard to find someone who will talk your ear off about how there are a ton of assholes in the world.  In a city, where you rarely if ever have to encounter the same person twice, it is nothing to be rude to a stranger.  This leads to tension.  Everyone hates all those rude people they encounter on the streets, and everyone loves to complain about them.  When the girl in South Korea didn’t clean up her dog’s mess, something snapped.

Read Don Park’s account of the incident.  People finally had someone on whom they could pin all of their pent-up rage, built up for all of those moments of rudeness on the streets.  They finally had their scapegoat, and they went at her with a vengance.  Don Park has it right when he calls it a witch hunt.

So this is what worries me about “internet justice” — because it is carried out by the mob, it has the very real danger of not being justice at all.

II.

OK, now, Jay commented on the original post, not the reworking I just did, but his point is still applicable.  Here’s the heart of what he had to say:

The implicit point that you are making is about the nature of humans. We choose to not forgive/trust. Yet, critical theory would point out that humans will change (evolve) when their circumstances require it. I think that people will have to learn to be more forgiving when everyone is indicted on some level (John 8:7).

Girard would say that people don’t learn to be more forgiving when everyone is indicted — they ignore their own transgressions, and foist them upon the scapegoat.  Girard would also say that our modern criminal justice system are the product of the a Chrisitanized Western society, which in turn is a product of Christ himself, who was able to show that the scapegoat mechanism was unjust and unnecessary — and John 8:7 is a perfect example.  The fact that the scapegoat mechanism is once again rearing its ugly head through the medium of the internet is an indication that society is devolving.

But putting all of these swirling thoughts to words has made me realize that my worries and concerns were based on assumptions and beliefs I no longer hold.  Girard would say that Christ’s ability to tear down the scapegoat mechanism is proof that he was divine — we humans could not overcome it on our own.  I disagree.  I hold humanity in a higher regard — we are capable of responding to problems the problems in our nature.  Society is resilient enough to absorb and account for new sources of strife and dischord.

So, relating this to my earlier post.  The eternal duration, easy searchability, and omnipresence of personal information on the internet makes it possible for mistakes and bad behavior to live on longer than they previously could.  But similar issues surely arose when writing was invented, or when the printing press came about.  After a period of adjusting, we will be able to handle the new ways that our mistakes may be published — either by becoming more forgiving as a society, by making fewer mistakes, or just getting better at hiding them.

Today, in the last 20 minutes of the last Property class with substantive reading, I was forced to say the words that had not escaped my lips all year, in any class (though they were occasionally true): “I’m sorry, I’m not prepared for this material.”  Sigh.  Almost made it.

Via Slashdot, the NY Times reports on an online community that hunted down a car thief.  (NYT requires registration.)  Stealing a car is a pretty stupid thing to do (not to mention pretty illegal), and there should be some serious consequences for it.  But look at the last line of the article (quoted in the Slashdot summary):

“This guy has worldwide recognition for being a car thief for the rest of his life,” Mr. Ironside said. “The Internet is not going away.”

This is way, way more punishment than a stupid teenager deserves.  The quote neatly captures the geographical and temporal scope of internet fame and infamy: world-wide, and forever.  GW Law Prof. Daniel Solove has a book called The Future of Reputation (available free online) that talks about the effect of technology on social interaction.  I’m guessing he’ll have something to say about this article over at Concurring Opinions pretty soon.  I have yet to read his book, so I can’t tie this story directly in with what he writes.  But I do have a few thoughts of my own.

In undergrad, a friend of mine did a stupid (and illegal) thing that justifiably pissed off a lot of our mutual friends.  There was no legal action, but “justice” was meted out swiftly and harshly through social means.  He apologized, but his reputation never really recovered.  Talking about it years later, he said that it basically ended him at that college.

So, he transfered.  He left that social circle, left his reputation, and got another start.  Now, he’s doing very well for himself.  He learned his lesson, and he was able to benefit from it because he had a way to start over without that stigma.

That’s the problem with the internet.  There is no getting away from it, either by going far away, or by waiting it out.  In order to learn from your mistakes, they need to be forgiven or forgotten.  But like Mr. Ironside says in the article, the internet doesn’t go away.

So, my initial thoughts are that to account for the infinite duration of any mistakes that manage to make it to the internet, we need to rethink the way we deal with other people socially. People change, but their public record no longer does — it’s all out there, and it’s all very searchable.  We need to take this into account when we assess people.  Of course, how can you really tell if they have changed?  Instinct would tell us that having someone’s life at our fingertips would make it easier to make judgments about them, but if you want to be fair to them, it’s still just as hard as it ever was.

I’ll write more about this after I see what Prof. Solove has to say in his book.  Hopefully I’ll also get to take a class with him while I’m at GW.  And hopefully, Jamie Jacobson can find some people who are willing to forgive the stupid theft that will follow him the rest of his life.

Early on in the semester, we talked about the Constitutional guarantee that federal judges will never get a lower salary than the one the start with.  The relevant language is Art. III § 1. “[Article III Judges shall] receive for their Services a Compensation which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.”

When we talked about this in Constitutional Law, I put a little aside in my notes, a flight of fancy, wondering if an argument could be made that rising inflation and stagnant salaries could be construed as a “diminishment” of compensation.  After all, the buying power of the compensation is being diminished, right?  I didn’t think too much of it, nor did I bother to bring it up in class.  But it looks like that argument may come in handy in New York.

Via How Appealing, the Times Union reports that New York Court of Appeals (which is actually NY’s highest state court — their nomenclature is weird) judge Judith Kaye is suing the legislature for a pay raise for NY state judges.  Looks like the NY state constitution has a similar provision regarding “diminished compensation.”

The first reaction to this sort of lawsuit is to say “oh, boo-hoo — you make well over $100k anyway.”  But compare it to other legal salaries: a first-year associate at any big NYC firm will make $160k… plus bonuses.  How are you going to keep them on the farm once they’ve seen $160k?

Well, that’s not fair to judges, or people in general — money is not the only motivating factor driving every decision anyone makes.  We will still have many fair, upstanding judges, even if they make less than a fresh-out-of-lawschool 26 year-old.  In fact, an argument could be made that we don’t want lawyers attracted to judgeships because of money — we want purer hearts and nobler minds, that aren’t swayed by mere pecuniary interests.

But of course, desire for more money doesn’t make one inherently corrupt, either — raising judicial wages will attract more interest in the jobs, but the additional interested parties are not, by necessity, interested only in the money.

So, say what you will about the merits of paying judges lots of money.  We still need to answer that question I asked in Con Law months ago: does rising inflation and stagnant wages constitute “diminished compensation” within the meaning of the Constitution?