Terrible Idea (.net)

Reading through my daily dose of blogs this morning, I came across two interesting and related items.  First, at Ask Philosophers, an intriguing question and answer involving step-children being raised by fundamentalist parents.  Then, The Legal Satyricon links to a post equating religious upbringing to child abuse.

These issues are… touchy.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all religious upbringing is child abuse.  This implies that the government can prevent children from instilling particular religious views in their children.  And as much as I and others may disagree with a particular religious viewpoint, banning its teaching to one’s own children is not a good idea.

However, the scope of the indoctrination presented in the Ask Philosophers question is also worrisome.  Is it really child abuse?  I’d be inclined to say that it is, but I see no easy or effective way to prevent it from happening without also limiting fundamental rights.

Thoughts?

At Concurring Opinions, Professor James Grimmelmann writes a post called “DRMbarassment for Us Law Professors?“  The title is derived from the specific technology about which he writes in the post, but I want to talk briefly about the larger points he brings up at the end of his post.  He writes:

We law professors who regularly opine on high technology are often dangerously blasé about the details of the technology we’re opining on. We get caught up in the minutiae of 1201(a)(1) versus 1201(a)(2) versus 1201(b), and we don’t pay anywhere near as much attention to the surrounding web of other kinds of IP, business arrangements, and especially technical specifications as we ought to. Consider these posts another plea for better interdisciplinarity. Our students are doing a better job of it than we are.

I think these problems are true on a broader scale.  Over at Simple Justice, in a post called “Hitting the Internet Wall,” Scott Greenfield touches on the same problem from a different side.  He writes:

[Cross-examining a witness with material from a website] made me competent to talk about [technology] back then. In retrospect, the idea of an old codger like me (meaning anyone over 30) talking about technology is laughable. Today, if you haven’t tried any of the tech ideas that appeared online in the past 30 minutes, you’re out of date. I am, regretfully, out of date.

The technical expertise required to understand what is going on with something even as simple as visiting searching for something on Google is substantial, and the details of what happens behind the scenes can be legally significant.  For those of us who have grown up with computers and the internet, certain things come naturally.  For the old codgers, new technology must be imperfectly analogized to old concepts.  Spyware as trespass to chattels comes immediately to mind.  And in the legal world, where precise definitions are needed, imperfect analogies can lead to mistakes.

These sorts of problems aren’t going to go away.  The nominal students know more than the teachers when it comes to many aspects of modern technology, and I don’t know of any easy way to fix the problem, other than waiting until the old guard retires and the youngsters move into the roles of power.  Of course, if the pace of innovation continues, we will be just as clueless as our former teachers.  At least we don’t live in boring times.

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.

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.