Screenbrave
The casual cruelty of online discourse.
“At any point in history where the masses have been trained to argue amongst themselves, the most radical stance in the world is to be reasonable.”
~ Anonymous
We are still in the wild west of the early internet.
The internet, like America, sought to escape the restrictions of the oligarchy, then of the media-machine, & instead first become lawless, then became the machine’s greatest weapon against the people. Cultural hegemony is in absolute control via the internet. If only because the internet has the ability to encompass all other mediums of human expression. It is, at present, the ultimate medium which contains all mediums & which all mediums are now subordinate to.
Screenbravery is the social phenomena of human beings saying purposefully snide, petty, insulting, degrading & combative phrases to each other online that they would never have the courage to say to that persons face in a public space. In brief, it is the expression of compassionlessness, of cowardice harnessed cold by the safety of the screen. Screenbravery is a false simulacra of bravery that reveals & revels in its own emptiness of personal drive. Screenbravery is a mask for a persons own inactivity & inaction, their own inability to say in public what they feel safe enough to express online.
So too is it easier to ignore the online, leave a message unread or left on seen, than it is to ignore someone who has the audacity to provoke you in public. And there too, it takes even more willpower & selfcontrol to not reciprocate verbal venom when someone intentionally tries to irk you in a public space. Too many of us fall into the trap the screenbrave person sets by even bothering to respond at all.
Freedom of speech, however illuminating of the internal revulsions others are bold or naive enough to voice, legally speaking, does not include threats. Death threats, bomb threats; disturbing the peace has never been a facet of freedom of speech.
But this bring us to cross purposes, for as James Baldwin infamously said, “The artists job is to disturb the peace.”
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Freedom of speech, like it or not, does in fact include hate speech, not because we ought to give it our attention, but because it’s better to know who the bigots are. It’s better to know where the hatreds lie in humanities heart by seeing who expresses them readily. It is better to know who thinks ill than to let them hide silent in their shadow. A silence more nefarious even than the expression of verbal venom.
To express hate speech in digital spaces is the online equivalent of wearing a pointed white hood in public spaces. An anonymity that reveals ones hatreds.
To allow hate speech allows the people to know who to ignore, who needs to be usurped, who ought to be dealt with thoroughly, & more importantly, who out there needs a friend, mentor, or therapist they can talk to about how much hate they have in their heart. To silence hate speech is to allow it to hide. Is to allow it to wear its klan mask. Repression only makes a negation grow stronger when it is silenced, left unexpressed.
The inhumane inclination toward dismissal of a person, event, or idea, without having yet understood it: This is the base-level screenbravery par excellence the internet offers as a temptation for those who seek only to express their glibness, their jaded perspectives, their repressed hostilities.
To react with immediacy is to not think before acting. A diversion for adults to treat each other like warring children on the digital playground.
The internet is humanity’s shadow work en masse & writ large.
The people’s shadow can see seen in every instance where they commented (therefore documented proof) that their viewpoint was once on the legions wrong sides of history, because they lacked compassion for their planetary kinfolk.
When expressions of vulnerability & compassion for other human beings are treated with disdain & mockery, those who dismiss those expression have plotted a course for their own destruction. Simple as that.
Hypermodernism is often typified by hypercategorization of Others. This too is a form of ideological weakness of Spirit. In practice, hypercategorization leads inevitably towards the death drive & its constituent: Fascistic tendencies.
Screenbrave harassment of someone you would be intimidated by in-person is the digital variant of the Capirote. Screenbrave spinelessness that provokes verbal violence from the safety of the screen is equally afraid that that violence they began with words may one day be met with a violence of actions if met face to face.
In this day & age we ought to have real-life troll-hunters: People who are tasked with & are legally allowed to (not unethically expose via doxxing but) physically confront the faces of those who feel so comfortable with their screenbravery, hiding behind the pseudo-safety of their screen, that they compulsively make the internet as hateful a place as it has become. This is global shadow work: Forcing the mirror into the faces of the people to see what they have inside them.
In lieu of direct confrontation, the only cure for any screenbrave person who tries so hard to assert theirself online but cannot do so when faced with the same conflict in the flesh, may be as simple as putting their phone down to: Go outside.
