There wasn't any conversation to be had, no objective to reach or conclusion to draw.

A very interesting article, Justine Sacco Is Good at Her Job, and How I Came To Peace With Her by Sam Biddle.

One year ago today, Justine Sacco was the global head of communications for the digital media conglomerate IAC. Getting on a plane for a trip to South Africa, to visit family, she published a tweet: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm White!"

At the time, I was editing Valleywag, Gawker's tech-industry blog. As soon as I saw the tweet, I posted it. I barely needed to write anything to go with it: This woman's job was carefully managing the words of a large tech-media conglomerate, and she'd worded something terribly.

It was a natural post. Twitter disasters are the quickest source of outrage, and outrage is traffic. I didn't think about whether or not I might be ruining Sacco's life. The tweet was a bad tweet, and seeing it would make people feel good and angry—a simple social and emotional transaction that had happened before and would happen again and again. The minimal post set off a 48-hour paroxysm of fury, an eruption of internet vindictiveness.

Sacco was in the air, unable to realize what she'd done or apologize it, and as the tweet garnered retweets and faves and the first drafts of think pieces, eager observers tracked her flight across the Atlantic. A hashtag trended: #HasJustineLandedYet. Several hours later she emerged into an unfathomable modern multimedia hell-nightmare and was quickly and summarily fired.

The post touches on many substantive things.

One is the nature of humor. Sacco's tweet was irony intended humor and probably might have made sense in a context of people who knew her and which, clearly, was susceptible to alternate interpretations that did not reflect well on her.

Biddle highlights a couple of his tweets which, like Sacco's, were intended as irony and yet taken at face value resulting in an avalanche of rage towards him.

What Biddle is highlighting, without explicitly discussing it, is the role of the internet in not only amplifying rage (which he does discuss) but in profiling the universality of 1) bias, 2) discrimination, 3) signalling and 4) the psychology of ingroup outgroup dynamics.

Following his own twitter mis-step Biddle observes:

There wasn't any conversation to be had, no objective to reach or conclusion to draw. Smashing a pinata isn't just for the candy—it feels great to swing your arms and feel a thud, and so they'd clobber me no matter what, even when it was clear there wasn't much sport left in it for GamerGate, either.

Twitter is a fast machine that almost begs for misunderstanding and misconstrual—deliberate misreading is its lubricant. The same flatness of affect that can make it such a weird and funny place also makes it a tricky and dangerous one. Jokes are complicated, context is hard. Rage is easy.

"There wasn't any conversation to be had, no objective to reach or conclusion to draw." It is of course a truism of the internet but it still bares reflecting upon.

People find something to be outraged about. They are biased and prejudiced against some perceived outgroup. They pile on, signalling to others that they are part of the in-group. They seek to destroy until the next glittery outrage catches their eye.

There are natural disagreements on all sorts of things. How do you distinguish blind prejudicial bigotry from simple disagreements about fiercely believed issues?

I think it is exactly what Biddle describes - "There wasn't any conversation to be had, no objective to reach or conclusion to draw." As long as a dialog is entered into in good faith with an intent to clarify, define, learn and improve decision-making, you can have energetic disagreements from which both parties benefit by learning more and deciding better.

On the other hand, if the point of the discussion is only to destroy the other, then there is no dialog and no benefit to anyone. Ad hominem attacks are simply a tactic to silence others.

Currently, outrage is what sells. I hope there is a promised land of civil discourse to which we can move. In the meantime, people are very revealing of their own bigotry without even realizing what they are revealing.