“The point is that the internet as a historical phenomenon is not some sort of force of evil making things worse – where excising it would actually lead to productive change. It’s more a kind of lens that both clarifies and then magnifies just how deeply racism and sexism run into society. Beyond complex or abstract arguments about the structure of ideologies, anyone who has ever been online knows this to be true: It is almost impossible to spend much time at all online without running into hate. And in removing the veneer of politeness and the risk of opprobrium, it is as if the web reveals not just the tenuousness of decorum or social norms, but the very structure of liberal democracies themselves. Yet, if that is the case, then there is genuine cause for concern. There is something about the rise of extremist ideology online that appears to remain deeply resistant to both shame and attempts to push it back into the shadows. Racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic thought instead seems to calcify online, the dynamic of suppression paradoxically fortifying the existence of that which one wants to quash. Put another way: Hatred isn’t simply going away, even if the superstructure of the internet were to disappear. Hatred is a thing that has to be confronted and fought at every turn, even if we don’t know what the form of that contestation will look like.”— The Internet is here to stay. We’re the ones who have to change - The Globe and Mail (via kenyatta)
