Public Storage

In News of the Weird this week, the New York Times on Tuesday announced the hiring of Quinn Norton as an editorial writer on the topic of technology (she would have written largely unsigned editorials in the paper's voice with perhaps an occasional op-ed)  and within hours announced her termination.

The reason for the rapid-fire about-face (is it a record of some kind?) had a familiar flavor: immediate outcry from the public over revealed 'homophobic', 'ableist' and 'racist' tweets as well as a habit of publicly referring to "weev" of the Neo-Nazi Daily Stormer site among other unsavory types as a friend, and the surfacing of ambiguous themes in her journalism, exemplified by an article in which she referred to actual Nazi John Rabe as her "patron saint of moral complexity."

You are the jury.  Do you have enough information to convict?  I warn you the story as presented is luridly provocative.  Answers to the flood of questions raised immediately by it do not come rapidly on cursory skimmings.

The Times' track record hasn't been stellar of late, so reading Salon's account of the story, it was not difficult  to view the latest as of a piece with recent Trump mirroring and normalizing moves by the paper.  Moreover, where was the Times' reporting on Norton before she was hired?  How could they have missed what 5 minutes of surfing by the volunteer army of internet police had readily discovered?  But on further delving, the story would not be so easily tamed.

Norton's friendship with weev, by all accounts an avowed and unrepentant racist from the bowels of the internet, had its origin in her reporting and advocacy on his behalf in the context of his legal battles against AT&T and the Federal government for a bit of personally motivated hacktivism on weev's part to expose the corporation's cavalier treatment of its customers' personal information.  weev lost the government's criminal case against him and did prison time for it.

As for the Nazi, John Rabe, a Siemanns executive and Nazi Party leader in China in the 1930's before his reassignment to Germany for the duration of WWII,  Norton's piece was an examination of the significance of Rabe's role during the Sino-Japanese war in sheltering countless poor Nanjing residents with no means of escape by themselves from the brutal treatment of Japanese troops as the city was captured.  Rabe and a committee of prominent Westerners took advantage of Germany's alliance with Japan to negotiate recognition of a safety zone into which Nanjing residents who couldn't leave the besieged city otherwise could flee.  By his actions an estimated 200,000 were saved.  Moral complexity indeed.

In Norton's words:

Sometimes the world refuses to be simple enough to understand. 

For those among us who seem to thrive on killing ambiguity and nuance wherever we find it it could be easy to miss the point Norton makes at the end of her Rabe article, one which without a great deal of stretching could be applied to our own times:

For me there is only this in the story of John Rabe: there are no clear bad guys or good guys in humanity. There is just an uncomfortable pause, where you can let history crowd in on you. The best you can do is be quiet in the face of the terrible contradictions, and try to figure out what the next right thing is.

It's easy to miss but essential to note that the force of Norton's point depends entirely upon an appropriate horror at the object of Nazism.  Nazi redemption is not Norton's only concern.  In the same vein, I recommend her November piece on the responsibility of white people to remain engaged with racists-- to not abandon responsibility for the topic and leave it up to non-whites who may not have the luxury of a choice of whether to fight. 

If you're wondering what Nazis and white guilt have to do with technology, the binding factor is Norton's explorations of identity and privacy in the public domain of the internet where the context of one's self-expressions are frequently lost-- often purposefully if the comment taken out of context best suits an opponent's agenda.

The effort to contextualize Norton's words is well rewarded.  A TEDx talk she gave in 2010 on 'Privacy, Ephemerality and Self' took a couple of listens for me to appreciate, but the topic resonates with what transpired this week.

In the course of the talk, Norton reveals that some years ago, in a fit of pique, she deleted herself-- her posts, her accounts, access to her blogs-- from the internet in an effort to at least for a while reclaim some of the privacy she had yielded to a life chronicled online; an action she confesses she has never regretted.  The Quinn Norton we see today was therefore something of an un-invention and re-invention which was as she called it in the talk, 'doing the best equivalent I could to moving away and starting again.'

On Tuesday, in a series of tweets posted as news spread of her turnabout in fortune that day, Norton the technology thinker offered perspective on what had happened, referring specifically to criticism of discovered tweets of hers revealing familiarity with members of 4chan and Anonymous:

One more thing, about me, and anons, and so on. One of the tweets coming up was a conversation I specifically talked about in an article about context collapse: https://medium.com/message/context-collapse-architecture-and-plows-d23a0d2f7697 … And context collapse is what happened here tonight.

From the article linked to in the above:

We all know what context is in our lives. The same thing we do with our friends can be horrifying to think about doing with our bosses or families. This isn’t because we’re all massive hypocrites, it’s because context matters in culture. One of the major problems with online space is that the wrong people see us hanging out with our friends, and suddenly decontextualize our actions. This makes them wholly different and often unintended actions.  ... What I can’t control is if one party sees me talking to another and gets the wrong idea about what I mean and what kind of person I am. When trolls bounce around Twitter they play a baiting game. At its best, it’s a conversational art that exposes contradictions. At its worst, it’s stupid bullying. Most trolling lives somewhere in between, full of cues and references that make no sense to people who aren’t part of the conversation. Sometimes even the trolls forget this.

In the article, Norton, who like many Twitter users keeps lively, no-holds-barred conversations going in multiple contexts has given a prescient explanation of how some of her tweets, rough and tumble communication directed narrowly to ears fully equipped to handle them, could be quite conceivably interpreted out of context as slurs.  Are we careful with what we think we can glean from the fragments of others that we come across out there on the web?  It's a big responsibility but do we have the capacity to live up to it?

The internet is us.  It is not all of who we are, but everything that the internet knows about us is what we ourselves have put there. Are we happy with how we're perceived?  Are we perceived as we intend?  There's a glee in hanging people by their own words on the internet.  It's a mistake to think of this contact parlor game as justice.

It's sobering to think about the editorials we don't get to read because of how this episode played out.  Norton's thoughts from the center of the storm make me wonder what we've lost by silencing her voice on so prominent a national stage on topics that could still use her deep thought and interpretation:

You were powerful today. You changed at least one person's life, and if I'm honest, my family's too. It feels good to be powerful. But this power doesn't go away. It doesn't evaporate when you use it without thinking, or at the wrong person.

Regardless of how you feel about the incident and the writer at the heart of it, Norton's words of warning as she concludes her thoughts on the matter bear serious attention:

What I need is for you to see yourself as powerful, as people who can change the world. And I want you to think about how [you] wield that power.

Choose the targets of your power wisely. History is watching you.