Risk

It is hard to be someone with high-risk tolerance in modernity.

It is hard to be someone with high-risk tolerance in modernity. There are no ways to flex one’s courage muscle in polite society, particularly when it comes to physical risk.

All those that wanted to ‘take one for the team’ and go get COVID-19 to increase the immunity in the population were demonised as reckless and wanting to kill Granny for the sake of the economy over the last few years.

In a never-ending campaign to reduce road deaths Victoria has now slashed its speed limits across the state. The opposition party labeled this as “lazy” and caused by the poor state of the roads but what about giving people the option driving to their abilities on rough roads and difficult conditions. By changing the speed limit, they deny people the option of ‘driving to conditions’ both in terms of the road and their competencies. Instead everyone has drive and the same slow speed no matter the conditions.

It isn’t just physical risk that the nervous ninnies want to protect people from – whether they want it or not.

The Twitter buyout by Elon Musk has sent into a tailspin all those who have been making excessive demands on our physical safety for the last few years.

Now they have words to worry about again. The most hilarious example is the monologue by Brian Stelter about not wanting to go to a party with no rules. But this is by no means limited to the kind of corporate left culture that produced the censorious Twitter that felt compelled to remove the Hunter Biden Laptop story or turf (or TERF) Babylon Bee off Twitter for the egregious crime of misgendering.

Writing in Quillette, Jim Rutt explained that Twitter should only engage in decorum moderation not content (except for clear cut violence promotion like instructions on making a bomb). The problem with this is that firstly I am sure those that believe that Twitter should be removing ‘dead naming’ and other infractions against self-identification, their justification would in fact be decorum.

What is considered decorum or manners is little agreed on in one country, let along across the whole world. Once upon-a-time there would have been a consensus of what counts as rude or lacking decorum. As the famous line from the Supreme Court in respect to pornography “I will know it when I see it” reflects the belief was that obscenity was more or less objective and need not be defined.

Today even in the one country we have people suggesting that everything from mocking Mohammed (like Charlie Hebdo did) to suggesting that a pre-op transgender woman may not need a pap smear is considered hate speech and should be beyond the realm of polite discussion.

Even things that should be agreed on, such as racial slurs and swear words maybe not be clear cut when the whole world is factored in. Perhaps it is the Australian in me, but I have no issue with a few four-letter words (in fact the c-word can be used in a complimentary fashion in Australia). Then there are the racial slurs that don’t have the same history in countries outside the US but will inevitably land you in decorum moderation goal.

Meanwhile words that actually carry a sting or a loaded with historical baggage of the most racist kind don’t carry the same penalties. I haven’t tried posting slurs for indigenous people local to the area I grew up in – but I bet you it won’t land me in the sin bin like the n-word would.

Given the lack of consensus of what ‘decorum’ means across different boundaries, cultures and histories it is clear that it would be very difficult to moderate based on this.

I used to run a meetup group which had a forum function. I had to do some soul searching when I was accused of green lighting antisemitism by not removing someone’s post – never mind that I have a job and can’t sit around everyday monitoring what people posted in the forum. Arguably, my having removed the post would have resulted in it going unnoticed rather than out rightly discredited which is what ended up happening. After this incident I ended up posting a kind of rule for the group “to behave like adults” and telling people that I have a fulltime job, running this is my hobby and I have neither the time or inclination to police the discussion.

The thing is that Twitter gives people the tools to manage their own experience of the platform – it is called the block button. There should be many more of these tools that allow people with higher intolerance for bad words or unsavory topics to have these removed them from their feed.

Just as when the pandemic hit everyone was treated like hypochondriacs that wanted to avoid the virus at all costs instead of treating higher-risk or higher-risk-adverse people differently (and funneling the immense resources expended over the last few years protecting them).  Twitter too has taken it on themselves to decide that everyone on their platform need be protected from Donald Trump and the Babylon Bee rather than letting people with a higher-risk tolerance for dangerous ideas be exposed and let the ones that don’t use the block button.

I wouldn’t get hopes up too high about Musk’s’ ability to upend Twitter, but overall it is a positive that it is now run by someone with some guts (SpaceX is not exactly a risk-adverse operation) is a positive for all those that of us that are getting very sick of our sanitised world run by bellyachers. 

If there is one change that has to happen it is that everyone’s Twitter experience should not be crafted by safetyphiles.