Rebecca F. Kuang: belief

Transcript context

…I’ve thought about it a long time. I don’t feel I understand it very well, but it could be that we’re naturally somewhat mean and judgmental, and there’s something softening about face-to-face contact, but it’s the absence of the face-to-face contact that matters, not because it’s the internet. That’s the closest I’ve come to an answer — that our internet selves are not so far from our real selves, and the other is an adjustment that we’re used to making to live in civilized society. I think that’s right. There is the protection of anonymity. If you’re just a string of letters, you can spew whatever you want and not deal with the consequences the same way you would if you were sitting next to somebody in real life. I think another complicating factor is that the internet is so distracting, and it doesn’t encourage us to think in nuance or to slow down or consider multiple sides of a problem. It is an immense amount of stimulation all at once that rewards quick, easy, reductive judgments. This is how many tweets go viral. They’re very funny, but they also use a shorthand to capture some kind of emotion or quick judgment statement about a problem, and usually, it’s problems that resist and are very vulnerable to these quick judgment statements. When you look at everything in binary, reductive terms, then of course, tribalism becomes a threat, and it’s easy to devolve into the easiest cruelest judgments about others rather than considering that even people you disagree deeply with might have a point. From one of your short stories in From a Certain Point of View: Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back — why don’t imperial walkers have a lower center of gravity?…

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