IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020 - 9

However, one of the perhaps counterintuitive outcomes of increased
connectivity through the development of Information and Communication Technology has been to increase
anger and cause polarization and
fragmentation, rather than bring people together. This could have been
predicted, given the prevalence of
flame wars in the early days of Usenet.
Usenet was a Unix-based computernetwork communications system,
accessed from a Unix command-line
client such as rn ("read news"). This
enabled a user to access newsgroups
and post their own opinions, which
can be seen as a forerunner to Internet forums and chatrooms, and social
media platforms enabled by the World
Wide Web.
One of the features of Usenet
newsgroups could be these flame
wars, in which two users would
verbally assault each other (the
"flames"), and perhaps other users
would take sides and pile in afterwards. Curiously, there was an
inbuilt self-control mechanism, called
netiquette (net etiquette): the limits
of self-expression in these hostile
exchanges were somehow, and at
least to some extent, boundaried,
and there was mutual -understanding
of, and respect for, these boundaries.3 These 1990 flame wars seem
positively courteous from a 2020
perspective, where trolling, cyberbullying, provocative selfie-ing,
twitter-storms, revenge porn, scientific disinformation, and various
other forms of anti-social behavior
appear to be rampant, uninhibited,
and unchecked. Furthermore, there
seems to be no interest in regulating
it: "there's gold in them thar twitter
storms." There is also evidence that
anger is being stoked by infiltration

of social networks and covert funding of activists on both sides of a
socially divisive issue [10].
At a time when climate change
is effectively creating an existential
threat to all of humanity, such that
it could be said that the prevailing environmental conditions are
as dangerous and inhospitable as
those confronting the Trobriand
islanders, the Ladakh, and the Eskimos, the outrage industry and the
willful manufacturing of anger is
only magnifying the threat. Anger is
not going to bind people and communities together in order to engage
in the collective action necessary to
confront the threat.

Inconvenience

It might be suggested that social
media platforms could constructively counter the creation of anger
by trying to create its opposite. But according to Plutchik's wheel of emotions
[11], the opposite of anger is
fear. However, fear is unlikeA slight inconvenience is a small
ly to help bind communities
either: it is as bad that comprice to pay for preservation of
munities should fear diversity, or consider diversity to
our shared planet.
be a threat (i.e., on the belief
that communal life is a zero
threat of climate crisis will not have
sum game, and that the reduction of
gone away; if anything, its contours
one person's inequality necessarily
have been thrown into even starker
implies another person's loss of
relief; second, we cannot persist
prestige or privilege).
with political leadership that in its
It could be better argued that
relentless pursuit of power finds
there is no opposite of an emothat is easy and popular to be antition, only its absence. Therefore, in
truth, anti-science, anti-evidence, antiaddition to the codification of deep
knowledge, and anti-expertise; and
social knowledge [12], platforms
third, we cannot simply go back to
for enhancing social coordination
the social, political, and economic
could take two further steps in using
systems that existed before and
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their
carry on regardless. All this means
approach to creating social good
accepting some inconvenience, with
and mitigating climate change. The
respect to what we want to hear, and
first is to dampen and diffuse anger
to what we want to do.
(as opposed to manufacturing outIt is not surprising that Participant
rage, or data harvesting, machine
Media's documentary about climate
learning, and targeted advertising).

3

There was also a newsgroup, alt.flame, where
users could go just to read flames, or flame
each other. It might not have been everyone's
definition of fun, but it was a useful sink for
those so inclined.

JUNE 2020

The second is that people have to
accept a little inconvenience.
It might seem parochial, almost
to the point of absurdity, to be arguing that people should accept a little
in convenience in their lives, at a
time when the Covid-19 crisis has
caused the entire planet to deal
with inconvenience on a personal, na--tional, and global scale that is,
by many accounts, "unprecedented." Clearly, though, faced with a
palpable, and immediate, existential threat, it turns out that some of
us, at least, for a while, at least, can
tolerate a lot of inconvenience. Dealing with the less immediate, but no
less remorseless, existential threat
of climate change requires a proportional acceptance of inconvenience.
So, in whatever way the Covid-19
crisis works out, three conclusions
must be drawn: first, the existential

∕

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

9
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020

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