Schadenfreudtastic Asshats

Via the KQED arts blog, I was reminded of the existence of Fail Blog, much to my dismay.

I don't follow, or forward, "fail" moment memes: those videos and pictures of accidents or random stupidity people commit. (I do the pet ones, not the people.) But yes, I'm aware of how popular they are. And yes, they can be funny sometimes. The dingleberry photo above is funny, and the police fail video of a cop who forgets to put on his parking brake.

But I don't like places where people go simply to laugh at other people's mistakes and feel superior to them. The KQED blogger's take is generous: that people feel better about our war-torn-bad-economy times by laughing at humanity, and by implication, themselves. But I'm not that generous. I think it's just about nasty mockery.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all about nasty mockery ... but in moderation, and mostly privately. Snark I'm down with; calling out people for the things they deliberately put on public display that aren't very good is cool; sitting at home with your friends and getting out your aggressions by making gross and inappropriate comments about famous people -- or people you don't like whom you would never invite to your house -- is a Great Human Tradition.

But setting up websites to immortalize the private or semi-public mistakes of total strangers? There's a whole range of things I feel about this, starting with "What's the point?" and ranging over into "You're a worthless asshole."

Fail Blog isn't the worst of them, by any stretch. While Fail just documents the stupid things people do to themselves that were already more or less in the public sphere (advertisements, stuff on TV, etc.) there are other sites online where participants actively look on semi-private forums (flickr vacation photos, for example) for targets to attack. I won't name or link to any of those here; I've had experience taking these folks on and I want to keep this blog relatively troll-free. But there are places on the web where people post images of strangers they've found on the internet and make fun of them. It's basically bullying without the possibility of consequences.

So I don't really buy the "we feel better about our nasty times" argument. Schadenfreude is schadenfreude. It's a basic human failing, but one which has become so amplified on the internet that it has its own ethical/criminal definition: cyberbullying.

Cyberbullying is when people use text, email, and public websites to harrass, embarrass, or humiliate others. It's creating the humiliation, and then laughing at it. I'm not accusing Fail Blog of cyberbullying; Fail Blog seems to keep private stuff private and focus on failings rather than personalities. But it all comes out of the same place: a delight in other people's embarrassments and humiliations. There is a substantive difference between laughing at a public embarrassment a person creates for themselves, and being the one who creates the public embarrassment for someone else, but the motivation is the same. It may seem like random policemen are fair game when they make stupid mistakes ... but then, when you set up a co-worker or classmate you hate, that may seem like fair game to you, too.

Targeting people by name and photograph and video ... basically targeting people in a way that makes them recognizable ... is unacceptable as far as I'm concerned. But, even though the vague and impersonal -- and sometimes even cute -- schadenfreude of Fail Blog and others doesn't attack individuals, I'm having a hard time identifying any virtues or valuable contributions to society these things represent.

Maybe I'm taking such things too seriously, but why should I support, even tacitly, the open display and enhancement of some of humanity's worst impulses?