Read: Stephen Marche, “Epidemic of Facelessness," in REQUIRED READING and submit 1-page analysis to discussion board.
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OPINION The Epidemic of Facelessness By Stephen Marche • Feb. 14, 2015 CreditCreditMat Brinkman A PART-TIME delivery driver named Peter Nunn was recently sentenced to 18 weeks in a British prison for tweeting and retweeting violent messages to Stella Creasy, a member of Parliament. He never saw his victim but the consequences of his virtual crime were real enough. In a statement, Ms. Creasy described fears for her physical safety, going so far as to install a panic button in her home. Mr. Nunn has been physically separated from the rest of society for posting abusive words on a social media site. The fact that the case ended up in court is rare; the viciousness it represents is not. Everyone in the digital space is, at one point or another, exposed to online monstrosity, one of the consequences of the uniquely contemporary condition of facelessness. Every month brings fresh figuration to the sprawling, shifting Hieronymus Bosch canvas of faceless 21st-century contempt. Faceless contempt is not merely topical. It is increasingly the defining trait of topicality itself. Every day online provides its measure of empty outrage. When the police come to the doors of the young men and women who send notes telling strangers that they want to rape them, they and their parents are almost always shocked, genuinely surprised that anyone would take what they said seriously, that anyone would take anything said online seriously. There is a vast dissonance between virtual communication and an actual police officer at the door. It is a dissonance we are all running up against more and more, the dissonance between the world of faces and the world without faces. And the world without faces is coming to dominate. Recently Dick Costolo, chief executive of Twitter, lamented his company’s failures to deal with the trolls that infested it: “I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO,” he said in a leaked memo. It’s commendable of him to admit the torrents of abuse, but it’s also no mere technical error on the part of Twitter; faceless rage is inherent to its technology. It’s not Twitter’s fault that human beings use it. But the faceless communication social media creates, the linked distances between people, both provokes and mitigates the inherent capacity for monstrosity. The Gyges effect, the well-noted disinhibition created by communications over the distances of the Internet, in which all speech and image are muted and at arm’s reach, produces an inevitable reaction — the desire for impact at any cost, the desire to reach through the screen, to make somebody feel something, anything. A simple comment can so easily be ignored. Rape threat? Not so much. Or, as Mr. Nunn so succinctly put it on Twitter: “If you can’t threaten to rape a celebrity, what is the point in having them?” The challenge of our moment is that the face has been at the root of justice and ethics for 2,000 years. The right to face an accuser is one of the very first principles of the law, described in the “confrontation clause” of the Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution, but reaching back through English common law to ancient Rome. In Roman courts no man could be sentenced to death without first seeing his accuser. The precondition of any trial, of any attempt to reconcile competing claims, is that the victim and the accused look each other in the face. For the great French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the encounter with another’s face was the origin of identity — the reality of the other preceding the formation of the self. The face is the substance, not just the reflection, of the infinity of another person. And from the infinity of the face comes the sense of inevitable obligation, the possibility of discourse, the origin of the ethical impulse. . The connection between the face and ethical behavior is one of the exceedingly rare instances in which French phenomenology and contemporary neuroscience coincide in their conclusions. A 2009 study by Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the Ahmanson- Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, explained the connection: “Through imitation and mimicry, we are able to feel what other people feel. By being able to feel what other people feel, we are also able to respond compassionately to other people’s emotional states.” The face is the key to the sense of intersubjectivity, linking mimicry and empathy through mirror neurons — the brain mechanism that creates imitation even in nonhuman primates. The connection goes the other way, too. Inability to see a face is, in the most direct way, inability to recognize shared humanity with another. In a metastudy of antisocial populations, the inability to sense the emotions on other people’s faces was a key correlation. There is “a consistent, robust link between antisocial behavior and impaired recognition of fearful facial affect. Relative to comparison groups, antisocial populations showed significant impairments in recognizing fearful, sad and surprised expressions.” A recent study in the Journal of Vision showed that babies between the ages of 4 months and 6 months recognized human faces at the same level as grown adults, an ability which they did not possess for other objects. Without a face, the self can form only with the rejection of all otherness, with a generalized, all-purpose contempt — a contempt that is so vacuous because it is so vague, and so ferocious because it is so vacuous. A world stripped of faces is a world stripped, not merely of ethics, but of the biological and cultural foundations of ethics. For the great existentialist Martin Heidegger, the spirit of homelessness defined the 20th century, a disconnected drifting in a world of groundless artificiality. The spirit of facelessness is coming to define the 21st. Facelessness is not a trend; it is a social phase we are entering that we have not yet figured out how to navigate. As exchange and communication come at a remove, the flight back to the face takes on new urgency. Google recently reported that on Android alone, which has more than a billion active users, people take 93 million selfies a day. The selfie has become not a single act but a continuous process of self-portraiture. On the phones that are so much http://www.levinas.sdsu.edu/ of our lives, no individual self-image is adequate; instead a rapid progression of self- images mimics the changeability and the variety of real human presence. Emojis are an explicit attempt to replicate the emotional context that facial expression provides. Intriguingly, emojis express emotion, often negative emotions, but you cannot troll with them. You cannot send a message of faceless contempt with icons of faces. The mere desire to imitate a face humanizes. But all these attempts to provide a digital face run counter to the main current of our era’s essential facelessness. The volume of digital threats appears to be too large for police forces to adequately deal with. But cases of trolls’ following through on their online threat of murder and rape are extremely rare. The closest most trolling comes to actual violence is “swatting,” or sending ambulances or SWAT teams to an enemy’s house. Again, neither victim nor perpetrator sees the other. ADVERTISEMENT What do we do with the trolls? It is one of the questions of the age. There are those who argue that we have a social responsibility to confront them. Mary Beard, the British historian, not only confronted a troll who sent her misogynistic messages, she befriended him and ended up writing him letters of reference. One young video game reviewer, Alanah Pearce, sent Facebook messages to the mothers of young boys who had sent her rape threats. These stories have the flavor of the heroic, a resistance to an assumed condition: giving face to the faceless. The more established wisdom about trolls, at this point, is to disengage. Obviously, in many cases, actual crimes are being committed, crimes that demand confrontation, by victims and by law enforcement officials, but in everyday digital life engaging with the trolls “is like trying to drown a vampire with your own blood,” as the comedian Andy Richter put it. Ironically, the Anonymous collective, a pioneer of facelessness, has offered more or less the same advice. Rule 14 of their “Rules of the Internet” is, “Do not argue with trolls — it means that they win. Rule 19 is, “The more you hate it the stronger it gets.” Ultimately, neither solution — confrontation or avoidance — satisfies. Even if confrontation were the correct strategy, those who are hounded by trolls do not have the time to confront them. To leave the faceless to their facelessness is also unacceptable — why should they own the digital space simply because of the anonymity of their cruelty? There is a third way, distinct from confrontation or avoidance: compassion. The original trolls, Scandinavian monsters who haunted the Vikings, inhabited graveyards or mountains, which is why adventurers would always run into them on the road or at night. They were dull. They possessed monstrous force but only a dim sense of the reality of others. They were mystical nature-forces that lived in the distant, dark places between human habitations. The problem of contemporary trolls is a subset of a larger crisis, which is itself a consequence of the transformation of our modes of communication. Trolls breed under the shadows of the bridges we build. In a world without faces, compassion is a practice that requires discipline, even imagination. Social media seems so easy; the whole point of its pleasure is its sense of casual familiarity. But we need a new art of conversation for the new conversations we are having — and the first rule of that art must be to remember that we are talking to human beings: “Never say anything online that you wouldn’t say to somebody’s face.” But also: “Don’t listen to what people wouldn’t say to your face.” The neurological research demonstrates that empathy, far from being an artificial construct of civilization, is integral to our biology. And when biological intersubjectivity disappears,