There Are No Saints Online

Published in the May 2013 issue.

The Internet has reached peak hate. It had to. At every other moment in history when there has been an explosion of text — whether through social change, like the birth of a religious movement, or technological change, like the advent of print — a period of nasty struggle ensued before the forces of civility reined it in. In the past few months alone, we've seen the catfishing of Manti Te'o, a professional tennis player quit because of trolling, and a rash of teenage suicides from cyberbullying alongside the by-now-standard Twitter hatestorms of various strengths and durations. The sheer bulk of the rage at the moment can seem overwhelming. But the fact that we recognize it and have acknowledged its unacceptability is a sign of the ancient process reasserting itself yet again. The Internet is in the process of being civilized.

Comedian Bill Burr claims that exactly 13 percent of people online are cool. "The rest are just a bunch of animals."

Hate is a source of acknowledged pleasure. Hate-watching. Hate-listening. Hate-reading. These are all things that you, your friends, and your neighbors, not monsters, likely do. We deliberately expose ourselves to objects of contempt to stoke inner outrage in order to enjoy the release of fury. It's not just online, though the Internet is the most obvious theater of cruelty. What's new is how all the bullying is on the record, so you can see just how horrific it is. Cyberbullying and its adult cousin, trolling, are merely the most extreme expressions of the low-level, mean-spirited abuse that fills every comment board and social-media forum.

In the sentencing hearing of Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer for hacking into AT&Ts servers and stealing iPad users e-mail addresses, his hostile chat on Reddits "Ask Me Anything" was cited three times by prosecutors. He was sentenced to more than three year

The change in tone is coming because the cost of hate is becoming clearer. The research on the psychological effects of bullying has become much starker in its analysis recently. In February, a long-term study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry established that bullies and their victims both have a higher rate of mental illness for decades afterward.Science magazine reported on the effects of nasty comments about science stories online: Not only do they fail to improve debate, they also make people stupider. The "nasty effect," as the researchers call it, has a polarizing effect in that readers react by becoming more entrenched in their previous opinions, whether positive or negative.

The use of pseudonyms greatly increases how much people write online — by as much as five times — but the depersonalization and the indirectness fuel abuse; people say things online they would never say to your face. But Twitter and Web comments are really just new expressions of that oldest of monsters: the crowd. Elias Canetti described the seething unstoppability of mass momentum fifty years ago in Crowds and Power: "The most important occurrence within the crowd is the discharge. Before this the crowd does not actually exist; it is the discharge which creates it. This is the moment when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal." Hate is the crudest means to fellow feeling — the desire to overcome the alienation that the Internet is so amazing at provoking.

Sources: Disqus, Jama

Canetti even has a prescient explanation for why retweets are effective and hatestorms die down as fast as they rise up: "The crowd, as such, disintegrates. It has a presentiment of this and fears it. It can only go on existing if the process of discharge is continued with new people who join it." The impermanence of Twitter, the fact that it dissipates in the mist of its own transience, is the source of its genius.

Proof that online hate now fails: We used to have Borking. Now we have Hageling, berating a candidate with the harshest personal assaults, only to have him become secretary of defense anyway.

It would be silly to blame Twitter or the comment boards for this human impulse. People are the problem, not technology. Every leap forward in our access to one another, every period in the intensification of discourse and debate, inevitably generates the question What are the appropriate limits of speech? After the explosion of pamphlet culture in the seventeenth century — which created a froth of furious, often anonymous debate — the English created the Royal Society to regulate discourse and verify authorial integrity, as well as to establish a common framework for exchange. English boxer Curtis Woodhouse fulfilled the fantasy of many when he set out to confront his Twitter troll directly.

The movement against Web hate is rippling through Hollywood. Marc Jacobs, the coolest man in fashion, players a cyber scumbag in Disconnect, a new film about the ugly perils of the web.

Almost every day more civilizing efforts arrive, whether it's the Illinois state legislature proposing an anti-anonymity bill or Google+ requiring ID verification or The Miami Herald shutting down anonymous comments or MIT's media lab working out a bullying algorithm that can identify hurtful comments before they're even posted. No less a prophet than Google's Eric Schmidt predicts the end of anonymity as governments lose their taste for "unverified citizens" and Web searches tie into online profiles. "The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance," he says. Pretty soon, the anonymous will be nameless and marginalized even more. Voices in dark alleys to be ignored.

Asshole of the Year: Michael Brutsch, who went by the name Violentacrez (before Gawker outed him), created Reddit discussions called incest, chokeabitch, and Jewmerica, as well as jailbait, in which he urged users to post photos of attractive teenage girl

But sheer experience is also altering the landscape. After you've been through one or two of these hatestorms, you recognize a very simple reality: They change nothing. As a promotion for his new show, comedian Nathan Fielder challenged Twitter to hurt his feelings, and nobody could manage it. Everybody knows there is a vague climate of hate surrounding everything that is distinct in any way. So who cares?

Wildness is always followed by civilization, the root of civilization is civility, and the rules of civility have not meaningfully changed in two thousand years. Cicero outlined them in "On Duties": Speak clearly. Don't speak too much. Make sure everybody has a chance. Don't interrupt. Alternate topics so that everybody can talk about something of interest to them. Don't criticize people behind their backs. Don't be angry or lazy. These are the rules. You already know them. They've always been the rules. People are just going to start following them again.

Stephen Marche

Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture. The best gig he ever had was as a professor of Renaissance drama at the City College of New York, which he quit in 2007 to write full-time.