subtitle: and authoritarianism

secret message: This is an attempt at satire.

Authoritarianism has been getting a lot of play lately, so I’ve decided to add it to my mix of everyday strategies. Since we are so short-staffed at work (do you know over a dozen mathematicians and software developers looking for jobs? Maybe some generally competent people who would thrive doing office work? Marketing? Anything?), everyone needs to pitch in and do a little bit of everything. The task of moderating our online Community (message boards) has fallen almost entirely upon women, which I am taking as either an implicit or an explicit sign that management wants girl-style rules to be enforced in bringing everyone in line. In the words of Cecelia from The Virgin Suicides, “Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a teenage girl.”

First off, there needs to be a clear in-group and a clear out-group. That’s really the core of enforcing any sort of social norms. On Wednesdays we wear pink. The plan is to heap praise upon the students who behave the way we want them to (the currency that I plan to use is, primarily, upvotes from admins). Offending posts will be deleted. Those who can not conform to community norms will simply be denied the opportunity to participate. The cheaters? Gone. The posts that use weird mark-up to make their way past the language filter? Deleted.

But to be truly effective, the rules can’t be simple. Enforcement needs to keep the “arbitrary” in “arbitration.” Back in the fourth grade, sitting at the table at the back of Mrs. Sicko’s (her real name) classroom (as we used plastic knives to carve mis-shapen seals out of bars of soap as some sort of way of commemorate the fact that an Inuit community far away carved seals out of soap stone), Dana Serowick told me the reason why I couldn’t join the rest of the group was because no one with black hair was allowed. I don’t have black hair. We have a team of moderators who all view the rules slightly differently. One feature of this situation is that there will always be small deviations in how the rules are interpreted and enforced.

One of the tools that admins can use in our online community is shunning. We call it banning (or, more clinically, “temporary account restrictions”), but it is shunning. And, like shunning in the real world of schoolgirls, one’s social status is even more precarious when they are allowed back into the group.

And while school cliques need to rely entirely on a traitorous lack of trust to gain information (and we have that, too, through the “report this post” button), our online community has far-reaching surveillance powers. Not only do admins have more access than other users, but I have access to (a copy of) the database. I know what you said. To whom. And how you edited it later. I googled the original version of the problem from your post, and I found it on a professor’s website, in a current assignment in a class taking place at a university whose network you logged in from. I’ll be watching your future posts.