Stuff White People don't like #1 - Freedom of Speech

There is a brilliant, gently satirical website about the rich world's liberal, educated intelligentsia called "Stuff White People Like" by Christian Lander. "White" here is taken from US slang, and is actually more about class distinction (and maintaining it):

It’s partially about race, but it’s fundamentally about class. It’s about a generation and class that values authenticity and credibility more than monetary wealth.

Update: Here is a part of the requisite section about Being Offended:

It is also valuable to know that white people spend a significant portion of their time preparing for the moment when they will be offended. They read magazines, books, and watch documentaries all in hopes that one day they will encounter a person who will say something offensive. When this happens, they can leap into action with quotes, statistics, and historical examples. Once they have finished lecturing another white person about how it’s wrong to use the term “black” instead of “African-American,” they can sit back and relax in the knowledge that they have made a difference.

White people also get excited at the opportunity to be offended at things that are sexist and/or homophobic. Both cases offering ample opportunities for lectures, complaints, graduate classes, lengthy discussions and workshops. All of which do an excellent job of raising awareness among white people who hope to change their status from “not racist” to “super not racist.”

Another thing worth noting is that the threshold for being offended is a very important tool for judging and ranking white people. Missing an opportunity to be outraged is like missing a reference to Derrida-it’s social death.

He also has a book out. But there is something he is unlikely to publish, as it will raise ire in the potential buyer. Last week showed me something very dark that these "white" people don't like, and that is Freedom of Speech (of people you disagree with). Once upon a time (The Age of Reason) it was the height of "white" (as in liberal intellectual) thinking to say:

“I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

(Voltaire, ftw...)

Now, however, it seems we are in the Age of Unreason. Two examples last week showed this - Jan Moir and Nick Griffin. Both are the "wrong" sort of White people, both were hounded on "24 hour Outrage* " flashmobs on Twitter and other social media. And the net result is quite a lot of people looked at the hounding and wondered just who the bigots were (see the response to the Nick Griffin episode on the BBC feedback website, its mostly full of people quite upset at the online and on-air mugging) - the reverse (albeit predictable) effect of what was intended.

Yesterday at Media140 (of which more, later) this "feature" of social media was alluded to every so often but only twice this downside was explicitly mentioned, and the corollary - that we will have to design social media decision architectures to "nudge" people into better behaviour patterns was only lightly brushed over.

I am in agreement with this - at the moment, on social media, populist misbehaviour is too widely rewarded. For social capital systems to work well, they need to be able to reign in the "increasing returns" benefits of low cost supporting, (twibbons, retweeting, turning your avatar a different colour on Twitter etc) of whatever populist fad is sweeping through. In game theory its called a "weak tell" and in real life we are quite good at distinguishing between these and real commitment, but online (it would seem, anyway) we are less so.

The hard thing will be to design systems so they are also capable of maintaining vigilance and hounding real wrongdoing, as also happened recently in the Trafigura case.

And as for being able to generate World Peace, I go to Kerry Gaffney's point in the comments below - Social Media can potentially function more as an echo chamber amplifier than a diversifier without some form of "nudge" to the serendipitous. (As opposed to a "nudge towards reduced privacy" which seems to be the main aim behind the Facebook gambit)

For the record, I follow Voltaire's nostrum up to the point of inflammatory incitement to violence (which makes me Millsian).

*To use a term coined in Media140 yesterday.