We never find out why the video game Rage is called “Rage.” Sure, it’s a violent game, but no more so than most first-person shooter games (and less so than many other games). The sequel, Rage 2, does feature a story that involves revenge to some extent, but the concept of “rage” is not explored or even brought up. Maybe rage is best conveyed when it isn’t explored, and when no effort is made to understand it. Maybe rage differs from anger in its lack of reason or sense. Maybe the explanation is that rage has no explanation—it is just unreasonable anger expressed as violence, and its very nature precludes exploration or understanding.
Unreasonable anger with no explanation or potential for comprehension is an exaggeratedly nihilistic view of the internet, but not an entirely inaccurate one. Rage 2 seems like an obvious choice for the companion game in my presentation of why I think that Section 230 will have diminished importance in shaping the socially interactive portions of the internet. Special thanks to Kate Klonick and Yale ISP for their week-long series on Section 230; I will make several references to that series here.
I. What is Section 230 and How Does it Affect the Internet?
Section 230 makes it a less risky decision to develop a platform like Twitter or Facebook, or any kind of interactive social media site, from YouTube to WordPress, InstaGram, or TikTok. Without Section 230, there would be a much more significant concern over lawsuits caused by the speech of users. The easiest way to deal with that would be to deny users the ability to publish speech on the site, which obliterates the entire purpose of a social media platform. Section 230 has other implications and affects the internet in some other ways, but I am focusing on this specific impact of this law.
Those who believe that Section 230 codifies “the 26 words which made the internet” apparently believe that the proliferation of User-Generated Content, Web2.0, and social media came about only because of this law. I do not know why these scholars ignore the entire two-decade history of a robust, emerging internet, which had bulletin boards, instant messaging, gaming, and the general framework and layout of the internet we know today. It may be that Section 230 helped to accelerate the rate of growth of the internet (though I think it’s much more persuasive to claim that decreased costs in devices and connections did a lot more to expand the internet). Maybe Section 230 increased the upper limit on the size of some sites and services, but it is clear that the internet was already on its trajectory. I think the role of Section 230 is massively over-estimated by its proponents and guardians. This leads them to fear that any reformation of Section 230 is an attack on the internet itself.
This is not just a snide, petty aside on my part. My assertion that the role of Section 230 is massively over-estimated is helpful to my prediction that it will become irrelevant. In some ways, I may be claiming that Section 230 was not actually so relevant in the first place. I broadly agree with most Section 230 advocates that reforming that law is unlikely to produce helpful results, usually because the problem at issue is not solved by a change to Section 230. However, I disagree about the importance of that law: if the reason changing Section 230 is that it’s the wrong law to change, it might be that Section 230 doesn’t really have that much of an impact.
II. Where is Rage Taking the Internet?
Rage 2 is a science-fiction, first-person shooter game set in a future, post-apocalyptic Earth. Around the year 2029, an asteroid collided with Earth, but humanity preserved itself by burying thousands of people in cryogenic chambers. In the game, you explore a world filled with tiny communities, bandit encampments, strange (and dangerous) creatures, and the miles of desolate Wasteland between everything.
In Rage 2, civilization is spread out into small, independent towns with limited communication between one another. Others gather in even smaller camps in the Wasteland. Some people travel between locations, but many stay put wherever they are. I imagine this is an apt description for the internet I expect to see in coming years.
The internet will become increasingly fragmented: smaller, more insular communities will form as the very large mega-communities crumble. Rage begets rage. We’re already seeing it, and it’s not surprising. The use of blocking and muting features is the precursor to essentially this result. People might say they want challenging, thought-provoking discourse that forces them to re-examine their beliefs, etc. but, based on my observations of behavior on large social media sites, I believe that is bunk.
A significant portion, perhaps the majority, wants to hear things which comfortably reinforce their existing beliefs. People prefer echo chambers. Why wouldn’t they? Echo chambers are comfortable and reassuring, and demand nothing except passive, agreeable silence. (Though there is an important exception, which is that echo chambers cultivate extremism like a petri dish cultivates bacteria, precisely because there is no disagreement.) It’s easy to under-estimate how unhappy people are with their social media experience because they’re addicted to it.
It will be more and more common for communities to have closed-door, invite only policies. Discord is leading the way in this model, and in typical internet progress fashion, is doing so accidentally.* The formation of strictly moderated community was also taking root in other platforms, to the extent that the architecture allows. Megaplatforms will become the broad hosting locations for these smaller communities, which will enforce their own content moderation policies, which will be much narrower and much more intense than the policies of the megacommunities and platforms of the previous internet.
{*It’s always worth remembering how much of the internet is not doing what it was designed to do. Most of the biggest sites and services were not designed or created to be what they have become, or to do what people use them to do.}
The role of content moderators, and the attitudes towards content moderation, will change from our current cultural expectations. There will be no effort towards any kind of neutral enforcement—indeed, people will not want that in their insular bubbles. There will be an expectation that content moderators will specifically forbid certain viewpoints and expressions, and that algorithms will promote other viewpoints disproportionately. Users will openly ask for that. This also solves the currently unsolvable problem of content moderation policies. In the June 24 panel, David Wilner said all the answers for content moderation are bad. The panel agreed this was an unsolvable problem. But they are wrong (because of the way they define “solve”)—there are several solutions, and this is the one that is most likely to emerge. Much of the current hubbub about Section 230 relates to questions about the fairness of content moderation, particularly regarding whether certain political viewpoints are being suppressed in some way. The fractured internet solves this problem—it is designed to.
III. What Does Section 230 Mean to an Internet Fractured by Rage?
In a fragmented internet, Section 230 has a very narrow and specific role. Section 230 does not protect those who express unpopular opinions (other laws do that); it protects companies from lawsuits by those angered by someone expressing an unpopular opinion. The primary function of Section 230 will be to dismiss lawsuits of defamation and liable when one community says hurtful things about members of other communities. This functionality will encourage small communities to emerge and express their views about other people and groups. So, in its own small way, Section 230 will play a part in continuing to shepherd along the growth of the internet, this time in a different direction.
The purpose of Section 230 was to allow platforms to avoid liability for the speech of users of those platforms. But removing Section 230 doesn’t automatically make platforms liable for the speech of users: each claim of liability still needs to be proven. Several panellists noted this, none more so directly than Blake Reid on June 23. So, even if Section 230 is undermined or destroyed, platforms do not automatically become liable for the speech of their users—the platforms are just at a higher risk for being found liable. The removal of this shield would encourage companies to take more aggressive content moderation policies, and it would also be a lot easier to implement these policies for a smaller community than for a larger one. Removing Section 230 protections might therefore further encourage smaller communities, but it would only accelerate a process that is already underway.
IV. Where the Internet is Going, It Will Go Regardless of Section 230.
Section 230 is a US law, and the internet is a world-wide web. OK, that’s a sentence that kicks a lot of dirt in the face of technological technicalities for the sake of punchy rhetoric. And there are some nuances and complexities to the role that a US law can play when an international company is based in the US; the internet has not obliterated national borders the way that some hoped or feared it might back in the mid 1990’s. But the core point here was observed by Rebecca Tushnet on June 23, when she noted that other nations don’t have Section 230 and users in those nations face a very similar internet to the internet that US users see.
On the subject of US law, it’s worth remembering that the First Amendment of the US Constitution is the real source of freedom of speech and expression in the US, not Section 230. One of the further reasons I predict the irrelevance of Section 230 is that the First Amendment is better positioned to protect freedom of speech. Section 230 has a much smaller, more specific role in addressing third party or intermediary liability claims.
The internet is heading towards a different structure of communities and culture. Section 230, or its absence, will neither prevent nor cause this. The internet is just another human tool, a cultural artifact, and it can only be subject to the whims of culture. As people change their expectations and desires for the experience they want from the internet, the internet will transform in response.
People who read this will probably disagree, but they won’t engage in a confrontational discussion about it. Experience on the internet has taught them that such a conversation is unlikely to be productive, interesting, or even respectful. Any interaction with it at all is more likely to be consigned to showing a friend and sharing a laugh about the foolishness and folly of the author. All of this is further evidence to support my prediction that the internet will move towards insular bubbles of communities.
In Rage 2, you play a character that travels between the small communities and explores the Wasteland. The game calls you a Ranger, and in typical Hero Trope fashion, one of the many things that sets you apart from those you encounter is this role of travelling between communities. I have to wonder, in an internet of insular bubbles, echo chambers, and closed and locked doors, if there will be Rangers. I wonder what role a person like that might play in a digital wasteland fractured by rage.
philogames 