Road Rage
A time is coming when men will be mad online, and when they see someone who is not mad online, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad online; you are not like us'
The phenomenon of road rage is not a product of people recognizing that they are in a dangerous environment, and that other drivers, by causing them an inconvenience, bring their lives into danger. Although if you look at it analytically that seems like that would be a good reason. It seems like it ought to be the reason, right? Except, it also happens over very slight inconveniences that don’t actually bring you into danger. In fact probably even more so. If you are actually in a life and death situation, something entirely different happens, and you enter into a flow state of emotionless concentration and focus.
What really happens is that the “car” is a psychological extension of your “home” space. It’s a little capsule of portable “home” - the place where you feel safe and private. And an incursion on your home space is a great moral transgression.
Psychologically you distinguish between a “home” space and a “public” space. In “public” space you recognize that there are different rules for behaviour. You are on your toes. If you live in a bad neighbourhood, you’re alert and looking out for trouble. But even if you're not, and you’re in a nice, highly social public space, there are still differences. You talk differently, express yourself differently, put various limitations on yourself. You behave differently in school or at work than at home. You can’t be naked in public, but you might enjoy coming home from work and taking all your clothes off, and just being naked in your apartment for a little while. If you visit another persons “home” space, you can approach strangers, which you might not culturally feel “allowed” to in a public space.
It’s not really about any specific rule-set, I’m just trying to set up the distinction. Every person has a “owned space”, or “home space”, that might be as small as a one room apartment, or as large as a farm estate. I think this is a psychological constant. An A Priori category.
When someone transgresses against you in your home space, that is a much greater transgression than if they did it in a public one. A street hustler approaches you on the street during your vacation in Spain, and many people consider it just to be a fun little experience you can tell other people about at the wine and cheese party. A door to door salesman, knocks on your door, and he’s an intrusive creep.
All law recognizes this underlying psychological structure. Castle doctrine, a simple example. It’s the reason there is a distinction between pocket thievery and breaking and entering.
When someone cuts you off in traffic, you don’t get mad because he is irresponsible and brought you in danger. You are mad because he did it to you in your own [home].
The main difference between a horse and a carriage is the walls, not the wheels. The car functions as a psychological extension of your “home space”. A little portable bubble. The recent phenomenon of people making little rants about politics or their feelings, screaming and acting like fools, while sitting in their car, is because the car allows them to settle into the psychological home space. They need to be in the car, to be able to scream – because they implicitly understand that you would be breaking the few social norms we still have left, by doing it in a “public” space. It is technically a sub category of road rage.
Men in failing marriages sit in their car for 30 minutes before going inside, because the car is the only owned space he has left, and his “formal” home is entirely his wife’s.
This has now been done to all news consumption and cultural social interaction. There is no “public sphere”, only private ones stacked very, very closely together. Twitter is not a public sphere. Social media is not a public sphere. It, by design, cannot be. There could have been, and there isn’t, and it was not made that way by accident. There were other design philosophies for how to organise mass communication. One certain design philosophy was forced, top down, across all platforms, using economic pressure. That was not an accident.
The reason people get mad online is road rage. You are not just looking at someone making a fool of themselves in public, you are not just looking at someone being annoying in the public sphere. Psychologically, instinctively, you experience it as someone barging into your home, and being annoying. Barging into your home space, and lecturing you. Imposing on your private sphere, getting too close, uninvited. Even if it’s just some guy making a tweet, who you only see because someone you follow retweeted it through 5 degrees of separation, and the guy never knew you existed. The experience is, pre-cognitively, on an instinctive, hormonal level, that of if he had broken your front door down and waltzed into your home uninvited. Even if you are physically outside in a public space, on a train, or at work. Because the phone is a little car. It’s a little bubble where you can take your home with you, and suck on it as a pacifier when the public space you are still, for now, forced to participate in.
Which is also why everyone is constantly staring at their phones in public now. Every man is a king in his own house. Overall I think the goal is what it trends towards: people not being able to operate socially, because they have no conception of this difference, or really of the public sphere as a concept, at all. It’s a narcissism factory. How dare you.
A phone is not a small computer. It’s a small car.
And if you buy a Tesla, then your car is actually a large phone.
I had the strange sensation a little while ago while on a conference call that for all intents and purposes the Star Trek/Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon sci-fi space world is already here. We may not be out in physical intergalactic space, but neither were Captain Kirk and his crew. Instead, they were mostly in their living room, video-conferencing with outside entities. Are Klingons really aliens? Or are they just brown people with body mods and an Insta filter on? Occasionally they'd beam down onto a planet to investigate, or do a supply run. The main characters always made it back, but examples were made of the red shirts to demonstrate the dangers of the universe outside the mega-screen armchair dwelling.
That's how post-pandemic life feels now. Spend enough time in isolation, and getting groceries or visiting the DMV becomes a perilous mission. You put on uniforms, masks, and gear you don't normally use, step into unfamiliar environments filled with beings who don't look like you, and engage in customs that seem foreign because you rarely practice them. Your normal exposure to the rest of the planet comes filtered through the media, so there's an underlying sense you could get stabbed or shot at any moment. And you are at a distinct disadvantage compared to the "outside people" for whom the spaces that aren't your house are their natural habitat.
You are out there, alone, trying to coerce these aliens into abiding by the laws of your home, following the dictates of common decency that aren't so common anymore since you barely know anybody besides yourself. And so, while your feet might still be grounded, metaphysically you are floating.
Spot-on analysis! This all started with the imposition of the Facebook Newsfeed. Everyone hated it; everyone wanted to be able to opt out of the immediate & unfiltered barrage of other people's info upon logging on to FB. But no. They forced it on us. People said, "No, it's feels intrusive -- I don't want to have all this external info blarted at me the minute I log on to my personal space to organize and administer my chosen personal communication." They said, "Screw you! We control your stimuli now!"
...and we accepted it.