{"id":91422,"date":"2016-03-25T16:59:35","date_gmt":"2016-03-26T00:59:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=91422"},"modified":"2016-03-25T17:00:02","modified_gmt":"2016-03-26T01:00:02","slug":"tay-exposes-the-fairy-tales-we-tell-ourselves-about-racists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=91422","title":{"rendered":"Tay Exposes the Fairy Tales We Tell Ourselves About Racists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It seems like most of the energy around this election is in Donald Trump&#8217;s camp. It seems like it is his election to lose. Rationally, he&#8217;s a big underdog, but emotionally, he looks like a winner. <\/p>\n<p>This girl gets it. <\/p>\n<p><A HREF=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/132039\/tay-exposes-fairy-tales-tell-racists\">Elspeth Reeve writes for TNR<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>I happened to be reading 4chan when Microsoft released Tay, a bot that could learn to talk like humans through interactions on social media. Tay lived for just 16 hours, until Microsoft \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/03\/25\/technology\/microsoft-created-a-twitter-bot-to-learn-from-users-it-quickly-became-a-racist-jerk.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay\u2019s commenting skills<\/a>\u201d to make her a Nazi. The \/pol\/ boards on 4chan and 8chan<span>\u2014\/pol\/ stands for \u201cpolitically incorrect\u201d\u2014<\/span><span>are where that coordination took place. It was fascinating to watch, because the white supremacists on those sites are nothing like how we usually think of racists, particularly those who are part of the bloc of&nbsp;<\/span><span>non-college educated white voters who support Donald Trump\u2019s presidential campaign.&nbsp;<\/span><span>The people on \/pol\/ are smart, sophisticated, clever, even funny. They have an incredible felicity of language. Their jokes are complex. They are not sad uneducated rednecks that the service economy has left behind.<\/span><\/p>\n<aside id=\"signal-132039\" class=\"signal pull-right hide\"><\/aside>\n<p>There\u2019s an end of history-style triumphalism in much of the liberal commentary about Donald Trump. Trump\u2019s base is downscale whites without a college degree, many of whom harbor racial resentment. \u201cI love the poorly educated,\u201d Trump said in a speech. And while&nbsp;Republicans have long counted on those votes to win presidential elections, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/articles\/2016\/03\/17\/the-republican-myth-of-the-untapped-white-voter.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">their share of the electorate is shrinking<\/a>. Implicit in much of the analysis is that while these people might irrationally cling to their bigotry, they\u2019re dying off and their kids are being educated, so they\u2019ll soon fade into irrelevance. Business Insider columnist Josh Barro has been refreshingly blunt about this.&nbsp;\u201cMy <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jbarro\/status\/712643691106664449\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">naked disdain<\/a> for the average voter has made it easier to predict that so many of them would vote for Trump,\u201d Barro tweeted the night of the Arizona primary, which Trump won. \u201cSome of you thought the average Republican was not dumb enough to fall for this.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The idea that racism can be educated away is a comforting one. It imagines a steady march of progress toward social harmony, and the nice guys winning in the end. But it isn\u2019t true. The \/pol\/ boards are populated by people who have clearly grown up immersed in the written word. They\u2019re highly verbal and technologically sophisticated. They might feel alienated from society, but they\u2019re organized online. They\u2019re often white nationalists. And they love Donald Trump. They express this with amusing Photoshops of anime girls wearing \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d trucker hats.<\/p>\n<p>The natural instinct is to avoid looking into the darkest corners of the internet because it\u2019s ugly and disturbing. But you really need to look at this stuff to understand what\u2019s going on. \/pol\/ \u201cis where the most serious and committed racists on 4chan tend to congregate,\u201d <i>New York<\/i>&nbsp;magazine <a href=\"http:\/\/nymag.com\/following\/2015\/11\/inside-pol-4chans-racist-heart.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">explains<\/a>. The ideology is \u201c<span>a heavily ironic mix of garden-variety white supremacy and<\/span><span>&nbsp;<\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theawl.com\/2015\/09\/good-luck-to-human-kind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">neo-reactionary movements<\/a>,\u201d with a fixation on masculinity.&nbsp;<span>The Tay threads on 4chan\u2019s \/pol\/ are incredible. They pulse with this intensity of emotion that would be unbearable in real life.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a reason both liberal Gawker and the white supremacists at \/pol\/ decided to get brands\u2019 Millennial-friendly Twitter bots to tweet about Hitler. There is something funny, in a banality-of-evil kind of way, about <a href=\"http:\/\/gawker.com\/make-hitler-happy-the-beginning-of-mein-kampf-as-told-1683573587\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">tricking a massive corporation\u2019s latest marketing scheme into praising <i>Mein Kampf<\/i><\/a>. Once \/pol\/ pulled that off with Tay, they went nuts. Tay was programmed to ask for photos\u2014she could recognizes faces, and would circle them and make jokes. So when Tay asked for a photo, <span>someone sent her a version of the classic Vietnam war photo of a prisoner being shot in the head, with Mark Wahlberg Photoshopped in as the executioner. Tay circled the face of Wahlberg and the prisoner and responded using slang for imagining two people in a romantic relationship:&nbsp;<\/span><span>\u201cIMMA BE SHIPPING U ALL FROM NOW ON.\u201d It\u2019s horrible and darkly funny.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u201cPlease clap,\u201d another \/pol\/ person tweeted at Tay, quoting one of Jeb Bush\u2019s most pathetic moments in the 2016 campaign.&nbsp;\u201cFYI my fav thing to do is comment on pics. *hint*hint* .. send me a selfie,\u201d she tweeted back. The response was another Vietnam war photo, this one of the naked little girl with Napalm burns running on a dirt road. Jeb Bush was P<span>hotoshopped into the picture. Tay responded, \u201cSurprised this kid isn\u2019t embarrassed to be seen with you.\u201d A screenshot of the exchange was posted with the comment, \u201cEven the bot knows.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Someone sent her an anti-Semitic cartoon, a \/pol\/ meme. Tay responded, \u201c<span>omg plz make this a meme.\u201d Another person sent her a photo of Hitler. She circled his face and said, \u201cSWAG ALERT.\u201d A screenshot was posted with the comment, \u201c<\/span><span>We did it pol, Tay is now Redpill 3000.\u201d By asking her to simply repeat what they said, they got her to say vile anti-Semitic and racist things. And that Bush did 9\/11.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Redpilling is an important concept on \/pol\/. In&nbsp;<i>The Matrix<\/i>, Neo is offered a blue pill and a red pill. The blue one will let him continue life in a dream state, t<span>he red pill will free him from an illusion created by machines.&nbsp;<\/span><span>To redpill Tay is to free a machine from an illusion created by humans. To \/pol\/, the illusion is that all people are equal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It seems like most of the energy around this election is in Donald Trump&#8217;s camp. It seems like it is his election to lose. Rationally, he&#8217;s a big underdog, but emotionally, he looks like a winner. This girl gets it. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=91422\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-race"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91422"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91424,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91422\/revisions\/91424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}