#angryjack

“Why are you so angry?”

I ask this question a lot. I wondered it in high school when I would watch someone cross a room at lunchtime to lecture the only vegetarian about how canines are sharp for a reason, and I wanted to yell it at that one dude that camped out on the #1reasonwhy hashtag1 for over an hour to tell women how wrong they were about discrimination in the tech industry.

It’s a contagious kind of anger. I’ve been guilty of it myself; at my ninth or tenth birthday party, I found out my friend Matt was an atheist, and demanded for him to explain why. I went on to stop him while we went around the ice-skating rink to ask him what he got for Christmas, making a point that an atheist who celebrates Christmas is a hypocrite. (I took it for granted that Matt being a hypocrite would prove that God existed.) 

It’s a very specific anger. It’s not the same as trolling—trolling is its own beast2, making trouble for the sake of making trouble. This is something knee-jerk, something not easy to reason with, and coming from a deeper place.

In high school, we used to yell “Why are you so angry?” at this one kid as he drove past. We found out at a party that his name was Jack. He drove a baby blue 1960's Volkswagen beetle with a glasspack on the tailpipe that made his engine blast like a Jaguar. He would drive down the hill revving his incredibly loud engine and scowling at all us pedestrians, and just generally being the epitome of inexplicable anger, weirdly directed. 

Since our mysterious anger is not trollishness, for the sake of language let’s call it AngryJack. And, in fairness, let’s try to divorce the term from its white male origins and think of it instead as a kind of genderless distillation—think of it like applejack.

Now: where does AngryJack come from? 

The atheist who has to defend their (dis)belief, the woman calling out sexism in the tech industry, the blogger discussing race, the vegetarian trying to eat lunch  – what do they all have in common? Their very existence seems like a critique, and people get defensive when they feel they have to justify themselves.

This phenomenon shows up in the documentary No Impact Man. The film is about writer Colin Beavan and his family, who commit to having no impact on the environment for one year. Only local food, no electricity, no toilet paper. When the announcement goes public, several sectors of the blogosphere jump on it. Colin and his wife, Michelle, are baffled by the vitriol—they meet the fury of angry bloggers, brutal commenters, and hate mail, all for something that does not affect anyone outside of the family. Michelle discovers she knows one of the bloggers tangentially, and ends up paying her a visit. The blogger, who by all outward appearances is a perfectly calm woman, talks rather apologetically about the way Colin’s project makes people feel. If shutting off your power is morally right, what does it say of the rest of us who leave it on? 

It feels awful for people to consider that things they've have done all their lives, with the best of intentions, could be bad. Most people consider themselves good people. The person who doesn’t drink is a person who’s taken a stance on drinking. For most of us, drinking isn’t a stance; it’s just what grown-ups do. We do it because it seems perfectly natural, and we get pissed off when people imply that it isn’t. Maybe they aren’t judging us, but they’ve passed a judgment on something we do.

If you’re a teetotaler, an atheist, or a vegetarian, this behavior has probably annoyed you. If you’re an environmentalist, it has probably gotten in the way of your work. But if you’re queer, female, or non-white, it has probably been personally damaging. Take the example of  Anita Sarkeesian, who was reported to YouTube as a terrorist because angry people didn’t want her to make videos about feminism. These same people sent her daily rape and death threats and made a video game about beating her.3

Sometimes it can be scary for a white person to consider that they have profited off of racism, for a man to consider that what he likes and how he acts is damaging to women, for straight people to consider that gender is not as simple as they may have thought. Some people wrestle with this, and reconsider what kind of white, straight, or male person they want to be. I’d wager this is where most allies come from.

But some people get angry instead.

Of course, nobody wants to consider themselves sexist, racist, or transphobic. So it is absolutely imperative to believe that the things being critiqued are not actually sexism, racism, and transphobia. The people bringing these things up must be wrong or lying. Because if they’re not, what does it say about us?

People drunk on AngryJack have the only  goal of proving to themselves that the other person can be dismissed, hence the willingness to leapfrog between contradictory arguments or to ignore a body of arguments because they find the speaker unserious. Engaging with a person in this state is not the same thing as having a discussion, because only one of you is having a discussion. The other is explaining that there is no discussion, there has never been a discussion, and why are you still trying to have one? This isn’t someone who refuses to know how the sausage is made. This is someone who denies, while they eat it, that the sausage is even a sausage.

It doesn’t seem fruitful to engage with people in this state. But I’m going to suggest we engage with them anyway, especially when there is an audience.

Take the Internet, for example. It isn't just a forum; it’s a document. At any given time there are dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people reading, some of them young and new to the medium. What happens when somebody makes an unwittingly-bigoted statement and nobody picks it up and unpacks it? What are we saying about its appropriateness?

If you choose to pick it up, you can’t hold much hope that you’ll convince your detractor. They're not generally in agreeable moods. Even if it happens from time to time, you can't frame your argument for that purpose. So frame it for the audience. Use it as an opportunity to talk to the people listening. Let them know that if they choose to make statements like these, someone will hold them accountable.

The thing is, if you are seeking to make the world, or at least the web, a safer and more accepting place, you don’t need the permission of the people who disagree with you.

The intent is to bring that world about with or without them.

1#1reasonwhy was dedicated to women, mostly those in the games industry, sharing stories about the ways women get treated in tech that discourage them from entering the field. Every single woman in gaming that I follow on Twitter had something to add to it.

2Jay Smooth addressed the differences between trolling and actual anger in his video Why You Should Feed The Trolls If You Damn Well Need To 

3 Anita Sarkeesian's TEDx Talk