I have a fairly long and sordid history with internet forums. In my early 20s, I spent a lot of time on a forum for a video game company based in Europe. I learned a lot about the real cultural differences between Europeans and Americans on this forum. And I ended up being banned. Ironically, not for one of my many "crimes" for which I paid time in the stocks of temp-ban, but for an off-handed comment about avatars.
Regardless, I was not alone. This forum banned people in droves. And strangely, Americans were targeted at much much higher rates than Europeans. I noticed this long before I was banned and I thought this was interesting, so I started to watch what happened. I noticed that Americans had a tendency to speak in a certain way over the internet, in declarative statements rather than tentative propositions like the Europeans tended to use. Where a European would be more likely to say "in my opinion, the sky is blue" and American would be more likely to say "the sky is obviously blue".
So the European moderators came to view the Americans as rude, even when they were not intending to be. People who were not really making personal attacks would be accused of doing so, simply because they were upsetting some poor European's sensibilities. And see that is what internet moderation really comes down to: sensibilities. This board just allowed me to see it clearly, by creating a line called the Atlantic Ocean, and thus the arbitrary nature of it became a really bright glare.
Lest there be any confusion, I have deep deep love for the European people. I am a Anglophile and Francophile, a history buff, a politics buff, and so on. But American and European internet communication styles do not mix. Oil and Water, these two. And to make matters worsee, on one political point relevant to this discussion, the Atlantic Ocean is a deep divide indeed; freedom of speech. The American political system, flawed as it might be in many other respects, has the best freedom of speech in the world. Hands down. End of discussion. You can say damn near anything you want here. And I don't think we realize how much that is in contrast to other parts of the world, especially in terms of how we speak.
And there lies the difference between Americans and Europeans on this forum. When a European was treated poorly by a moderator, they would acquiesce. When an American was treated the same way, they would fight. They would be pissed that someone was silencing them. And as anyone knows who has spent any time on message forums, fighting is a quick path to the permaban.
- You are being given a warning
- What? That's dumb. I didn't do anything wrong.
- You are disagreeing with a moderator, you are now temp-banned for 3 days
- *reregisters* This is bullshit! I can't believe that you are....
- PERMABAN
I saw it happen over and over and over. Since Americans were more likely to run afoul of the European moderators due to their "tone" (read, the way they speak), they were more likely to begin this death spiral to banishment.
So what does this have to do with a setting?
Well, we are seeing dramatic decline in state power right now and a dramatic rise of corporate power. We are heading into a kind of "golden age" like in the 1800s where big business runs everything. So what if you created a cyberpunk future where everything important was conducted online, under corporate control, and subject to the whims of an extremely corrupt moderation process. Free speech falls to the wayside, authoritarianism takes it's place.
The characters could be people who once said something that was a little off-color. And the system has come down on them so hard that they are forced into something akin to a SINless existence in Shadowrun. You could use all the politics you love to hate from forum politics, and just apply it to a cyberpunk future.
I'm not gonna take your crap any more, moderators! It's go time!
I think it could be a cool setting. Anyone else think so?
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