The Open Society and the Internet

Karl Popper adapted his theory of democracy in 1945 to make room for the Open Society. Popper's model revised the conventional question of “Who should rule?” to ask how the state can remain alert against bad rule. The thought behind an Open Society is for persons to defend the public welfare by removing the crummy leader. This means accessing non-violent ways to rid bad leadership.

Can the concept of bloodless rule also refer to the governance of the transnational Internet? Yes, because the the www isn't exclusively a virtual zone. The relationship between the Open Society and the web functions online per influence of the offline environment.

You are the leader of your internal world while surfing the Internet solo. Your status changes once you start participating with other users, even those not physically present. There are two choices before you. If you are communicating as a team member like most, you will voluntarily quit the leadership mantle, but if you're the dominating type then you're the sort of dictator Popper was warning against. The problem begins with the second option. Popper was practically aware of the oxymoron situation that a democracy can be used as a platform for societal manipulation. His 1988 essay “The Open Society and Its Enemies Revisited” acknowledged that cultural and political openness are not the same. Cultural openness and political openness are two different things since individual and community standards can operate without the formal political structure of rules and laws.

But what if those standards are abnormalities? An absence, then, of regulatory political mechanisms can give way to a disposable society, a defect that's necessary to fend off. Persons can cover their tracks where there's less to accountability to comply with. A disposable society makes it easier to get away with wrongs.

The apparently borderless Internet adds to the risk of creating a disposable society. Bad leaders can quash their opponents at whim. The circumstances leading to U.S. v. Lori Drew, or the MySpace suicide case, show this. Hence the behavior directed against the victim is disappointing but not incomprehensible. Lori Drew and her daughter were Megan Meier's neighbors in Missouri. They were socially close with Megan's family and knew that thirteen year old Megan was under medical care for depression and ADD. Mrs. Drew mistakenly thought that Megan was being mean to her daughter. She intervened in an unorthodox manner. With her daughter and her eighteen year old employee, and perhaps others, she fraudulently opened a MySpace Account using a male name. The next steps were to invent a profile of a teenage boy and lure Megan as an online friend by sending a “friend” request. The several individuals represented the alias in conversations by tailoring the personality to hold Megan's interests. They played mind games which broke Megan ultimately.

In 2008 Lori was convicted of three misdemeanors under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a hacking law. A California Grand Jury found Lori guilty of violating the MySpace Terms of Use Agreement when she registered a false profile in order to harass other users. Her liability actually materialized as soon as she had clicked the assent button on the Agreement, which lists the types of activities and content MySpace forums prohibit including promoting misleading information and harassing others. Felony charges against Lori failed under the Act. A conviction would have proved that Lori had intended to cause emotional distress to Megan. The tort intention would have been present when Lori opened the MySpace account, designed the profile, and chatted with the victim, both a legitimate MySpace user and a minor, with deception at all times and inappropriate speech sometimes.

The MySpace case also has glossed over the role of Lori's daughter. Would the daughter have been seen accountable if she had participated as actively as Lori or in Lori's place? Or would the public's response be to give her a break? Awwwww she's a thirteen year old girl. Lil Tinkerbell messed up....but she probably don't mean it. Is it fair to arrest her future development? Lori, on the other hand, avoided felony conviction since the proper legal mechanisms didn't exist. The federal charges required a burden of proof for which the jury required stronger evidence, while Missouri didn't have a cyber harassment statute then. But the cyber environment of cultural openness in which the Drews had approached Megan strongly suggests that there was a prior desire to inflict a negative effect. This was done through the medium of cyberspace with the goal of delivering the result offline. The Drews targeted Megan because they wanted her to feel awful. Whether they sought for anything more to manifest isn't tangible to us, the spectators, but the victim was harassed certainly. Mrs. Drew and her accomplices stalked Megan systematically by calculating their acts and communications over a time period. A point in their favor is the tendency of the legal structure to address stalking as a gray area. The reason is due to the collision of the victim and stalker's knowledge elements. Stalkers play cat and mouse games with preys based on threats; they exploit what they know about the victims. The threats might not be explicit but hints to menace emotionally and flaunt the victim's insecurities. Stalkers may aim for maximum control of victims though Smart Stalkers are careful not to implicate themselves. This way the law can evade the Smart Stalker, who can't be held directly liable if the victim hasn't been harmed before complaining to the authorities.

A predator's scope to deal out mental abuse is encouraged by the cultural openness of the Internet. Internet users have the emotional liberty to indulge themselves. They can conveniently assume the presence of friendly or competitive relationships with other users by cyber diffusion, however one sided or cannibalistic. The growth of the Internet Addiction Syndrome which gorges on bandwith and of Internet goup suicide pacts, often with short term acquaintances, exploits psychological fragilities. That's why it may be self defeating to dismiss harassment and stalking by a net junkie as an exercise of anonymous cowardice alone. A common response of spectators is that the armchair warrior is a loser who becomes bold behind a computer screen. That the unpalatable bad ruler wouldn't have have the gumption to say or do things offline and face to face. Such explanations can give undue credit to an offender. They overlook that a perpetrator may reconcile his Internet activities with his offline persona. He or she could even admit that the behavior is incongruous with societal expectations, but willingly orchestrate one's cyber identity rather than being perceived by family and society. as a threat in real life. The advantages of having a permissive family or fawning support network can assist that self confidence. It may well be that the individual has a satisfactory external environment and hums happily to the hits “I've Never Been To Me” and “Superwoman.”

So the Internet harasser may think it's cute to impose upon the leeway of the Open Society by staging indirect criminal libel against others. Lori Drew might not feel genuinely responsible for her actions. Yet, she objected when confronted subsequently by a loss of her business clients from bad publicity instigated by Megan's mother. Mrs. Meier targeted financial sentiment as Lori's emotional vulnerability. We err as an Open Society by letting Internet harassers off the hook. Persons who manipulate benefits of cultural openness must surely know that their agenda of pestering is being tolerated by the structure of political openness. In terms of decorum though their conduct is uncivil. Medical terms that pop up to describe the excessive cyberstalker are antisocial; pathological; perverse. The Internet harasser should heed this worthy sound byte from our pal Cicero. The statesman made the character assessment over 2000 years ago.

THE SIX MISTAKES OF MAN

1. The delusion that personal gain is made by crushing others.

2. The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected.

3. Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it.

4. Refusing to set aside trivial preferences.

5. Neglecting development and refinement of the mind, and not acquiring the habit of reading and studying.

6. Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.

An uninvited nosey parker recently hacked into my family email account. The hacker committed the crimes of identity theft, property theft, and fraud. An Internet search on how to report a hacked account quickly brings up Yahoo! Answers which explains that Yahoo! Mail, the server of my account, probably wouldn't do anything. The hacker probably had relied on that reassurance. In the bigger picture, similar lack of regulation by web portals exemplifies how cyberspace is increasingly susceptible to the growth of a disposable society. When the company subsidiaries of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! in India allowed ads on their search engines for the sale of gender selection baby kits, they were breaking the law against female foeticide. A legal challenge brought their attention to the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994 and lead to Google and Microsoft removing the ads followed by Yahoo. Yahoo! Giddy-up.