Tragedy makes no sense

One way we make sense of senseless tragedies is to frame them into political debates.

My Facebook feed seems to be split between two perspectives on the Santa Barbara shooter's misogyny. One is that his violence was fed into by sexist online cultures and attitudes that turn women into commodities. Another perspective is that the guy was, plain and simple, severely mentally ill, and misogyny has nothing to do with it.

It's easy for me to turn the conversation about the Santa Barbara shooter into a conversation about masculinity and misogyny, because those are topics that I want to talk about, anyway. I'll check my privilege and admit that I have no idea what it's like to be a woman who has to deal with our society's conflicting expectations. But when I studied feminism, I was captivated because we went even further beyond gender into unpacking all of the inequalities and false assumptions that underly society – including capitalism and militarism. My role models for “manly men who recognize how screwed up gender roles are” include people like George Carlin and Louis CK, who also take that leap into recognizing how screwed up everything is.

Do we need to talk about misogyny and online cultures that turn women into objects? Absolutely. Would this guy have found something else to drive his rampage even if he hadn't bought into those sexist attitudes? Probably.

When something terrible happens, we struggle to make sense of it. Can we really make sense? I was just reading Roger Ebert's review of Elephant, a movie about a school shooting, and he praises the movie because it doesn't give us any easy answers. It just presents, without comment, the lives of the people affected by the tragedy.

One way we make sense of the ambiguity is to make political points about it, putting the unexplainable and horrible into a less unsettling box, with ideas we already know how to talk about.

Look no further than the gun control debate. I don't even need to ask to know that there are two different perspectives emerging from this tragedy. On the gun control side, people are lamenting that he had access to guns, and calling for stricter regulation – then this wouldn't have happened. On the pro-gun side, people are imagining what would've happened if one of the victims had a concealed carry and was a good shot – then this wouldn't have happened.

We want to make sense, and we have things we already want to talk about. But when faced with something so horrible, no matter how we slice it, we are trying to make sense of something terrible that defies sense.

Technology outpaces values, but so does everything else

    Mary Shelley literally created a monster; Ray Bradbury warned of automation eroding our humanity. Today, instead of Frankenstein's monster or sentient robots, technology meets values in taxicabs and episodes of Girls.
    Ride-hiring smartphone apps like Lyft and Uber are taking off because riding through them is cheaper and often more convenient than taking a cab. But, of course, this new menace of sharing your car with strangers is something cities are rushing to regulate – cheered on by cab companies who don't want to lose business.
    The rationale may seem principled, but is really pure self-interest, with an icing of whatever principles happen to back it up. When a corporation doesn't want environmental regulations or taxes to cut their profits, they don't want big government meddling in the free market. But when a rival business model comes in, thanks to that sacred free market, they want the government to step in and protect their profits.
    As for cities regulating ride-sharing, trumped by ostensible “safety” is the concern over whether everyone is paying their taxes – whether the regulators are getting their piece of the pie. Values follow convenience.
    Technology has been outrunning both our values and regulations for some time. For instance, stalking and privacy laws don't account for victims of “revenge porn” – intimate photos uploaded by angry exes – because those laws were written back when those intimate photos would have been developed on 35mm film at Walgreens. In the case of Lyft and Uber, insurance regulations and chauffer laws were not written to account for someone's liability giving a ride to a stranger via smartphone. By the time the slow legislative process could pass a law, smartphones would be obsolete.
    Apart from phones enabling a drug-like hit of Facebook anywhere, the average person most notices technologial acceleration in how we consume music and TV. It may not be fair to download an mp3 without the artist being compensated – but this small bit of stealing has become acceptable. Record companies warned that “home taping is killing music” back when people would copy Devo cassettes for their friends – now, technology is such that people just refer their friends to a link on The Pirate Bay to illegally download it. Not just free, but way more convenient than copying a tape.
    Or, say you don't have cable, but you want to watch HBO. You can Google an illegal stream of Game of Thrones in less than a minute. You could watch it legally through HBOGo, but to get an HBOGo subscription, you need cable. Or you could get someone else's password. If people don't want to pay, would they be willing to watch advertisements before a program – the way Hulu and Crackle make money and pay the rightsholders – in exchange for a higher quality picture and not having to feel the lingering sense of criminality? This can't happen yet. The powers that be who make sure HBO gets their piece of the pie haven't yet figured out how to make money off the non-cable demographic, so there's no convenient way to be legal, therefore yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
    People will be legal when it's convenient. Services like Spotify have become ubiquitious – still with lingering doubts that artists are being paid fairly – and many people stream music off of Youtube, which has “content matching” and runs ads to ostensibly pay the artist by paying the rightsholders. The success of these organizations proves that people want to be legal, so the nice argument goes. But these things have not taken off because they're legal; they've taken off because they're convenient and luckily they happen to be legal.
    In everything from where we shop to who we vote for, principles should be our foundation for how we act. We should make our decisions on which companies we buy from or how we get music based on underlying values – the kind of person we want to be or the standard of fairness we want to uphold. But, just as our values run to catch up to technology, we buy or steal based on what is convenient, with the “principles” behind it catching up later.