With Ron Paul’s now-infamous newsletters once again making headlines, I mulled whether I ought to revisit the issue, but ultimately decided that there wasn’t much to add to the long piece Dave Weigel and I wrote for Reason back in 2008, especially since I’d already elaborated in a couple blog postscripts written shortly after that article appeared.

Apparently, The New York Times agreed. On Monday, they ran a piece that amounts to a couple paragraphs of “fresh tops” aimed at trying to make the piece current, followed by a very light, very lazy rewrite of our article. It cites exactly the same essays and materials we did, takes for granted the identity of Paul’s chief ghostwriter and newsletter editor (which our article spent a fair amount of space publicly establishing for the first time), and even interviews exactly the same sources on the same subjects. (I’ll buy that any reporter would have phoned Ed Crane up; I’ll eat my left shoe if the authors had the first idea who Carol Moore or Mike Holmes were before they read our piece.)

Please don’t take my word for it, though: Compare for yourself. This isn’t a “follow-up” story. It’s a sloppy paraphrase whose authors expended the bare minimum effort of getting our sources to repeat quotes anew so they could use our material without citing the original source.  Or very nearly: A few sentences from the very end, they acknowledge one tidbit was “first reported in Reason,” which is a rather brazen implicit deception, given that the same is true of almost everything else in the article. The sad thing is, if they’d been willing to open with a candid reference and link, they could’ve saved the time spent revisiting ground we covered and actually contributed something to the story.

Unlike Dave Weigel, I’m no longer a journalist, so I actually don’t care about being credited for long-ago reporting on a topic I had no intention of ever returning to. What I do care about is de facto deception of the audience by lazy journalists eager to pass off their regurgitation as reporting—which seems to be rather  a habit at the Times. I imagine they get away with it because their scribes are normally lifting from people who aspire to work there one day—but since, again, I’m no longer a journalist, I don’t feel any particular qualms about pointing it out.  

I still probably wouldn’t have bothered with a post just to lob a brickbat at some lazy journalism, but in this case it’s actually germane to the substance of the story. The implication, after all, is that even though the newsletters were a focus of national attention four years ago, Paul’s fellow travelers were content to gloss over this ugly history—quietly complicit in this pandering to racism—until the bold bloodhounds at the Times sniffed out the scoop. It looks rather different if the Times is just rehashing the highlights of what a libertarian magazine explored in greater details years ago.  

As an ex-journalist myself, I get that it seldom makes sense to waste valuable column inches stroking the ego of every hack whose work you looked at before tackling a topic. The hack’s mom may care, but the average reader certainly doesn’t. When it’s an isolated factoid or a quote, I say lift and godspeed. When you’re doing little more than recapitulating an earlier article wholesale, however, and when it is actually directly relevant to the story that this topic has been exhaustively investigated and discussed within the very movement you’re writing about… well, in those cases, if you don’t have any professional scruples, at least have a little fucking shame.

Addendum: Just to clarify, I’m not annoyed about our reporting being “stolen”—you can’t “steal” public domain facts—or looking to get some kind of acknowledgement by name, which would be of no particular professional value to me at this point (and probably generate unwanted interview requests on a topic I’m happy to be done with). I’m annoyed that what I’d thought was a decent piece of writing and reporting got the equivalent of a rewrite by a stoned highschool student adapting a review essay for an overdue book report. So readers got this mangled account—including an incredibly confused idea of what the faultlines in contemporary libertarianism are about, assuming anyone cares about these internecine pissing contests—rather than a simple link to a more thorough treatment. While I appreciate the supportive comments, nobody should really be offended on my behalf here. Be offended that people who subscribe to the Paper of Record aren’t getting the quality of coverage they’re paying for because a couple of indolent hacks are too desperate to give the appearance of being real reporters to provide a reference and do original work.

Proponents of ever stronger and longer copyrights, supported by ever more draconian enforcement mechanisms, like to throw around terms like “piracy” and “theft” for the emotional reactions they provoke. This is not, as Matt Yglesias notes, an aid to clear thinking: Copyright infringement and theft are both illegal—along with jaywalking, murder, and speeding—but they’re otherwise quite different acts, which are quite properly treated very differently as a matter of law, and prioritized differently as a matter of enforcement practice. The most obvious reason the analogy fails is that “theft” centrally involves depriving the owner of the thing that’s stolen. Copying a CD or DVD for a friend—or letting them borrow your copy, for that matter—may occasionally displace a legitimate purchase, but it doesn’t leave the artist or rightsholder with any fewer copies than they had before. That’s not to say copyright infringement isn’t also problematic, or something the government needn’t worry about deterring. Copyright maximalists insist on “theft” instead of “copyright infringement,” however, mostly because they don’t want people thinking too hard about the myriad ways these offenses are different, and how they might therefore call for different policy responses.

But if the defining characteristic of theft is that it deprives the victim of something they were entitled to use and enjoy, then there are things that can accurately be described as “intellectual property theft.” When legislators—many of whom now support censoring the Internet to stop “piracy”—rewrote the copyright bargain with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Exension Act, they retroactively extended the monopoly of rightsholders over existing works by 20 years. That retroactive extension, of course, did nothing to incentivize new creation. And since economists have estimated that the present value of a copyright monopoly was already barely distinguishable from the value of an unlimited term, it’s doubtful that even the prospective extension bought us much additional creativity. But it did mean that the general public would be denied, for another 20 years, the free use of works that had been slated to fall into the public domain under the original copyright bargain. That sounds more like “theft” of intellectual property—and not just theft from a particular creator or industry, but from the whole of the public.

When rightsholders engage in copyfraud, insisting that other creators beg for permission and pay licensing fees for “fair uses” copyright law allows—and when skittish lawyers make that insistence effective, creators and their audiences are deprived of a use of that intellectual property they’re entitled to. When overbroad DMCA notices sent by careless lawyers remove original creations that making novel transformative use of prior work from the public Internet, users are robbed of art they are entitled to enjoy.

The pillaging of the public domain is real “intellectual property theft.” How about a crackdown on that?

“Rational Selves, Moral Communities, and Ethics for Sociopaths“, over at the new Libertarianism.org blog.

I’ll lay off Occupy and turn to the exponentially more objectionable treatment of them by authorities after this, but this is sort of what I was talking about in the previous post:

Authorities removed protesters Saturday evening from an abandoned school in downtown Washington that had been entered by members or sympathizers of the Occupy D.C. movement…. Earlier, it appeared that about a dozen people went into the three-story building, unfurling a large black banner from the roof of the three-story building, and vowing to stay inside the school until it is converted for community use.

One protester elaborates:

City officials have said they hope to have the building privately developed. Protesters said it should be kept for the public, perhaps to reopen as a homeless shelter.

“This building is not surplus, and we won’t allow the city to give it away or turn it into a boutique hotel,” said Abigail DeRoberts, a member of Free Franklin.

For those unfamiliar with D.C. geography, this is a little like demanding that a soup kitchen using only solid gold utensils be opened on Park Avenue. This is a huge property overlooking a park in the middle of D.C.’s downtown business district, and it’s not especially surprising that the city’s elected representatives think it maybe makes more sense to sell or lease it, reap a continuous stream of tax revenue, and use those funds to support social services—including homeless shelters elsewhere in the city. Maybe there are strong arguments against this, and if “occupation” is a short-term stunt to draw attention to the issue so that the public can be more engaged in further deliberation, fine, that’s how protest works. If “we won’t allow the city” means “we’ll exert political pressure by mobilizing opposition and advancing arguments,” fantastic.

But if that’s a “won’t allow” in the sense of actually trying to seize the space for the use your group thinks is best, I find myself again thinking: Wait, who elected you? There are cases where even a formally democratic decision might be so invasive of fundamental liberties that people are justified in attempting to just directly block implementation of that decision. But choices about how to use a public building don’t really seem to fall in that category. This is a decision involving a whole bunch of stakeholders—including those dozens of community activists and various folks who hate boutique hotels, but also developers and business owners and their employees and customers, surrounding businesses that might benefit from a hotel, beneficiaries of other programs that rely on tax revenue, and a broader taxpaying base (most of whom are unlikely to personally invest a whole lot of time and thought on this particular question).  I’m familiar enough with D.C. local government not to be excessively sanguine about their making the right call, but they’re the ones actually elected to balance all those interests.  So when a few dozen—or even a few hundred—people say “no, we won’t allow it” on the premise that they speak for “the community,” I think it’s fair to say: “Wait, no, you don’t.” And again, I get worried when a group is so convinced that it represents the authentic voice of the people that it thinks it has a mandate to override, as inherently illegitimate, any political decision it doesn’t like.

Almost everything about the execution of yesterday’s eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park was an outrage, from the interference with reporters seeking to cover the event, to the needless destruction of protesters’ property, to Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s stunningly lawless disregard for a court order restraining the city. But on the underlying question of whether the city must allow any group to set up a tent city in public space indefinitely, I think Doug Mataconis gets it right: There’s no First Amendment right to camp out in a park, and no reason to think that there’s anything constitutionally offensive about a content-neutral rule designed to ensure that public parks can continue to be used as, well, parks. People, of course, have every right to speak their mind in public (or, in this instance, quasi-public) space. But laying down dozens of tents and announcing that you and your friends intend to live there indefinitely always sounded suspiciously like an attempt to, in effect, privatize that public space.

I’ve always had a similar reaction to that hoary protest chant: “Whose Streets? Our Streets! Whose Park? Our Park!” Here we’re supposed to understand that “our” means “the people” as a whole. But protesters—even when they call themselves “The 99%”—comprise a pretty minuscule fraction of a percent of the population of a city the size of New York.  In practice, “our” means “this particular group of people,” even if they aspire to represent a much larger group. We don’t put expressive rights to a vote, fortunately, but it does seem like a whole bunch of democratically elected city officials are under the impression that their constituents want their parks to remain usable for traditionally park-ish purposes. Maybe they’re wrong, of course, or maybe that’s a pretext offered to squelch a threat to their corporate paymasters. But it always seems presumptuous when soi-disant populist movements, left and right, declare that “we the people” want this or that.

For most of human history, we’ve spent our whole lives in social clusters of a few hundred people—we’re basically hardwired for groups of that size. That makes it easy to look at a throng of a few thousand out at a rally and tell yourself, as another familiar chant has it: “This is what democracy looks like.” 

Except, of course, it isn’t really. Or at any rate, it’s only a tiny part of what democracy looks like. 

A small group of people self-selected for their commitment to some set of shared goals and values may be able to pick a set of slogans to chant in unison, or resolve their limited disagreements by consensus process.  But real democracy in a pluralist society involves deep and often ineradicable disagreement—and not just on the optimal uses of public parks and other commons. It’s true, of course, that concentrated and wealthy interests routinely capture the apparatus of government, and use it to serve ends inimical to the general good. But a frame that sets up an opposition between “the 99%” and “the 1%” —or, if you prefer, between “Washington/media elites” and “Real America”—suggests a vain hope that profound political differences are, at least in some spheres, an illusion manufactured by some small minority.

Against that background, it’s instructive that so many OWS organizers have cited Tahrir Square as an inspiration. In much of the Arab world, after all, the problem isn’t so much resolving democratic disagreement as getting to the point where there are regular, free elections whose results are respected. However broken our system might be, we’ve at least gotten that far. In that context, though, once protest has successfully drawn public attention to an issue, it seems like the next step should be to get on with the messy and prosaic business of debating and deliberating on concrete reforms with those who have different views. If the people all (or nearly all) want the same thing, but an oppressive authority refuses to act on that shared desire, debate and deliberation are beside the point: There’s nothing to do but throw your bodies on the gears until the rulers have no choice but to comply.  My sense is that many of the OWS folks think that’s more or less the situation we are in. Spend a few weeks in a self-selected community, and perhaps it becomes possible to believe that 99% of us really are all on the same page—or at least, would be if we weren’t brainwashed by the 1%. This has long been a major strain in conservative thinking: Everyone would see that our views are just simple common sense—obviously correct!—if not for a liberal media cabal systematically lying to people all day. Dark as this sounds, it’s utopian in one sense: It implies we’d all agree but for the malign influence of this or that small but powerful group.

I’m neither cynical enough to believe that our deeply flawed democracy is a complete sham, nor optimistic enough to hope the appearance of fundamental political conflict is a stage production masking an underlying harmony. But if disagreement is real—if large numbers of my fellow citizens sincerely hold very different views about what policy is best—then protest, however vital as a consciousness raising tool,  can only be a preparation for the more humdrum enterprise of convincing your neighbors with sustained arguments (or being convinced yourself), electing candidates, and all the rest. To imagine protest not as prologue to politics, but as a substitute for it, suggests a denial of the reality of pluralism, and an unwillingness to find out what democracy actually looks like.

Citing Robert Nozick, Matt Yglesias argues that it’s incoherent to oppose redistribution for the purpose of equalizing people’s outcomes, while at the same time touting tax-supported efforts to ensure “equality of opportunity.” If the objection to redistribution is that people have strong claims over their own assets, then it should make no difference whether they are taken to equalize the welfare of adults or the life prospects of children. It’s debatable whether this necessarily follows from the best reading of Nozick’s view, but in any event, I think it’s mistaken.

On any non-anarchist view, people may be legitimately expropriated for some purposes, even if those purposes are limited to funding the “night watchman” functions of a minimal libertarian state, compensating people for the imposition of negative externalities, and so on. We can agree with Nozick that “No one has a right to something whose realization requires certain uses of things and activities that other people have right and entitlements over,” in the sense that it will not do to talk in abstract terms about people having a “right to” whatever seems good for people to have, as though these goods were just manna from heaven. We need to speak clearly about what we think other people are obligated to provide those we’re asserting have a right, and which of those obligations may be coercively enforced.

Many people who say we have a “right to healthcare,” for instance, mean that they think we are all obligated to contribute—and if necessary may be compelled to contribute—to some public scheme for the universal provision of healthcare. Most of those people do not mean—I hope—that retired doctors are under a coercively-enforceable obligation to help provide that care, such that they may be conscripted into service, or that healthy people may be compelled to serve as unwilling kidney donors. Rights do not float free from enforceable duties, and we ought to take care in asserting a purported “right” that it does not conflict with other rights, including just claims over assets.

But the same holds in the opposite direction.  I may have a just claim against anyone who would seek to compel me to cough up $20… unless they are the agent of someone to whom I promised that $20 in return for some service, and are demanding it for the purpose of making good on my pledge. Ditto for an agent of someone whose property I damaged in a way that will cost $20 to repair. Whether I have a right against someone seeking to expropriate me will often depend upon what they want the money for.

Suppose, counterfactually, that we did live in a society where some intergenerational scheme of transfers and provision of certain goods, such as public education, did substantially achieve equality of opportunity, within realistic limits. Assuming the persistence of something recognizably like current family structure, there would be no getting around the vagaries of upbringing, or of our basic biological endowments, but without gross disparities in things like educational opportunity, childhood nutrition, and so on. Despite this  basic equality, there would nevertheless be significant disparities in outcomes—and in particular in wealth—owing to all sorts of remaining differences between people, including their talents, determination or worth ethic, preference for income over leisure, and a healthy dollop of simple dumb luck.

Eventually, the taxman cometh to each adult member of this society, and suggests that they are obligated to contribute some percentage of their income for each of two distinct purposes.  One is the preservation of the system of equal opportunity in which each was raised. The second is a system of transfers to equalize the differential outcomes of the adults who have come out of that system.  The better off among these adults object that they’ve fairly earned their wealth, and should not be coercively deprived of it. The taxman, it seems to me, has a stronger response in the former case than the latter.

In the former case, the taxman can say: What you have now, you have in no small part because of this intergenerational system of goods provision.  Even if your parents would have been able to give you a decent start without public assistance, you have earned your income by engaging in productive cooperation with people who may not have been as fortunate. You cannot reasonably complain about being asked to pay back into this system at least the amount by which your position is better than what it would have been in the absence of that system. Moreover, your claim that you have fairly earned your holdings may depend, in part, on your having started out under conditions of rough equality with others. They cannot object that it is unfair of you to command so much wealth when they had as much opportunity to earn it as you did, but did not.

Nozick, to be sure, would not have been much moved by these arguments at the time he wrote Anarchy, State, and Utopia, but they are, at any rate, facially somewhat plausible answers to the property owner’s objection, provided the underlying empirical claim turns out to be true. In many ways, this answer would parallel the answer the taxman might give to justify taxation in order to support provision of police and courts: You could not have earned your wealth, or nearly as much of it, absent the stable institutional background that enables market cooperation.  You cannot now turn around and deny your support, by means of the same resources you have earned on the market, to the perpetuation of the system that made it possible.

Nozick explicitly rejects the tacit principle of reciprocity invoked here: We do not (he observes) normally think people can be unilaterally obligated to pay for supposed benefits they’ve been provided with unasked. You cannot weed someone’s garden while they sleep, then demand a fee for the service. But in this case, the taxman can point out that it would not have been possible to ask each child whether they wanted to agree to take part in this sort of system, leaving us with little alternative but to fall back on some kind of principle of reciprocity, or to forego a system of benefits we genuinely think makes everyone—including those asked to do more to fund it—better off in terms of the very wealth they’re asked to pay back. Each may be better off economically with a system of opportunity-plus-taxation than each would be without either the system or the taxes that fund it, and for obvious reasons, it may simply not have been possible to let each person decide in advance whether they want to accept this package deal. But if you say you would have rejected it, all you’re being asked to return is the same funds you would have implicitly rejected at the same time.

Perhaps the taxpayer relents in response to these arguments. Can something similar be said about taxation for equalization of economic outcomes? This, too, might be a partly empirical question. It’s conceivable that at a given time, it’s less costly to provide some minimum standard of living to the worst off than to pay for more cops and prisons when the worst off become desperate. But against a background of rough equality of opportunity, it will generally be much less plausible to argue on grounds of reciprocity that each taxpayer—each actual taxpayer, including those who pay in without drawing on the system—is made better off on net by the existence of a system of compulsory contributions and transfers.

Here, the taxpayer may say: “I have recognized several exceptions to my general claim to have a right to my holdings. When you pointed out that my business creates various environmental externalities, I recognized my obligation to surrender certain funds to support programs that mitigate those harms or compensate those adversely affected. When you pointed out that my holdings depend on a system of courts and law, and upon a system of education that prepares my fellow citizens (in childhood) for social cooperation as adults, I acknowledged that I couldn’t coherently invoke my right to my holdings against a demand to help support the very systems that are its preconditions.  But these exceptions do not plausibly apply to a system of redistributive transfers to other adults, at least above whatever level is necessary to ensure basic social stability.  These transfers are not part of an intergenerational system from which I myself benefit; this system of transfers merely imposes a cost on me for the benefit of others. It might be morally better for me to voluntarily contribute to help my fellow citizens, but absent some such special justification, there’s no exception to my general right to my holdings that would permit compulsory expropriation for this purpose. Moreover, as an adult, I am perfectly capable of joining in a system of mutual social insurance with others if I do think it’s likely to be in my interest to do so.”

There are a number of familiar answers to this sort of argument, and there’s little purpose to my rehearsing “Theories of Social Justice 101″ here by elaborating on them. But there’s at least a facially plausible argument for treating public provision of “opportunity” programs as justifying an exception to people’s generally valid claims on their fairly-earned holdings, in a way that is not available for straightforward redistributive programs.  This may, of course, be wrong. It may be wrong because a parallel argument is available for those programs, or it may be wrong because the type of justification I have sketched very roughly above will not actually work even in the case of opportunity-providing programs. Even if my proposed distinction is right insofar as it goes, there may be other arguments supporting compulsory funding for redistributive outcome-equalizing programs that render this distinction moot. It may be that I am not obligated to cough up the funds for such programs on the basis of this sort of justification, but some other better one that applies equally to “opportunity” and “outcome” programs. But it is not, it seems to me, an obviously wrong distinction to draw, or a clear sign of theoretical incoherence to treat these cases differently.

It’s no coincidence that the rise of the American chain restaurant coincides pretty neatly with the automobile’s shift from an aristocratic toy to a mass means of transportation.  As society grew more mobile, a novel problem arose: As you found yourself routinely passing through areas you didn’t know intimately, how could you know where to grab a decent bite? Standardized franchise restaurants—by adapting the assembly line methods of Henry Ford, appropriately enough—provided the answer. What they might lack in quality, they made up for in consistency: Anywhere the internal combustion engine might take you, you could Look for the Golden Arches (or some other easily recognizable logo) and know exactly what you were going to find. The chain was unlikely to be the best casual dining in town, but you at least knew you weren’t going to be surprised with something epically awful. That was a particular risk for roadside restaurants catering primarily to travelers rather than locals: If you don’t expect to do much repeat business, there’s not much percentage in spending time and effort raising the quality of your food much above the level of “palatable.” The national chain, by contrast, had an incentive to ensure that local managers didn’t injure the reputation of the overall brand. A customer might not ever set foot in a particular McDonalds a second time, but a chain has to be concerned with whether her experience makes it likely she’ll visit any McDonalds again.

Now,  Brad Plumer reports, there’s research suggesting that online review sites like Yelp are cutting into chains’ bottom line by providing an alternative solution to the information problem. The combination of peer-produced online reviews (which cover local diners along with the big-city restaurants) and mobile, location-aware Internet devices has made it incredibly easy  to figure out where you can find the nearest restaurants with good reputations, wherever you might be. Under conditions of uncertainty, the chain represents a rational maximin strategy. As ubiquitous connectivity and peer-production of information reduce that uncertainty, the chain becomes an unnecessary hedge.

Yet it’s not just chain restaurants that have thrived by using standardization and branding to solve a consumer information problem: Branding and marketing generally often serve much the same function. Frequently, generic or store-branded products (soda, cereal, ibuprofen) are literally chemically identical to the more recognizable name-brand product, and only cheaper because they haven’t been saddled with the overhead of a costly marketing campaign designed to signal quality. (Think of the traditional argument for the evolution of peacock feathers: To survive while paying the high overhead cost of such a gaudy display signals genetic fitness.)

Imagine, then, what effect it might have if, five or ten years hence, augmented reality using sophisticated image recognition were as ubiquitous as Internet-enabled phones are becoming in the developed world. Imagine that, for nearly any product consumers encountered, some kind of aggregate rating—based on whatever criteria the individual has determined are most important—would simply appear, with minimal effort. Simply looking at an aisle of products—or even passing shops on the street—I might effortlessly learn which were deemed most satisfactory by people with tastes similar to mine. My incentive to take the time to rank products would be provided by my desire to give the system a basis for determining which other user’s rankings were most likely to be relevant for me. (Think here of Netflix recommendations or other type of social filtering, where contributing ratings enables the system to make better predictions about what I am likely to enjoy.)

With such information more directly available, marketing would become far less relevant to the buyer—and a far less worthwhile investment for the producer. Products, of course, would still need to be distinguished in some way, but a seller with a superior product would be far better able to compete without investing in a costly national marketing campaign. Advertising might be initially important in raising awareness about a new product and building an initial pool of reviews, but its salience would rapidly diminish.

That’s one way things might go, at least. The picture is a bit complicated because today we often “consume” the brand, and not just the product itself. That is a company like Nike might invest a great deal in slick marketing partly in order to create a series of public associations with their logo, so that part of what I’m buying when I purchase their sneakers is what (I hope) the Swoosh signals about the sort of person I am—or how I see myself, at any rate. But this seems like a major consideration in a relatively limited number of product areas, such as clothing (precisely because it’s displayed on the person). If that’s right, the “Yelp Effect” in world where augmented reality technology has been widely adopted could dramatically diminish the broader cultural prominence of corporate logos and brands.

A bit of shameless speculation about why the FBI expends so much time and energy setting up goofballs like Rezwan Ferdaus, who it seems hard to believe would manage to translate their angry fantasies into serious threats without outside help. The relative paucity of sophisticated, coordinated plots not enabled by the FBI over the past few years suggests that there just aren’t a huge number of trained Al Qaeda operatives in the country. But the FBI has to assume that there might be a few who have slipped through the cracks at any given time.

One possible motive for these elaborate and highly publicized stings is that, whether or not the particular people they indict would have moved from rage to action without prompting, the steady stream of news reports will eventually force any candidate for jihad to assume that an “Al Qaeda recruiter” who approaches them is much more likely to be an FBI informant or undercover agent than a genuine operative. That’s likely to make it much harder for any real recruiters who’ve gone undetected to rope in anyone savvy enough to be truly dangerous. In a haystack of 300 million people—or even 2.5 million Muslims—the government can’t possibly be confident it will be able to identify in advance all the particular needles who are really prepared to carry out an attack, rather than simply ranting online. They may have concluded that the next best thing is to create a climate of suspicion in which such people are unwilling to risk collaborating with others. That means that the scale and destructiveness of any attacks that do occur are more likely to be limited to what a lone individual can achieve. Without the fuel of mutual encouragement or realistic hope of carrying out a really spectacular attack as a mere “lone wolf,” many of those angry young men may decide to give up and go bowling before they get around to putting their fantasies into practice. Or at any rate, such may be the FBI’s hope.

A typically insightful post from danah boyd examines why campaigns against “bullying” and, perhaps especially, “cyberbullying” so seldom manage to accomplish much. Part of the trouble, boyd argues, is that teens are reluctant to see themselves either as victims or aggressors, and therefore define as mere “drama” much behavior that adults are prone to class as “bullying.”

On the victim’s side, even a teen who is conscious of being the victim of bullying might feel ashamed to admit it. But it’s actually more complicated than that, because once we move out of the realm of bullying as simple physical assault, the difference between psychological bullying and more innocuous types of ribbing or reciprocal verbal aggression ultimately comes down to how the teens themselves feel about it. So a teen who denies being “bullied” and appears to shrug off various kinds of social animosity as just “drama” is not necessarily in denial about the independent, objective fact that they really are being bullied. Rather, insisting on adopting the attitude that they’re on equal footing with their aggressors (and so not bullied) may be a primary determinant of whether or not this is, in fact, the case. We all know, of course, that there’s often a sharp disconnect between internal feeling and external performance: We pretend to be unruffled by remarks that, in reality, cut deep. But we also know that these are hardly totally separate domains: Telling yourself that you don’t care what those jerks say about you is often part of the process of actually ceasing to care what those jerks say about you—or at least, ceasing to care much. On the victim’s side, then, psychological bullying is hard to quantify, because “bullying” is not always an observer-independent natural fact: Denying that you are being bullied is sometimes a means of making it true that you are not (successfully) bullied—though when that gambit fails, it may prevent some students from seeking necessary help from adults. Call this the Bullying Heisenberg Effect.

On the aggressor side, as boyd observes, part of the problem is that nobody likes to think of themselves as a bully, and so the teens who are dishing it out find other descriptions that minimize the harm they do. More than that, however, because bullying is so often a social phenomenon, it may literally be impossible to evaluate whether “bullying” is happening at the level of the individual agent—even for the bullies themselves!

As regular readers know, I’m fond of invoking a thought experiment from philosopher Derek Parfit called “The Harmless Torturers.” Parfit imagines one scenario in which 10,000 torturers each torture one of 10,000 victims using an electrocution machine. Each torturer clearly inflicts terrible agony on an individual victim. In Parfit’s second scenario, each torturer’s machine is configured so as to deliver one-ten-thousandth of the same voltage—a quantity so small as to be utterly imperceptible to the victim by itself—to all of the victims who were individually electrified in the first scenario. In the aggregate, the torturers inflict exactly the same amount of pain on exactly the same number of people. But in this second scenario, each torturer can—with some justice—claim that his actions are “harmless.” Each, in other words, can claim: “If I stayed home, there is not one of those 10,000 victims who would feel any difference.”

As applied to physical torture, the scenario is fanciful. As applied to psychological torture, it describes the norm. Only a few really horrid people commit themselves to relentlessly harassing and abusing a single individual. But many teens—and not a few nominal adults—will make a handful of snarky and cutting remarks to numerous different individuals over the course of an ordinary day. It would often be overblown to characterize any particular remark as bullying: In isolation, all but the most fragile of us would shrug it off. In the aggregate, they may be intolerable to even the most self-assured.

One reason “cyberbullying” may present special problems is that the Internet and social networks dramatically increase the realistic number of people who can pile on a single victim in a short period of time. Each aggressor might rationalize their own part in the distributed bullying as just one or two comments, though the victim perceives an overwhelming assault when these are all combined. For an analogy in the physical world, we can look to street harassment, which is enabled by the high volume of anonymous, brief public interactions characteristic of urban environments. Some men, of course, engage in vulgar and intimidating speech that anyone would consider harassing in itself. But often, the harassment is a distributed phenomenon. Many of us would not particularly mind a single stranger yelling out “Hi, gorgeous” or “You look good today!” once every other month—and I’ve seen men (inexcusably obtuse, to be sure, but not obviously malicious) react with genuine surprise when such remarks are not welcomed as compliments, not realizing they’re the tenth person in as many blocks to volunteer a similar comment to the same woman.

It may be hard to stamp out bullying, then, not just because victims are often unwilling apply the label to their own experience, but because individual aggressors can plausibly—even if somewhat disingenuously—deny that their individual actions qualify. Insofar as it may be counterproductive to encourage the victims of psychological bullying—cyber or otherwise—to consciously identify themselves as such, the more fruitful strategy may be encouraging teens on the aggressor side to be better Kantians, as it were—to imagine whether each mean offhand remark would qualify as “bullying” if it were multiplied by a dozen daily interactions, day after day, week after week.

Scene: Friday evening, 9 p.m., a group of friends are gathered around a living room table for poker night.

Harry: OK, folks, snack time. I’m thinking we should order a couple pies from that new gourmet pizza place.

Darrell: What, Mama Solyndra’s? That place is so overpriced! Let’s just go with some chips and salsa from the corner store; I was planning to make myself a sandwich when I get home anyway.

Mary: Show of hands? [The group votes.] Bad luck this time, cheapskate, Mama Solyndra’s it is.

Barack: OK, everyone throw in, I’ll call for a couple extra-larges. Oh, and Harry brought the beer, so everyone chip in for that too.

Darrell: Hmph, alright, alright, lemme find my wallet.

Half an hour later, the food arrives.

Darrell: Let’s see, I guess the pesto and ricotta looks like the best…

Mary: Woah-ho-ho there Grabby McGrabberson! What do you think you’re reaching for there? As I recall, you didn’t think Mama Solyndra’s was worth it. You wanted us to tighten our belts and cut our snack spending. And now you want a slice? Guess that was all a lot of empty talk—what a hypocrite!

Darrell: Hey, I still think we should go with chips next week, but I threw in like everyone else, so unless you feel like returning my $10…

Harry: What are you, a comedian? You know the rule. We all vote on what we’re getting, and everyone splits the check.

Mary You’ve got some serious chutzpah! Sitting there with a slice in your hand, and you’re still talking about how you want to gut our pizza budget? Well actions speak louder than words, Darrell: If you had any integrity, you’d drop that slice right now.

Barack: You are looking pretty hypocritical there, Darrell. I don’t know how you expect anyone to take you seriously when you start badmouthing Mama Solyndra’s next time.

Darell: What? You guys, I said I don’t think it’s worth it. I wouldn’t have bought any if we were getting single slices, but it’s not like you gave me a choice about paying in! Now I’m not even supposed to enjoy any of the food I got outvoted about paying for?

Mary: Not really; it just means that from now on, you have to shut up about how overpriced it is and start voting for Mama Solyndra’s.

Fade to black.