THOUGHTS: The Internet, Psychosis and Harassment Campaigns, by Adam Lehrer
A guide to not getting involved
I’ve been in the game for a minute now. I’ve seen smear campaigns come and go. When you first embark on a career in the public square in an era in which fans, followers, and haters all have a direct digital pipelins right towards your own personal head space, hearing your name associated with negative stories, even nonsensical and obviously fake ones created by clearly mentally unstable people, can be extremely overwhelming. Your friends, with the best of intentions, might accidentally even intensify the anxiety you experience by sending you screen grabs of the malicious and defamatory content, to check on your well being. This only makes you feel worse because you realize that other people are also seeing this trash AND some of them might not even be immediately discarding it as preposterous. Concerns and worries might circulate your mind, varying in severity depending on the nature of the defamatory content being posted. You might wonder about potential legal ramifications, or what the one you love might think if she or he sees such drivel.
Firstly, don’t panic. Remember the fact that if what you’re reading about yourself isn’t true, it will likely have little merit in any kind of legal setting. How could it? There can’t be any fucking proof of something that never happened. It’s just fake.
Always consider the misbegotten potency of the effects that the Internet has on mentally unstable people. A 2008 study demonstrated that manifestations of schizophrenia are always environmentally and culturally shaped. In the 1940s, schizos often believed that radio waves were controlling their minds, for example. In the 2000s, at the advent of the reality TV boom, they often thought they were the stars of their own reality programs playing out with hidden cameras – I actually witnessed such a paranoid delusion with an ex-girlfriend, but that’s for another story.
So, given this, it only makes sense that someone with an unhealthy attachment to Internet based subculture will concoct some kind of conspiracy based on the Internet subculture figures that they are unhealthily attached to when psychosis finds him or her within its grasp. The real fear with these people is not that they are being conspired against, but that those who they’ve become parasocially fixated upon don’t think about them at all. The delusion, as absurd and surreal as it might sound, is a heightened method of capturing your attention. Don’t give it to them.
That brings me to my next point: block, report, ignore and move on. There is zero rationale to the anon honor code of “no blocking.” Not only is blocking OK, it’s absolutely necessary to maintaining your sanity and dignity as you embark upon an online cultural career. There is nothing more humiliating than finding yourself in a back and forth with an account named something like “SmellyDickGroyper666” about something you said or didn’t say or did or didn’t do. It doesn’t matter. YOU are the one with the courage to put your name on your work or ideas. These people are often so afraid of losing their precious PMC email jobs that the vaguest allusions to their actual identity will send them spiraling. I personally think anons fetishize their own anonymity, but that’s also a separate conversation (nevertheless, do you really want to be on your deathbed and reveal to your family: “Kids, I was ‘HammerCockRedPil22’ the whole time?”)
It’s often hard to tell the difference between a generic online loser and someone genuinely unwell and potentially dangerous. How do you know? You don’t. So, you block them, you report them if they are particularly defamatory or obnoxious, and then you ignore and move on. If one of these freaks has made a particularly faux story up about you, you can address it in a vague and noncommittal manner (like writing a text about how to deal with the online mentally ill and their scandalous smear campaigns, for example.) NEVER address the person directly. These people are ultimately desperate for attention, and any sort of engagement that you can throw their way will only falsely flatter their egos and, even worse, exacerbate their mental illness or psychosis.
In The Divided Self, R.D. Laing identifies a feeling of “disembodiment” as one of the primary markers of schizophrenia. He writes this particularly pertinent passage:
”Instead of being the core of his true self” writes the psychiatrist, “The body is felt at the core of a false self, which a detached, ‘inner’ true self looks at with tenderness, humor or contempt.”
I’ve spoken to my friends about what I call “Internet detachment syndrome,” which I can describe as the cynical and false belief that whatever happens on the Internet is simply “no big deal” or doesn’t have any weight or consequence in the real world. But even this kind of thinking is consistent with these people’s extreme cognitive dissonance – if this shit didn’t matter in the real world, why hide behind your avatar?
Indeed, I believe that these schizos feel alienated from what Laing would call their “true selves” and let their “false selves”, or their Internet personas, define who they are as human beings. When someone is deeply unwell, it makes perfect sense then that they will start to create narratives about not just their selves, or their “false selves” and avatars, but also the other avatars that they’ve become obsessed with.
Remind yourself of this: when someone is skewering you online, they are often completely lost amidst an ocean of false, disembodied narratives that they’ve concocted about their lives. I’m not saying that I or anyone else is immune to criticism, but come on: most of us know the difference between fair enough criticism and batshit crazy lunatic bullshit artistry. These people are fucking psychos lost in their own inner hell dimensions and you, as an online cultural figure, are just an ephemeral environmental factor in the materialization of their 21st Century schizophrenia. Ultimately, it has NOTHING to do with you and isn’t worth a shred of your time, attention or anxiety.
If you are concerned, however, that you’ve come across an extremely unhinged paranoid schizophrenic, contact the authorities immediately.
Illustration by Richard Dadd