I just saw a news story about a podcaster who was murdered by her stalker, and the comments really irritate me, so I'm trying to pick this apart. There's a large group of people who seem to think that this lady either attracted the inevitable or (worse) got what she deserved because she had a podcast.
Personal feelings aside, there's a logic/false dichotomy problem with this, and it's very annoying.
These people are basically arguing that we should create a society in which good people sharing their knowledge, expertise, and experiences should be afraid to show themselves in public and should voluntarily limit their own career and networking opportunities so that the minority of abusive people like stalkers can be free to live their lives and continually put abuse them or someone else. I don't know if people who argue this are just forgetting that we create the laws we live with and that we have the resources to enforce the rules we create, but because we do make up our own rules as a society, they're basically arguing that having good people live in fear of being in public is a more sensible way to run a society than simply removing the people engaging in anti-social behavior. They are arguing that society should suppress its best assets--it's decent, responsible, well-behaved, cooperative people--from fully coming into bloom and reaching the peak of their usefulness in terms of adding to the culture.
This attitude seems like it comes from people stuck in 1990, not people in the 21st century who are expected to have LinkedIn profiles, who are supposed to try to be seen as industry experts to get a job, who connect with their friends and relatives on social media, who engage in hobbies and learn on social media, and often want to make a living off of the information industry.
Sure, when the internet was brand new in 1995, and we naively believed that we had the option of staying anonymous, it felt smart to try to obscure your identity. But privacy is in the past. Google and a hundred other sites have your information all the way up to your social security number. So much is on the dark web, and it multiplies every day. All these people with fake names on YouTube seem to think they're anonymous. They're not. Google has all your info. It knows your phone number and probably knows everything else about you too. It takes one data breech and anything and everything Google knows about you could be on the dark web. And the government gets data breeched all the time, and they know your info too. It only takes one tiny misstep to become traceable to even a script kiddie. We just haven't invested resources in tracing people who do horrible things on the internet yet unless they're trying to mess with really serious government affairs for a long period of time. But AI is really, really freeing up a lot of workers' time these days, so... I don't know what's going to change. All I know is that karma is real, and that we as a society really need to get more security-minded. And I think we are. Cybersecurity is a blossoming career field right now.
Right now, we as a society seem to have decided that psychopaths are pretty rare, so we should just let them do whatever. And that that's just how it is, and should be, and it will never change. Well, yeah, but the only reason it won't change because we choose not to do anything about it. And I mean there is a whole range of anti-social behavior that we tolerate.
I think all one can do these days is to adopt a philosophy of living without fear. Internet use is not optional in 2023. We all benefit from it, and so I think we should work together to optimize its benefits to society. That's going to mean different things for different individuals, but in any case, that 1990s argument that "celebrities" are asking to be stalked and should therefore not receive much assistance in countering it, doesn't make sense anymore. We are no longer talking about wealthy King Richard III needing to hire bodyguards to rule a kingdom because he's so famous. Now, this is a lot more likely to be your next door neighbor just trying to get by.
In my opinion, things like this stalking crime and other violent crimes suggest that we as a society need to get really serious about improving the root causes of these kind of events: a lack of emotional intelligence and wellness. We've already failed as a society to protect our citizens from mass shootings. The next thing is going to be AI-driven/robotic mass shootings, and that's going to be a lot harder to shut down if we keep our current approaches to security. We (as a society, not necessarily as individuals) shouldn't ignore it when people exhibit severe pain like this guy did. There's a good chance that if there was some kind of mental health intervention combined with locking this stalker up for a while, no one would have died. But we weren't prepared.
