ACAB includes neighbourhood Facebook groups

Seven short essays on how technofascist surveillance is destroying social cohesion

1.

Neighbourhood Facebook groups embody the best and the worst of the Internet. Need someone to check on your cats? Looking for a copy of Orwell’s 1984 in Spanish? Did anyone hear that explosion? These sorts of questions bring out the best of mutual aid and information sharing. Community care. Community connection. Your neighbourhood Facebook group has it all.

But it’s also a gathering place for little fascists. Control freaks. Misanthropes. Private property sycophants. Surveillance saps. Cop lovers. The eyes and the ears of the neighbourhood watch are used for evil just as often as they’re used for good. And it drives me crazy.

Years ago, someone in my local Facebook group posted about seeing some racialized, low-income youth possibly putting a lighter up to the side of a car. The alleged incident happened within 100 ft of my front door. The complainer (older, white) was indignant. He was sorry he didn’t catch it on camera, warned the neighbourhood of these vicious acts and encouraged everyone to call the police.

The comments were uniformly on the side of Fuck Them Kids. Call the police. They need to be taught a lesson. Jail would do the kids some good.

I jumped in, with my atrocious French grammar, to remind people that 1. Maybe we shouldn’t trust this guy’s account of what happened and that 2. Even if it did happen, who cares, this is why car insurance exists and that 3. If you’re stroking your knee to the idea of siccing a bunch of cops on poor, racialized kids maybe you should be the one marginalized from society and that 4. Everyone probably should relax.

I might as well have taken a flamethrower to the group. It was not well received. My neigbours pounced on me to send a message: in these parts (this Facebook group) we are pro-cop, anti-immigrant, anti-teenager and certainly anti-poor. You got that, Nora? The administrator of the group messaged me to say that I should watch what I post because she would ban me if I stepped offside again.

Message received.

2.

When my kid was in Grade One, we were crossing the street walking home from school. There was a car waiting for us to cross, a Mercedes, and I was on the left side of my kid, holding his hand. As we made it to the other side of the road, the man in the car called me over to him. Madame! Madame! Eager to give him directions (that’s fucking right this Anglophone knows where things are in this city), he says to me, “Madame, ton fils m’a fait un doigt d’honneur.” As we had walked past the man in his car, my kid had given him the middle finger, and the guy was so mad about it that he stoped me to tell me.

I have no idea why my kid did this. As any parent knows, children go through phases of experimenting with giving people the finger. They like to see if a teacher notices them scratching their forehead with their middle finger, or, I guess in my kid’s case, just go all out and hold it up to a guy driving a Mercedes. Of course, I was one third proud and two-thirds howling at how funny it was. But here I was, staring at the driver with my kid now hiding behind me because he was going to get in trouble, because the man in the Mercedes was asking his mother to discipline his insolence.

Of course, I have more respect for the profane than I do the wealthy and I just laughed to the guy and asked him what he had hoped to acheive by telling me this. Oh, should I punish him? Spank him in front of you? He’s in Grade One. Laugh it off, bud. It’s no big deal. Actually, it’s a big deal in how funny it was.

I think a lot about this guy when I think about my neighbourhood. I don’t know if he lives here — the street he was driving is used by commuters to cut from one major road to another — but this attitude is what dominates the soup of attitudes in the neighbourhood Facebook group. Children are out of control. They need to be disciplined. They should be neither seen nor heard because in being seen they block the flow of traffic and in being heard, they disrupt the quietude of our (busy, downtown) neighbourhood. And anyone who breaks these conventions should be marginalized.

3.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was something that makes me laugh every time I tell people about it.

The neighbourhood Facebook group, with its 2000 or so members, was my only source of information for what’s happening in the neighbourhood. And the administrator was a tyrant. The kind that deletes every post that originates from the wrong side of Ave. Belvédère or the wrong side of Ave. De Salaberry and scolds renters looking for subletters.

One day, this woman posted something like, Remember to add ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to your posts. Being courteous goes a long way! I had been stewing over how much I hated how this woman ran this group, how much of a tyrant she was over something that matters so little, and I couldn’t believe that I could be worked up over it. So I responded to say something like this: We aren’t children. We don’t need to be told to be polite.

Instant ban.

I knew that’s what was coming. I was cruising for a bruising from a loser and the loser delivered. I was on notice since the car-lighter incident and she had an itchy finger when she saw my foreign name. And yet, once banned, I felt cut off at the knees. I love knowing what’s going on. I need to know what’s going on. I’m not a journalist because I love pain, I’m a journalist because I love seeing what’s going on. I knew it was coming and yet I felt so sad to be blocked from the only group in the neighbourhood.

Because I knew this was coming, I had long ago imagined poking at how fascist this ridiculous little group was, both in how it was run and in what kind of opinions were allowed. I wanted to put posters up around the neighbourhood about how this group was fostering closeminded, xenophobic attitudes.

I imagined creating an album cover for a fake punk band that was called “My Neighbourhood Watch Are a Bunch of Fascists” and then asking the group if anyone had a copy of this rare British album. I thought about putting up posters in the neighbourhood about the group administrator being a cop. I know, it’s obsessive. This group was making me nuts.

So I decided to do the most obvious and least questionable thing: start my own group.

4.

For about one year, every time I ran into an Anglophone, my online opinions would inevitably come up in the conversation. “Holy shit Nora, you really went after that person who wanted to pay a baby sitter $5/h.” “Wow, people really hate you in the Anglophone Facebook group eh? You were right, by the way.” “Hey Nora, I did some research and the guy who keeps attacking you in the Anglo group looks to be a far-right sympathizer, I think, what do you think of these pictures?” I never loved these conversation starters. Unlike my local groupt, the group, Anglophones in Quebec City was more irritating than it was helpful. Sure, I liked to see what was going on in the English community but honestly, I was relieved when I was blocked by the administrator of that group. I don’t recall what the offending post was.

But in my neighbourhood, I need to know what was going on. So when I started my own group, I felt instantly better. It was small but I promised that in exchange for no hatred, group members will experience no censorship. Within a few hours, I had been messaged by 20 people who told me that they too had been banned from the main group, all for posting opinions that ran counter to the administrator’s opinions.

The new group was a success. It grew quickly and within a year, it was bigger than the main neighbourhood group. Today, there are nearly 12,000 people in it and I’m overwhelmed by the moderation that it takes — not managing individuals and their opinions but the spam and businesses that all want access to this audience. People get mad that I don’t moderate very well (I lost another moderator recently) or that I let businesses post on the page (I have a hard time conceptualizing the cut off between a local advertising their cleaning service and someone advertising their cleaning service who lives two neighbourhoods away). Regardless, the one constant remains — people still love being cops to one another.

5.

A woman posts a video of two teenagers and warns her neighbours: beware, I caught these two TRESSPASSING!!!! They ran RIGHT THROUGH MY YARD!!!!! It didn’t happen in my group or my neighbourhood, it happened in the Facebook page for the neighbourhood that is right next door.

The comments were predictable: call the police, someone ID these two and call their parents, can you BELIEVE THIS!? Just the most brain-dead private property takes that ChatGPT can conjure.

I jump in, knowing that I’m going to receive shit — I dunno folks, is it normal to film kids and then post the video online?

The response: not only is it normal, it’s just and righteous.

The architects of the security state must roll around in so much drugs and money at their conferences, laughing and doing orgies or whatever the ultra rich do, knowing that they’ve managed to turn average people into their biggest promoters. Not only have people accepted the unaccaceptable, they are justifying the unacceptable and marginalizing the critics.

I’m pounced on. People make fun of my French (the most common reaction I get in situations like these). They argue that these videos are surveillance footage and this group (of 10,000 people) is private, actually, and that if you don’t want to be blasted online by your cranky ass neighbours, you should behave. Sure, there are some people who agree with me, but mostly, no.

Months ago, a similar video was posted in my own group, though in that video, the intruder was a Black woman and it isn’t clear what she’s doing in the yard. Nothing in the video shows her doing anything worrysome or harmful. She’s just walking around. Of course, the filmer is too much of a coward to go out and ask the woman what she’s doing. Instead, she filmed through her window and posted the video in our group to permit everyone who wanted to be racist and shitty in the comments. At least there, I’m the administrator and I deleted the video.

Several other posts appear related to immigration, and the racists are out in full force. Amid the real estate agents, beauty salons and photographs of beautiful snowy mornings, the newsfeed in the group is peppered with racism and xenophobia. Who is pushing this? I put people on notice.

I write: this group is a pro-immigration group and xenophobia will be deleted — and of course, all hell breaks loose. A chorus of white accounts argue that this is censorship and that I’m actually doing tyranny to them. I respond: I couldn’t give a third of a rat’s ass and they are welcome to leave. Again, there are some supportive accounts, but as the majority seemingly fight for their right to be xenophobic and racist online, I feel myself morphing into the same misanthropic attitude that fuels so many of these people. If these are my neighbours, why would I ever want to talk to them?

6.

I like to imagine that people are generally good and I do think this. But there are fewer things than the neighbourhood Facebook group that tests my faith in humanity.

A few years ago, two researchers from France reached out to me to talk. I didn’t really understand the request but I agreed to go out for breakfast with them (fun fact about me: I am very easy to kidnap because I almost always agree to going out with strangers). I wasn’t really looking forward to it, it felt like a waste of my time, but it turned out to be a fascinating meeting.

I misunderstood why they wanted to talk with me. In addition to Facebook messages, we had met briefly at a rally and I thought that they had wanted to talk about public transit (boring). But their research was actually about neighbourhood Facebook groups and the importance that they have taken as local news declines. While they were focused on France, they also wanted to get the view from Quebec, and they asked me as the administrator of our local group.

It’s true that Facebook has filled the role of local news. Gossip, want ads, local advertisements, important information, updates from local elected officials — it’s all there. And it’s raw and unfiltered. And it’s volunteer. It’s fallible and poorly moderated and sometimes it’s run by a little despot.

And it tests your faith in humanity.

Unlike on other social media platforms, the vast majority of people in these groups are not anonymous. They are real. They post videos of local teenagers hoping that someone’s mother sees them. They post videos of local unhoused people rummaging through grabage cans to demonstrate to their peers that they are housed and housing is virtuous and righteous and this individual on camera is neither. They demand their right to say racist thing without pushback and then claim that the real fascists are the ones who won’t platform racism.

They are also the same person that I pass on the street. They are the parents of the kid in my kids’ swimming class (actually, thankfully, I haven’t actually had a situation where someone has been among the racist chorus and I recognize them as a kids' friend’s parent). They are the old timers who sit on the bench outside of the SAQ to have the sun set on their faces every afternoon. They are the neighbourhood, in all of its frustrating closemindedness, in all of its helpfulness, in all of its French chauvinism.

While I could look away, I instead choose to look right at it and, from time to time, send a signal into the ether to say: maybe surveillance is shameful and maybe we should just let kids be kids, the cops and our private property be damned.

7.

Ultimately, local Facebook groups are premised on surveillance. Watch for theives. Watch your neighbours. Watch what they’re up to or not up to. It is basic human nature to watch, gossip and pay attention. But surveillance makes tanks the health of our local communities. Worse, groups are profiting off of how we surveil one another.

And crazily, we eagerly accept surveillance tools that surveil not only our neighbours, but also ourselves. Doorbell cameras, purchases tracking, Siris or Alexas, “smart” appliances — technofascism weasels its way into every aspect of our lives. Yet we imagine surveillance as a tool to help us — watch the street when we’re not there, look for Amazon package thieves, create content that we can post online.

If humans are naturally curious and like to watch what our relations are up to during the day, technofascism has turned us all into mini cops who think we have power but who instead, are just acting against our collective and individual interests. And thanks to a million different touch points, we rarely think about the psychic damage that this technofascist surveillance does to our cohesion.

I don’t imagine I was much different than any teenager when I was a kid. But we stole, set things on fire, set up secret camps in the woods, tresspassed, broke the law — we did all the stuff that a normal society should tolerate as part of allowing youth to learn their surroundings, their boundaries and practice safety without the rubber padding of surveillance.

And surely, we caused old men to yell at clouds. Being irritated by those around you is part of life.

Humans have never been as surveilled as much as we are today. The level of surveillance we are under is the stuff of prisoners chained to a wall, not of average people trying to live their lives. It’s always been unjust for those chained to the wall, and yet at some point, we’ve collectively accepted the oppression of technofascism and we praise its virtues.

The neighbourhood Facebook group is just a symptom of a much larger problem, but it’s the kind of symptom that causes you to scratch till you bleed. Even so, when you find yourself breaking out in a rash that is so itchy that you risk causing harm to yourself, you buy a cream. You try to limit the damage.

What will it take for us to do the same thing for our brains?