[protomyth]

Oh, I have the SysAdmin style of humor because you either laugh or cry. I've sold software and experienced that fun angle to customers. My favorite is still the customer who got confused and blamed me for another vendor's software. It was an interesting e-mail chain. Being a SysAdmin for a number of years has lead to me seeing some of the worst in people.

I used to think these people are mentally ill or sociopaths too, but I think I have come to a much simpler explanation. Steve Jobs was correct about computers being a bicycle for the mind, but I think we need to look at the negative part of that statement too. Computers just emphasis what is already there and a cost of the strengthening / speed is the removal of societal filters.

We grow up learning a bunch of societal filters that we use to take our raw thoughts and make them acceptable to the world around us. Most people get this right. At our hearts, most of us are good people and don't want to cause harm.

Sadly, most people don't really write e-mail, tweets, or posts to another person. They write it to some image in their head where the basic societal filters are no longer operating. Communication is dehumanized and you get the raw person. Sadly, many of our fellow humans are not very pleasant without those learned filters. In fact, they are rather primitive scum. Add to that the voices that say you don't have to be nice or even be humane to "them" for some value of "them" that is not "us" or "me". I really wish there were some fix, but I guess its AH from here on out.