What Can We Learn from Being Blocked?

Did I spend the two days I was locked out of my profile thinking about all the bad things I did? Or thinking about all the bad things the reporter did? What is the true meaning of being blocked? And why should everyone experience it, at least once or twice, in our times? Until you've been blocked, deleted, locked out, and kicked out of a group - and perhaps even subjected to an internet lynch - you don't know

Shall I go or shall I strike the rock?  (Source)

Why does the experience of being blocked evoke such strong emotional reactions? Anyone who has experienced being blocked knows that it is perceived as an act of pure violence - but apparently nothing has been done. No one owes you anything, and no one is obligated to interact with you. The other side is an autonomous subject. Your desire to communicate with them, when communication requires consent (and consent is the basis for human relations and morality... isn't it?), doesn't obligate them, of course, and might even be a bit pathetic. If so, how is it possible that the man who punishes his partner with silence is often perceived as even more violent than the man who shouts and breaks things and is physically violent? Why does the man you slept with last night, or even just went on a date with, who doesn't owe you anything at all, but chose to ghost you unilaterally, provoke such intense female anger towards all men, and a strong feeling of injustice and unfairness? Why does even a random person on Facebook, with whom we're not particularly interested in having a special connection, feel violent when they suddenly block you, more so than if they had cursed your mother ad hominem? Is it just because our feelings were hurt? And actually - why were our feelings hurt? After all, no wrong was done to us. And lack of communication isn't a wrong, is it? What kind of violence is this, that is so pure, so insubstantial - and completely passive. Nothing happened. And nothing was done to us.

The feeling of being blocked created by the digital situation combines the pain of social rejection (which, as brain research shows, is experienced as completely physical pain) with a new kind of digital purity - as pure as the sky itself. When Facebook blocks you, or when a person blocks you in digital communication - there's no explanation, only speculation. There's not even a facial expression, or any emotion. The act of hot violence turns into cold indifference, impersonal, Kafkaesque-bureaucratic ("If you believe we made a mistake, click here"). Today, they would block Spinoza with a click (why feed the troll when you can report him?). And indeed, why argue when you can simply delete? Fighting is violent - and deleting is civilized. Violent monkeys - and humans block (ignoring is no longer enough for us, after all, ignoring requires our attention, and why do we owe anyone attention? After all, attention=money).

Both the individualistic paradigm, which hides behind the theory of recognition, and the philosophy of language, which conceals the paradigm of communication, do not conceptualize at all what's wrong with blocking. If we didn't relate to a person at all - we didn't treat them as a means instead of an end, and we have no valid demand for communication from another person. We didn't misuse language (or even use it manipulatively) - we didn't use it at all. Blocking is the blind neutral point of these moral philosophies, which demand action or speech, or at least thought - and we precisely didn't dedicate any thought to the other side. Why should this nuisance interest us, and on what basis does he demand our time, our thoughts, our communication and our action? He's not in distress, and we have no binding connection with him, and he simply doesn't interest us. Is there anything wrong with that? Can there even be anything wrong with that? What kind of unreasonable demand is this from us? What exactly did we take from him?

The philosophy of learning has a different answer - we took learning from him, and the possibility of learning. And we took it from ourselves too. If we are not autonomous subjects, but one big learning system, then our connections are not measured only as consensual communication (linguistic morality), or as action with intention behind it (cognitive morality), but as learning connections. A quality connection is a learning connection, and a bad connection is a connection closed to learning, and a connection that resets learning - is a blocked connection. When you block the guy without any explanation after you talked on the phone or after you texted for two days - you're depriving him of any potential for learning, even if he was interested in it, and maybe from yourself too. When you lower a curtain and ignore her nagging and petty complaints with grunts that show no listening - you're destroying the learning, and only as a result you're destroying the relationship. In the philosophy of learning, a relationship is built not on communication, as is commonly said in the philosophy of language - but on learning. Learning can occur without communication - and communication can occur without learning (what is the critical parameter?). When a parent ignores their child, they're not harming their "attachment" (psychology influenced by the communication-language paradigm), but their learning. Your problem, man, is not that you don't listen - but that you don't learn. And your problem, my dear, is not that you don't communicate (you actually do! And a lot! And sometimes too much!) - but that you don't learn.

When Facebook blocks me because of some reports, without any explanation, it resets my opportunity for learning ("Why was I blocked?"), and also resets the reporter's opportunity for learning (which would probably have been created from my response). This doesn't mean we would necessarily agree (probably not!), or even that there would be some constructive communication between us, but we probably would have learned, and learning would probably have been created in the system. The deletion of another person is wrong not because of the harm to them - but because of the harm to the system. Boycotts harm the cultural system. Quotas and protectionism harm the economic system. Silencing harms the intellectual system. And censorship harms the artistic system. Boycotts harm the relationship system more than arguments do. The idea of blocking a person to punish them is a bad idea not because it's forbidden to teach another person how to behave, but because it doesn't teach them. Reward and punishment and behavioristic reinforcement are an inefficient learning method, and worse - deceptive. It seems to you that it's teaching the other side a lesson, but they haven't learned anything. And maybe they even learned the opposite of what you wanted. The carrot and stick method is a training method - not a learning method. And since humans are not donkeys (who don't learn) - but learners - it provides particularly poor results. It seems to you that you're teaching your partner (or the other nation's son, or your son) a lesson - but the lesson they learn is different from what you wanted. Because you're a bad teacher, who removes the disruptive student from the class. If so, what did I learn from being blocked? Maybe this article. But certainly not what the blocker wanted me to learn. Because actually - I have no idea. But in a learning morality beyond action and concept, which doesn't stem from a wrong action or a wrong concept, but from wrong learning - we can answer the question we opened with, and describe the carrot and stick method from the side of the person placed as a donkey (and what wonder that he becomes as stubborn as a donkey?).

The moment punishment isn't learning-oriented, it's perceived as violence, and therefore blocking - the anti-learning - is perceived as an act of pure and clean violence, precisely because it has no personal, dirty and involved component. This is an exercise of power that doesn't involve power, and therefore "allowed", but precisely because of its lack of learning-orientation it's the one that denies the humanity of the other side, who encounters a completely opaque technological wall. The opacity is what feeds the feeling of "Joseph K. must have been slandered by someone, for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested." The tragedy of the Kafkaesque hero isn't lack of communication (they actually communicate a lot) - but being trapped in a system that doesn't allow learning, and has no learning in it, and therefore has no meaning. And in this sense, of creating an anti-learning closure, that is, Kafkaesque, the digital age no longer requires a maze - but a wall. No longer needs complication aspiring to infinity - to create learning-impossibility (i.e., absurdity) simplicity aspiring to zero will suffice. It wasn't the breaking of language that Kafka described - but the breaking of learning. Learning-orientation is our deep inner human core, for we are not autonomous subjects, who can choose to learn or not. The very possibility of choice stems from learning, which is our nature: evolutionary, neurological, cultural, and perhaps even physical and mathematical. We are learning systems. And therefore to give meaning to an experience that has no meaning - we must structure it in a learning-oriented way. Until you've been blocked once - you didn't understand. Until you stood in front of the digital wall from its outer side and tried to scratch the screen with your nails - you didn't gain a formative experience of the information age. You missed out on missing out.