Anonymity and distance have destroyed the public square

By Matthew Gagnon

The city of Portland has a bit of a branding problem, for obvious reasons, and it is affecting the bottom line. I’ve written at length about the deteriorating situation in Maine’s largest city for years, with growing crime problems, a brewing humanitarian disaster of homelessness, and self-inflicted policy mistakes that have made the city unaffordable. 

If you are a business owner in Portland today, it can be a pretty tough sell to convince people to come and visit. That’s why the city has recently begun talking about adding a new tax on hotels to create a “tourism development district” that could help market the city as a tourist destination. The proposal would add a 1.5 percent fee on guest bills, which would pull in an estimated $2 million annually. 

I’m not a fan of this idea, of course. No, the fee for each individual guest at a hotel is not large, but the funny thing about fees is that a lot of very small fees add up and become big fees in the aggregate. This is especially true in Portland, where the city’s biggest problem has been that it is living through a “death by a thousand papercuts” of bad policy decisions, none of which is catastrophic by itself but is in combination.

There is also an iron-clad law of economics to consider that states that “if you tax something, you get less of it.” There is something deliciously ironic about charging a fee to make something more expensive and getting less of it, and then turning around to advertise for that very same thing to hopefully get more of it. 

And, of course, all the marketing in the world is not going to attract people to the city if the fundamental problems being experienced by Portland aren’t dealt with. 

But the merit of the idea is no longer on the minds of Portland’s City Council after the events of Monday’s meeting, at which the proposal was considered. At the meeting, the discussion was derailed by what the Portland Press Herald described as “an onslaught of hate speech,” racist and white nationalist in nature, once the public comment portion turned to remote participants on Zoom. 

I didn’t go to the meeting, but I reviewed the video of it and such characterizations are certainly not an exaggeration. The meeting was utterly disgusting to watch.

The first participant listed his name as “C. Kyle,” forcing Mayor Kate Snyder to unknowingly say “Sieg Heil,” the victory salute of the Nazis. Things devolved from there, with multiple comments made by people preoccupied with preserving Maine’s “whiteness,” and one that ended with “heil Hitler,” which visibly shook Snyder.

Portland has been dealing with this nonsense at its council meetings for a while now. Just last week, the Press Herald ran a story talking about councilors debating options, including shutting down remote testimony, in order to stop the abuse and trolls from disrupting meetings. 

While public testimony at local town and city meetings has always been a bit of an adventure, something far more sinister has begun with the introduction of remote participation. Once distance, anonymity and a separation from human contact are introduced, people turn into absolute monsters. 

I’ve been writing for the Bangor Daily News for more than 12 years now, and as much as I’ve enjoyed and appreciated the experience, I have repeatedly considered quitting due to anonymous abuse from people who’ve never looked me in the eye and would never speak to me as they do if they were standing next to me. My wife has been unable to tolerate reading online comments for years, and for the most part neither can I.

The stakes of city council meetings are a great deal higher and more visible than anything I write, that’s for sure. There, the comfort and protection of distance and anonymity have empowered racist scumbags to freely espouse mindless hate without fearing any real consequences. It has also given opportunity to losers and trolls, who don’t even believe what they say but spout shocking things just for the “entertainment” they get from the chaos, again without any real consequences. 

If we are interested in restoring some sense of a civil society to our lives — and I certainly am — we need to incentivize being human to one another, and increase the cost to the public of dehumanizing behavior. In the case of Portland, that probably means making public comments in person only going forward.