This American Life: Moby Dick and Screwing with Africans
by zunguzungu
They’re making a movie about Moby Dick, apparently; a piece of literary art which theorizes the human from the act of killing an animal, it seems, will be transformed into “what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story.” I am fascinated.
A couple posts back, I was thinking about how finessing the distinction between animal and human helps us unlearn the distinction between people who have rights and those who do not, thereby reassuring ourselves that some forms of people are killable. Terrorists do not have rights when we think of them as flies, because flies are without rights. Criminals, too, are often taken to have reduced themselves to the level of mere animals, like the savages which gave the British something to do for centuries, and of whom they enjoyed saying “violence is the only language they understood.” Paging Dr. Caliban, please, the patient is cursing; is there a subaltern in the house?
But this–being a blog–is floating on a particular level of vague generality, and reality is experienced in specific terms. So let’s get specific. On Saturday, I was listening to This American Life and, as they often do, the good people at NPR managed to raise some interesting questions by letting interesting people talk about themselves and then set it to music. Specifically, in an episode called “Enforcers,” the segment I listened to focused on a group of self-appointed internet vigilantes who have taken it upon themselves to rid the world of as many internet scammers as they can. These saviors of the republic (to be found at a website called 419eater.com), offer the following explanation for their practices:
“So what is scambaiting? Well, put simply, you enter into a dialogue with scammers, simply to waste their time and resources. Whilst you are doing this, you will be helping to keep the scammers away from real potential victims and screwing around with the minds of deserving thieves…Although this site concentrates mainly on the Nigerian 419 scam, we are happy to deal with other types of scams if and when the opportunity arises. We also have a large team of experts dedicated to the removal and closure of fake scammer banks and sites. Even if you are a newcomer, much fun can be had and at the same time you will be doing a public service.”
Important boxes are being ticked off in my head. Doing a public service by doing vigilante violence on deserving criminals? Check! A team of experts dedicated to destroying an African infrastructure? Check! The pleasure to be had from exerting power over an annoying source of otherness? Check! Transforming racism into a technology of the self? Check!
For example. Our friends decide to take action on Adamu, a particular “lad” they’ve “hooked,” allowing me to check the infantilization box and the African as big-game trophy box. But I’ll let them tell it in their own words:
“Prof So and So, YW and myself have been working on a lad donated by fellow baiter freddyfudpucker, who was too busy to deal with his lads due to school. Well, he had this lad well hooked. So, we decided it was time for him to be a man of the world. He needed to get a bit of traveling under his belt. I mean, there is nothing more fun than a vacation arranged by our church. So, after thumbing through TONS of brochures of beautiful places to visit around Africa, we decided that one of the best places to go would be Chad. After reading this article and talking to YW, I just fell in LOVE with the place. Now, some of you might be thinking that Chad is but a war torn, dangerous place to be. But trust me, it is more than that. It is a mostly Muslim country, which is great because our lad is an evangelical missionary! And, of course, when traveling to Chad he must wear the traditional missionary getup. All white of course. With a pink sash. Another reason why Chad is such a good destination is because it borders Sudan. Why do we like Sudan so much you ask? It cannot possibly be as beautiful as Chad, you say. Well, because it houses Darfur, which is well-known for its hospitality and peaceful nature. Obviously at some point, our missionary will have to make an emergency run to Darfur to do something. Coincidentally, that will be the day he arrives in Ndjamena.”
All of this is done. If you’re interested in the grim details of what this hapless Nigerian scammer goes through, you can listen to the episode in question here. It’s harrowing, if you find human suffering to be a harrowing thing, and even if you think his suffering was justifiable, even if you call it a thing he brought on himself, you have to admit this much: he was human and he suffered. And these fellows-Prof So and So, YW, and jojobean-really enjoyed doing their part in it.
I’m not trying to say that these guys are terrible people, actually; the point is (again, via Arendt) that evil things get done by people who are not themselves evil. And blaming them for that act, as if they themselves are the sole cause of that evil is to do what they did, to judge without trying to understand, which strikes me as (among other things) not very interesting. I’m struck, instead, by the ways they themselves seem to track their own progress over the line, the note of defensiveness that comes from, if not a guilty conscience, an active one. On the radio program, when they said things like “These guys are pure scum as far as I’m concerned…if they get killed, there’s two less scammers in the world” or noted that if they were killed, “I wouldn’t feel responsible; their greed led them there,” I find myself much more willing to relate to them as human beings, exactly because they protest too much. So the care they take to establish that their victim is fuckable-with illustrates how important such defensive maneuvers are: carefully first showing that the victim will knowingly steal money from eminantly good sources (money that will otherwise go to a daughter’s surgery, or for a church), they can thereby slot him into the “scum” box where he will be removed from the realm of human sympathy.
What interests me in all this is not that relegating Adamu to “scum” status translates into the total loss of any sense of shared humanity with him, such that it is okay to do anything to him. That’s the banal, everyday logic of criminal enforcement. What I find remarkable is the kind of joy they take in doing it. Concepts like “bare life” have to do with the juridical status of being kill-able, since the law does protect (or avenge) the forms of life (most animals, selected criminals, parts of the third world) which have been so classified, this peculiar joy illustrates the way some forms of life are, via this status, not only negatively stripped of legal recourse but positively imbued with a special kind of attraction as target. It is not merely okay to fuck with this guy, it is positively a joyous opportunity.
Why, pray tell, is that so? There is nothing inherently virtuous about eating a BBQ chicken sandwich, since the meat is not, as meat, the reason you eat it. You eat it because it tastes good, and you negatively strip away any possible attachment you might feel towards your meal by de-humanizing it. It’s not a human, it’s an animal. Yet to acquire a positive joy from eating that meat, precisely because of what it is, seems strangely different: instead of eating it despite its status as life, which has therefore to be neutralized, you eat it because of its status as a certain kind of life, which therefore has to be emphasized. This is what big game hunters do when they go to Africa, to shoot lions or elephants. And this is what big game photographers do when they go to Africa to shoot lions, elephant, or Maasai. This, too, is what these guys do when they take pictures of the scammers they’ve defeated and humiliated* (in ways that are transparently analyzable)
To pick a totally hypothetical example, it is not unlike a whale-ship captain who loses his leg to a sperm whale and then piles all his rage at the trauma (and all the trauma of life) onto the figure of that whale, making the destruction of that whale not merely a means to a different end, but a kind of end in and of itself. A use-value, in acquiring a new exchange value, produces an occult commodity somehow outside the moral economy it was originally implanted in, or perhaps a negative status–an animal as not-human–has simply become a positive one, the animal as anti-human or something. Maybe that’s why I want to eat just a BBQ chicken sandwich. Maybe that’s why we want to keep saying that Moby Dick is, at its core, just an adventure story. Maybe that’s why certain categories of people are, as such, persons you can bomb without penalty, and should. If it were something more than that, then maybe we would be too?
* In case my big-game head-hunting metaphor seems harsh, note this: the people at that site not only have a “trophy room” (from which all those pictures are taken) but they also list the names and statistics of the Africans they’ve bagged underneathe their signatures. As in “jojobean”‘s:
Christ 
Ghana-Ndjamena, Chad
Miracle Benin-Ndjamena, Chad
Adamu 
Lagos-Abeche
Emi – S Africa-Egypt-Sudan- 10k miles
Chris 
Dakar to: Niger, BF, Niger, Cameroon, Lagos, Nairobi, Lagos, Mali 9.6k miles
Kevin 
Accra – Burkina Faso x2, Togo x2, Kumasi x3, Bolgatanga x1, Benin City x1, Tamale x2 
5k miles 
Kenny 3k miles- dont f*ck me up about the payment plz. i have a policy about that. I JUST GOT A SMALL GOAT TODAY AND ITS IN MY HOUSE NOW. i lobve the goat.
Misc 
Germany-Holland, Atlanta, Beijing-ChangZhou, China, London-Glasgow, Niger-Benin-TIMBUKTU, Ben 2.5k miles
zunguzungu 
Over at SEK’s joint, a commenter posted the following:
“Let’s say that a woman earned an average of $3.70 per hour over the course of her long blue-collar career. That included 40 years of working at least 5 days of menial labor each week. She kept that money in a bank, and now after 7 years of retirement, she has a little nest egg and Social Security. Because of problems in paying the mortgage or any of a thousand family emergencies, she needs money. She gets caught up in an on-line scam. There goes 40 years of sweat and her semi-secure future. The linked author empathizes with everyone but our hypothetical woman. Is it the story of the Great White Hunter on an African Safari or is it the story of Robin Hood? Is there such a thing as a vigilante when national and international police agencies will NEVER catch the scammer? I find it hard to believe that you can take the law into your own hands when there is no enforceable law.”
Now,
I didn’t want to make a big point of it over there, since I didn’t think SEK really meant to link to that post in particular, but over here I feel I can do as I please. So:
My sympathies were never *not* with our anecdotal hard-working but clueless 419 victim. In fact, the point was precisely not to make judgments about who is right and who is wrong; as I said “to judge without trying to understand” simply isn’t interesting to me. And the logic that extending empathy to a criminal is somehow incompatible with empathizing with the victim (as the commenter implies) is something I would categorically reject. That, again, was the entire point of the piece. Unethical people do not, via their lack of ethics, cease to become human beings, any more than clueless people do (and you have to be pretty clueless to fall victim to the kinds of scammers that the 419eater people target). Human beings are human beings, and putting a person in real physical danger (as the 419eaters do) is a thing we should take very seriously. The 419eater folks do not, it seems, take it that seriously. They laugh at what they’re doing. They enjoy it. They put up trophies of their kills.
I find this incredibly disturbing. While I can fully endorse law enforcement taking steps to apprehend and punish people who run these kinds of scams, there’s a reason why privatized justice is something we should be very, very leery of. If a public system of law enforcement abuses its power, it can be reformed. We can talk about what the standards of proof need to be, what the appropriate punishments are, and we can make sure that the rights of suspected criminals are not violated via a presumption of guilt. This is, by the way, the same reason why we should treat terrorists as criminals, not as “enemy combatants”: if you focus on punishing what a person has done, you tend not to slide into simply equating criminal status with complete lack of human rights. If you put them on trial, punish the crime not the person, you will do much less damage to innocent people who just happen to be the wrong “type.”
Now, the 419eaters emphasize the fact that their victims are scum, and therefore deserve whatever form of disproportionate justice they get. This is why farming out the job of law enforcement to people like this is a bad idea: Adamu doesn’t get a defense attorney. He doesn’t get Miranda rights. He doesn’t get any of the due process that we accord to American criminals as a matter of course. As self appointed bounty hunters, the 419eaters have a sort of vested interest in *not* worrying about these kinds of issues.
Moreover, while the commenter at Acephalous was quick to weave a narrative about how the victims of 419 scams are hard-working people under economic pressure, he or she ignores the fact that a Nigerian 419 scammer is also under incredible economic pressure. I am going to assume that the commenter has no real conception or interest in what, say, Nigerian economic conditions are like, so let me make this claim: the anecdotal hard-working Westerner was born with the advantage of “hard work” being a possibility as a route to success, while the vast majority of Nigerians are not. In such a context, boot-strap mythology (get a job!) is simply not a viable way to parse the ethical dilemmas of the situation.
More importantly, though, the 419 scam works not by offering a noble westerner an honest hard-working way to make money; it offers them the opportunity to profit from someone else’s ill-gotten booty by capitalizing on their birthright as westerner. Most 419 emails actually hint at this fact, implying that the westerner’s opportunity is to get a piece of a vast sum of money that
Again, my point in all this has never been not that the victim of such a scheme deserves what they get; my point is that there isn’t a clear ethical distinction between these two people, between the hustler who hustles someone by offering them a fraudulent chance to hustle someone else and the person who is hustled when they accept that opportunity to hustle someone else. No one is innocent here, which is why “we” (or anyone else) don’t suddenly have the right to arbitrarily punish some of the guilty as much as we feel like. If you believe that, in fact, then you have just given the Nigerian scammer an excuse for doing what he is doing; he too would have no trouble justifying his actions by reference to the ridiculous wealth of his victim, the fact that he never forced them to do anything, and his own extreme poverty. If the 419eaters simply play along with the fantasies of the scammers, you cannot extent them the benefit of that doubt without also extending it to the scammers themselves.
To reiterate: I am disturbed when people with power use that power to cause less powerful people to suffer. I am disturbed when they pretend enjoy doing so and when they act like their pleasure is really morality. I am disturbed when such Robin Hood’s direct their attention not against the King, but against people who have no power to harm them, and when they have no real interest in thinking about whether the damage they do is excessive. I am disturbed when it becomes respectable to punish criminals without even winking at the *idea* of the law (and the commenter is typical in pretending there is no legal recourse and could never be), and when we stop trying to adhere to idealisms and prefer to think of the world as us and them. And I am disturbed by the bald racism of the entire project. These are targets of opportunity for the 419eaters because they are too stupid and too “third world” to defend themselves, and the 419 eaters not only adopt the language and imagery of big game hunting, but they do it with zest. I find this disturbing.
“Eater’s anti-racism policy is sincere. We are genuinely offended by the accusation that we are racist, hence this effort to persuade you that we are not.”
Hah.
also, What the fuck.
That site made me feel like I wandered into /b/ and must now take a shower. Come to think of it, my money is that this start – like all internet evil does – on 4chan.
Just wanted to stop by to say that that was a brilliant response. More than I deserved, but certainly well appreciated.
I do have a few observations. You used the term “disproportionate justice,” which in the case of Adamu may or may not be correct. (I suspect it is, but I have only read a few of the 140+ page case study on the website). I am not a 419eater, as I’ve only just found the site through SEK and you, but it seems the strange case of Adamu Lawal is very much the exception and not the rule. It appears that he was put at risk, and that was “going too far.” But what of the many other cases which just involve people wasting the scammers’ time?
Also, you noted that I have serious doubts about whether law enforcement can catch the Nigerian scammers. I believe that to be true, but I will listen to your evidence to the contrary. Still, if we take your argument a step further, then isn’t it true that the Nigerian scammers have legal — even criminal — recourse against the 419eaters? Have you stepped in to become the internet vigilante of vigilantes?
To answer my own last question, I think absolutely not, as I also think the site is racist with its “stinky” and “rock-kicking” descriptors. Also, the term “Mugu” is thrown around a bit, and I suspect it may be defamatory. And, yes, the Great White Hunter metaphor is absolutely horrible. If they got rid of all that, and they kept their “Safaris” to, say, a 200 mile radius of Lagos, I don’t have a problem with it.
P.S. The UCI Library System is connected by the internet to all the library systems in the world. And we control information! Finally, why bother picking on the Mets — that’s not low-hanging fruit, that’s ground-fruit; moverover, it’s the Cubs that have a 100-year history of “suspending” operations in October. Highest Regards, the UCI Library System.
You’re a good sport for stopping by, UCI library, though don’t tell SEK I said a nice thing about you. And with regards to the Mets, well, I didn’t write the piece, but I’m a Nats fan (that’s the Nationals, also a baseball team, supposedly), so nuff said.
In principle, I don’t object to the project of wasting scammer’s time, per se. If it is possible to distinguish the racist idiom the 419eaters talk in from their actions, then yeah, I’d be happy to flag Adamu as an extreme case and move on. But the point of criticizing that racist paradigm is to question whether an extreme case like Adamu is more of a feature than a bug. In that sense, I find the energy and glee that goes into the whole project to be worrisome, and the ways the third world becomes a playground for American adventurism to be an incredible illustration for the the kind of thinking that has made our foreign policy what it is. These kinds of games, I worry, help people normalize the idea of a broad American right and privilege to do whatever they want as long as it happens “out there.” After all, the idea that if a crime is happening in an area we deem to be insufficiently policed gives us the right to intervene there, then it becomes fully rational to do what Sepoy pointed out we’re doing in Pakistan: dropping bombs in the “tribal” area and in doing so running the risk that our invasion of Pakistani sovereignty will provoke catastrophic results, on the idea that because no “legitimate” law enforcement exists, we can do whatever we want.
Another undeserved and fantastic response! And the word “supposedly” was deliciously well-chosen. Kudos. As for your main argument, it is laid out well on these pages, and I won’t argue with it. We seem to agree on much more than we disagree.
If the 419eaters led the scammers to a police station for eventual arrest rather than to the middle of a war zone, (at least in Adamu’s case), they would be accomplishing much more, and, yes, they can do all of that without the nasty rhetoric.
P.S. The UCI Library System fears no blogger! (necessary puffing to be expected from any healthy library system). Best Wishes, the UCI Library System
Yeah, isn’t that the way in internet “disagreements”? Or it should be, any way. I have many of the same thoughts you’ve expressed, but for rhetorical effect, the piece is structured in a different direction.
As for “supposedly,” well… The Nats avoid utter irrelevence in the playoff race by playing spoiler with the Mets. Last year, we knocked them off by winning against them, but this year, count on us to end their season by ignominiously laying it down against the Phillies. In the NL East, we’re Kevin Costner in Swing Vote and the Mets are whichever candidate he throws the election to. Or maybe we’re Joe Lieberman in the Senate? Actually, I hate both those metaphors. I think we’re just a very bad baseball team. And on that, we can all agree!
Hi there,
We’re not racists. We would have done exactly the same thing to the bastards no matter what color they were. Simply put, we’re jerks.
~PhD
Hello,
We are dicks, as Prof says. Not racists. Plain and simple. Can you do me a favour though? Please change my “signature”. I now have a golden helmet for this wonderful Adamu safari.
You can email us at chadbait@gmail.com if you like.
Jojo
Very, very late arriving, but, honestly, I think it’s a real stretch to call a guy a “victim” when all that was done to him was that he was told he had an opportunity to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from religious aid workers.
Nobody forced him to leave Lagos, much less travel to Abeche. He chose to do that because he was fooled with exactly the same tactics he was bent on using to steal from his would-be victims.
Did he suffer? Sure. Why? Because he was willing to risk that suffering in order to steal from a church, thereby preventing them from providing humanitarian aid to people in a war zone. He _chose_ to suffer every hardship he received because his mouth was watering for a stolen payoff that would cause vast suffering to innocent third parties.
[…] another internet rabbit trail re. Moby Dick and racism led me to to this blog post where the author equates Ahab’s revenge hunting of the white whale with 419eater.com and […]