Nerve: Anonymity, Consequence and Dunbar’s Number

Nerve (2016)

Emma Roberts, Dave Franco

A high school senior finds herself immersed in an online game of truth or dare, where her every move starts to become manipulated by an anonymous community of "watchers."

How much would someone have to pay you to act outside of your personality? Outside of your own code of morality? Outside the code of common morality? Outside of the law? What if doing it could cover your groceries for the week? Rent for the month? Pay for a car? Clear your student loan debt? Make you famous? Admired?

The above questions are nothing new in fiction or film. Stephen King’s Needful Things (as well as the film) asked what sins you’d commit for the material things you’ve wanted all your life. Indecent Proposal asked if you’d commit, and/or forgive infidelity for $1,000,000. But, there’s always a new generation, new people who are tempted by the same questions and offers for different representations of the same abstract concepts (fame, wealth, status) in exchange for increasingly risky, and darkening moral behavior. It’s generally referred to as a Faustian Bargain at its height, trading one’s soul either literally or figuratively, for selfish gain.

Those Damned Millennials

2016’s Nerve explores similar themes, using the medium of the internet and social media to be the primary driver for the plot. Marketed as a techno-thriller, it risks the same failings as all the other internet-centered techno-thrillers in the 20^th century. Gen X Sandra Bullock “getting caught in” The Net is considered a dated laughingstock now, but the concept of your identity being stolen and completely rewritten as that a career criminal, your medical records altered to make a visit to the hospital potentially fatal, and your entire life being devastated by unknown assailants… is now kind of possible.

Hackers provides all of the same fears, but with Gen Y teenaged hackers as the heroes, fighting for the ideals of the internet, freedom, neutrality, and presentation and ownership of one’s own identity. It’s still dated as Hell, though, as there’s a scene of the characters oohing and ahhing over a laptop’s tech specs that were rendered hysterically obsolete inside of two years.

Nerve presents the last of the Millennials, teenagers born in 1998 and 1999, all caught up in an app-based social media game of “truth or dare without the truths” where every watcher and player’s phone is a server, a subtle reference to blockchain-based possibilities. The plot of the movie is simple enough: Vee, the protagonist, is a worrisome student photographer who lets her fears and anxieties run her life. She signs up for Nerve as a Player and becomes a sensation and hugely popular on her first night, the last night of the current game, getting internet fame and thousands of dollars by completing dares, until it turns out that the game is much more sinister and subject to mob rule than originally thought.

The story itself runs along well-worn tropes and expectations, and there aren’t too many big surprises for anyone with multi-modal literacy over the age of 25 (hence it being a YA movie), but it still raises discussion topics, refusing to be shelved as a “turn-your-brain-off” popcorn movie. For starters, it shows the strain of the social contract the larger the society involved grows.

Social Media vs. Social Contract

A challenge of social media is that of Dunbar’s Number, also known as “the monkeysphere”, or the theory that the human brain does not possess a developed enough neocortex to manage social connections, such as friendship, with more than 150 people. (This number has been suggested to be as low as 30 and as high as 250, depending on the society the individual dwells in.) This is generally why social connections fade as one moves from one society to another (neighborhood, school, work). The larger the society, the more difficult to impossible it becomes to maintain a social connection, and therefore attachment to the social contract.

The social contract itself is, at its most simplified and barest essence, “I won’t kill you if you won’t kill me.” This isn’t to imply that social media will bring about an end to that aspect of the social contract, but what the social contract relies on at its core is the regard for other people as living human beings. This is often circumvented through rationalization and dehumanization. Often, this is done in mass psychology with simplified rules and guidelines to appeal to less developed areas of the brain, often using rhyme, melody, or catchphrases to ingrain concepts.

This is done in Nerve at first with its three rules: 1) Every dare must be recorded with one’s own phone, 2) Bail or Fail and lose everything, and 3) Snitches Get Stitches. All three rules are displayed laden with memes to link the rules to primal emotions, particularly rule 3, which uses images of violence and cowardice to imprint that the consequences will be dire. That breakers of the third rule are beaten, have their identities and money stolen, and havoc wrought on their and their family’s lives, is brushed aside and ignored, or rationalized by group chanting of “Snitches Get Stitches” while the rulebreaker is punished for calling out the increasingly dangerous dares to anyone with the power to stop it.

Oversharing vs. Data-Mining

Considering that the dares are primarily built around a player’s worst fears and moral philosophy, it could be argued (likely by anyone over the age of 30) that the blame lies solely with the player, as all of the information used against them is directly mined from their social media profiles, and how much and can learned about a person by deep-diving into everything someone elects to share online, and that an expectation of privacy is only supposed, not actually implied by law, and is given nowhere in that lengthy Terms of Service agreement that everyone agrees to without reading. (Victim blaming, as we all know, has been one of the darker parts of society for ages.)

However, in the case of Nerve, the app mines data without the player’s, or watcher’s knowledge, making it freely available to anyone who’s paid $20 for a one-day watcher pass. It can be argued that the app’s simply mining everything that was freely shared by the player, or that they were tagged in. This is presented to be a simple task with every phone in the network acting as part of a bot-net. It presents a counter-argument that this information was being taken and used without their knowledge or approval, but they don’t argue because they’re getting paid hundreds to thousands of dollars to either let it happen to complete dares, or watch the increasingly dangerous broadcasts for their own voyeuristic pleasure.

Anonymity vs. Consequence

The finale of Nerve takes the plot to its logical-to-slippery-slope end with the final two players facing each other with loaded guns and the final dare being for one to shoot the other for the grand prize, surrounded by hundreds of fans dressed in masks, all with phones out to watch or film. This, of course, is to show that everyone present or watching in private will retain their anonymity no matter the result of the “duel” between the last two Players, both of whom are revealed to be “Prisoners” or Players who snitched and are relegated to essential slavery to the game under threat of ruin to themselves and their families. An impassioned speech by the protagonist inspires unease in one watcher present, but in the end is ignored.

While it can be critiqued that this is what Millennials will become without threat of consequence, it’s more indicative of several theories and their effect on the social contract. The finale of Nerve can be explained simply with John Gabriel’s Internet Fuckwad Theory (Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Fuckwad), but can be delved into more adequately by examining the factors at work in Nerve.

First, the sheer number of watchers severely outweighs the players, and only in one scene are the protagonist’s friends watching, thus overwhelming Dunbar’s Number by hundreds, and thousands. Since the protagonist is not part of the vast majority of watchers’ “monkeysphere”, personal connection’s effect on personal morality is negated or never established.

Once personal connection is off the table, Kohlberg’s Moral Development comes into play. Adherence to the social contract is within the Post-Conventional stage, and is removed by the overwhelming of Dunbar’s Number. The protagonist, after all, is stripped of her name and identity, being only a screenname to the thousands of watchers, and only seen on screens, making it easier to dehumanize her, and the other players, as only existing for the entertainment that they paid to see. (That many of the watchers are from well-to-do families and the players are largely from working class cannot be ignored.) That the watchers are only screennames themselves and afforded the same level of anonymity places extra strain on morality. That “Snitches Get Stitches” is the most stringent and punished rule removes the concern of Conventional Morality. (Do the laws of society forbid this?) This leaves the watchers with only concern for Pre-Conventional morality. (Will I be punished?)

Anonymity removes the concern for punishment, made evident by the final dare issued by the protagonist herself, “I dare you to shoot me”, and decided upon by the watchers themselves. Even with one of her friends insisting that others at a party vote no, the choice to kill her wins in a landslide. This isn’t surprising, considering the preceding dare for the two finalists to shoot each other wasn’t shouted down by anyone but raucously cheered on. After all, we had no problem with Katniss Everdeen dropping a hive of tracker jackers on a woman to die in horrifying agony because we had no idea who that girl was other than having killed a kid because she was made to by the games. No one got arrested for cheering on the combatants. No one was punished for being in the faceless masses that cheered on Joaquin Phoenix to give people the thumbs down in the Colosseum. There wasn’t enough personal connection to the characters to penetrate the shroud of anonymity to warrant any modicum of mercy.

It’s not until the big reveal is enacted that anyone shows a modicum of fear, when every phone addresses the watcher by their real identity and names them as an accessory to murder for voting yes. They all sign out, and the app is shut down forever, because the crowd is forced to confront the morality that human beings learn as toddlers, “if I’m bad, and I’m caught, I’ll be punished”. Even if the actual logistics of arresting and convicting that many people is laughably absurd, the fear of possibly getting 20 to Life for tapping “Yes” is enough to shut the game down.

In the end, Nerve asks its intended audience to consider the effect that social media and perceived anonymity might have on one’s moral center. It’s a line of questioning that has to be approached by every generation that grows more complex with each advancement of technology that enables further and wider connection, but acts as a double edged sword with how it can enrich and harm both oneself and others, and, to refer to the old adage, with its increasing power, comes increasing responsibility placed in the hands of those who are still figuring out what morality is without the added strain of peer pressure, mob rule, and an increasingly strained (and still developing) neocortex with an ever growing number of people in our lives. Nerve, at least, offers a happy ending, with the network shut down by the fear of consequence. It doesn’t mean our society is fixed, though. For the opposition to that ending, you only need to watch Black Mirror, or worse, The Purge.

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://vaughndemont.com/2018/07/16/nerve-anonymity-consequence-and-dunbars-number/

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