These conditions can obviously manifest themselves in contexts far removed from online forums and social media. But a simulation of the experience of power, understood as the collapse of the space between impulse and act, may be more generalized in online environments where a forgetfulness of the body is also a default setting.

The interval of hesitation is not unlike what Haugen described, in very different language, as part of the embodied feedback cycle of human interaction, where a wince and a tear are visible to the one who elicits them from the other. And in this way the idealized frictionless quality of online actions, particularly in the absence of the body, can be understood as an inducement to cruelty. Although, inducement may not be quite right. Perhaps it is better to say that in online environments, certain critical impediments to cruelty, fragile and tenuous as they already are in the course of human affairs, are lifted.