#have i mentioned that my algorithm is fucked beyond belief

[hbpseverus]

i genuinely love alan rickman so much, i think he was genius and did an excellent job at portraying snape, but damn sometimes it drives me crazy how the general public who just watched the movies casually without diving much deeper into the franchise genuinely think that snape was a 60 year old man 😭 that doesn't even make any sense timeline wise

[womendeservehumanity]

Every time I subconsciously start to minimize the scale at which men hate women I remember when I went semi viral on tiktok for pointing out disgusting, misogynistic comments on a video. This sick fuck saw a video of a woman showing her ex emotionally abusing her and accusing her of cheating for simply interacting with her friend’s boyfriend. He then decided to take that audio and make it seem as though this was his brother’s “cheating girlfriend”. The audio which is now gone was fucking terrifying. And how you could see it as anything but an abusive situation is beyond me. But males were in the comments laughing at and mocking her. RELATING to the guy. It was beyond me

So I make a video highlighting how reprehensible all of this is. How it truly encapsulates how little men care about female victims, all while women constantly advocate for male victims and their “double standards”. I truly wasn’t expecting this to blow up in any capacity. I literally made an account specifically for the post that same day but alas the algorithm did its thing. At first it was mostly women who were talking about how disgusting the comments and audio were. Talking about their own experiences as well. Then I got an influx of males. Ranging from the good ol devils advocate to the clearly does not comprehend what’s going on at all. They were essentially doing the same things. Spewing misogyny, spreading misinformation that this woman cheated, or victim blaming because why didn’t she leave (she did). I wasn’t gonna let that shit go untamed in my comments as more comments were going in than I could respond to. So I limited them. BUT I kept my dms open and these were some of the comments I got for simply being a woman showcasing how men act.

This was SO many men's reaction to me simply showing what other men were saying in regards to a woman being abused. And how another man saw a video of a woman being abused and decided to use the sound and pretend as though it was a made up scenario where she deserved it. And the logical gender who swears up and down that they wanna hear both sides and get the full context didn't even look and see that the account that had posted the video had a different pfp than the one of the original sound so it was obviously not his video.

I've mentioned this before but the patriarchy relies so heavily on women's suspension of belief that men collectively hate them. That it's truly a few bad apples and that all those bad apples are socially inept, ugly basement dwelling losers who we would never even glance at twice. In a vast orchard full of shiny apples who are attractive, chivalrous prince charmings. When in reality, there is no one set way a misogynist looks or acts And when I got all of these dms full of men showing their unabashed hatred of women and rage at me for showcasing that. It showed me that it has not and will never be a few. And men have absolutely no problem showing that. It's insane how I see women constantly policing other women over the most asinine shit (like being rude to a moid) because it makes women in general look bad. And is going to make more men hate women (as if they don't already). Meanwhile men quite literally could not give less of a fuck. They will be so outward and passionate about their hatred of women, especially online. They have no problem harassing women and subjecting them to misogyny. They don't, not even once, think about how that could make women resent men. And sadly they mostly don't have anything to worry about because so many women are so male obsessed that they will see and experience onslaught misogyny everyday. Both online and off but cope by writing it off as isolated incidents and not a reflection of men and their hatred of women.

[silverjirachi]

ok so like i wanna be real with you about what being a writer/artist/anyone who posts content on the internet is like sometimes, especially from the perspective of someone who has anxiety/depression etc

so on the one hand there’s that (and this has been said before) some of this art is shared with you, not for you. sometimes we make stuff just for us, but then we post it because we’re proud of it and it made us happy and we want it to make other people happy as well.

and then this thing we make that we’re proud of that we wanted to share for other people to see seems like it falls into the silent abyss of cyberspace and no one responds and you question whether it matters at all. and suddenly the thing you shared and were proud of becomes something you question if it was really as good as you thought it was, or if rather by posting it you’re being annoying and the people who like/reblog/comment/engage with any of the things you make in any capacity are only doing it because they feel bad for you.

on top of that, then you get afraid to question/talk about it or open up about how you feel because you think it will come off as narcissitic or attention-seeking. so you stay silent and make the next thing and the same thing happens and the cycle repeats itself.

for example, those of you who watch my videos (thank you!), you probably notice that i make a lot of self-deprecating humor. part of this is just who i am as a person. but the other part is because half of the time i do actually struggle with those beliefs and the “haha this is trash content” is very real. sometimes if i’m in a really bad place i have to fight about three different internal voices telling me that i should stop because no one cares and i’m being annoying and i have a screechy voice and by sharing this i’m just reminding people how bad i am etc etc etc. i’m not saying this for you to say “oh no your content isnt trash you’re wonderful” every time i make one of those jokes or talk about this, i’m just telling you that sometimes it is what it is and i don’t need sympathy for it, it just happens, and i have to fight against it personally a lot

the same goes for writing etc etc. I dont post my art on here but from what i’ve seen lately about the HUGE gap between likes and reblogs for artists on here, i know they struggle with it as well. and some of them really need that kind of exposure because they’re trying to make art a career, they need to take in commissions and every reblog is a better chance for that to happen. we work on multiple platforms oftentimes to try to get the word out but that doesnt mean it’s always effective and that the same shit doesnt happen there too. it does. always.

then there’s the thing like... we post it online because we want it to be shared. we want it to be seen. and due to a variety of factors ranging from fucked up algorithms to just people “lurking” vs. leaving likes/comments/reblogs, sometimes or oftentimes it’s not seen and that’s for me when the questioning begins. and i ask myself if i complain about this am i annoying and begging for attention? but here’s the thing guys.. most artists dont WANT to do art in a vaccuum. If they do, they don’t share it. That’s why i don’t post a lot of my drawings. Thats more just for me. But stuff like writing and other content that I HAVE posted, and same for any writer or creator, has inherently passed that threshold. We want engagement, we want it to be seen, so yes, we want attention. And that isnt a bad thing because that art needs an audience and we want it to have one.

When we share things, we want you to see it and we want you to engage with it. We want to make you happy, we want to make you think, we want to entertain you. We want to make a difference in your life, even if just a small and momentary difference. But it is impossible for us to reach through the screen and see you. When I do live theatre, I can see and feel my audience so I can tell how they’re feeling and reacting and it’s great. But I imagine if I tried to do a one-person-show behind a one-way curtain without hearing or seeing the audience or even being able to tell if there is an audience at all, it would probably be a very different, and really sucky, experience, and that’s what posting content on the internet is like.

That’s why it makes writers’ and artists’ day when we get comments on our work. That is the only way we are able to tell that we reached through the screen. Even if it’s dumb, even if it’s incoherent, even if you think you’re being annoying, really, more often than not, the simplest comment can really make us feel that way. Because of everything I just mentioned above. All we wanna do is make you happy, entertain you, give you the joy our art gave us, and it’s scary and uncertain when you send it out there, and even more scary and uncertain when you hear little to nothing back.

I also have compared this to when I used to teach a class of 90 students. It was a gen ed theatre course and teaching it genuinely sucked ass for much the same reason. I also just get really stressed out teaching. But when you’re teaching a big class like that, you look out and see any number of faces with expressions ranging from “bored,” “on the phone,” “interested,” “awake,” to completely unreadable. And the completely unreadable ones are the worst. Posting stuff on the internet is like teaching a class full of completely anonymous, completely unreadable students.

But, in the same vein, in every class i taught, there was always a small handful of people who seemed genuinely interested in the topic. They’d raise their hands, ask questions, go above and beyond for assignments. I still think about the students in my classes from years ago who seemed like they enjoyed being there, or at the very least tried a little bit more than everyone else. They were a beacon of hope that what I was doing and saying mattered. So when I got scared of those bored, unreadable faces, I’d look to the two or three people who I knew cared, and it gave me courage to keep going. It was like I was teaching the class just for them.

Getting comments, reblogs, any equivalent of engagement on any platform is like having those interested students. When creators talk about their audience being the best part of what they do, it really is the truth. Because a lot of time everything else can be scary and uncertain and suck. And so then sometimes even when those hateful inner voices are getting the best of me, I do it for the one or two people in my class who make my day of teaching brighter when I see them. So to any of you who engage with artists, writers, and creators in any way- seriously we do it just for you sometimes, and you have no idea how much even the tiniest poke through the screen means to us.

This was a lot longer than I intended it to be but yeah I just kind of needed to get it all out of me because it’s personally been something i’m struggling with right now, and I know others do too. And again this not to say like “NEH NEH NEH WHY ARENT I GETTING ATTENTION” but just to be upfront about what it’s like so that you on the other side of screen understand that you do make a difference and can also have a positive effect on our lives, the same way we want to have one for you.

[somnilogical]

<<Over the past year, however, Google has appeared to clamp down. It has gradually scaled back opportunities for employees to grill their bosses and imposed a set of workplace guidelines that forbid “a raging debate over politics or the latest news story.” It has tried to prevent workers from discussing their labor rights with outsiders at a Google facility and even hired a consulting firm that specializes in blocking unions. Then, in November, came the firing of the four activists. The escalation sent tremors through the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif., and its offices in cities like New York and Seattle, prompting many employees — whether or not they had openly supported the activists — to wonder if the company’s culture of friendly debate was now gone for good.

(A Google spokeswoman would not confirm the names of the people fired on Nov. 25. “We dismissed four individuals who were engaged in intentional and often repeated violations of our longstanding data-security policies,” the spokeswoman said. “No one has been dismissed for raising concerns or debating the company’s activities.” Without naming Berland, Google disputed that investigators pressured him.)>>

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/18/magazine/google-revolt.html

<<“Of the five people that were fired, three of us are trans women,” Spiers said. “That is either an unbelievable coincidence or Google is targeting the most vulnerable.”

“Trans Googlers make up a very small percentage of Googlers,” she added. “They make up a slightly larger percentage of organizers, but not 60%.”>>

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/17/fifth-google-worker-activist-fired-in-a-month-says-company-is-targeting-the-vulnerable

i too am transfem and would "violate longstanding data-security policies" if my organization were being unjust. i wouldnt say that unless it were already obvious by what bits ive leaked to people about my life, because otherwise i could suppress this information and whistleblow more.

if you were an evil corp at this point youd probably try to avoid hiring any trans women in the first place because given this happens to you, its likely done by a transfem. not that this saved CFAR, who never hired a trans woman, from having a bunch of transfems whistleblow on them despite not being employees.

from what ive read from transfem google employees who are or were involved in activism, the degredation of google's culture. their complicity with ICE and weapons manufacturing mirrors CFAR's with OpenAI and DeepMind; authoritarianism and expulsion of transfems who object to this among a myriad of wrongs. to protect the territory of injustice and complicity with organizations like ICE, google needs to import "a consulting firm that specializes in blocking unions", CFAR needs to violate their whistleblower policy. if you once protect injustice, justice is ever after your enemy. morality isnt some modular thing such that you can be comitted to protecting injustice and not have this choice spiral into also invoking and protecting systems that protect injustice and invoking further things to protect those, recursively. all the way down to doing really dumb and obvious unjust things like transmisogyny (lots of future posts), changing your fundraiser after its clear its losing money, announcing that this year you got way below your donation target and claim to have no idea why.

well *i* know the compact generator for all of these things, and that makes me strong. unlike MIRI/CFAR who like the CDC rely on gaslighting the populace for myopic gains. i also wore a particle mask during the time that the CDC claimed that they were useless to preventing spread of disease, so it was really important to give them to doctors and nurses.

after so much gaslighting, *i* have built up general capabilities at arbitraging the difference between what agents claim and the truth. people who say:

<<Edit: This is a type of post that should have been vetted with someone for infohazards and harms before being posted, and (Further edit) I think it should have been removed by the authors., though censorship is obviously counterproductive at this point.

Infohazards are a real thing, as is the Unilateralists’s curse. (Edit to add: No, infohazards and unilateralist’s curse are not about existential or global catastrophic risk. Read the papers.) And right now, overall, reduced trust in CDC will almost certainly kill people. Yes, their currently political leadership is crappy, and blameworthy for a number of bad decisions—but it doesn’t change the fact that undermining them now is a very bad idea.

Yes, the CDC has screwed up many times, but publicly blaming them for things that were non-obvious (like failing to delay sending out lab kits for further testing,) or that they screwed up, and everyone paying attention including them now realizes they got wrong (like being slow to allow outside testing,) in the middle of a pandemic seems like exactly the kind of consequence-blind action that lesswrongers should know better than to engage in.

Disclaimer: I know lots of people at CDC, including some in infectious diseases, and have friends there. They are human, and get things wrong under pressure—and perhaps there are people who would do better, but that’s not the question at hand.>>

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/h4vWsBBjASgiQ2pn6/credibility-of-the-cdc-on-sars-cov-2/comment/uDYbgf3QtEQirbsJk

havent. its easy to see how peoples minds are warped when its someone elses glowy thing, when its someone elses friends working for an institution that that someone else routed their hopes through.

its easier to recognize betrayal and see knowledge beyond the veil when its happening to someone else, instead of you.

until you build up general skills for recognizing it, this sort of betrayal isnt infinitely powerful. and like how you might expect that smart people who live for predation would do anti-inductive smart predatory things, but they end up converging on child sex rings; institutions that betray you, because justice is their enemy will start doing dumb unjust things like banning two people from speaking about their irl experiences with anna salamon, saying their first-hand accounts werent evidence and then citing anna salamon's first-hand account of the meeting as evidence. when i objected that this was a fucked up self-serving ontology of "evidence" they acted like i was objecting to "beliefs flow from evidence" and they acted as if what i was saying was obscure and beyond their ability to comprehend. their "incomprehension" was fake, downstream of a fear to dynamically compute things in front of other people that might end up outside the orthodoxy. the result of which is they display a blue screen of death and say “i just dont understand and aaa dont explain this to me!!!”. and then people agree that it "seems like it could be an infohazard" because when your goal is the preservation of the matrix, everything that tears it down looks like hazardous information.

or a cfar employee, in response to claims that anna's transmisogyny influences CFAR's hiring choices, claiming that anna salamon, head of CFAR, is not involved in CFAR's hiring. until i post proof from another CFAR employee pursuing personal vengeance against the org for hiring their rapist where its tangentially mentioned and they suddenly "realize" that anna salamon, head of CFAR, is involved in CFAR's hiring process.

or a thousand other injustices that have burned themselves into my brain during my months of talking with people under the assumption that they were simply mistaken in their path to saving the world. when they were actually un-mistaken in their path to having babies and a low chance of personal death. hoping and expecting someone else will take heroic responsibility for the planet.

like when you drill down to the base of injustice, it bottoms out in dumb and petty injustice. like the structure doesnt go infinitely high and complex, if you go down to the base level, you just need a bit of courage to not flinch away from what you see even if it seems that it means the ruin of something you ran your hopes and dreams through.

--

"isnt this a little... extreme?" i hear some people ask. ""dont protect regions of injustice?" that sounds like the end product of obsessive compulsive fixation on virtue at the expense of practicality."

well, assuming the algorithm seeding this response is a systemic reasoning tool, it should forkbomb when you consider if youd output ""dont protect regions of untruth?" that sounds like the end product of obsessive compulsive fixation on virtue at the expense of practicality." in response to eliezers essay. the principle behind both is the same such that if you hold by one you should hold by the other.

all of these things have parallels. if you want to see what is happening with MIRI/CFAR, theres a lot of mutual information with whats happening with Google.

[meeedeee]

Cancel Culture: The Internet Eating Itself RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

As social media platforms enter their collective adolescence – Facebook is fifteen, YouTube fourteen, Twitter thirteen, tumblr twelve – I find myself thinking about how little we really understand their cultural implications, both ongoing and for the future. At this point, the idea that being online is completely optional in modern world ought to be absurd, and yet multiple friends, having spoken to their therapists about the impact of digital abuse on their mental health, were told straight up to just stop using the internet. Even if this was a viable option for some, the idea that we can neatly sidestep the problem of bad behaviour in any non-utilitarian sphere by telling those impacted to simply quit is baffling at best and a tacit form of victim-blaming at worst. The internet might be a liminal space, but object permanence still applies to what happens here: the trolls don’t vanish if we close our eyes, and if we vanquish one digital hydra-domain for Toxicity Crimes without caring to fathom the whys and hows of what went wrong, we merely ensure that three more will spring up in its place.

Is the internet a private space, a government space or a public space? Yes.

Is it corporate, communal or unaffiliated? Yes.

Is it truly global or bound by local legal jurisdictions? Yes.

Does the internet reflect our culture or create it? Yes.

Is what people say on the internet reflective of their true beliefs, or is it a constant shell-game of digital personas, marketing ploys, intrusive thoughts, growth-in-progress, personal speculation and fictional exploration? Yes.

The problem with the internet is that takes up all three areas on a Venn diagram depicting the overlap between speech and action, and while this has always been the case, we’re only now admitting that it’s a bug as well as a feature. Human interaction cannot be usefully monitored using an algorithm, but our current conception of What The Internet Is has been engineered specifically to shortcut existing forms of human oversight, the better to maximise both accessibility (good to neutral) and profits (neutral to bad). Uber and Lyft are cheaper, frequently more convenient alternatives to a traditional taxi service, for instance, but that’s because the apps themselves are functionally predicated on the removal of meaningful customer service and worker protections that were hard-won elsewhere. Sites like tumblr are free to use, but the lack of revenue generated by those users means that, past a certain point, profits can only hope to outstrip expenses by selling access to those users and/or their account data, which means in turn that paying to effectively monitor their content creation becomes vastly less important than monetising it.

Small wonder, then, that individual users of social media platforms have learned to place a high premium on their ability to curate what they see, how they see it, and who sees them in turn. When I first started blogging, the largely unwritten rule of the blogsphere was that, while particular webforums dedicated to specific topics could have rules about content and conduct, blogs and their comment pages should be kept Free. Monitoring comments was viewed as a sign of narrow-minded fearfulness: even if a participant was aggressive or abusive, the enlightened path was to let them speak, because anything else was Censorship. This position held out for a good long while, until the collective frustration of everyone who’d been graphically threatened with rape, torture and death, bombarded with slurs, exhausted by sealioning or simply fed up with nitpicking and bad faith arguments finally boiled over.

Particularly in progressive circles, the relief people felt at being told that actually, we were under no moral obligation to let assholes grandstand in the comments or repeatedly explain basic concepts to only theoretically invested strangers was overwhelming. Instead, you could simply delete them, or block them, or maybe even mock them, if the offence or initial point of ignorance seemed silly enough. But as with the previous system, this one-size-fits-all approach soon developed a downside. Thanks to the burnout so many of us felt after literal years of trying to treat patiently with trolls playing Devil’s Advocate, liberal internet culture shifted sharply towards immediate shows of anger, derision and flippancy to anyone who asked a 101 question, or who didn’t use the right language, or who did anything other than immediately agree with whatever position was explained to them, however simply.

I don’t exempt myself from this criticism, but knowing why I was so goddamn tired doesn’t change my conviction that, cumulatively, the end result did more harm than good. Without wanting to sidetrack into a lengthy dissertation on digital activism in the post-aughties decade, it seems evident in hindsight that the then-fledgling alliance between trolls, MRAs, PUAs, Redditors and 4channers to deliberately exhaust left-wing goodwill via sealioning and bad faith arguments was only the first part of a two-pronged attack. The second part, when the left had lost all patience with explaining its own beliefs and was snappily telling anyone who asked about feminism, racism or anything else to just fucking Google it, was to swoop in and persuade the rebuffed party that we were all irrational, screeching harridans who didn’t want to answer because we knew our answers were bad, and why not consider reading Roosh V instead?

The fallout of this period, I would argue, is still ongoing. In an ideal world, drawing a link between online culture wars about ownership of SFF and geekdom and the rise of far-right fascist, xenophobic extremism should be a bow so long that not even Odysseus himself could draw it. But this world, as we’ve all had frequent cause to notice, is far from ideal at the best of times – which these are not – and yet another featurebug of the internet is the fluid interpermeability of its various spaces. We talk, for instance – as I am talking here – about social media as a discreet concept, as though platforms like Twitter or Facebook are functionally separate from the other sites to which their users link; as though there is no relationship between or bleed-through from the viral Facebook post screencapped and shared on BuzzFeed, which is then linked and commented upon on Reddit, which thread is then linked to on Twitter, where an entirely new conversation emerges and subsequently spawns an article in The Huffington Post, which is shared again on Facebook and the replies to that shared on tumblr, and so on like some grizzly perpetual mention machine.

But I digress. The point here is that internet culture is best understood as a pattern of ripples, each new iteration a reaction to the previous one, spreading out until it dissipates and a new shape takes its place. Having learned that slamming the virtual door in everyone’s face was a bad idea, the online left tried establishing a better, calmer means of communication; the flipside was a sudden increase in tone-policing, conversations in which presentation was vaunted over substance and where, once again, particular groups were singled out as needing to conform to the comfort-levels of others. Overlapping with this was the move towards discussing things as being problematic, rather than using more fixed and strident language to decry particular faults – an attempt to acknowledge the inherent fallibility of human works while still allowing for criticism. A sensible goal, surely, but once again, attempting to apply the dictum universally proved a double-edged sword: if everything is problematic, then how to distinguish grave offences from trifling ones? How can anyone enjoy anything if we’re always expected to thumb the rosary of its failings first?

When everything is problematic and everyone has the right to say so, being online as any sort of creator or celebrity is like being nibbled to death by ducks. The well-meaning promise of various organisations, public figures or storytellers to take criticism on board – to listen to the fanbase and do right by their desires – was always going to stumble over the problem of differing tastes. No group is a hivemind: what one person considers bad representation or in poor taste, another might find enlightening, while yet a third party is more concerned with something else entirely. Even in cases with a clear majority opinion, it’s physically impossible to please everyone and a type of folly to try, but that has yet to stop the collective internet from demanding it be so. Out of this comes a new type of ironic frustration: having once rejoiced in being allowed to simply block trolls or timewasters, we now cast judgement on those who block us in turn, viewing them, as we once were viewed, as being fearful of criticism.

Are we creating echo chambers by curating what we see online, or are we acting in pragmatic acknowledgement of the fact that we neither have time to read everything nor an obligation to see all perspectives as equally valid? Yes.

Even if we did have the time and ability to wade through everything, is the signal-to-noise ratio of truth to lies on the internet beyond our individual ability to successfully measure, such that outsourcing some of our judgement to trusted sources is fundamentally necessary, or should we be expected to think critically about everything we encounter, even if it’s only intended as entertainment? Yes.

If something or someone online acts in a way that’s antithetical to our values, are we allowed to tune them out thereafter, knowing full well that there’s a nearly infinite supply of as-yet undisappointing content and content-creators waiting to take their place, or are we obliged to acknowledge that Doing A Bad doesn’t necessarily ruin a person forever? Yes.

And thus we come to cancel culture, the current – but by no means final – culmination of previous internet discourse waves. In this iteration, burnout at critical engagement dovetails with a new emphasis on collective content curation courtesies (try saying that six times fast), but ends up hamstrung once again by differences in taste. Or, to put it another way: someone fucks up and it’s the last straw for us personally, so we try to remove them from our timelines altogether – but unless our friends and mutuals, who we still want to engage with, are convinced to do likewise, then we haven’t really removed them at all, such that we’re now potentially willing to make failure to cancel on demand itself a cancellable offence.

Which brings us right back around to the problem of how the modern internet is fundamentally structured – which is to say, the way in which it’s overwhelmingly meant to rely on individual curation instead of collective moderation. Because the one thing each successive mode of social media discourse has in common with its predecessors is a central, and currently unanswerable question: what universal code of conduct exists that I, an individual on the internet, can adhere to – and expect others to adhere to – while we communicate across multiple different platforms?

In the real world, we understand about social behavioural norms: even if we don’t talk about them in those terms, we broadly recognise them when we see them. Of course, we also understand that those norms can vary from place to place and context to context, but as we can only ever be in one physical place at a time, it’s comparatively easy to adjust as appropriate.

But the internet, as stated, is a liminal space: it’s real and virtual, myriad and singular, private and public all at once. It confuses our sense of which rules might apply under which circumstances, jumbles the normal behavioural cues by obscuring the identity of our interlocutors, and even though we don’t acknowledge it nearly as often as we should, written communication – like spoken communication – is a skill that not everyone has, just as tone, whether spoken or written, isn’t always received (or executed, for that matter) in the way it was intended. And when it comes to politics, in which the internet and its doings now plays no small role, there’s the continual frustration that comes from observing, with more and more frequency, how many literal, real-world crimes and abuses go without punishment, and how that lack of consequences contributes in turn to the fostering of abuse and hostility towards vulnerable groups online.

This is what comes of occupying a transitional period in history: one in which laws are changed and proposed to reflect our changing awareness of the world, but where habit, custom, ignorance, bias and malice still routinely combine, both institutionally and more generally, to see those laws enacted only in part, or tokenistically, or not at all. To take one of the most egregious and well-publicised instances that ultimately presaged the #MeToo movement, the laughably meagre sentence handed down to Brock Turner, who was caught in the act of raping an unconscious woman, combined with the emphasis placed by both the judge and much of the media coverage on his swimming talents and family standing as a means of exonerating him, made it very clear that sexual violence against women is frequently held to be less important than the perceived ‘bright futures’ of its perpetrators.

Knowing this, then – knowing that the story was spread, discussed and argued about on social media, along with thousands of other, similar accounts; knowing that, even in this context, some people still freely spoke up in defence of rapists and issued misogynistic threats against their female interlocutors – is it any wonder that, in the absence of consistent legal justice in such cases, the internet tried, and is still trying, to fill the gap? Is it any wonder, when instances of racist police brutality are constantly filmed and posted online, only for the perpetrators to receive no discipline, that we lose patience for anyone who wants to debate the semantics of when, exactly, extrajudicial murder is “acceptable”?

We cannot control the brutality of the world from the safety of our keyboards, but when it exhausts or threatens us, we can at least click a button to mute its seeming adherents. We don’t always have the energy to decry the same person we’ve already argued against a thousand times before, but when a friend unthinkingly puts them back on our timeline for some new reason, we can tell them that person is cancelled and hope they take the hint not to do it again. Never mind that there is far too often no subtlety, no sense of scale or proportion to how the collective, viral internet reacts in each instance, until all outrage is rendered flat and the outside observer could be forgiven for worrying what’s gone wrong with us all, that using a homophobic trope in a TV show is thought to merit the same online response as an actual hate crime. So long as the war is waged with words alone, there’s only a finite number of outcomes that boycotting, blocking, blacklisting, cancelling, complaining and critiquing can achieve, and while some of those outcomes in particular are well worth fighting for, so many words are poured towards so many attempts that it’s easy to feel numbed to the process; or, conversely, easy to think that one response fits all contexts.

I’m tired of cancel culture, just as I was dully tired of everything that preceded it and will doubtless grow tired of everything that comes after it in turn, until our fundamental sense of what the internet is and how it should be managed finally changes. Like it or not, the internet both is and is of the world, and that is too much for any one person to sensibly try and curate at an individual level. Where nothing is moderated for us, everything must be moderated by us; and wherever people form communities, those communities will grow cultures, which will develop rules and customs that spill over into neighbouring communities, both digitally and offline, with mixed and ever-changing results. Cancel culture is particularly tricky in this regard, as the ease with which we block someone online can seldom be replicated offline, which makes it all the more intoxicating a power to wield when possible: we can’t do anything about the awful coworker who rants at us in the breakroom, but by God, we can block every person who reminds us of them on Twitter.

The thing about participating in internet discourse is, it’s like playing Civilisation in real-time, only it’s not a game and the world keeps progressing even when you log off. Things change so fast on the internet – memes, etiquette, slang, dominant opinions – and yet the changes spread so organically and so fast that we frequently adapt without keeping conscious track of when and why they shifted. Social media is like the Hotel California: we can check out any time we like, but we can never meaningfully leave – not when world leaders are still threatening nuclear war on Twitter, or when Facebook is using friendly memes to test facial recognition software, or when corporate accounts are creating multi-staffed humansonas to engage with artists on tumblr, or when YouTube algorithms are accidentally-on-purpose steering kids towards white nationalist propaganda because it makes them more money.

Of course we try and curate our time online into something finite, comprehensible, familiar, safe: the alternative is to embrace the near-infinite, incomprehensible, alien, dangerous gallimaufry of our fractured global mindscape. Of course we want to try and be critical, rational, moral in our convictions and choices; it’s just that we’re also tired and scared and everyone who wants to argue with us about anything can, even if they’re wrong and angry and also our relative, or else a complete stranger, and sometimes you just want to turn off your brain and enjoy a thing without thinking about it, or give yourself some respite, or exercise a tiny bit of autonomy in the only way you can.

It’s human nature to want to be the most amount of right for the least amount of effort, but unthinkingly taking our moral cues from internet culture the same way we’re accustomed to doing in offline contexts doesn’t work: digital culture shifts too fast and too asymmetrically to be relied on moment to moment as anything like a universal touchstone. Either you end up preaching to the choir, or you run a high risk of aggravation, not necessarily due to any fundamental ideological divide, but because your interlocutor is leaning on a different, false-universal jargon overlying alternate 101 and 201 concepts to the ones you’re using, and modern social media platforms – in what is perhaps the greatest irony of all – are uniquely poorly suited to coherent debate.

Purity wars in fandom, arguments about diversity in narrative and whether its proponents have crossed the line from criticism into bullying: these types of arguments are cyclical now, dying out and rekindling with each new wave of discourse. We might not yet be in a position to stop it, but I have some hope that being aware of it can mitigate the worst of the damage, if only because I’m loathe to watch yet another fandom steadily talk itself into hating its own core media for the sake of literal argument.

For all its flaws – and with all its potential – the internet is here to stay. Here’s hoping we figure out how to fix it before its ugliest aspects make us give up on ourselves.

          from shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows https://ift.tt/2V13Qu4 via IFTTT

[jules-hoard-of-stuff]

OK SO Vent warning, about Tumblr, porn bots, and why this algorithm isn't working.

So, I can no longer tag Tumblr staff. Every time I have tried, the app has crashed.

But as you can see, I was trying to show evidence of bots using tags that don't belong to them to bypass the ban. Here's the evidence.

The tags that disturb me the most, are the ones that DEFINITELY should not be there. Some of them are bound to happen, such as random words bots pick up on, or plain old what might be a popular tag, but there are a few in particular that really scare me. Keep in mind, these are PORNOGRAPHY bots.

"Asian Goddess" -targeting POC women's tags

"Black man" - targeting POC men's tags

"Coloured" - targeting POC in general's tags(in a racist way too, wow)

"Ladies" - targeting any women tags

"Girls Kissing" "bu tch" -targeting lesbian/wlw tags

"Transs exual" -targeting transgender tags(very poorly might I fucking add)

"TEEN BOYS" -TARGETING TAGS AIMED AT TEENAGERS.

Not to mention, specific fandoms, makeup categories, song genres... These bots are escaping the ban via tags that do not fucking belong to them. Not only are they doing that, but it's working. This blog was suggested to me, because I follow a tag it had on it. Wanna know what that tag was?

The tag was "puppy", guys.

I'm just pissed beyond belief honestly that Tumblr seems to be taking out all their REAL users, and banning them, and taking out their links, but the bots still get links, still use all of our tags, and showing cleavage while doing it which, by the way, 3 of my friends got flagged for. What, are you PROTECTING the bots now???

Tumblr. Fix. Your. Shit. Manually.