Mastodawn

RE: https://mastodon.social/@joepbc/116538636210023270

Strong disagree. Technology is a convenient scapegoat for wealth concentration, racism, and misogyny, all of which exist separate from tech.

Eg, Nigerians are still dancing, getting married, and having kids. There is no global birthrate crisis. That's a made up term.

Black and brown people are still meeting on dating apps and using all the same technology. Young Black people use social media to share videos of themselves dancing. That's a huge part of what social media is.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FiccIGppFOo

The problem is not technology. Just like the problem is not venture capital.

The problem is that most of the technology you use, is owned and run by people that are publicly and vocally against democracy. The problem with VC, is that much of the money under management is controlled by people that write papers expressing their explicitly sociopathic and genocidal philosophies.

The problem is the excuses we make for racist and misogynistic little gremlins.

The problem is that too much of the world's wealth is tied up in the accounts of people that don't want to have children (which is fine!) and that hate other people's children (not fine).

Whether or not AI or social media or any other technology exist, these problems persist.

Some people think that venture capital is a fundamentally evil business structure. I disagree.

Thought experiment:
If you could press a button tomorrow, that would cause 50% of the entire population of the continent of Africa to die within 5 years😮, but would 50X your profits and create dozens of trillion dollar companies, and help humanity become interplanetary 10 years earlier, would you press it?

If you're on this weird little Mastodon thing reading this, then you are most likely:
1) A technologist of some sort
2) Not a genocidal maniac

So you would of course say no.

Some of you suspect that I'm going to *imply* that many VCs would say yes. But I'm not going to imply anything. I don't have to. Because many of these VCs have written papers and blog posts under their real names, celebrating the fact that they believe that it's wrong *not* to press that button.🤦🏿‍♂️

The problem with VC is neither the profit motive, nor the business structure.

The problem is that the vast majority of the funds that our entire society uses to solve hard problems, are controlled and allocated by people that believe that it is their duty to create new buttons like the one above, and then mash it repeatedly.

All I'm saying is that if you believe that your problems are caused by:

"1) technologists, 2) that are genocidal maniacs, 3) and that allocate most of society's resources"

then maybe focus on the "genocidal maniac" part, or the "most of society's resources" part, before the technology part.

ᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIES

#socialMedia didn't invent #bigotry, but it turbocharged it

1. a bigot can be their true selves online with few consequences

2. moderation is a cost. say "freeze peach", gut the mod dept, and save $

3. "don't feed the trolls"? outrage means clicks and eyeballs, good engagement metrics. for-profit social media is incentivized to push bigotry

so fuck social media?

nope

clean it the fuck up

luddite mental gymnastics won't make social media disappear

the problem

is bigotry

Yup. With one clarification: social media objectively, unequivocally, reduced bigotry.

I'm a nerd. I went to a fancy prep school, then a fancy liberal arts college, then work with computers. I'm a classic nerdy jock. I don't do hard drugs, I don't steal I don't get in trouble. I didn't even drink in high school. Super square!

But I started getting pulled over and harassed by cops starting from age 12, because I'm a Black boy.

Before social media, no one that wasn't Black believed me about my experiences. Now, after social media, people believe it.

Before social media, no one believed Black people when we said how often cops lie and plant evidence. Now, after social media, people believe it.

No one believed Black people about how many evil, racist, white ladies there are, being racist and attacking Black people and kids, and trying to get us killed by cop or vigilante. Now, after social media, people believe it.

Elon bought Twitter, in large part because racists are mad at how effective social media is at calling racists out on their nonsense.

icastico 21h ago

@mekkaokereke @benroyce

This resonates. I am white, but have spent my career working in communities of color. I saw all the bigotry you describe, but couldn’t get people to believe me about it. Now more white people see it and believe it. What I am less sure of is whether this visibility has reduced the frequency of the behaviors. Does the visibility impact the perpetrators? I mean, the bigots brag to me all the time about their bigotry because they think I am on their team. Here in Seattle, I am regularly approached by the bigots for that quiet racist or sexist comment because I am a grey haired white dude with a beard. They assume I must agree that the problems come from our tolerance of “those people “ - they are proud to share their vile view.

It’s an intractable problem we (white people) need to solve.

cognitively accessible math 20h ago

@icastico @mekkaokereke @benroyce It is still helpful that we know about it; and it's why I am going to have a conversation w/ a relatively elderly student about their attitudes towards Black folks; there was an uncomfortable interaction wiht somebody and I could *easily* think it was just "finals stress" but ... I know better now. Yes, they'll prob'ly get defensive - but I did, too, first callout.

cognitively accessible math 20h ago

@icastico @mekkaokereke @benroyce (I know better b/c of what they said after the Black professor left.)

@mekkaokereke @benroyce

I kind of wonder if part of the reason the white supremacists worked so hard on maintaining segregation is so the more empathetic whites wouldn't be able to see just how cruel the treatment of Blacks was.

Early social networks offered a way around the physical inconveniences put up to block meeting people from "different sides of the tracks".

And I believe the white supremacist billionaires have been buying up all the TV and digital media to trying to tweak the algorithms to suppress the type of political content that's about caring about other people

keeps vis.social running 19h ago

@alienghic @mekkaokereke @benroyce I suspect that this it true.

cwicseolfor 17h ago

@alienghic @mekkaokereke @benroyce Both to avoid empathetic folks of privilege seeing how bigotry unfolds, and to avoid humanizing the targets of bigotry to people being groomed toward said bigotry.

Compare how terrified people are told to be of letting their children share a class with a trans kid, or thirty years ago with a gay kid. There's an ongoing project to insulate "the innocent" (property: women and children) from evidence lest they begin to question the decisions made by "the worldly."

Ben Rosengart 14h ago

@alienghic @mekkaokereke @benroyce I think this is also why they want services to be delivered frictionlessly through apps and “AI”

Queen of Anxiety 21h ago

@mekkaokereke @benroyce One of the first steps on my anti-racism journey was a woman in the UK I was friends with on Livejournal. She was Black, dealt with poverty and harassment, and was patient with my white girl questions. Technology let me connect with someone I would otherwise never have met who had a major impact on me.

So yeah, not the tech. It’s the ghouls we let dictate things that are.

Dr. Robert M Flight 18h ago

@mekkaokereke @benroyce yep. I joined Twitter in 2011 or 2012, and got exposure from Black people posting about their everyday experiences.

That really opened my eyes to the systemic racism all around (especially in US and Canada) and helped me to deal with my own prejudices (which I'm still working on).

Similarly for hearing from women about their life experiences. I was not someone who women confided in growing up. My eyes have been opened to a lot due to social media.

@mekkaokereke @benroyce

Yup, both things are true:

1. All horizontal/peer-to-peer mass-media including actually-existing oligopolistic SocMed (TwiX, FB etc) massively increases ordinary folks's understanding of the lives of those in different circumstances

2. SocMed in the hands of the West's genocidal nutter 0.00001℅ who control the advertising-industrial complex, has supercharged & sped up various destructive spirals.

@mekkaokereke @benroyce Also phone cameras? Unless that's what you mean by social media?

@nomdeb @benroyce

Both.

Phone cameras and camcorders existed before social media, and it wasn't enough. Even Rodney King was viewed as an isolated incident of how rogue cops act, and Caroline Bryant was a rogue example of white women trying to murder Black men by pretending to be harmed. It wasn't until social media that people could see how widespread the issue was.

Before social media, video of racist police abuse of Black people could only reach the masses through the news. And the news was actively complicit in hiding this truth. Every major newspaper in the US knew that Black people were telling the truth, and knew that cops lie constantly. And every major newspaper in the US lied about it and covered it up. Evil, unjustifiable behavior.

Which is why social media is much more important than newspapers for civil rights, and it's not close. And why video evidence without a distribution channel doesn't drive change.

Martin Vermeer FCD 13h ago

@mekkaokereke @nomdeb @benroyce Yep. The word you're looking for is 'sousveillance'. It's BLM. It's Gaza. It's Minneapolis/St Paul. The old copaganda / hasbara ways don't work any more.

And I'll never forget seeing Fergusonians and West-Bankers exchange tear-gas experiences on Twitter.

Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦13h ago

Media implies centralized editorial selection and control. Twitter attempted to cherry pick just the advertising income model of media, without the centralized editorial part, and it didn't work. That made it vulnerable to the fascist takeover. It being centralized made the fascist takeover attractive.

Zuck's version never was anything but living room fascist to begin with.
@mekkaokereke @nomdeb @benroyce

@osma @nomdeb @benroyce

Didn't work *for you*. Twitter worked great for the Black people that finally had an outlet for highlighting racism.

And advertiser model or no editorial board, are not what made Twitter vulnerable to a fascist takeover. What made Twitter vulnerable to a fascist takeover was the fact that one of the world's fashiest dudes was rich enough to buy Twitter on a whim. Billionaires can and have bought newspapers on a whim too.

I agree that Mastodon isn't as vulnerable to billionaire drunk purchases, as there are too many little pieces to buy. It's like squeezing jello. But again, by percentage, there are more fascists on the Fediverse than on Twitter, and it's not particularly close. And the abuse Black people experience on the Fediverse is worse than on Twitter and in other places. The Fediverse isn't magic.

Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦11h ago

I said nothing about whether it worked for *me*, or for Black people. It didn't *work*. They couldn't make it profitable enough to be protected from a fascist takeover.

I also said nothing about the moderation models of fedi. This place has a LOT of designed-in issues, which I've not been shy to talk about.
@mekkaokereke @nomdeb @benroyce

@osma @nomdeb @benroyce

If the definition of "work" that you are using is "profitable enough to prevent a fascist takeover," then no publicly traded company can work. So it's a statement more on capitalism and publicly trade companies than about Twitter in particular.

Maybe that's the point that you're making? You're focusing on the attractiveness of a centralized target?

I'm not trying to be argumentative. I think we agree on most of it, but I want to make sure that I understand you correctly.

Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦10h ago

I could name a number of long-term profitable publicly traded companies that have been able to avoid (as well as resist, and even actively block) takeovers. Nevertheless, in the case of Twitter, that is a sidetrack. Over its history, Twitter was a capital-destroying enterprise, yet because it was a media, with ability to excert editorial control over content, it was attractive for those who seek such control - eg, fascists. That's the nature of most media.
@mekkaokereke @nomdeb @benroyce

Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦9h ago

To be clear, my argument is not that centralized enterprise is necessarily bad, or that capitalism is necessarily bad, or that technology is. But what is bad, every time, is allowing *anyone*, whether that's Elon, Orban, Goebbels or the New York Times, to excert editorial control over the public (social) conversation. There must never be one "town square". Media MUST be a collection of competing voices.
@mekkaokereke @nomdeb @benroyce

Steve Holden 11h ago

@mekkaokereke @BernieDoesIt @osma @nomdeb @benroyce Disappointing, isn’t it?

Jérôme Petazzoni 9h ago

@mekkaokereke @osma @nomdeb @benroyce

Are there some reliable metrics on the safety of various social networks for different populations? (I feel like this is a hard question because I don't even know where to start if I were to measure that. Number of hateful messages received per N messages seen? Sent? Per unit of time? Which population categories should we consider? How do we determine what constitutes a hateful message?)

John Mierau 3h ago

I like the take @osma has: social NETWORKS good, not social MEDIA.

Media+oligarchs=social control.

@mekkaokereke @nomdeb @benroyce

Chuck Fry 🏳️‍🌈15h ago

@mekkaokereke @benroyce I joined Twitter during the Ferguson police riots, precisely because I wanted to hear what was happening on the ground, unfiltered through official channels.

I make a conscious effort to follow people who are not my race or gender, or raised like I was in upper middle class whitebread America. I need their perspectives.

Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦13h ago

Social is good, but media is a problem. Networks were a solution that centralizing to media model eliminated.

Technology plus capital has a built in tendency to centralize, because both reward scale. Very few systems exist that work better at small scale - but without interconnected, small scale systems, we end up with a form of fascism winning by default.

Social networks, not social media.
@mekkaokereke @benroyce

@osma @benroyce

I disagree on "scale equals centralization." The exact opposite is true in many cases.

It's easier to get scale by decentralizing than by centralizing. Map Reduce for the win. A data center is a decentralized supercomputer. Chinese restaurants are a decentralized mega franchise. There is no central governing franchise over Chinese food restaurants. They're almost all independent. And yet I can go into any one and order orange chicken and lo mein and have a pretty good idea of what I'm about to get. Norms over "guidance from corporate." The decentralized Chinese fast food chains are 7% of the US fast food market. That's bigger than Taco Bell, Wendy's, Chick-fil-A, Burger King, Dominoes, Etc.

Most of the centralized Twitter alternatives have failed already.

Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦11h ago

I did say technology plus capital. That's economies of scale, in everything from factories, to conglomerates, to political control. While a Chinese restaurant isn't technology dependent, even food is centralized everywhere where technology and access to capital matters - and you might be surprised how many "independent" restaurants are actual franchises.
@mekkaokereke @benroyce

La Guiri 9h ago

@mekkaokereke @benroyce I'm sorry to mention a white man as example, but this was my experience as a child.

The singer Peter Gabriel was in some human rights stuff in the late eighties or early nineties and he was on the news on TV, describing an ambitious project to give activists video cameras of the lightweight sort my dad used on holidays, so that they could be very effective eyewitness of injustices. I was young and naive and thought "when they report, that's enough, right?" I thought the project was frivolous.

As you can see I have never forgotten how stupid I was. The advent of activist social media showed it.