| website | https://apparebit.com |
| github | https://github.com/apparebit |
It was challenging finding these two perspectives to meet regarding centralized #socialmedia and #ai, and I didn't cover AI as well as I would want to in this piece.
Hopefully I explained it well enough.
https://knowprose.com/2026/02/the-building-of-the-stochastic-social-media-penal-colony/
Through Mastodon, I came across two posts from people who seem to be pointing in the same general direction I am. Chronologically, I first encountered a post by Robert Grimm, linking to his paper “Mapping the Stochastic Penal Colony” on arXiv. That paper, in turn, references Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Yay, my arXiv preprint on Mapping the Stochastic Penal Colony is finally live. Find out how #socialmedia #contentmoderation may just have prepared us for the fascist take-over in Trum'erica.
With peak content moderation seemingly behind us, this paper revisits its punitive side. But instead of focusing on who is being (disproportionately) moderated, it focuses on the punishment itself and makes three contributions. First, it develops a novel methodology that combines auto-ethnography for collecting experiences and artifacts with procedural justice for analyzing them. Second, it reworks Foucault's model of the penal system for the algorithmic age, restoring the penal colony as the historically liminal practice between punishment as performance and punishment as discipline, i.e., the stochastic penal colony. Finally, it applies this methodological and conceptual framing to three case studies, one on the gallingly performative moderation by pre-Musk Twitter, one on the exhaustively punitive content moderation for OpenAI's DALLE~2, and one on the relatively light touch but still rather precious moderation by Pinterest. While substantially different, all three feature the pervasive threat of account suspension, thereby banishing users to the stochastic penal colony.
Fair play to Minneapolis. This is the fight back the whole US needs.
I just posted a blog post about happily dancing in a train seat and the hazards of needlessly planting your flag.
Taran Rampersad
Robin Cafolla
