Almost like its really frickin hard to joke about these things. Who’d have thought it?!?
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Except like nowadays, everybody is expecting you to show up at the bowling, and when you tell them you’d rather not go, they don’t understand.
Then you could say you won’t go to a place where they treat their customers badly, where they film you all the time and sell the footage to anyone with money including perverts, where they also don’t do much about the Neonazis in the lobby and the pamphlets written on the toilet wall in shit - but then, they’d roll their eyes and tell you to stop complaining since at least it’s not the school gym, like before.
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The writing on the wall is no different. It’s just the internet is everyone’s toilet if that’s the lowest-common-denominator. Otherwise you can actually make some pretty cool stuff.
We’re not talking “the internet” here, I think. We are talking the past everyone nowadays sees as the internet, but which is a privately owned space.
It has always been privately owned. I have lots of counterfactual things I used to believe in the past. Before I matured and treated people the way I would like to be treated, and had expectations of others that mirrored what they could expect from me.
For the most part it was my understanding of the world, and not the world, that changed.
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I’m not sure electing the head of facebook every four years would make things better rather than worse. I’m also pretty convinced that if a publicly run option for social media appeared people would be terrified that the government would be getting all their information and avoid it (even though this is nonsensical).
I don’t think that cynical profit-motivated businesses do as good a job of reflecting the public’s mood as capitalists pretend they do, but on social media it looks like they are being pushed in that direction. Twitter and facebook will always be less progressive than I would like, lagging a little bit behind society at large.
But honestly, I’m just glad that in a nation that refuses to balance the public good of free speech against the public good of fighting nazis, there are aristocrats who can do the right thing. I’m not diminishing the problems of having these platforms accumulate so much power, but every single good thing every done has created a new problem, and we keep solving the problems (and making more) and things keep getting better (until they all end).
Fuck principles, here’s to results.
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False equivalence and whataboutism are favorite tactics of those up to no good.
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Of all the messages that you can witness on TV, “turn off your TV” is the one people are not going to hear.
Similarly, reading on social media that social media is just a placebo button… is going to generate exactly the same virtue signal and tongue clucking that social media always gets.
The revolution wont be blogged any more than it will be televised.
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I went on a Twitter dive earlier, and can’t go down it again to find this tweet I saw addressing these symbols-of-racism slippery slope arguments, but it was pretty great. It was something like:
White Supremacy apologists to protesters:
2016: Relax, not everything in America is racist
2017: Relax, everything in America is racist
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Privately? Bits and pieces, true.
A friend of mine actually owned a Usenet node from 1992 or 1993 onwards. He also was a node at the FIDO. He taught other friends how to maintain servers, set up in their living rooms. They created a privately owned public space. They had node meetings, agreed on principles, published their moderation guidelines, they even kicked servers from the node list after misconduct.
Privately owned, indeed.
How would their public space look to me, a non owner of it? It would look privately owned, because it was. Indeed!
It would have looked very public. It was not quite perfect, but you could participate in decisions about policies easily.
It was much, much more community-driven then all of the corporate models Rob is bemoaning. It had toxic spaces, trolling was invented there, FFS. But it felt like it belonged to the community. And in more than one way, it did.
I know you are not taking my word for it. I wish you would believe me that I’m not just nostalgic. Nor is the OP.
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Not to someone who didn’t own it. Not even then. Even then it’s just a pretense. Looks. For context, I’ve been on ‘the internet’ since 1991. I do know what you’re saying. One of the corporate models Rob is bemoaning, i believe, between the lines, is this one.
You don’t know if I am taking your word for it, but I’ll take that as the end to this sidebar.
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As Jason Scott once said ‘Facebook changes at the whims of Vodka.’
I have had enough crummy experiences in online groups where I saw clear favoritism that I have no faith in any group being truly all inclusive. There is always going to be an ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ It is simple human nature based on the fact we can only feel invested in so many people at a personal level, and we want friends to have advantage (intentional or otherwise.)
Plus there’s always that one asshole that ruins good faith doctrines for everyone else. As the saying goes ‘this is why we cannot have nice things.’
Edit: To clarify I’m not saying the above behavior is ‘evil’ on the part of groups. It’s just the nature of human social dynamics. You make the best of it as you can. Also I am severely socially stunted (in my own opinion.) So yea. Never mistaken a community for anything other than at it’s core some guys with server access putting up a thing and you happen to be allowed in.
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After a discussion which already went slightly OT, I wanted to leave this here:
I don’t fully buy into that narrative of data mining and big data - you can only sell so much to me as my bank account allows, and so on. As someone who learned a thing or two about statistics (but not yet on machine learning algos), I want to be able to play with the data some of the big players.
@beschizza, you might just scroll down to the last sentences of the Guardian piece. 
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