The temptation to tag here is *almost* irresistible, but I think I'm disliked enough as it is, and I've got SF daycare to pay for with all this scribbling. Even among the White Knights of Truth, you've got to go along to get along.
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Replying to @antoniogm
think you would be less disliked here if you spent more time thinking about ways to help the conversation around all of this stuff evolve, then just shitting on the class of people trying to make sense of it all
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Replying to @CodyBrown
I don't exactly hear lots of proposed (realistic) solutions coming from anyone. Personally, I think the Gutenberg era of Enlightenment institutions like nation-states, liberal democracy, objective truth, etc. is over. The smartphone is undoing what the printing press created.
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Replying to @antoniogm @CodyBrown
Either we engage in some reactionary Luddism, a real-life Butlerian Jihad, and reject virtualized identity and social media entirely. Or human culture, probably after much violence and turmoil, adapts and enters some new, hard-to-predict age.
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Replying to @antoniogm @CodyBrown
so your position is basically that the journalists in question are right that tech is bad (assuming you like Enlightenment values/dislike violence) but silly for thinking anyone can do anything about it?
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Replying to @jeffbercovici @CodyBrown
This is about the worst forum for this discussion, but it's what we have (speaking of deleterious social media). Globally, I think we all agree on the impact of social media, whether good/bad. The question is what exactly is wrong with it, and what (if anything) can be done.
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Among many other civilizational headwinds we face--inequality, looming automation, climate change--social media serves to exacerbate underlying problems and serve as megaphone to the worst (and rarely best) among us. Even if FB goes away tomorrow, we're in trouble.
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But leaving that aside and focusing on FB, yes, I think we often obsess over the wrong things re: FB. There have been so many headline topics in this busy FB media cycle, I almost can't keep track. First, supposedly 'micro-targeting' was the horrifying bogeyman.
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Cambridge Analytica could swing an election using provably ineffectual keyword targeting in FB, but hey 'psychometrics'. Well, where'd that story go? Targeting system is the same as before. Now it's not worth worrying about?
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Or privacy as the big deal, and GDPR was the great savior. Well, GDPR didn't do shit, and if anything, solidified FB/GOOG's market position in the EU (which I wrote about extensively, to much jeering). Nobody gives a shit about privacy really, so I guess that's gone.
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Now, it's disinformation, something that's unavoidable in any disintermediated system with free(ish) speech where Joe Tin-Hat can beat the reach of a NYT piece if he's inflammatory enough. But maybe since FB is blocking marginally more than it used to, that story will die.
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I'm cataloging two years of talking points to illustrate that much of the conversation has been as mimetic as the FB platform itself, with questions rising and never quite resolving, and being dictated by whim and viral happenstance.
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