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from the Garbage-in-garbage-in-garbage-in-and-more-garbage-in dept.
At the The Verge:
Today, The Verge is publishing an interim edition of Sarah Jeong's The Internet of Garbage, a book she first published in 2015 that has since gone out of print. It is a thorough and important look at the intractable problem of online harassment.
After a year on The Verge's staff as a senior writer, Sarah recently joined The New York Times Editorial Board to write about technology issues. The move kicked off a wave of outrage and controversy as a group of trolls selectively took Sarah's old tweets out of context to inaccurately claim that she is a racist. This prompted a further wave of unrelenting racist harassment directed at Sarah, a wave of coverage examining her tweets, and a final wave of coverage about the state of outrage generally. This is all deeply ironic because Sarah laid out exactly how these bad-faith tactics work in The Internet of Garbage.
[...] The Internet of Garbage provides an immediate and accessible look at how online harassment works, how it might be categorized and distinguished, and why the structure of the internet and the policies surrounding it are overwhelmed in fighting it. Sarah has long planned to publish an updated and expanded second edition, but in this particular moment, I am pleased that she's allowed us to publish this interim edition with a new preface.
In that new preface, Sarah stresses that her original text was written from a place of optimism. But the years since have not been kind to internet culture. She writes that the tactics of Gamergate, so clearly on display during the harassment campaign waged against her over the last few weeks, have "overtaken our national political and cultural conversations." That new culture is driven by the shape of the internet and the interactions it fosters. "We are all victims of fraud in the marketplace of ideas," she writes.
I hope everyone with a true and sincere interest in improving our online communities reads The Internet of Garbage and contends with the scope of the problem Sarah lays out in its pages. We are making the entire text of The Internet of Garbage 1.5 available for free as a PDF, ePub, and .mobi ebook file, and for the minimum allowed price of $.99 in the Amazon Kindle store. Below, we have excerpted Chapter 3, "Lessons from Copyright Law."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 31 2018, @04:49PM (7 children)
So, uhhhhhhh - she engages in race baiting, with other race baiters, online. She claims she was "satirizing" the other race baiters. So - she gets a free pass? Uh-huh. "But she was just mimicking those dirty white racists!" Somehow, that just doesn't cut it with me. If men and women around the country can be castigated, and even fired, for comments made a decade or more ago, this chick don't get no free pass. That goes double for someone with an education. Sarah was engaging in this racist nonsense AFTER she got her degree, and AFTER she was employed as an *cough* adult. What she posted online can be taken as her current attitude. She thinks white people suck.
Of course, saying that white people suck is in vogue these days.
(Score: 2, Troll) by ikanreed on Friday August 31 2018, @04:52PM (5 children)
Yeah, sure. That's a fine narrative to tell yourself.
No way the context explicitly given to you as a link establishes anything different.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 31 2018, @05:11PM (4 children)
From your link:
Yes, I looked. Your link stars yet another asswipe making excuses for Jeong's racist remarks.
You WILL NOTE, please, that I'm not defending any of those racists who attacked Sarah, presumably because she's Asian. They are racists, and assholes. But, Sarah most definitely sank to their level - if that is, she ever was above their level.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:03PM (3 children)
I don't think Runaway should be modded troll here. While I am of the opinion that her tweets were not actually as hateful as they appear they are still a load of hateful garbage even as jokes.
I think the white oppression bit is ridiculous and overblown, but it is still a valid complaint they have that everybody should be held to the same standard.
Runaway those two paragraphs should explain everything to you. I agree that we should just fix this by holding everyone to the same standard, but you should really see why people aren't taking the hysteria about these tweets as seriously as they take actual racism. Trying to equate the two just comes off as defending the racists by playing "whataboutism". Just condemn the bigotry wherever it occurs, but don't mix-and-match to try and minimize or amplify.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @11:30PM
I don't think Runaway should be modded "Troll", either, since he is so bad at it. But we do not have a "ignorant hillbilly fellow traveller" mod. So, until we do . . .
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday September 01 2018, @02:03AM (1 child)
That's quite the piece of work. Why? is the obvious question here. If racism is supposed to be bad, then why is it ok to be racist?
There is a vastly simpler principle than that of hypocrisy. Treat everyone the same regardless of ethnicity. Don't make spurious exceptions merely because dead people were historically oppressed (or whatever excuse du jour is pulled out).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @06:06AM
Indeed... In my day the most widespread teaching was to "judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Nowadays it is not uncommon for skin color to be the primary factor of judgement, and some also expect to receive preferential treatment based on it. [npr.org]
It all seems like a step backwards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @10:36PM
My granny says "an educated njigger like Sarah is similar to a monkey with a masters degree."