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posted by martyb on Friday August 31 2018, @03:51PM   Printer-friendly
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."


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Friday August 31 2018, @04:50PM (11 children)

    by acid andy (1683) on Friday August 31 2018, @04:50PM (#728814) Homepage Journal

    When I read the title, I hoped it was going to be about the Internet of Things. Isn't that the real garbage?

    --
    If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
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  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday August 31 2018, @05:09PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Friday August 31 2018, @05:09PM (#728833)

    Didn't you notice who submitted it? Progressive political garbage on the Internet. Ah well, might as well have a good noisy thread heading into a long weekend.

  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday August 31 2018, @05:12PM (5 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 31 2018, @05:12PM (#728837) Journal

    Thank you for being the one person to post something not based on a nazi astroturf campaign. This is what I came into the thread to talk about.

    I've got a great twitter account for that [twitter.com]. Because there's so much half-maintained trash out there, that makes peoples' lives harder but looks high tech.

    • (Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @05:50PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @05:50PM (#728864)

      everyonewhodisagreeswithmeisanazi.jpg

      • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday August 31 2018, @06:09PM (3 children)

        by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 31 2018, @06:09PM (#728872) Journal

        "Oh sure there's compelling evidence that the people who started this complaint advocate for genocide of jews and a totalitarian ethnonationalist state, but have you heard of godwin's law?"

        • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @06:27PM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @06:27PM (#728879)

          >everyone who thinks you can be racist against white people is a Nazi
          >Saying Sarah Jeong is a racist is the exact same thing as calling for racial extermination
          Are you like, legitimately brain damaged? Is there some neurological reason your brain makes these contorted leaps straight to the holocaust, every time, without fail?

          The ultimate irony is that you and your ilk have way more in common with the brown shirts than the entire half of the voting population you keep calling Nazis.

          • (Score: 1, Troll) by ikanreed on Friday August 31 2018, @06:34PM (1 child)

            by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 31 2018, @06:34PM (#728883) Journal

            Again, it's great you can gloss over the fact that it's literally true.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:22PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:22PM (#728949)

              Truth is anathema to these fuckers. As I said elsewhere, totally why this site is dying, we can only state the facts so many ties before the bullshit evasions and counter arguments wear thin.

  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @05:47PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @05:47PM (#728861)

    The real internet of garbage is The Verge.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:20PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:20PM (#728914)

      Oh please - are you forgetting Myspace and AOL already?

      • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Friday August 31 2018, @10:06PM (1 child)

        by Sulla (5173) on Friday August 31 2018, @10:06PM (#728999) Journal

        When I clean the yard I throw both the cat and dog crap in the same bin I throw expired food into.

        --
        Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @02:00AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @02:00AM (#729068)

          I see you're keepin expired shit, you're so full of it.