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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @05:28PM (4 children)
Who is Angus Johnston?
Why are half the posts images that cut off half the text they're trying to quote?
Shouldn't there be posts from Jeong responding to a racist? Who is this racist (racists?)? Is Johnston the original racist??? I am so confused.
I swear I have no idea what jmorris or AC are talking about or what you are talking about or what the hell any of this is about other than jmorris being butthurt because he doesn't have a blue checkmark. However, I would still like to have some idea WTF???
(Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Friday August 31 2018, @06:03PM (3 children)
Ace has been the best at nuking this story from orbit. So I'm just gonna link to some of his greatest hits to get you up to speed.
NYT Hires Virulent Racist for Their Editorial Board; The Cucks, Get This, Insist That She Should Keep Her Job [ace.mu.nu]
Here he documents some of her "greatest hits", links to a Federalist article with more and then gets to the heart of my argument about rejecting a dual caste society. Also, as implied by the title, a lot of abuse heaped upon the cruise ship #NeverTrump cucks. These new deplatforming rules either apply to everyone (and everyone is going to be unemployed and the Internet will go dark from lack of users) or they are going to be rewritten to rules everyone can agree to actually live under.
Then there is It's About Time: Autotrader Announces it Will No Longer Advertise on Samantha Bee's Show [ace.mu.nu]
Not exactly related but I'm including it because it is in the same wheelhouse and has this incredible part that I'm going to just quote for those unwilling to click across:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @06:37PM
Ok. Let me make this simple, you two drama queens.
Let's start with one (1) question. WHO THE FUCK IS ANGUS JOHNSTON?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @09:21PM (1 child)
why can't some people just stop being jerks and find something better to do?
free speech is great. don't be a jerk is all i would ask for in return.
before anyone says but she or he said this or that, they are not you. if everyone wasn't a jerk on purpose there'd be less need to reciprocate for something that didn't happen to someone who thought better of being a jerk and decided to go outside and play or something instead.
debate/arguing/fighting all cool. being a jerk about it, no
i guess that leads to arguments about what it means philsophically to be a jerk. it's the same definition as obscenity, but not the same thing. in other words i know it when i see it!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @11:53PM
We need to get that abomination of a 'standard' out of the courts. Even if obscenity could be objectively defined, the government has no Constitutional authority to ban it.