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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 Thexalon on Friday August 31 2018, @05:39PM (6 children)
Right now, we live in a society with a bunch of castes, more than 2, and lots of people who believe that is as it should be. Younger "old money" white dudes are basically in the top tier, regardless of what they do. The bottom tier, also regardless of what they do, is likely to be older poor black women. And there are lots of grades in between for various combinations of these factors. Some effects of being in a lower caste:
1. It's harder to get an education when you're young. For instance, a student that needs financial aid to go to college is held to a higher standard than a student who can pay full price both before and after admission, and will typically have to hold down a job while in school as opposed to focusing entirely on studying.
2. Being in a lower caste will hurt your ability to get a job. They've done experiments where they've sent out resumes that are identical except for the names, and the names that sound like they're white people get more interviews.
3. Once you get a job, you'll get paid less for that work if you're in a lower caste than your higher-caste colleagues.
4. Insurance is more expensive if you're in a lower caste. That's health insurance, car insurance, homeowners/renters insurance, etc.
5. Housing options are more limited if you're lower caste. A lot of landlords won't rent to you based on caste, and banks will try to avoid giving you a mortgage if you're lower caste. Housing is worse in every respect and more expensive because of this.
6. Larger purchases like appliances and cars are more expensive, because lower caste folks usually have to buy these things on credit, and they'll get higher interest rates making those loans more expensive.
7. You can't even buy the same kinds of things as higher-caste people if you're lower-caste without being hassled. For example, actor Daniel Radcliffe, who has loads of Harry Potter money lying around, tried to buy some top-tier artwork and found he couldn't because he hadn't grown up in the world of art collectors.
8. If you have to interact with the police and court systems, your caste will have a giant effect on how you are treated. Really low-caste people sometimes get killed by police even if they've committed no crime whatsoever, and most of the time the police are not punished in any way for this. Really high-caste people sometimes get no jail time and sometimes no punishment at all for serious crimes including murder and rape, even if it's proven beyond any doubt that they committed said crime.
And the strongest example I can think of as to the caste system in operation: 2 out of the last 3 presidents are by all appearances complete screw-ups of human beings, with drug problems, alcohol problems, an inability to conduct business without bailouts from suspect sources, criminal records, and draft-dodging, but got to the top of politics in no small part because they were born into wealth and power. Meanwhile, a substantial number of people with 4-year college degrees are working at McDonald's and other fast food jobs, in large part because they were born into poverty and were blocked by the caste system from getting jobs that actually used their qualifications. It's not impossible to overcome the caste system, but don't think for a minute it isn't there.
And this caste system is detrimental to society as a whole, because it means that idiot screw-up children of high-caste people end up in charge of things they have no business running, while brilliant disciplined children of low-caste people often end up letting their talents go to waste flipping burgers.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:10PM (4 children)
Not disagreeing per se. Just kind of taking a "first derivative." Most of that comes down to economic class. If we could pursue socialist/progressive policies such as medicare for all and restoring welfare/food stamps/etc, taxing the 1% the way we used to, the rough places of injustice would be transformed into a smooth plane of equality of opportunity, to paraphrase a great man.
My gripe is that identity politics isn't going to do anything on its own. We must pursue socialist policies and programs if we hope to do anything tangible about these injustices.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday August 31 2018, @07:46PM (2 children)
Correct. We would all be equally poor and desperate. Until you can point to a success story somewhere I'm going to keep looking at the mass graves Socialism has left everywhere and conclude it is a bad idea. If you really want to live like that, Venezuela is waiting for you. And don't bring up Europe's Socialism Lite because it is currently collapsing too. Massive crime, suicidal birth rates, little hope for the future except from the rapidly rising reactionary parties seeking to cast it all out.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:19PM
Well since you're an idiot that doesn't even understand what Socialism is I don't think anyone is going to lose sleep over your lack of support.
Dumbass is as dumbass says.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday September 01 2018, @03:14PM
US GDP: $18 trillion. US population: ~330 million (75 million children, 255 million adults). US poverty line: $12,500 per adult, $4,500 per child. Cost to keep all people above poverty line: ~$4.5 trillion, or about 25% of GDP. Which means that there's plenty to go around or invest in larger projects after you cover keeping everybody alive.
Venezuela GDP: $370 billion. Venezuela population: ~29 million (10 million children, 19 million adults). Venezuela poverty line: ~$6000 per adult, $1500 per child. Cost to keep all adults above the poverty line: $140 billion, or closer to 40% of GDP. Which is why there's a problem: Venezuela can either keep its people alive, or have lots left over to invest in projects that would make them a wealthier country on the whole (e.g. building better roads), but not both. And unlike the US, the Venezuelan GDP has been shrinking, largely because its #1 export product, oil, has been dropping in price dramatically, which means they were probably screwed no matter what they did.
But Venezuelans are not all equally desperate, either, not even close: The people who were rich before Maduro are mostly still rich, and the people who were dirt-poor in Venezuela are also still mostly dirt poor.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 01 2018, @09:53AM
We never taxed the 1% "the way we used to". There were so many tax loopholes that the 1% paid a little more tax than they do today.
As to "economic class", some people will always been incompetent, ignorant of economics, disinterested in wealth accumulation, and/or with a variety of personal flaws that happen to make them poor. Socialist policies won't fix most of that.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday September 01 2018, @07:21AM
Just about everything in that wall of text is BS. Time being finite I'll take a few at random and have a go at em.
Welcome to the real world, snowflake. If you have good grades and are willing to go to an in-state university it is almost always a viable goal. Having a job while going to college used to be a routine occurrence for anyone not born with a silver spoon in their mouth. And if your grades suck, perhaps college is a bad idea anyway. Learn a profitable trade and start working after a year, skip three years of accumulating dept toward a degree you had to settle for because it was a subject you wouldn't instantly flunk but has no real world uses.
That isn't lower caste, that is a warning sign that your parents were idiots or making a political point. Either way it is highly inheritable (genetics or nurture) and a warning to avoid hiring a problem. Best advice to give Laqueffa is to to change the stupid name instead of wallowing in resentment the rest of her life about how "unfair" life is. Just being a minority is a plus these days, if one is competent at something, everybody has a quota to fill and would really like to find quality people to fill the slots instead of carrying useless deadwood to keep HR and the governement happy. You see White people trying to be "trans-black" but not so many trying to pass as White anymore.
Citation needed on that one. Mr. Radcliff isn't some orphan a producer turned up, both of his parents are in the media industry and were themselves child actors. Not to mention being Jewish, which usually opens most doors in the upper levels of society; both here and in England.
Assuming you are again mixing race and caste and repeating the popular myth that cops kill blacks. The numbers tell an opposite story. Your odds of death by cop are worse if one is a white criminal. If one isn't a criminal low life the odds of surviving an encounter with law enforcement are good regardless. The FBI on the other hand.... Police are very reluctant to shoot black perps because they know it has a high chance of ending their career in law enforcement.
This is of course true. A good example would be Hillary Clinton. More felonies than space permits listing. Mr. Trump campaigned on "Lock her up!" and yet she remains unjailable. Trump might joke about shooting someone on 5th Ave, but we all know the Clintons actually DO kill people who piss them off.