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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: 1, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Friday August 31 2018, @06:22PM (7 children)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Friday August 31 2018, @06:22PM (#728876) Journal

    Poor white guy! Centuries of white privilege, all for naught!

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  • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Friday August 31 2018, @06:56PM (6 children)

    by Sulla (5173) on Friday August 31 2018, @06:56PM (#728895) Journal

    Come Arist, I expect better of you. How am I wrong, is it okay to fire a guy just because he is white?

    As far as levels of privilege goes, a Mandarin or a Han is pretty high up there if we are just considering those in China (perhaps all of east asia). Is it okay to hate one of them if you are a Tibetan, and have it not called racism? Certainly the Tibetan is oppressed by them, is their level of privilege so high that lashing out against them is not racism?

    Without accepting that you cannot judge a person on the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, you can never fix the root issues.

    --
    Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:13PM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:13PM (#728907)

      hahahaha oh wow

      You fools are really out there, I guess I should feel sorry? you example ari replied to is totally "valid" I guess. I use quotes because technically yes, those are two examples of prejudice based on skin color.

      However in the real world there is an overwhelming occurrence of your first example and almost zero occurrence of the second. What does this mean? Your examples are just a way to escape the fact that #1 is a real problem while your white persecution complex is stupid and lame, the ultimate in first world problems.

      So much equality that the ethnic elite feel persecuted!

      Ok, enough poking fun. I'm sure your position is rooted in the Affirmative Action legislation. Yes that bit of law is racist, but it is trying to counter balance the systemic societal racism that really truly for-realsies exists.

      • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday August 31 2018, @11:17PM (3 children)

        by aristarchus (2645) on Friday August 31 2018, @11:17PM (#729022) Journal

        Discussions of Affirmative Action as reverse racism against poor, put-upon whites are as relevant to anything as perfectly spherical, friction-less cows in a two-body problem involving torid bovines.

        • (Score: 2) by chromas on Saturday September 01 2018, @02:15AM (1 child)

          by chromas (34) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 01 2018, @02:15AM (#729073) Journal

          First, we assume a spherical Nazi.

          • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @06:00AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @06:00AM (#729116)

            Unpossible! Nazis are always rightists, and being rightists, they favor symbols that are rectangular, like the swastika, because they are simple and easy to understand. It is much like Trumps positions on tariffs: other countries are disrepecting the US by trading with it. Shirley you can see the symmetry, when it is laid out in a powerpoint of only three slides, because after all, Trump falls asleep after three slides, and gets an erection, which is rather un-Precedential.

            Ergo, no spherical Nazis. Unless they are on the Moon.

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @08:27AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @08:27AM (#729155)

          Discussions about whether race, gender, sexual orientation, and other features of identity politics are the primary divisions of society are not nearly as relevant in the present moment as a discussion about whether economic class is the primary division of society.

      • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Monday September 03 2018, @08:37AM

        by cubancigar11 (330) on Monday September 03 2018, @08:37AM (#729791) Homepage Journal

        So, at which point of time would you think that enough has been done?

        Tell me, give me a real hard data based condition.