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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: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday August 31 2018, @07:46PM (2 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Friday August 31 2018, @07:46PM (#728926)

    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.

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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:19PM (#728948)

    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

    by Thexalon (636) on Saturday September 01 2018, @03:14PM (#729246)

    Correct. We would all be equally poor and desperate.

    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.