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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:07PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:07PM (#728941)

    Climate science = it's not true (and watts up with that?!) because the conclusions make me feel uncomfortable!

    Never said that.

    Science showing that the brain may be a gendered organ = it's not true

    Never said that, only that it contradicts the claim that men and women are the same.

    Science fails to show any truth in racialist theories = science is important and more research is needed.

    What racial theories? It's not me conflating scientific racism with measurable differences between populations. Neither did i bring the subject up.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @02:15AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @02:15AM (#729074)

    only that it contradicts the claim that men and women are the same.

    No shit, Sherlock! If men and women weren't different, why the fuck would anybody bother with gender transition?! If anybody says that men and women are the same, tell them to go to fucking hell! Especially if they're a feminist--oh men and women are the same when it's convenient for my Diane-worshipping cisfemale supremacist bullshit but different when that's convenient for my Diane-worshipping cisfemale supremacist bullshit. Gender is a social construct but only when it's convenient! Gender is biological when we get down to the implementation of gross violations of Title IX in public education and the Fourteenth Amendment elsewhere!!!

    argh!

    i'm gonna beat that dead hobby horse to death!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @03:19PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @03:19PM (#729247)

      No shit, Sherlock! If men and women weren't different, why the fuck would anybody bother with gender transition?

      Save your scorn for the "gender is a social construct" crowd.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @04:38PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @04:38PM (#729259)

        Ah. My sarcasm detector must have given a false positive. As long as you don't then go and say "Ok, gender is not a social construct, so that disproves that brain sex could possibly exist."