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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: 3, Interesting) by crafoo on Friday August 31 2018, @09:40PM (4 children)
Alright. Tolerance + Proximity - Diversity is also alright. Why are we so convinced diversity is a good thing, in general, for societies? Why are we so selective on which societies we want to force to be diverse? You know, let's start shipping 10s of thousands of settlers into non-diverse, non-European countries to help combat their "diversity problem". We can even help them write a proper constitution, set up reasonable legal systems, and give them a bump up the cultural ladder. Let's start with Israel.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Aegis on Friday August 31 2018, @11:42PM
Why are we so convinced diversity is a good thing, in general, for societies?
Diversity is a fact. Our society is comprised of a diverse group of people.
It's like the moon, it just exists. It's kind of immaterial whether it's good or bad.
What's good is acknowledging the existence of these facts and planning accordingly. Sea voyages go much quicker when you plan for the effects of the moon on the tide.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 01 2018, @01:48AM (2 children)
Probably because we have a lot of history that shows it to be a good thing in the long term. For example, it's a huge driver for scientific and business endeavors. Since all the smart people don't belong to one particular ethnic group, a society which mixes successfully a lot of cultures is going to have a stronger scientific foundation and greater creativity than one that strongly favors a few cultures. And a huge part of business is trade. The more diverse society can trade more effectively with other societies (less of a knowledge barrier, for example).
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @02:35AM (1 child)
Khallow, honorary member of the Liberal Society.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Saturday September 01 2018, @09:37AM