SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
You might say we're all living inside a ruinous waking nightmare that spawned from the dream of Web 2.0.
Don't get me wrong: It was a beautiful dream.
Web 2.0. We are all of us producers. With our blogs and our comments and our tweets and our YouTube channels we will democratise content and the algorithms -- those glorious algorithms -- will aid in the process. We will upvote and favourite and like and the wheat will be separated from the chaff.
Magic.
I think we can all agree that Web 2.0 didn't quite work as advertised.
It gave us Minecraft. It gave us Wikipedia, collaborative spaces, online tools. But it also gave us Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, Gamergate, incels, toxic communities, Logan Paul wandering into a suicide forest. It gave us Twitter bullying, Kelly Marie Tran harassment campaigns on Instagram.
It gave us terrible, opportunistic video games about school shootings.
Wednesday, after yanking Active Shooter, a video game where you play as a high school shooter, from its Steam store, Valve made an announcement. In a blog titled "Who gets to be on the Steam Store" Valve discussed the steps it's taking to prevent a video game like Active Shooter from making it to the Steam store in the future.
Its solution is about as Web 2.0 as it gets.
"[W]e've decided," wrote Valve, "that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling."
"Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam, and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see."
In 2018, at this current moment, it seems like a decision out of time. An old-fashioned solution to a problem that literally every single platform on the internet is currently trying to solve. We live in a world where Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are in the process of trying to actively take responsibility for the content produced and posted on their platforms.
Meanwhile, Valve is busy trying to abdicate that responsibility.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @10:43PM (1 child)
What I find toxic about the "left" is how homophobia is obviously rearing its ugly head. This term is obviously meant to reconstruct attraction to men in people who were not born with a womb as an assault on women instead of as a natural part of human sexuality. I disagree. People without wombs are not sexual servants of womyn-born-womyn. The sum total purpose of the existence of somebody without a womb is not to sexually gratify womyn-born-womyn.
I mean, just look at the attempts to normalize the fallacy of some X are Y, therefore all Y are X. Some alt-righters are homosexual men, therefore all homosexual men are alt-righters. That's propaganda, not some profound conclusion about human sexuality. There was an article in HuffPo somebody linked me the other day that was raising from its grave the notion that homosexual men are pedophilesand that pedophilia and homosexuality (in people without wombs) are fundamentally intertwined (a homosexual with a womb is powerful, not deviant, and people with wombs are, by definition, incapable of pedophilia, even if they are found guilty of rape of a victim without a womb who is under 18 in a court of law.)
I Kant even? Do these terms even mean the same thing to "left"ists that they mean to me? Or have "left"ists gone full retard and completely divorced the idea of a gay man or a trans woman from any definable reality? Are these now just abstract intersectional identities that have nothing to do with lived experience and demonstrable preferences?
How may one prove that one is not an incel? If one is not attracted to women, that's not good enough. If one lacks possession of a womb, the "left" tells us that they must be attracted to women XOR they must needs wish violence upon womyn-born-womyn (woman != womyn-born-womyn). If one demonstrates lack of attraction to women with a sexual history of relationships with people without wombs, that is not good enough, because the entire "incel" theory is gynocentric. No, we need a better word here than gynocentric, because gynocentric here is sloppy. With extensive experience with flesh and blood feminists in real life (you know, that place that doesn't involve the internet), it is easy to determine exactly what is wrong here. Not gynocentricism, but hysteracentricism. The only authentic people according to the view of hysteracentricists are those who have wombs. All other people are unpeople, and further more, if they are not willing sex slaves begging to sexually service womyn-born-womyn morning, afternoon and night then they are obviously and by all accounts incels.
(I'm so livid I've omitted an Oxford comma!)
But perhaps the venerable word chauvinism might apply to this situation. When combined with institutional power, perhaps the word hegemony applies.
What would a lesbian say if we were to presume to dictate her sex life to her. What would a lesbian say if we demand, with a bigoted 24/7 media campaign, that lesbians have sex with men? (Leave me out of this rhetorical world. I have no interest.) Now, watch how quickly my words get twisted around to somehow prove that I'm demanding that lesbians not only have sex with men, but that some lesbians must have sex with me. (Ugh... ugh... just... somebody will use this as evidence of whatever the fuck and once again I have the feeling that I Kant even.)
What about sexual assault against somebody without a womb? It is not fun being violently grabbed by somebody physically stronger than oneself and sexually assaulted. That is fucking humiliation. That is not a damned kink; that is an exercise in power! This is how a womyn-born-womyn demonstrates that she thinks that her victim's body is a goddamned sex toy that is perhaps, in error, inhabited by a thinking, feeling soul. It is not something I will ever feel thankful about or whatever the "left" demands I feel about the experience of being sexually assaulted.
I am wondering if, in light of the "left's" embrace of this kind of bigotry, it makes sense to vote for Republicans. The enemy of my enemy?
Whatever. Might as well check the anon box. This post is going to -1.
(Score: 0, Troll) by takyon on Sunday June 10 2018, @12:05AM
It probably should go to -1. It's off-topic. Put it in a journal. But let me brighten up your day.
Unless your karma is straight up negative, you might as well uncheck the box and post 1 point higher than anon. "What the hell do you have to lose?"
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]