7 ms·

If the Internet is a dark forest, it's not populated by evil aliens out to kill you, but a witch in a beautiful gingerbread house inviting you to eat your fill.

• KirinDave 7y ago
  Spoken like someone who has never pissed off fascists and found death threats in their PO box. Or lost their job because of a tweet about men being sexisg. Or (to flip the political spectrum), been carefully outed from your hidden fascist leanings by undercover agents and machine learning, instantly losing your job and being evicted from your home. Violence exists on the internet.
  • derp_dee_derp 7y ago
    Tweets and internet posts are not violence.
    • Kye 7y ago
      Violence is an expansive concept beyond the usual usage. Tweets and posts can lead to all kinds. Recent example: at least one politician being milkshaked after the first incident. And even though I find fascist views abhorrent, I can see the fear they feel about the possibility of being clocked post-Spencer as a sort of violence. Oddly, these same people would reject the notion of violence as something beyond immediate and physical... And then LGBTQ+ people experience economic violence all the time. There are no protections in most places, and plenty of people are happy to fire them/kick them out of apartments based entirely on stereotypes.
      • derp_dee_derp 7y ago
        There is no such thing as economic violence either. The word you are looking for is discrimination.
        • BillSaysThis 7y ago
          Actually, maybe calling these things violence would do more good in getting people to understand the problems need solutions.
        • KirinDave 7y ago
          Why is there no such thing? Because you say so? That exact phrase appears to be in common usage globally. Given that, who's actually out of step with reality here? The word discrimination describes what an discriminator does. Violence usually applied to what a victim experiences. Surely we can imagine a scenario where someone experiences violence without discrimination occuring.
          • derp_dee_derp 7y ago
            you. you are the one out of step with reality. here is the dictionary definition of violence for your reference. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/violence https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/violence
            • KirinDave 7y ago
              There are 4 senses of the word and only 1 names physical violence. Thank you for helping my argument, but we can all check the dictionary on our own time.
              • derp_dee_derp 7y ago
                Cool story. Call me when you come back to reality.
                • KirinDave 7y ago
                  Have a nice time doing whatever it is you do besides critically examining reality.
        • ionised 7y ago
      • matz1 7y ago
        Sure, if you redefine the word violence. To me violence has to involve physical force.
        • Kye 7y ago
          I don't need to redefine it. This usage is common among people who work on and with these subjects. KirinDave was using it in the sense used by sociologists and people who depend on their work. These kinds of conversations would be less touchy if people defined their terms in advance so everyone is on the same page. It's okay though. It's all cleared up now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence#Types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence#Types
          • KirinDave 7y ago
            I am sorry these characters are downvoting you rather than actually engaging with your arguments. Please know that someone else sees it happening and thinks it's... uh... par for the course given the post histories of at least one person here.
            • deleted 7y ago
              [deleted]
          • cgriswald 7y ago
            I don’t think it’s simply a matter of defining terms. The choice to call non-violent actions “violence” is a political one. It is certainly not made less so because certain people use it regularly when discussing these issues. Nor is your choice to use it any less political. You can’t wash your hands of it by pointing to others’ use. What you are referring to here has been, in the past, considered a call to violence (or perhaps an implied call to violence). People, rightly or wrongly, object to the conflation of speech and violence. I happen to think the normalization of speech as violence is dangerous doublespeak. What is gained by classifying speech as violence rather than simply vilifying the type of speech without the violence label? What is lost?
            • 7y ago
    • KirinDave 7y ago
      I'm fairly certain that I did not describe tweets. I describe information and identity disclosures that led to significant negative outcomes for individuals. That the internet is their delivery medium is not particularly important to the outcome, but it is the subject of the conversation here.
      • derp_dee_derp 7y ago
        > Or lost their job because of a tweet about men being sexisg. a direct quote from your comment. you describe tweets. how do you not remember what you just wrote?
        • KirinDave 7y ago
          To quote myself: "describe information and identity disclosures that led to significant negative outcomes for individuals." The violence is the disclosure. That it is a tweet doesn't matter anymore than the ammunition type used in a fatal shooting is uninteresting to most victims. > how do you not remember what you just wrote? How do you not read more than one sentence of what I just wrote? It's difficult to see your response as anything but a disingenuous reading.
  • jerf 7y ago
    A non-trivial part of the reason this environment exists is that we are being enticed into these big centralized platforms, with centralized identities, because it benefits the witches, not us. When there was no central big service, there was no ground for these massive centralized pushes to exist. Bad stuff happened, but bad stuff happens in real life, too; as long as the scales are roughly comparable I'm not inclined to go too ballistic trading freedom for safety. The risk of all those things exists today in such an outsized way because it benefits Facebook and Twitter to centralize everything.
    • KirinDave 7y ago
      I've made a conscious effort as well to move off centralized platforms, moving more to federated models and staying out of hub nodes, myself. But even there we see coordinated acts of harassment on folks cross instance. Ironically many of these are coordinated via a centralized service like Gab or Reddit. I am not sure that it makes sense to mandate from a government standpoint that organizing harassment is violence. It's difficult to imagine a world where this is not abused to quash any substantial reformist movement. But I do think from the standpoint of individuals and community norms it is not going too "ballistic" to recognize them as such.
• VvR-Ox 7y ago
  There's both of them. Google Tools, Social Networks like FB and Tinder are like Odysseus' Sirens - they lure the sailors in with some promises for free to shipwreck them and drive them into addiction so they control the mindset of people (your being influences your state of mind and vice versa). And then there is really bad alien predators who have set up a shitload of nets to get you when you are not carefully enough. When they have you you are probed (think of the Borg) and if you're a "valuable target", whatever the goals of this predator are, you'll be assimilated (taken into a bot net), milked like a cow (assets/data is stolen) or abused and thrown away (they use you to get to a higher valued target).