Clinton on Sanders: It's the Culture Around Him

Zero fucks Hillary Clinton is the best Hillary Clinton.

In an interview with Hollywood Reporter about the upcoming series about her, here she is on Bernie Sanders:

"I will say, however, that [the problem is] not only him, it's the culture around him. It's his leadership team. It's his prominent supporters. It's his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it. And I don't think we want to go down that road again where you campaign by insult and attack and maybe you try to get some distance from it, but you either don't know what your campaign and supporters are doing or you're just giving them a wink and you want them to go after Kamala [Harris] or after Elizabeth [Warren]. I think that that's a pattern that people should take into account when they make their decisions."

I appreciate Clinton bringing gender to the forefront in the 2020 election, because gender has oddly not been, despite a primary that started with record numbers of women running.

Of course, last week's conversation, if one can call it that, about whether or not Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren he didn't think a woman could win the presidency, after which Warren was viciously attacked online by influential Bernie supporters and surrogates, demonstrates why female candidates might choose not to foreground gender, and misogyny, in their campaign.

There is absolutely a toxic left misogyny culture around Bernie Sanders, a culture that he has let fester.

Observe, for instance, my reaction last week to well-known Bernie supporter Michael Moore's attack on Elizabeth Warren, which he tweeted out to his 6 million followers:

This rhetoric is so unnecessarily violent and is like throwing gasoline on a smoldering fire, yet typical as to how so many men perceive even the mildest, most tepid suggestions that they said or did something sexist. https://t.co/AozUHjnoAW

— Fannie Wolfe 🌈 (@fanniesroom) January 15, 2020

This type of vitriol from influential Bernie supporters isn't even rare. Shaun King, who has over 1 million followers, was also repeatedly tweeting attacks on Warren, claiming to have inside knowledge about how Warren is dishonest.

It's also hard to overstate how the festering of this culture is made so much easier on social media, particularly Twitter. For instance, on Twitter, once a high-follower, pro-Bernie account tweets a general soundbite about another candidate, bots and Bernie supporters begin swarming with riffs on that soundbite, targeting that candidate and the ordinary people who support that candidate.

Bernie could de-escalate a lot of what we see, online, from his hard-core supporters, but too often, we see that, through his silence, he lets the abuse and misogyny work in his favor. Historically, to "address" the abuse, he has just given a general statement saying he doesn't want his supporters to attack people, and they continue to do so anyway.

Interestingly, though, when one of Bernie's surrogates attacked Joe Biden in a piece at The Guardian, Bernie just recently outright apologized to Biden, in public.

It's a notable distinction to how he treats his female/POC opponents.

[1/23/20 - UPDATE: Conspicuously proving Hillary Clinton's point about the culture that permeates Bernie's campaign, with his endorsement, today Bernie Sanders approvingly tweeted a clip of Joe Rogan speaking well of Bernie and saying he's probably going to vote for him. As Sady Doyle notes, Joe Rogan is, uh, pretty problematic for a host of reasons.]

On the Death of Internet Feminism Being Greatly Exaggerated

I have to admit that one aspect of the post-2016 feminist backlash that I did not anticipate is women writing clusters of articles declaring Internet feminism to be dead. But alas, here we are (she typed, from her 12-year-old feminist Blogger blog).

The most recent example of this trend is a piece posted at Jezebel (yes, really) bizarrely-entitled, "How the Internet Killed Feminism," which neither proves that feminism is dead nor that it was "the Internet" that killed it.

To put it in the most mild way I can, my issue with this particular piece - in addition to the factual inaccuracies* - is that it is missing quite a bit of nuance.

The piece is sort of all over the place, but if you piece the narrative together, her general thesis seems to be that the main problem with the feminist blogosphere was that a few of the most privileged, white feminist women leveraged their blogging platforms into book deals and were not inclusive, which led to rifts with women of color. For instance:

"Within the blogosphere, Feministing was side-eyed for watering things down, getting things wrong, not being inclusive and even appropriating other bloggers’ work. Outside of it, the blog was known as the feminism 101 site and Valenti the number one feminist blogger. That meant bylines in mainstream publications like The Guardian and The Nation, and book after book.

....

The disparity between white feminist bloggers and bloggers of color was underscored by the first annual BlogHer conference in 2005, which 1000 people attended, almost all of them white, and the first annual Blogalicious conference in 2009 (also sponsored by BlogHer, oddly), which had about 175 attendees, almost none of them white. Reappropriate’s Fang referred to the 'balkanization' of the feminist blogosphere from the beginning, where the standard was an upwardly mobile white coastal community that had limited self-awareness. 'They were like, let’s have feminism as a race-neutral conversation,' she said. That meant refusing to engage when they were asked to examine their privilege. 'So much of the culture of feminism that is forward-facing is driven by New York,' Angry Black Bitch blogger Pamela Merritt said. 'But the people who contribute to the movement dialogue are not living in Park Slope.'”

As I tweeted yesterday in response to this piece, those of us who were active in the blogosphere during its heydey are well aware of the blog wars, in-fighting, blindspots, and abuses of privilege.  Yes, there were many, much-needed conversations about race. At the same time, I think it's overly-simplistic, and a profound erasure, to suggest that the issues that feminists sought to hash out online, among each other, were solely along racial lines, particularly because also occurring during this time period were splinters and rifts between feminists online who were trans-exclusionary and trans-affirming, in addition to issues such as abortion access, sex work, fat acceptance, sexual orientation, religion, and class - and these issues are barely, if at all, mentioned in the piece.

I think this framing speaks to the way this article sort of lumps some of the larger feminist sites together and acts like they all had the same issues and blindspots, which is very similar to how MRAs used to treat feminist blogs back in the day, like they were one giant, monolithic feminist hivemind.

For instance, the article vaguely references Shakesville as being problematic in the same ways as some of the other large blogs, but the writer doesn't take the time to actually specify what "Shakesville" had done wrong. (She also categorizes a recent hit piece on Shakesville, written by someone with a longstanding grudge against Melissa McEwan, as an "expose." And, when she couldn't reach McEwan for comment on the piece, the writer simply framed the hit piece as the big "explanation" as to why Shakesville shut down, ignoring McEwan's stated, published reason that running Shakesville was harming her health.)

Rather, this writer's implicit distillation of the feminist blogosphere's demise into one easy, simple answer ("white feminists") seems to be more a reflection of this particular political moment, and the liberal-left political spectrum's loathing of the oft-cited "53%**", than of the many coinciding, more complicated reasons the feminist blogosphere declined.

I would attribute this decline, by the way, to burn-out, the dearth of financial opportunities for doing this work, writers' receipt of abuse and harassment, in-fighting, privileged people acting poorly, and changing trends in the media, social media, and economic landscapes.

And, disturbingly, even as the writer of this piece says that it wasn't "blog wars" that killed the feminist blogosphere, she devotes far more paragraphs to "blog wars" than she does to any other reason for the demise of the blogosphere, including the titular "Internet" or even to harassment, even though pretty much every feminist online has cited harassment as a big fucking problem, if not a key reason for scaling back or stopping their work.

In short, the article treats the feminist blogosphere like it was largely a big, dramatic catfight among women, which strikes me as pretty sexist and does a huge disservice to a lot of people's contributions to feminism. But, I suppose that the harassment of feminists online is old news that women have been talking about since forever, and there's always market in patriarchy for women taking down women, even in this very meta- way.

But, let's take a step back.

And, uh, this seems obvious to actually write, but feminism isn't "dead" just because feminist blogging has declined. Many feminist bloggers have simply migrated to other platforms, platforms where audiences and users have likewise migrated, such as Twitter or podcasting, because these platforms now typically have greater reach than blogging. Or, they issue private newsletters, if they want more granular, limited engagement.

For, it's not just feminist blogs that have declined, it's blogs in general. Yet, we don't get story after story about how atheism or Christianity or mommy-ing have "died" just because these blogs have declined. People rightly mostly acknowledge that people just do this sort of topical work elsewhere now.

(Uh, except for me, I guess. Hi! No, just kidding, there are still like 60+ blogs in my Feedly that are still updated regularly, many of them feminist blogs).

In conclusion, this piece was ambitious and the writer touted it on Twitter as "the real story" of what went down regarding the feminist blogosphere, which is why I think I've been disappointed in it.

Many influential bloggers were omitted from this "real story" of the feminist blogosphere, particularly women of color, including women of color who wrote at some of the larger feminist blogs she critiques as excluding women of color. I mean, so much is missing, really. And, in reality, one would need a book, if not volumes, to even attempt to do justice to this topic (and it seems like this writer is angling for a book deal, goddess help us, even as her piece implies that feminists who get book deals are immoral/greedy/bad).


An interesting thing about the feminist blogosphere is that there's actually an extensive written record of what happened, if one simply reads the blogposts and comment threads themselves, and thus it seems like that record should be used pretty extensively in a historical account. One doesn't have to rely solely on oral, after-the-fact interviews and impressions to piece together a narrative about the feminist blogosphere, so that's a choice when one does do that, as is the case in the Jezebel piece.

The feminist blogosphere is/was a deeply important social phenomenon, and I hope one day someone does take the time to write a just history about it, someone who knows how to do the scholarship. I reckon it's not going to be a neat, tidy story with simple, cartoon heroes and villains, cranked out in a few months. 

[Update, 12/21/19: After the writer of the Jezebel piece continued to promote her piece on Twitter after it didn't go viral, feminists primarily engaged the piece by critiquing it, pointing out errors, and disputing the overarching narratives. 

In response, the writer of the piece made the following statement: "the responses to my jezebel piece really make me understand why so many renounced feminism in the end." This statement was alarming to me because it's the same sort of victim-blaming that MRA/anti-feminists habitually engage - that feminists are too insufferable to deal with and, thus, feminism is a garbage movement that they want no part of.

As of today, she has deleted her Twitter account.]


Related:
The End of an Era at Shakesville
A Woman Will Win, Eventually, But Will the US Let Her?


*For instance, the writer asserts that the "lifepsan of the feminist blogosphere" was from 2001 - 2009, even though feminist blogs continue to exist today and multiple large sites she includes in her piece, such as Shakesville and Feministing, existed through 2019. As another example, the piece erases the fact that the founder of Jezebel, framed as a big white blog, is a Black woman.
 
**The oft-cited "53% of white women" who voted for Trump in the 2016 election, which is sometimes loosely equated with all white women.

Melissa Benoist Shares Experiences With Intimate Partner Violence

In an Instagram video she posted last week, Supergirl star Melissa Benoist shared that she experienced intimate partner violence in a previous relationship.

The full video is currently up on YouTube here, and in it she details how a previous romantic partner emotionally and physically abused her. Benoist did not name the previous partner, although some in the media have attempted to fill in the blanks based on the timing of some of the incidents she refers to. Out of respect for the fact that Benoist didn't name him, I won't speculate here.

Instead, I'll offer my story.

When I was 18, in one of my earliest relationships, my partner was emotionally abusive, including regularly belittling me, isolating me from my friends and family, cheating on me, and making us keep our relationship a secret (always complicated and "easy" for abusers to justify in queer relationships). Even after I broke up with this person, they continued to stalk me and break into my email account to keep track of what I was doing, who I was communicating with, and who I was hanging out with.

I didn't have many tools at the time to recognize much of this behavior as abusive, let alone to effectively counter it. After years of work, including therapy, martial arts and self-defense training, and feminist education and analysis, I am in a very different place now.

My past experiences with abuse also inform why I have little to no tolerance for abusive Internet behavior, especially those who, for instance, stalk and harass me through my Twitter account even after I've blocked them.

The fact is, especially after more than 10 years engaging with folks on the Internet, I almost immediately know how to recognize abusers and their abusive patterns, and the best course of action for me is to simply refuse to engage with them because what they desire more than anything is to keep their target trapped in an abusive cycle on their terms, not yours.

This is not to say that Internet abuse is the same as physical violence. In fact, I don't think it's useful to compare or rank which types of abuse are "worse" than others. To put it simply, and to paraphrase Tig Notaro in One Mississippi, "they're all bad."

I'll just offer that I'm sorry Benoist experienced intimate partner violence. I have long admired her acting on Supergirl, but even aside from that, no person should have to endure abuse in an intimate, or any other, relationship. And, I hope she is getting any help and support she needs to deal with the trauma from her experiences.

Social Media Disinformation Today and Beyond

I recently read a series of articles about Russia's ongoing disinformation campaign against the United States that I think do a good job of articulating how this threat is much larger than the 2016 election.

In the first, a Rolling Stone article, by Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, the authors suggest that professional trolls don't actually troll. Amateur trolls* are pretty easy to spot if you've been on social media for a moderate amount of time.

Yet, many times, professional trolls are far from obvious, even to experienced social media users, and work to befriend users and then sway them with spin, using the following strategy:

"Grow an audience in part through heartwarming, inspiring messages, and use that following to spread messages promoting division, distrust, and doubt."

The goal is to undermine trust in American institutions and "drive mainstream viewpoints in polar and extreme institutions." Yes, this goal seems somewhat obvious, but it's interesting to note in the context of ubiquitous sneering on the left and the right at "moderates" and "centrists." 

And, while I believe that it's generally not helpful to find a "moderate" position between civility and, say, neo-Nazis, the phrase "centrist" (like "neoliberal") is often thrown around on Twitter in pretty disingenuous ways by people acting in both good and bad faith to drive people toward the extremes. .

In a related piece, Linvill has noted just how adeptly Russian trolls understand US culture, as he's written about disinformation in the context of our national conversations about campus climates, for instance:

"Covert Russian disinformation may seem out of place in the context of a conversation regarding campus climate. It is not, though. The IRA’s attempts to demoralize, distract, and divide have been discussed as a form of political warfare (Galeotti, 2018) and, through social media, it is a form of warfare that extends to our college campuses. Not only does the IRA seek to reach students on our campuses in order to influence their ways of thinking, but also they wish to attack the institution of higher education itself and make it a political wedge between Americans of different ideologies (Bauman, 2018; Morgan, 2019). Bauman pointed out, for instance, that in the run up to the 2016 election, IRA troll accounts repeatedly tweeted segments of conservative media that 'spotlighted incidents of liberalism run amok at colleges' (2018, p. A28)."

Here, it's worth pointing out that conservative Christian Rod Dreher bemoans campus political correctness practically on the daily at his blog at The American Conservative, essentially acting as a useful idiot for amplifying, overreacting to, and sowing these divisions. He's hardly alone there, as this PC Gone Awry narrative is a cottage feature of rightwing media.

Anyway, Russian disinformation has been ongoing since before the 2016 election. And, knowing this, although I don't always succeed, I've been trying pretty hard to stay above the fray, particularly online, when it comes to getting embroiled in the day-to-day dramas of the 2020 Democratic Primary. 

Just so you know where I stand, I am leaning heavily toward voting for Elizabeth Warren, because I believe she has the best policies, judgment, and demeanor for the job. But, I also believe we have a solid slate of candidates, with some exceptions, any one of which would be infinitely better than Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

I also think candidates should be critiqued, fairly, when warranted, but Twitter in particular is often used to virally spread some of the most disparaging, superficial, and yes dumb critiques of candidates. In fact, the retweet is built for the shallow dunk that's less about analysis and more about feeding users' need for the dopamine hits they get from attention/notifications for likes and retweets.

Relatedly, another takeaway from the Rolling Stone piece is that Russia's disinformation efforts are ongoing, and are bigger than the 2016 and 2020 elections. What I need from political candidates is an acknowledgement of this problem and solutions to address it, not people who boast about how they woulda won in 2016 (or will magically win in 2020) even though nothing about their platforms, statements, or mental capacities suggests they even understand the magnitude of the threats facing our nation and democracy.

Finally, these stats:

"Recent research exploring fake news may expand Boyd’s concerns regarding how we have taught digital media literacy. Research examining Twitter suggests that concerns regarding fake news may be based on incorrect assumptions of its prevalence. Grinberg, Joseph, Friedland, Swire-Thompson, and Lazer (2019) found that only 0.1% of users were responsible for sharing 80% of fake news posts, and these users were highly concentrated among conservative voters. Research examining Facebook found similar results. Guess, Nagler, and Tucker (2019) found the sharing of fake news on that platform to be a rare event; and to the extent that it was a problem, it was largely a problem among Baby Boomers. Users over 65 were nearly seven times more likely to share fake news as the youngest cohort of users. This stands in strong support for Lee’s (2018) call to teach digital media literacy to older adults. Yet to date we have been teaching digital literacy in college, when we should be teaching it in retirement homes."

Whew.


*I continue to object to using the word "troll" to describe abusive online behavior, because I believe it tends to minimizes the harmful impact such behavior can have on legitimate users of social media. I've used it throughout this post for the sake of consistency with how Linvill and Warren use it.

It's Not Just the Algorithm

It's the fact that the dominant culture in the US is a misogynist white supremacist one, that explains why it's so easy for young men to get themselves "radicalized" by misogynist white supremacist videos "they stumble across" on YouTube.

As I tweeted yesterday:

I don't buy the notion that young men "innocently stumble" upon Nazi vids on YouTube "because of the algorithm." Like, maybe a lot of men are a little bit Nazi to begin with?

When I go down a YouTube rabbithole, I end up watching "Anna Kendrick's gayest moments" or whatever.

— Fannie Wolfe 🌈 (@fanniesroom) September 5, 2019

[Text: I don't buy the notion that young men "innocently stumble" upon Nazi vids on YouTube "because of the algorithm." Like, maybe a lot of men are a little bit Nazi to begin with [to which I'll add, precisely because our culture primes them to be receptive to videos YouTube suggests for them].

When I go down a YouTube rabbithole, I end up watching "Anna Kendrick's gayest moments" or whatever."]

And, for what it's worth, the lesbian algorithm inside my brain also recommends said Anna Kendrick vid, which YouTube recommended to me after I had been searching for femslash fan videos set to the tune of the Gentleman Jack theme song. (I couldn't find any. I'm a dork).

The End Of an Era at Shakesville

We have lost another online feminist space.

Shakesville, of course, wasn't just any feminist space, to me. My friend Melissa McEwan's writing has been hugely influential to my thinking around progressive feminism, social media, Internet culture, and politics. I was an active commenter at Shakesville for at least 10 years (I looked at my DISQUS account yesterday and I have posted over 3,000 comments). In addition, Melissa often included links to my writing here in her regular blog roundups, sending readers my way. Then, shortly after the 2016 election, I became a guest contributor at the space she cultivated and led for 15 years.

I was honored to share my writing at Shakesville and mindful of the trust that she and the other contributors and moderators had placed in me. Melissa's contributions to feminism and to the heydey of the feminist and political blogosphere during the late aughts are likely immeasurable. And, like any feminist who rises to a certain level of visibility, she has long been held to impossible standards (although, over the years I came to see that she also holds herself to sky-high standards in her writing, fairness, and accuracy). I saw repeatedly how any real, perceived, or invented missteps were eagerly pounced upon by others before the inevitable "cancellation," while she simultaneously experienced relentless torrents of targeted abuse from misogynists across the political spectrum.

As a contributor and longtime user of Internet, I was appreciative of the Shakesville comment moderation policy, even though it has long been a topic of ridicule and is sometimes put forth as "evidence" that Shakesville was "a cult." My perspective, as I've been a contributor at multiple blogs for more than a decade, is that I've come to see how lax moderation policies at many other platforms, blogs, websites, comment sections, and forums have completely normalized a collective, societal opinion that cruelty is a casual and non-important thing we just have to "deal with" when on the Internet, rather than a thing that is deeply traumatizing to humanity.

"Just don't read the comments," they say, accepting that abuse is just the price we have to pay for being online.

And politically, I think we will be experiencing the fallout of content platforms that have, or long had, relatively "anything goes" or "all sides have a point" moderation policies, like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter for a very long time. These continue to be leveraged against our political system today. The zeitgeist of libertarian tech culture has long been "connecting people" and "free speech" rather than building communities and, welp, it turns out there's a difference. It's as though the founders of so many platforms didn't care, or know, or understand how their philosophies could be gamed by extremists and used to silence the marginalized and monetize fascism.

In many ways, social media sites are the anti-thesis of community-building. Or, rather, people have to put a lot of work into making these sites functional online communities, if it's possible at all on a platform. Civil debate about literally any topic, even the most mundane, does not just magically happen. At its core, a comment moderation policy is the setting of boundaries in one's space, used to delineate the bounds of engagement the community agrees are acceptable.

That so many perceived or framed Shakesville's comment policy as abusive and/or cultish, I think, speaks to a deep, longstanding discomfort many people, including women, still have with women setting clear boundaries, building community, and then leading that community.

During the heydey of political blogging, many people eagerly started "weblogs" without putting thought into what their comment moderation policy would be. Most sites in the early days didn't even have a written one. I've run this site for about 12 years now, and I think many people were figuring it out as they went along, myself included. I remember early confrontations with homophobic male Christians who approached commenting here with complete and total entitlement. There are some things I wish I would have handled differently, but never have I wished I would have spent more time in this one precious life engaging with bad faith assholes here.

Eventually, many people in the blogosphere abandoned their blogs. I think they did so for a myriad of reasons: it was a risk, it was labor that was hard to monetize, it became boring, they didn't have instant success, they realized it's a pain in the ass to deal with assholes, it was stressful, they moved on to other things, they started podcasts, and more. Sometimes, I wonder why I'm still here and whether I'll stay, but I suppose that's a post for another day.

Here, I mostly want to say that, as a writer at Shakesville, I was deeply appreciative that I wasn't expected to engage with abusive comments following my posts there. I had done that before, repeatedly, at other sites and eventually the toll made me want to post less and less at that site until I eventually just stopped writing there (or the blog owners just deleted the blog altogether).

Mostly, I will miss Shakesville. A lot.

More broadly, it seems that we continue to lose more and more feminist spaces online and off, precisely when we need them most, including feminist bookstores, cultural events, and lesbian bars. And, I don't say that to imply that I think Melissa should have continued to run Shakesville. She took on the world for so many years at great detriment to her well-being.

I think about these losses of feminist space and contemplate the way that misogyny so often adapts as feminism progresses, in this neverending cycle. For instance, the near-election of Hillary Clinton in 2016 freaked rape culture patriarchy the fuck out and so we're currently in a feminist resurgence that's also a profound backlash. The world has decided that since roughly half of the white women who voted voted for Donald Trump, then white women do not experience gender-based oppression, or else why would they have voted for their own oppression?

Yet women, all women, actually do continue to experience gender-based violence, hostility, and aggression - in addition to, in many cases, additional identity-based oppressions. Even so, some progressives are joining their MRA brethren and starting to concede that "just" being a woman these days, that is - a white cishet woman - isn't "enough" of a marginalized identity to warrant analysis or advocacy. Some progressive/leftist/liberals communities, particularly if they're very keen on how progressive/leftist/liberal they are, act like they exist in a sort of post-feminist "gender-blind" space. In reality, such spaces are really only blind to gender-based disparities, as they replicated the norms of rape culture and patriarchy. 

Mostly, it continues to make me angry that progressive feminists, especially as they become more high profile, have to deal with so much abuse until they/we can't take it anymore. I think a lot about the voices we've lost over the years. And, while we expect the attacks from the right, so many within the moderate-to-left political spectrum are bystanders at best and active collaborators in the abuse at worst. 

Progressive feminists, especially now, just don't fit neatly within the political spectrum in the US. 

So many people casually take it for granted that this or that high-profile feminist is "trash" or "garbage" or "cancelled." Sometimes, that perception is based on honest critique. Yet, in combination with the reality that most women who are public figures get to make maybe one or two mistakes in their careers while white men get cultural forgiveness and redemption tours, the end result is a net positive for white patriarchy and rape culture.

But, many times, the "critique" is straight-up misogyny, abuse, or people being resentful that a woman has set a boundary with them. Many times, the abuse goes viral, on Twitter, with people competing with one another for the hottest, most abusive "dunk" on the feminist, in a process that is profoundly dehumanizing and usually distorts and simplifies everything she stands for. Her entire body of work, discounted because someone with a bunch of followers ridiculed one of her tweets, generating an algorithmic pile-on in which the targeted woman is reduced to a stereotypical "vapid garbage idiot."

It seems to me that it's the fate of every feminist of any renown to be reviled in her own day as "ruined forever" because she is imperfect, "crazy," "idiotic," "hateful," and/or "angry" so that instead of building upon feminist works, new generations of women who have internalized the message that earlier feminists had nothing valuable to say simply start over and over again, repeatedly. In reality, most feminists of any renown have something to teach us, even if they were profoundly flawed in other ways. And, gender-based hostility, discrimination, and violence are ills against which every generation has to be vigilant.

I will end by linking to a Shakesville piece that has long been one of my favorites. "The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck," which Melissa wrote almost 10 years ago to the day. 

It has resonated with me for many reasons. The clear articulation of the usually-unacknowledged dynamic that women contend with on a daily basis when confronted with casual, pervasive misogyny: "Swallow shit, or ruin the entire afternoon?" How this dynamic led her to be distrustful of men, rather than - as the stereotype claims of us - hateful toward them. 

And, the critical concept that being an ally to marginalized people is an ongoing act of vigilance wherein we each have to make ourselves trustworthy to those with identities we do not share:

"This, then, is the terrible bargain we have regretfully struck: Men are allowed the easy comfort of their unexamined privilege, but my regard will always be shot through with a steely, anxious bolt of caution.

A shitty bargain all around, really. But there it is.

There are men who will read this post and think, huffily, dismissively, that a person of color could write a post very much like this one about white people, about me. That's absolutely right. So could a lesbian, a gay man, a bisexual, an asexual. So could a trans or intersex person (which hardly makes a comprehensive list). I'm okay with that. I don't feel hated. I feel mistrusted—and I understand it; I respect it. It means, for me, I must be vigilant, must make myself trustworthy. Every day.

I hope those men will hear me when I say, again, I do not hate you. I mistrust you. You can tell yourselves that's a problem with me, some inherent flaw, some evidence that I am fucked up and broken and weird; you can choose to believe that the women in your lives are nothing like me.

Or you can be vigilant, can make yourselves trustworthy. Every day.

Just in case they're more like me than you think."

The work of progressive feminism will never be finished. Don't let our most valuable tools be taken from us - and, just as importantly, don't throw these tools by the wayside yourself: the insights of those who came before us, and our capacity to build upon these insights.

Maudespeed, sisters.

Republican Administration Seeking Federal Regulation of Speech on Social Media Sites

Via Politico:

"The White House is circulating drafts of a proposed executive order that would address allegations of anti-conservative bias by social media companies, according to a White House official and two other people familiar with the matter — a month after President Donald Trump pledged to explore 'all regulatory and legislative solutions' on the issue."
...

'If the internet is going to be presented as this egalitarian platform and most of Twitter is liberal cesspools of venom, then at least the president wants some fairness in the system,' the White House official said."

Part of the "justification" here is that many conservatives are aggrieved that non-governmental entities don't grant them wanton freedom to spread hateful lies, violent rhetoric, and conspiracy theories.

Social media sites' banning of righwing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, for instance, is an oft-cited example of "bias" against "the conservative viewpoint," which is one of the biggest indictments of 21st-century conservatism in the US.

What's also neat here is that so many formal and informal checks on the Executive Branch are sort of just accepting that Trump can do whatever he wants, especially regarding "culture war issues," by merely issuing an Executive Order.

There's also this relevant tidbit:

"Trump said Monday that he wants the government to work with social media 'to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike,' and the White House has invited internet and technology companies for a discussion on violent online extremism with senior administration officials Friday."

If you actually believe the goal of such "tools" would be to prevent rightwing-inspired domestic terrorism, rather than to persecute the people Trump identifies as his political enemies, I have a large wall to sell you that will be paid for by Mexico.

Gen X as the "Reailty Terrorism" Generation

What a sad state of affairs it is that I was off the grid for most of the weekend and when I logged onto the Internet Sunday night and saw references to more mass shootings, I automatically knew that people couldn't have still been talking about the previous weekend's shooting in Gilroy, California.  That one, after all, was "too long ago" to "still" be in the news a week later.

We simply have so many shootings that each one lasts a news cycle or so as they follow a predictable pattern of breathless reporting > anger > fear > sorrow > cries of the citizenry for our legislators to do something, anything to help keep us safe > admonitions to stop politicizing this political issue > thoughts and prayers > and then repeat the next day when yet another man murders people.

Personally, I try not to get too bogged down in generational narratives, particularly the ones that pit generations against each other, but I hope you'll bear with me today as I speculate. Cynicism is supposedly a defining characteristic of Gen X, but in retrospect, I wonder if what has largely been described as cynicism is actually a shocked, numb horror of coming of age just as terrorism and sociopathy were rapidly normalized by both Internet culture and news-as-politicotainment media culture.

The infamous OJ Simpson Bronco chase of 1994, which I remember seeing nonstop coverage of during high school, seemed to help usher in an era of 24/7 "watch the drama as it happens" news that is at once horrific and dehumanizing precisely because it is implicitly presented as entertaining. As a teenager, I remember the hokey slogans ("the Juice is loose") and the trivialities that the media focused on ("Marcia Clark is ridiculous! Her hair!") that seemed to take center stage, much moreso than the grim reality that someone had committed murder. 

Reality TV was not yet a major trend until circa 1992, with MTV's The Real World, and prior to the reality TV fad, I would argue that TV had a more clear separation between news and entertainment. Yes, the news had a point of view, often told from the perspective of white men who were granted auras of objectivity and authority, but what was particularly dehumanizing about the OJ case was that it was like the media companies had found this new way of presenting murder as existing for our collective entertainment consumption. (In 2006, OJ Simpson had a one-episode prank-based reality TV show called Juiced, which was in the "too offensive but entertaining to look away" category that is a pretty good summary of the mainstream media's attitude toward covering/enabling Donald Trump's political rise).

The Columbine school massacre occurred in 1999, which is largely seen as a birth of a new era of young (often white) angst-driven male violence, and the coverage told us that the incident was both incredibly scary and entertaining. There are, of course, very different narratives around, and state responses to, violence perpetrated by Black people. And, since Columbine, the federal government's lack of effective response to white-male-initiated domestic terrorism can only rightly be seen as a continuation of the United States of America's historical, state-sanctioned approval of white male rage, entitlement, and violence.

Contrast the state's casual indifference to homegrown, white male domestic terrorism, for instance, with its over-reaction to international terrorism. After brown men engaged in terrorism against innocent civilians in 2001, the federal government quickly banded together, started a whole entire war, and passed sweeping legislation in response. Coupled with, and perhaps "justifying," this state-sanctioned aggression and erosion of liberties was the fact that we saw the planes crashing into the Twin Towers over and over and over and over again on TV and online and in newspapers. 

We now take our shoes off in airport security lines. We ration our shampoos and "liquids" into TSA-approved amounts. We're urged to "say something" if/when we "see something." These are all things that are done now because that's what's done in America.

We are still reckoning with these issues and traumas in ways large, small, known, and unfathomable, and that's before I've even factored in the rise of Internet culture, social media, and the cottage industry of white male pundits who perform "political news, but as irony/jokes."

Donald Trump stoked the embers of 9/11 as he ran in 2016 on a message of keeping the country safe from immigrants, terrorists, and/or people of color even as he himself was engaging in stochastic terrorism against his political opponent Hillary Clinton. He continues this course of action, often online and often against women of color who publicly stand up to him, with the help of Twitter who tacitly approves of his behavior through its indifference and inaction.

Of note, Trump hasn't promised to keep anyone safe from the white men in this country who commit political violence, and if he had promised to do so, he'd be failing miserably.

When white men go on shooting sprees after leaving rambling, bigoted Internet screeds, we're told to get over it quikcly, that it's not political violence, and/or that their online behavior and bigotries are irrelevant to their acts of aggression. Many commentators still think that what happens online "isn't real life," even though what happens online often has consequences offline. Sometimes, those consequences are "just" harming another user's mental health or ruining their day, but sometimes - in a nation with relatively easy access to guns - it's a mass shooting spree. That's not to say online culture/radicalization, bigotry, or reality politicotainment are the one cause of mass shootings, just that when easy access to guns are added to the picture they maybe all combine to make the killing that much easier.

The fear many of us have upon attending fairs, concerts, religious services, festivals, or doing basically anything at all in the public sphere is just the price we pay for "living in a free country." The same asinine talking points from people committed to the violent status quo that we heard after Columbine are still being uttered today: lone wolf, video games, bullying, the sadness/angst of white boys.

What is discussed less frequently, and this is a special note to people still operating under the delusion that "the young people will save us," are the ways Internet culture helps radicalize people, especially young white men, given that the US is steeped in a brew of racist misogyny, white male supremacy, techbro libertarianism that constantly engages in both-sidesism, and dehumanizing murder-is-entertaining politicotainment.

Online interactions and the normalization of Reality Terrorism have likely led a lot of people into viewing their interactions with people online as "not real" in a way that is profoundly dehumanizing (as I tweeted yesterday, oh the irony). Social media platforms like Twitter reward the toxic pile-ons and endless quote-tweet "dunks" that, once a target has been identified, end up being profoundly dehumanizing once the competition starts for the best "slam."

It's not only white men who dehumanize others on the Internet. In fact, social justice lingo and half-understood concepts are often weaponized on social media in ways that are extremely abusive. But, it is disproportionately white men who go on terroristic murderous rampages in the US and there are, I think, cultural reasons for that.

As commentators left, right, and center scream at each other about gun violence, hypocrisy, which "side" is worse, First Amendment rights, and the Second Amendment as though we're still living in the media and cultural landscape of the 1960s, I note that most of them will actively ignore (or mock) anything progressive feminists say about the links between mass violence, misogyny, rape culture, and Internet culture. (It's the same story with rape and sexual misconduct. Many on the left and right only care about the issue insofar as they can use it against political opponents, rather than for the simple reason that it's wrong and dehumanizing).

In December 2017, I wrote about the content moderation labor we do that has become a built-in aspect of using social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook given the reality that some users use these platforms in ways far darker than the creators originally imagined. This moderation labor - blocking, muting, reporting - is just what we do now because sociopathy is normalized online and Internet culture designates you a fascist if you want platforms to be different and better.

And, oftentimes taking actions like blocking and muting other users leaves the harassing, extremist, and/or hateful content still "out there," unaddressed, for others users to see and be radicalized by. It puts the targets of such content in a difficult position of knowing that harmful content is still there, able to seen by others and acted upon for the rest of the Internet's life.

I liken it to an experience I had some years ago having been invited to participate in a conversation with men at an anti-feminist site. The site owners invited me to participate in a conversation about feminism wherein they would host two separate blogposts about my commentary: one that I could ostensibly participate in and that they would moderate for (by their standards) hostility, and a separate post where they would post my article and anti-feminists could say whatever they wanted about me and my opinions.

From my correspondence with them, I was supposed to be very grateful for this extreme generosity, but their setup overlooked the detail that, even if I didn't go visit their hostility-is-okay blogpost, I still knew that they would be hosting a forum for anti-feminists to engage in hostility toward me and that such commentary would exist on their site in perpetuity without being addressed by feminists (because most feminists didn't comment at their site).

A current rule of Internet culture really seems to be that users should just "ignore" online hostility and sociopathy targeting us because thinking of more complicated structural solutions isn't worth the "loss of free speech" or is too hard. Unfortunately, the old advice of just ignoring online bullies doesn't seem to be working out so well for us, as a society, as it seems that approach just normalizes aggression and bystander apathy.

Back in my December 2017 post about content moderation, I wrote:

"I think it's reasonable to say that most Internet users are actually exposed to traumatic content somewhat regularly. We've also largely accepted exposure to this content as 'normal,' without having begun to really grapple with the effects of it as a society.

In a popular piece at Medium, James Bridle wrote recently of frightening videos posted on YouTube to scare children, ultimately saying:

'What concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects.'

Bridle concludes that 'responsibility is impossible to assign.'
...
I think often about the voices we've lost over the years, and there have been many, because of the toxic cultures that thrive on platforms where the performance of content moderation labor falls on us, as users and writers.These harms are not something people in my generation (Gen X, if you're curious) really grew up learning how to deal with, or that, in my experience, many mental health professionals are even equipped to understand. I think many people have simply adapted to living with at least a low-grade state of anxiety about what they might encounter today on the Internet, particularly if they do a large portion of work on the Internet as part of their jobs."

Are we, Generation X, the Reality Terrorism Generation?

Perhaps. And perhaps we will soon be the last generation that remembers life before extremely online life. I'm not sure what the implications are of that beyond, in our own small ways, trying to advance norms that are not centered around the sociopathic norms that currently dominate Internet and politicotainment culture.

Everything Wrong With the Social Media Ecosystem In One Image

This comes from an Independent article about the privacy (and potentially national security) concerns with popular app FaceApp:

This app is concerning, and was made by developers in a nation that interfered with our last election, but hey check out the best celebrity photos from this app! We're getting close to 2020 elections after all!

In related news, I'm taking a social media detox for awhile. I will continue to post here from time to time but I don't have the time or will right now to monitor Twitter.

Among other things, Twitter is a platform that both allows and rewards viral sociopathic cruelty, thereby normalizing it within society, without adequately protecting its users or, absconding that moral duty, even providing adequate tools for users to protect themselves. 

Social Media and Disinformation Watch #2

Over at Shakesville, I have a new piece up as part of my ongoing series on social media and disinformation. Check it out!

Social Media and Disinformation Watch, #1

In light of the role that disinformation, particularly on social media, played in the U.S. 2016 presidential election, I thought it would be prudent to start a semi-regular roundup of news items related to disinformation and social media as we look toward 2020.

This new series will be posted at Shakesville. Check out the first post!

I Guess I Listen To Podcasts Now

It was bound to happen, and it's actually been a nice way to take more walks. 

Here's what I'm currently listening to:

• Nancy - The folks at Nancy, particularly co-hosts Kathy Tu and Tobin Low, generate queer content that has both humor and heart. Recommended episodes: "The Ring of Keys" and the interview with Alexandra Billings.

• Battlestar Galacticast - One of my favorite things about Battlestar Galactica is that many of the cast members are at least as nerdy about the show as the diehard fans. This podcast is hosted by Tricia Helfer (Cylon Number Six) and writer Marc Bernadin, with special guests also appearing.

• Gaslit Nation - Co-hosts Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa provide essential analyses of current political events, particularly the Trump regime and Russia.

• The Hilarious World of Depression - The format here is that host John Moe interviews comedians, musicians, and celebrities about depression and mental health. It's done well, I think, and it's been informative to me to see how differently the same mental health issues can manifest in different people. 

• Bag Man - This one's hosted by Rachel Maddow and, in it, she recounts the investigation into Vice President Spiro Agnew's illegal activities and eventual resignation, with obvious parallels to current events.

Feel free to drop recommendations in the comments!

Social Justice Writing and the Decline of Blogging

I'm not going to link to the article I'm referencing today, but I miss the heyday of blogging.

Twitter is much more popular now than blogging and I sometimes wonder how that platform has changed people's conception of what social justice writing is or should be. I think many people do Twitter threads well, in terms of fleshing out thoughts in ways more similar to longform.

Twitter has increased the character count and has made it easier for users to thread their Tweets into a continuous "longform" piece if they wish. Although, I find using that feature to be much clunkier with my usual writing process where I move words and sentences around, compared to the Blogger interface that is essentially a giant text field. For instance, I wrote about this topic on Twitter this morning as well (ironically?) - the piece for Blogger was going to be exactly the same, but even as I copy-pasted the Twitter thread to Blogger, I realized right away that it read choppily and I had additional thoughts to insert.

Anyway, on Twitter, I also see a lot of social justice "dunking" where the aim is to humiliate someone for being so "self-evidently" wrong that it doesn't warrant explanation. I've had run-ins with some serious assholes, as I've sometimes written about here where it's been clear folks were using me as a prop to score cool points to their followings.

Not that this kind of thing didn't happen during the blogging years of the aughts. I remember a lot of blog wars and much of the bully behavior and profile is similar. But, engaging with people on Twitter, particularly in a "dunk" context, gets not worth it fast. Unlike with comment moderation at a website, any fucken rando can chime in to the convo. And, even if you block assholes, you know their comment is still "there" on Twitter, for other people to engage with and view.

Or, you see a bunch of people vehemently agreeing with the dunk, but no one really explains.... why.  This phenomenon probably happens more on Twitter than on blogging platforms, because it more coincides with what Twitter was for. It was designed for the hot, short opinion.

Dunking has its role, I suppose, perhaps mostly if/when users are building solidarity around someone else being wrong/stupid/bad.

But, its purpose and impact on audiences compared to analysis is quite different. With respect to the article in question that I read yesterday, it was a longform piece that read like the author thought social justice writing should be a series of "dunks" and social justice lingo with almost zero analysis.

Part of this, too, might be attributable to a lot of gender studies/social justice writing in academia being inaccessible to many lay audiences - physically, financially, and/or linguistically. For instance, I read a recent journal article, and had to do so 5 times before *I think* I understood it.

It read as though it was written *for* other academics within the same bubble and sphere who already know the zillion other articles already written about the topic at hand, as well as the obscure terminology, rather than for the masses.

Nonetheless, the concepts within academic articles often flow onto Twitter and, like a modern version of the game "telephone," are often warped beyond what the author meant or intended.

So, people think they know what something means, but their understanding comes from a "dunk" or from someone else's (or their own) misreading. And concurrent with these dynamics are bots, deliberate ratfucking, and bad actors.

Despite the decline of blogging, I've also kept up my blog for more than a decade, for these (and other) reasons, including that I just get different things out of each platform.


UPDATE: Okay, the editor-in-chief of the article that inspired this post has publicly addressed the, um, problematic article. So, it's this.

The Emailz, Lock Her Up, etc.

Well, well, well.

Donald Trump's daughter, Ivanka, has purportedly been using a personal email account to conduct government business.

Via the Chicago Tribune:

"Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules, according to people familiar with a White House examination of her correspondence.

White House ethics officials learned of Trump's repeated use of personal email when reviewing emails gathered last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit. That review revealed that throughout much of 2017, she often discussed or relayed official White House business using a private email account with a domain that she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner."

If you remember, and who doesn't, the mainstream media's sheer devotion to the topic of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server during the course of government business far, far outweighed their coverage of her policy issues.

Yet, who else among Trump's administration has since been found to have used personal email for government business? His VP, Mike Pence, for one. As did at least six more of Trump's advisers. In terms of Republicans in general, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, and Bobby Jindal also did.

And, it doesn't matter. It simply doesn't, because none of these people will experience the consequences or an iota of the media coverage and public shaming that Clinton experienced.

As I tweeted yesterday:

It was never about the emails. It was always about finding any conceivable reason to collectively latch onto to stop a woman from becoming president.

And, it will happen again. "The emails" will simply morph into some other reason the woman "isn't qualified."

— Fannie Wolfe 🌈 (@fanniesroom) November 20, 2018

[Transcript of Tweet: It was never about the emails. It was always about finding any conceivable reason to collectively latch onto to stop a woman from becoming president.

And, it will happen again. "The emails" will simply morph into some other reason the woman "isn't qualified."]
 

Is Facebook Worth It?

Today at Shakesville I wrote about the recent New York Times revelations on Facebook's behavior during and after the 2016 presidential election.

Specifically, NYT has reported that Facebook hired a PR firm to discredit those who criticized the company for allowing Cambridge Analytica to access (and then mis-use) Facebook users' personal information and that the company, which has existed since 2004, had no "policy on disinformation."

Given the diminishing public trust in Facebook, at what point will people begin to mass migrate from Facebook to other, more responsible, platforms?

Read the whole thing!

No, You Don't Have To "Tolerate" Nazi "Free Speech"

Today at Shakesville, I have a piece up about "free speech" and the tolerance trap:

"What if all of your abstract adherence to 'anything goes' free speech for, and liberal 'tolerance' of, bigots isn't principled at all; it's just a reflection of your own comfort with a bigoted status quo and your discomfort with taking a stand against abusers?"

 Read the whole thing!

The Absurdity of Engaging Abusers Rationally

Particularly since the 2016 election, op-eds along the lines of "why we must be nice to bigots" have become something of a cottage industry.

Over at Everywhereist, Geraldine shares her account of what happened when she tried to engage her Internet abusers with civility and an open, questioning mind.

In short, it was sort of pointless.

The problem with Internet abusers, you see, is that they are abusive, a trait that often comes with it an unwillingness or inability to show empathy, and deliberate attempt to push buttons and cause pain. Remember, "Many 'trolls' understand that their targets might be feeling upset, sad, angry, or hurt - they just don't care," because the typical profile of an Internet abuser is that he (most often) rates high in psychopathy and sadism and low in empathy.

In my experience dealing with Internet abusers, they adapt their abuse to whatever method I use to engage them: If I ignore or block them, they frame me as a coward. If I directly engage them, they continue and often escalate the abuse, often roping in abusive allies. If I de-construct the nature of their abuse in a blogpost, they frame me as pathetic for writing a blogpost about their abuse. If I show anger, sadness, or fear, they mock me, obviously pleased at getting a reaction.

Geraldine ends her piece:

"There’s a lot of discussion about how we need to reach out and talk to people who disagree with us – how we need to extend an olive branch and find common ground – and that’s a lovely sentiment, but in order for that to work, the other party needs to be … well, not a raging asshole. Insisting that people continue to reach out to their abusers in hopes that they will change suggests that the abuse is somehow in the victim’s hands to control. This puts a ridiculously unfair onus on marginalized groups – in particular, women of color, who are the group most likely to be harassed online."

Indeed.

I note here with a fair amount of cynicism that some of the endless, daily acts of emotional labor that marginalized people engage in both keeps us safer in the world and continues to privilege the feelings of the privileged. It's part of what makes bigotry, and abuse (because they are hopelessly intertwined), so difficult to eradicate.

Think for a second when the last piece scolding you to be nicer to bigots came with it even the barest acknowledgement of the emotional toll that doing so might take on you, or ways to keep your self safe when navigating these conversations, or - hell - an admission that these scold-pieces themselves are, yes, quite absurd but necessary because, in the US, privileged people have a pervasive, infantile notion that if bigotry exists at all, it only exists in its most obvious-to-the-privileged manifestations: the KKK grand wizard, the Westboro Baptist Church, Ann Coulter, and so forth. 

In the US, most people are culturally trained to disregard the feelings, pain, and lived experiences of  those who are not male, not white, not cisgender, not Christian, and not heterosexual.  A refusal to coddle bigots and abusers is so uncomfortable for many people because it de-centers the privileged within the conversation.

At its core, refusing to coddle bigots and abusers sometimes isn't about convincing assholes to be nicer, it's to tell ourselves and everyone else that we fucking deserve better even if the asshole doesn't think so.

Today In Internet

Via Newsweek, this seems fine:

"Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) trained an artificial intelligence algorithm dubbed 'Norman' to become a psychopath by only exposing it to macabre Reddit images of gruesome deaths and violence, according to a new study."

After exposing the AI to violent images, the researchers then tested it with Rorscach inkblot tests:

"Among the Rorschach inkblots used to test the now-tainted AI, Norman said an image showed a man being 'shot dead,' while a standard AI looked at the same image and saw 'a close up of a vase with flowers.' In another, Norman said he saw a man being shot 'in front of his screaming wife,' while the AI not exposed to sordid, disturbing images saw 'a person holding an umbrella in the air.'"

...The MIT researchers in this study redacted the name of the specific subreddits used to train the AI. The researchers said the AI 'suffered from extended exposure to the darkest corners of Reddit' to illustrate 'the dangers of Artificial Intelligence gone wrong when biased data is used in machine learning algorithms.'"

Imagine what sadistic, sociopathic, and psychopathic web content is doing to actual human beings. What is the mental health impact, not just of violent web content, but of trolling, harassment, and microtargeting of Internet users?

A Personal Twitter Update

I've deleted Twitter from my phone.

I may install it again, but my main goal in deleting it was to at least temporarily prevent myself from compulsively checking it, while observing any change in my attitude, perceptions of the news, and my own mental state.

So far, it's been highly liberating (even though, yes, I do check it via computer).

As I mentioned last week, news happens very fast on Twitter, along with lightning-fast "takes" and misinformation. Twitter largely, for me, has become something of a time suck in which I observe a steady stream of people reacting (which I guess is the point), but the reactions themselves are often strongly-negative while also being somehow incredibly-fleeting.

It's not all bad. But, in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, I wrote that people on social media, especially Twitter, seemed to have been having different experiences and perceptions of Election 2016 than people who were not. We now know, of course, that some of the skewing of perception and the shit-stirring was intentionally cultivated by Russian agents and Cambridge Analytica, among others.

"Today on Twitter, the President said" is just a thing that we read and hear and see over and over and over again because it is also now completely normalized within the mainstream media that Donald Trump recklessly and incompetently broadcasts his democracy-destroying utterances and warmongering provocations via his Goebbels-Schnauze, while the press largely seems to be very impressed that he speaks so "directly" to the citizenry of the world, unlike that deceptive she-bot who ran against him.

I also find that I am not always remembering some of the outrages from months ago, not because they are not horrible, but because they are so, so many. So much that I sometimes think, my god, how can we ever dig ourselves out of this? Can this ever become unbroken?

To maintain my hope, I cannot have these thoughts be the first and last that I reach for at my nightstand.

Facebook Users and Informed Consent

This op-ed is a week old, but over at The New York Times, Zeynep Tufekci wrote about Facebook surveillance in general and with respect to the 2016 election. 

In it, she makes an important point about, while user profiling and surveillance are part of Facebook's business model, it's likely that most users do not give informed consent to everything the company does:

"Facebook doesn’t just record every click and 'like' on the site. It also collects browsing histories. It also purchases 'external' data like financial information about users (though European nations have some regulations that block some of this). Facebook recently announced its intent to merge 'offline' data — things you do in the physical world, such as making purchases in a brick-and-mortar store — with its vast online databases.

Facebook even creates 'shadow profiles' of nonusers. That is, even if you are not on Facebook, the company may well have compiled a profile of you, inferred from data provided by your friends or from other data. This is an involuntary dossier from which you cannot opt out in the United States.

.....Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you had explicitly consented to turn over your Facebook data to another company. Do you keep up with the latest academic research on computational inference? Did you know that algorithms now do a pretty good job of inferring a person’s personality traits, sexual orientation, political views, mental health status, substance abuse history and more just from his or her Facebook 'likes' — and that there are new applications of this data being discovered every day?

Given this confusing and rapidly changing state of affairs about what the data may reveal and how it may be used, consent to ongoing and extensive data collection can be neither fully informed nor truly consensual — especially since it is practically irrevocable."

Most Facebook users know that the company generates revenue by selling ads, many likely sense that these ads are targeted to them. But, it's likely that most users don't know the extent of it. See, for instance, this Twitter thread.

As I've noted before, we should be terrified if Mark Zuckerberg actually does choose to run for office, particularly given the number of human profiles, including profiles of people who don't even use Facebook, his company has seemingly amassed.