Twitter was not made for serious, challenging conversation from the beginning.
Every feature it has is designed for short, sarcastic tweets or replies. It's almost hardcoded to the product. Possibly that's why politicians love it.
Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
131–140 of 148 posts
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting that only one of those three qualities is subjective. I also think you are incorrect about this being a pick-two situation. Righteousness, in addition to being subjective, is mutually exclusive with impartiality.
The way you remain both righteous and impartial is to never do anything consequential. That way, you can have the same effect for all parties while never doing anything you would find morally objectionable. It's essentially the trivial solution (magnitude of impact = 0), but is often implicitly advocated for in many debates here. It occurred to me after writing this that there's a fourth variable: integrity , defined…
What you will may be subjective, but your ability to bend others to your choices is not. Thus I'd argue power is objective.
Righteousness occurs as a value assessment within a moral framework. When all values, including opposing values, are of equal worth, we have a framework of amorality, which cannot ever produce a judgement of righteousness or wickedness. In other words, the term itself reduces the frameworks which fit. All of the remaining frameworks require active choice (as far as I understand).
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
That ambiguity was a deliberate strategy of Gamergate (and still is a deliberate strategy even today of those with similar disposition).
It's not just gamergate that uses that ambiguity -- think of how the "okay" symbol ("o" formed with thumb and first finger, remaining three extended upward) has been repurposed as a white power gesture; all of the group photos of proud boys and other white supremacist groups now have them all holding up that distinctive "okay" hand gesture, because it's a call out to their values and to the people that share them. Bu…
The proud boys are a strange white power group when they have prominent black members.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#134Wetherell was not involved with launching retweet, and didn't implement much (maybe any?) of the code in that Nov 2009 launch. He probably did write a version of the frontend for retweet at some point, and had done some backend code, but all of that was largely rewritten by launch day.
To be fair, he probably didn't claim that, but making his involvement out to be more than it was probably did well for the article.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
That might be how the activists like to spin it but it became about much more than that when it blew up and went viral. It was really about an entire established lively and chaotic culture developed over multiple decades that people adored and got defensive over. So some heavy handed top down attempts to manually change it didn’t go over well. Then the villainization of anyone who disagreed with the activists approac…
Then the villainization of anyone who disagreed with this approach as people who simply think it’s okay to harass women only increased backlash. Is it recency bias on my part to say it feels like this tactic is showing up in more places than it deserves to? The last American election cycle was terrifying to watch for precisely what you just described happening all across Twitter and elsewhere on social media. Assent…
It’s a tactic that was perfect during the course of the last election. Which of course existed well before that but now it’s been refined for the internet and social media age.
I’m not looking forward to the next election.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#136Hyperbole. Social media is not broken. The retweet is not why. And this guy didn't invent the idea of republishing content. Other microblog services had that, and I'm pretty sure Twitter users were doing it on their own.
So I'm curious what you think is the problem, or if there is one - and if so, what your proposed solution would be?
People create their own problems out of nothing. People make mountains out of mole hills. Twitter is one of those problems. Twitter is one of those mountains.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#137Reading through some of the comments here, it occurs to me that there's a moral trilemma at play here: you can have power , you can have righteousness , or you can have impartiality , but you must pick 2 out of 3. If you bring something new into the world that gives new voice or new capabilities to previously disenfranchised groups, then you have a choice between explicitly selecting who you bestow this power on (in…
It's absurd to describe groups whose concerns have been primary focus of American politics for 50 years, who benefit from numerous policies granting preferential treatment and have whole departments in universities devoted to their interests as "disenfranchised".
And that's where most attempts to be "righteous" fail: either through shallow thinking or the desire to be popular, they favor those groups that are already politically powerful and ignore the truly disenfranchised.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
That might be how the activists like to spin it but it became about much more than that when it blew up and went viral. It was really about an entire established lively and chaotic culture developed over multiple decades that people adored and got defensive over. So some heavy handed top down attempts to manually change it didn’t go over well. Then the villainization of anyone who disagreed with the activists approac…
Then the villainization of anyone who disagreed with this approach as people who simply think it’s okay to harass women only increased backlash. Is it recency bias on my part to say it feels like this tactic is showing up in more places than it deserves to? The last American election cycle was terrifying to watch for precisely what you just described happening all across Twitter and elsewhere on social media. Assent…
> Is it recency bias on my part to say it feels like this tactic is showing up in more places than it deserves to?
No, but it is recency bias to think that it showing up in more places than it deserves to is novel. It has been an exceedingly common tactic everywhere for probably as long as civilization, or maybe language, has existed; it manifests in moral/religious/philosophical dualism, for instance, which is extremely widespread and ancient.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it not a reflection on the argument? If I say something is good advice but don't follow it, I clearly don't believe it myself in every respect. That seems highly relevant.
Again, that says something about you , not about the argument. I say people should get some exercise every day. In practice, however, I only get to the gym once or twice a week. That means I'm a hypocrite (and a lazy one at that), but it doesn't mean people shouldn't get some exercise every day.
But it says you don't believe your own advice doesn't it? If you believed it, you'd exercise despite your laziness. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say you believe a counterfactual more. I'm pretty confident about the effects of exercise, but we're talking here about hypothetical difficult questions. If even the person who supposedly knows the most about a particular argument isn't convinced by it, how can that not reflect poorly on the argument?
But even if I accepted that pointing out hypocrisy is purely argument by ad hominem, I don't see how it would be irrelevant. If someone believes something radically different from me and therefore works towards radically different outcomes, I consciously try to stay open minded in case they know something I don't. If someone isn't consistent in what they profess and what they work towards, I don't feel I owe them that sort of hearing. At best, their ideas are good but they don't understand them well enough to represent them. Would you really call that unfair?
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I'm curious what you think is the problem, or if there is one - and if so, what your proposed solution would be?
People create their own problems out of nothing. People make mountains out of mole hills. Twitter is one of those problems. Twitter is one of those mountains.
So you haven't thought very deeply into this? Those statements don't tell me anything - I can say there's the colour white, but that's actually made up of a spectrum of colours. I ask because if you haven't thought deeply into it, how are you confident that your macro statements are accurate?