BF2S Forums Where are all the whiny peaceful "Enlightened" European now?

open source programmer culture exists at facebook? lmfao. under what leadership? they are one of the least accountable and most private companies in the world when it comes to what they do with consumer data. you could just as easily generalise and say 'this silicon valley tech world that they come from is full of misanthropist 1%'er libertarians'. right.

i think it is a bit much to say it 'contributed to the organisation of the arab spring'. it provided a platform, passively, which they had built to harvest and monetise data about its users. they didn't design a communications network so that dissidents and rebels could gather in a safe space: it was an inadvertent byproduct of their site becoming so popular. you're really crediting facebook with too much there. that they threw in a few minor features like a 'i'm safe' button in the event of natural disasters or terror attacks is them taking the momentum and running with it. it's good PR for trivial effort. but it's not their fucking mission statement.

are you really crediting facebook, of all places, with aspects of the online culture that created things like bitcoin or the dark web? ha ha ha.



"recently they paid teens $20 a month to install VPN's that then spied on them" --> wow, facebook has some idealistic staff!



i have no real problem with warren's argument that giant tech companies should be broken up. i'd rather not sleep-walk into a world of supra-national platform capitalism, with unaccountable companies that pay no tax harvesting personal data for profit.

re: foucault, what exactly is wrong with crypto-anarchism, anyway? is this character assassination by VPN? i'm sure you have a very nuanced appreciation of his work. i really hope you're not trying to suggest that facebook are somehow part of the cause for crypto communications and that, by extension, foucault would be pro-facebook.

it is perverse that you present facebook as a company interested in 90s-era hacker visions of 'the open internet', with its slogan of 'information wants to be free', when it is a profit-driven private company that has as its PRODUCT the HUMAN USER. it's insulting you talk about them upholding ideals of free speech when the very real problem is that these tech giants are actively contributing to the poisoning of our public spaces, not bravely protecting it. how the fuck did you just watch that documentary about facebook's dealings with cambridge analytica and conclude that they're a bunch of 'we must evade the tyrannical state!' freedom fighters?!?

Last edited by uziq (2019-10-26 06:40:22)

i mentioned foucault precisely in the context of his critique of liberal public spaces. you were the one citing them as if they were some ideal space where people can connect and say anything. i was citing thinkers like foucault in the contrary, moron. quite sure i’ve read a lot more of it than you.

so facebook gives access to tranches of data for millions of people to the trump campaign, or rather there are long unacknowledged ‘leaks’, and allows political campaigns to pay them to advertise to targeted demographics on its platform ... who are psychologically engineered by facebook’s feed and ads for maximal impact and reactions ... but facebook isn’t anywhere near as responsible as those trump staffers. right.

and i’m discussing the problem with companies like google, facebook, amazon etc wanting to be inclusive platforms for people to do everything on. i’m not condoning censoring the internet. why does criticising facebook’s shady data policies and algorithmic fostering of ugly politics mean the internet is going to become a state-owned space? not sure i follow your logic.

people don’t get upset when state legal authority is used to enforce competition laws, or to regulate broadcasters for the public good. so what’s your problem here with reigning in totally unaccountable corporations like facebook, who operate pretty much with impunity?

last month a story broke about facebook systematically inflating the viewer figures for their video apps by 900% entire industries moved their content production to facebook because ‘that’s where the viewers are’. websites shifted their whole model to producing facebook-ready content. meanwhile facebook was purposefully lying about its activity and audiences. do you know how many writers, video producers, etc lost their job over that? facebook were fined $45 million. so about a day’s work for gutting an entire creative industry. but hey, their workers are super idealistic !

Last edited by uziq (2019-10-26 08:56:00)

i am not framing it as a ‘culture war’. it’s not a matter of values or social norms — the internet should be free for people to congregate and talk about whatever they want within broad legal bounds. get outta here with that ‘rap music’ and ‘gay promoting media’ stuff.

it’s a different matter when there are tech companies with more data than anyone else in the world selling access to political actors. people are being manipulated and access to clear information, and by extension democracy, is being seriously disrupted.

i don’t buy your frankly unproven ranting about the media influencing human behaviour. it’s illiterate as far as psychology and sociology are concerned. i’m not asking for the big kind government to hide scary or unwholesome things from me with moral arguments. don’t hijack the argument.

Last edited by uziq (2019-10-26 09:39:57)

i like mass media? that’s news to me. i don’t watch tv, have never subscribed to netflix, haven’t read or seen game of thrones, don’t listen to pop music, never had spotify ... don’t use facebook, instagram, snapchat ... so no, i am not clinging onto beloved mass media.

the president is a reality tv star because politics is a popularity contest. famous people are familiar. people misplace feelings of trust to the readily familiar. donald trump being president is not the same thing as someone being led to shoot someone because of a rap lyric. you just cannot make the same assumptions about human behaviour and causes. we had these fucking debates in the 2000s. marilyn manson and quake do not create school shooters. gangsta rap has less to do with crime levels than crushing poverty.

in any case, you’re turning the argument from ‘tech corporations are too powerful’ into ‘americans have too much freedom’. talk about a category error.

Last edited by uziq (2019-10-26 10:09:01)

there are a lot of different types of publishing houses. please tell me some more about how nonfiction books on history and politics are poisoning the minds of people. lol. fucking moron.

are you really conflating problematic advertising by gun companies/lobbies (and pharmaceutical companies, for that matter) with ‘the media’ being a bad influence? very hot take. i guess it’s the fault of literary editors in new york that gun companies can advertise and sell pink handguns to children.

do you even try?

Last edited by uziq (2019-10-26 10:47:41)

We already know you follow social justice Twitter. I wouldn't be surprised if you work for a publisher of gay non-fiction.

Like a biography on Elton John, I guess.

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fwiw former IT industry. I don't use facebook at all apart from maintaining a placeholder account (as bereft of personal info as possible) to prevent people from making one in my name. I've seen that happen to businesses as well, and facebook was rather uncooperative in terminating those. There are no good reasons to trust that company or get sucked down its bullshit rabbit hole. Some people like to talk about fox brain and cnn brain, but they have a blind spot when it comes to facebook brain.

These tech companies should be made to sweat more under the scrutiny of lawmakers.

i am not going to click that. suffice to say that reputable publishers do not have ‘gay non-fiction’ lists and editorial teams. spare me your bizarre fixations. there is no way i am part of the ‘mass media’ with a stake in promoting ‘culturally damaging’ sinful products.

the notion that none of foucault's ideas can be applied to the internet because he didn't see it, or wasn't around to write about directly, is fatuous in the extreme. that might be prudent academic process in history departments, but it's not how philosophy or critical theory works. plus, lots of thinkers have built on foucault's thought to write about modern media and technologies very well, running the whole panoply from mcluhan to kittler and virilio. foucault isn't imprisoned in the era of type or television. the internet hasn't completely changed the notion of the public sphere. if anything, certain of his central concepts such as bio-power or bio-politics have only gained more valency the more and more that technologies intrude into our daily life; things like wearable tech and social media are supercharged versions of the incipient things he was writing about.

what exactly is the problem with the proposition that political adverts or campaigns should be kept away from social media networks? with the amount of data they have, effectively building intelligent models of umpteen categories of user according to micro-demographics or individual psychology/sociology, it is really too dangerous to sell off access to political actors. facebook has clearly collected all the data there is to collect about a person, from their strongly held beliefs to the navel-fluff they toss out into the aether at 2.30am, and they have paired it with one of the most effective, dopamine-leveraging mechanisms ever developed on a web platform. what we had in the last round of elections was 'swing voters' being aggressively marketed to by highly targeted (and sometimes outright mendacious ad campaigns): so that someone whose data profile identified them as a xenophobe would see nothing but dishonest lies about mexicans/turks/refugees/etc. on their feed constantly -- facebook's open source, idealistic boffins having long ago identified that outrage and negative emotions elicit far more (and thus far more profitable) feedback than positive, feel-good information.

political campaigning and adverts before were about presenting information with persuasion or rhetoric to try and convince someone to your cause. now, sites like facebook have facilitated a new sort of campaigning, where in exchange for ad money, campaigns can get access to incredibly well-calibrated and sifted data profiles and essentially invade someone's home space/computer/mobile device to continually excite their pet fears and 'trigger points'. there has never before been such a potential for direct influence over people -- and fusty criteria like 'truth' and 'transparency' which previous campaigns were expected to meet in order to broadcast on television or whatever, aren't even mentioned. you don't even know where the money comes from, or who puts the adverts before your eyes. this is Bad.

it's a disastrous overlap of interests, i'm sorry, and does need to be regulated. these huge tech companies want to position themselves as single-platform entities used for everything, and their branching out into news aggregation and online currencies heralds a truly frightening new direction. they are held to none of the accountability or transparency of old-style 'media organizations' and yet that is increasingly the function they are trying to serve, as an auxiliary estate to the press/politics. it needs regulation or a few heads of the hydra need to be cut off.

Last edited by uziq (2019-10-27 08:42:03)

Well Dilbert just talked himself out of his own vote...

uziq wrote:

the notion that none of foucault's ideas can be applied to the internet because he didn't see it, or wasn't around to write about directly, is fatuous in the extreme. that might be prudent academic process in history departments, but it's not how philosophy or critical theory works. plus, lots of thinkers have built on foucault's thought to write about modern media and technologies very well, running the whole panoply from mcluhan to kittler and virilio. foucault isn't imprisoned in the era of type or television. the internet hasn't completely changed the notion of the public sphere. if anything, certain of his central concepts such as bio-power or bio-politics have only gained more valency the more and more that technologies intrude into our daily life; things like wearable tech and social media are supercharged versions of the incipient things he was writing about.

what exactly is the problem with the proposition that political adverts or campaigns should be kept away from social media networks? with the amount of data they have, effectively building intelligent models of umpteen categories of user according to micro-demographics or individual psychology/sociology, it is really too dangerous to sell off access to political actors. facebook has clearly collected all the data there is to collect about a person, from their strongly held beliefs to the navel-fluff they toss out into the aether at 2.30am, and they have paired it with one of the most effective, dopamine-leveraging mechanisms ever developed on a web platform. what we had in the last round of elections was 'swing voters' being aggressively marketed to by highly targeted (and sometimes outright mendacious ad campaigns): so that someone whose data profile identified them as a xenophobe would see nothing but dishonest lies about mexicans/turks/refugees/etc. on their feed constantly -- facebook's open source, idealistic boffins having long ago identified that outrage and negative emotions elicit far more (and thus far more profitable) feedback than positive, feel-good information.

political campaigning and adverts before were about presenting information with persuasion or rhetoric to try and convince someone to your cause. now, sites like facebook have facilitated a new sort of campaigning, where in exchange for ad money, campaigns can get access to incredibly well-calibrated and sifted data profiles and essentially invade someone's home space/computer/mobile device to continually excite their pet fears and 'trigger points'. there has never before been such a potential for direct influence over people -- and fusty criteria like 'truth' and 'transparency' which previous campaigns were expected to meet in order to broadcast on television or whatever, aren't even mentioned. you don't even know where the money comes from, or who puts the adverts before your eyes. this is Bad.

it's a disastrous overlap of interests, i'm sorry, and does need to be regulated. these huge tech companies want to position themselves as single-platform entities used for everything, and their branching out into news aggregation and online currencies heralds a truly frightening new direction. they are held to none of the accountability or transparency of old-style 'media organizations' and yet that is increasingly the function they are trying to serve, as an auxiliary estate to the press/politics. it needs regulation or a few heads of the hydra need to be cut off.

My argument wasn't that none of foucault's ideas could be applied to the internet - at the end of the day discourse exists there as well so fair enough, I'm sure plenty of his theories are still applicable. However, I assumed anything that he may have written on public space must have been in the context of either hidden state power or the control over populations through implicit rules & norms, both of which are most applicable in if not confined to the physical space. Which the internet isn't. Anyway, I've only read discipline & punish / the order of things and some selected works so I'm sure you can point me to something I might've missed. Biopower is familiar but I don't think I've read into it much. As a sidenote, there's wonderful parallels to be found in thomas kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions & foucault's archaelogy of knowledge (historians spend a good deal of time on those).

As for political adverts - I don't think it's realistic to expect politics to separate itself from social networks. Nor would it be healthy in a time when it is more important than ever to bring high politics to the people in more visible ways. It has to move with technological advancement, though it would be best if it does so in a conscientious / responsible manner. That's where these adverts were so very wrong. But it's not just about politics here either. The algorithms also respond to and structure people's news feeds. Someone who is identified as a xenophobe as per your example will have his google feed & hits filled to the brim with articles that appeal to his or her narrow world view. There you could argue is a strong case for holding companies like google and FB responsible, though paradoxically that sort of stuff is also the only thing people who can be categorised in certain ways (i.e. xenophobes or others) really respond to or even search for. Part of the problem and responsibility then also lies with users and how we as a society educate people on these subjects. At present, we don't.

I disagree that political adverts 'were about presenting information with persuasion or rhetoric to try and convince someone to a cause'. That's an idealised version of politics that never really existed.

Wrt to splitting up big tech - The Economist has a few in depth articles on those proposals and the jury is still out. In terms of social media platforms I think the whole point to it is that everyone uses it. If FB is broken up into a dozen different companies, you can bet that it would only be a matter of time before 11 of them die and one dominates. This isn't a commodity market and wouldn't have the same effects as the break up of Standard Oil.

Last edited by Larssen (2019-10-29 15:14:28)

Well seems there's going to be a december election in the UK. Unless Boris cocks up spectacularly I expect him to win with a decent margin, as he holds strong appeal to quite a bit of people who are traditionally part of labour's base. However, the LibDems will gain a far larger presence in parliament as well.

Boris won't be able to secure more conservative seats in parliament than the tories currently have and voting rounds will be severely impacted by a significant liberals + labour 'no' on almost every proposed deal. Meaning he won't be able to force through his vision on Brexit after mid-december. Moreover, the timeline from formation of a new government to brexit is too short to manage an orderly exit by january 31st. I expect another 3 month delay in january.

uziq wrote:

if the jury is out at the economist, it's probably a good indication that it's a great fucking idea tbh.

Hey, their analysis is pretty good.

Last edited by Larssen (2019-10-29 15:39:55)