swampman posted:It's right to be angry about politics but you don't need to be in the moment, hearing about every police brutalization, every far flung country getting usurped to bits, it's okay to not know about stuff. The internet is exhausting because it puts you in a position of constant reaction.
Caesura109 posted:Deciding to log off after having multiple productive conversations about politics with people face-to-face, Online is a shithell of faceless partisans screaming loaded statements for gratification and applause from others. I'm only frequenting this site now.
*arms spread wide* welcome to the real world, neo
roseweird posted:hi. i don't use and have never used facebook. i have very few close social connections. there are very few people, online or offline, whose opinions matter to me at all. i feel pretty happy most of the time.
saem
might sound too cool for school but i remember when facebook was first around the fact that it was "exclusive" and for people at "College only" really turned me off and i never got into the idea aside from making a page specifically for it to get password hacked and me to never care. maybe my page is a part of a giant trollfarm or something who knows.
Beyond that, it is fully public that Facebook enrolled tons of users unwillingly & without their knowledge in a long-term private behavioral experiment the company could never have gotten past the NSF (I mean besides just their site as a whole), where the goal was to try to make people's lives more unpleasant and make them feel more socially isolated, simply to see if they could.
This is worth looking up if you missed it, and again, this was all fully uncovered after the fact and has been written about in the news press many times, and there's no reason to think it hasn't been followed by other, ongoing experiments on users.
if you find visiting those sites makes you less happy you might as well assume it's multi-site fallout from your unwitting participation in that experiment, I mean the truth is that, past a certain very small amount of time per week, visiting those sites makes everyone less happy, but it's not really paranoia to assume that it's the intended outcome in any specific case, and it might help you to walk away from them without living in fear you're somehow missing something helpful just around the bend or something. these sites are always somewhere between passively and actively out to fuck with you and wreck your mood.
instagram: not even once
twitter: https://curiouscat.me/getfiscal/post/192246370
It says a lot about these techies that they were completely blindsided by the backlash.
Of course, they learned the hard way to do this secretly now
elemennop posted:however, dating for younger people is done almost exclusively through phone apps.
I just realized that it's been 5 years since I've been on a date with a person that I didn't meet through an app, incl. my current partner. I want to feel depressed about this but I guess it's no more soulless than whistling at dames down by the soda jerk or writing personals in the Sunday Post or whatever the hell people did before Tinder.
Belphegor posted:If I recall correctly the mood-fucking experiment was published openly in PNAS (yes) when it was completed and the people at Facebook who were in charge of it were completely shocked that it caused an outroar.
I'm kind of curious now if every single person involved in the research was a STEMlord huffing their own farts with absolutely no social sciences experience who had never even heard of a research ethics board and just did it on a lark, or if they hired a bunch of professional anthropologists who are already used to being ethically bankrupt and had no qualms ignoring research protocols.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/social-abacus/201407/facebook-experiment-where-social-science-and-business-meet posted:As discussed in multiple places, people were not given the option of opting in or out of the study, were not told about the study afterwards, and the ethical review procedures were done in-house at Facebook. The reality, however, is that most ethics review boards would likely have approved the study without serious questions. Technically, such a study did not place people at heightened risk of emotional or physical harm.
But there’s a bigger question. Facebook is always testing to see which News Feed algorithms result in the most engagement of its users. Little experiments are always ongoing, causing Kashmir Hill in her expose in Forbes to wonder, “what other kind of psychological manipulation users are subjected to that they never learn about because it isn’t published in an academic journal?”
But wait a minute. Isn’t the constant testing of a product good business? Virtually every vibrant company is constantly conducting little experiments to see how to improve the sales, service, or efficiency of its product. The difference here is that Facebook took the initiative to publish an important psychological finding that benefits scientific thinking.
Petrol posted:one cool thing about facebook is you dont have to go cold turkey since they make it real easy to deactivate your account for as long as you like. so you can just try it out. post that you're taking a break; if there's anyone you want to keep in touch with but dont have other means, send em a PM and work it out; then deactivate. and see how it goes. try it for at least a week? you can still go online and read stuff and msg people in other ways but hopefully it'll give you some mental/emotional breathing space and encourage you to use some of your time and energy in other ways. baby steps. you'll do better than you expect!
in a moment of acute narcissism I once installed a facebook plug-in that notifies you when people delete you as friends. since the way it works is by comparing snapshots of your friends list, the main thing it actually does is tell you when people deactivate, which has in turn revealed to me that there are a lot of people who routinely delete and undelete their facebook. one of them is the (now former) tribal judge i used to work for, who is an extremely cool and relatable person who continues to do extremely important work for her people in a very high stress position. when her account is active, she posts plenty of political and personal stuff, but she's deactivated almost as often as not and that appears to work for her, and for quite a few others
i think that's a viable path, at least for some people--seek moderation, but don't trust yourself to moderate in the moment to moment and instead set up minor barriers to yourself
roseweird posted:today i lived another day
congrats!
roseweird posted:today i lived another day
nice.
shriekingviolet posted:Belphegor posted:If I recall correctly the mood-fucking experiment was published openly in PNAS (yes) when it was completed and the people at Facebook who were in charge of it were completely shocked that it caused an outroar.
if they hired a bunch of professional anthropologists who are already used to being ethically bankrupt and had no qualms ignoring research protocols.
you run into anything in particular? every one I know is deathly serious about field ethics, even the biomedical people
The oil and gas industry owns academics in every field out here, so you have things like generous "philanthropic" research grants from oil companies to do a cozy ethnography (to show they really care) about the reserve community downriver from a tailings pond with a tragicomically high rate of cancer and birth defects (which will not be mentioned,) or whose land is going to be expropriated and bulldozed next week to make room for a theoretical future pipeline that isn't even approved yet.
Out of context interview segments from these projects have this weird tendency to show up without the participants informed consent in propaganda campaigns to fabricate fake local support for oil megaprojects and undermine indigenous solidarity. Which is not to say that these are never contentious things within communities, but corporate money happily funds research that will give them means to tilt the scales, essentially turning it into espionage.
cars posted:the employers have stooped ever so slightly to meet ethical critiques through learning, using and deploying the right language, while being much more ready to toss people out for bad publicity that's not on message.
this reminds me, in a roundabout way, of an astute left critique of political correctness embedded in a stewart lee bit. allow me to quote a fragment of my unpublished zizek takedown (bold for emphasis):
Zizek has a formula for critiquing left/liberal ideology. He often begins by highlighting its inauthenticity, and the dangers that arise. For example, he begins a recent video about political correctness with the observation that it "not only covers up the actual relationship of power, but makes it even more impenetrable. You know, if you have a boss who is up there, the old-fashioned boss shouting at you, exerting full brutal authority. In a way it’s much easier to rebel than to have a friendly boss who embraces you or how was the last night with your girlfriend, blah, blah, all that buddy stuff. Well then it almost appears impolite to protest." So far, so reasonable.
The next step after the initial observation is anecdote. This is always where things begin to go awry. In the present example, he describes a father, standing in for "traditional authority", commanding a child to visit his grandmother because it is his duty. A "clear order" like this, Zizek says, is fine because rebellion is still possible. "But what would the so-called post-modern non-authoritarian father do? I know because I experienced it." He describes the father guilt-tripping the child into going while at the same time saying it's ultimately their choice. This, he claims, is a "much stronger order", and is in fact "the formula of totalitarianism... 'I know better than you what you really want and I may appear to be forcing you to do it, but I’m really just making you do what, without fully knowing, you want' and so on."
This only really qualifies as a description of totalitarianism if two conditions are met. The first is that you are only concerned with the psychological relationship between the totalitarian state and the citizen. The second is that you approach this relationship from the perspective of the citizen whose only experience of victimisation by the totalitarian state is mere restriction. In fact, Zizek at this point almost seems to be describing a frustration not with the effect of political correctness on the actually oppressed, but on people like himself. Does he really experience the proscriptions of political correctness as a more forceful system of control than totalitarianism? Doubtful, but this sort of hyperbole is simply another frequent strategy to excite the audience, and this is one of the milder examples.
He then offers a more bizarre anecdote (by way of hearsay) - apparently, certain US airlines have banned e-cigarettes not for safety reasons, but because by vaping "you publicly display your addiction and that is not a good pedagogical example for others and so on and so on". In the absence of any source for this claim, I can only assume this is a deliberate misunderstanding of the reference in airline policies to "simulated smoking materials", as though it was the simulation of smoking that poses the problem and not actual concerns about unsafe batteries and extreme heat generation. Perhaps this absurdity is an attempt at humour, which is ironic, since it brings to mind the more intellectually astute insight of a comedian, Stewart Lee:
"84% of people, apparently, think that political correctness has gone mad. Now, I don't know if it has, people still get killed don't they, for being the wrong colour or the wrong sexuality or whatever, and what is political correctness? It's an often clumsy negotiation towards a kind of formally inclusive language, and there's all sorts of problems with it, but it's better than what we had before. But 84% of people think that political correctness has gone mad... I'm 40, and I can remember before political correctness. That's why I think it's better. When I was 12, there was one asian kid in our class, and every day when he read the register out, for a year, the teacher instead of using his name called him 'the black spot', every day for a year. The street I grew up in, just south of Birmingham, there was I remember, in 1972 a black family wanted to move in, and all the white families put pressure on the guy not to sell the house. And 6 years previous to that, David Cameron never mentions it, but the Conservative Party won a by-election in Birmingham, and they sent out little kids with leaflets that said, 'If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour.' And if political correctness has achieved one thing, it's to make the Conservative Party cloak its inherent racism behind more creative language. But on the whole, when people say political correctness has gone mad, I think well, what d'you mean? Unless it's my nan, right? When my nan says to me, 'Oh Stew, that political correctness has gone mad.' I go, 'Why is that Nan?'. She goes, 'Well. I was in the hairdresser's yesterday Stew, and they said to me, "Would you like a cup of tea Mrs Harris?" I said "Yes please." They said "Well you can have one, but you have to drink it in the waiting area, 'cause we can't have hot liquids at the workstation." It's political correctness gone mad, Stew! It's old Red Robbo, Stew. He's saying we can't have tea anymore, in case it annoys a Pakistani!' Basically, there's a whole generation of people who've confused political correctness with health and safety legislation."
Petrol posted:Zizek has a formula for critiquing left/liberal ideology. He often begins by highlighting its inauthenticity, and the dangers that arise. For example, he begins a recent video about political correctness with the observation that it "not only covers up the actual relationship of power, but makes it even more impenetrable. You know, if you have a boss who is up there, the old-fashioned boss shouting at you, exerting full brutal authority. In a way it’s much easier to rebel than to have a friendly boss who embraces you or how was the last night with your girlfriend, blah, blah, all that buddy stuff. Well then it almost appears impolite to protest." So far, so reasonable.
The next step after the initial observation is anecdote. This is always where things begin to go awry. In the present example, he describes a father, standing in for "traditional authority", commanding a child to visit his grandmother because it is his duty. A "clear order" like this, Zizek says, is fine because rebellion is still possible. "But what would the so-called post-modern non-authoritarian father do? I know because I experienced it." He describes the father guilt-tripping the child into going while at the same time saying it's ultimately their choice. This, he claims, is a "much stronger order", and is in fact "the formula of totalitarianism... 'I know better than you what you really want and I may appear to be forcing you to do it, but I’m really just making you do what, without fully knowing, you want' and so on."
This only really qualifies as a description of totalitarianism if two conditions are met. The first is that you are only concerned with the psychological relationship between the totalitarian state and the citizen. The second is that you approach this relationship from the perspective of the citizen whose only experience of victimisation by the totalitarian state is mere restriction. In fact, Zizek at this point almost seems to be describing a frustration not with the effect of political correctness on the actually oppressed, but on people like himself. Does he really experience the proscriptions of political correctness as a more forceful system of control than totalitarianism? Doubtful, but this sort of hyperbole is simply another frequent strategy to excite the audience, and this is one of the milder examples.
I don't think this is really responding to the point Zizek is making, or understanding it.
(I'm out of practice with Proper Terminology so excuse me not being philosophically fluent or whatever.)
First, what he is saying: I am pretty sure he is describing the process of creating a closed space of thought. i.e., the social reality created by the "accommodating authority figure" is such that they convince you that they genuinely wish there was an alternative, that they lament the situation just as much as you do, but they have looked at all of the potential outcomes (including retribution etc) and there is no way out of this thing, the thing you must now do. It is similar to the general concept of ideological framework that I think I have seen discussion of on the rhizzone -- a closed system of thought is created where there is no alternative to such-and-such capitalist process because it literally cannot be conceived inside of the complete system of possible thoughts. Not even acceptable thoughts, but possible thoughts -- anything outside of it is treated as mental disease. Accommodative authority is a little microcosm of how a totalitarian ideology functions, an example of which to Zizek would be late capitalism.
So your objections:
a) this is only totalitarianism if you only look at psychological conditions: I would argue he is only describing a psychological condition, so, sure, yes, but I think he would also say (and I agree) that psychology is society and society is reality, so it's not really a useful criticism to say this is "only" psychology, since it is meant to illustrate how the broader social system - which is also "only" psychology - functions in totalitarian ideology.
b) this is not a description of the effects of political correctness on oppressed people: I don't see how what I am describing here doesn't match up with the Stewart Lee bit. Imagine a Conservative party message towards people they're being racist to: An apologetic description of the status quo, open commiseration with the people socially installed as below you in a power structure, lamentation at the lack of other options. "there is no alternative." sad!
drwhat posted:I don't think this is really responding to the point Zizek is making, or understanding it.
(I'm out of practice with Proper Terminology so excuse me not being philosophically fluent or whatever.).
first let me say i have no pretense of being a philosopher myself, and i very deliberately chose a different route in my critique than, say, sam kriss, who attempted to attack zizek on his own jargon-y turf, leaving himself open to counterattack on the same terms, with ultimately nothing resolved.
second, in response to your initial statement - and this is made clearer in another part of the draft that i didn't include - zizek's defenders often object that his critics miss the point he was trying to make, but the problem is in his failure over the course of his career to ever make those points which are so apparent to his fans. there is no 'there' there. this is particularly true of his popular writing and speech, which is the main target of my critique as opposed to his academic work - he is surely smart enough to know that he cannot assume knowledge of any philosophical principles by his lay audience, so why skip over this context if it is vital to understanding his actual point? instead of 'reading in' any metaknowledge or good intentions on his part, i take what he says on its face (with the understanding that he does of course frequently attempt humour and so not everything he says is meant to be taken literally).
drwhat posted:First, what he is saying: I am pretty sure he is describing the process of creating a closed space of thought. i.e., the social reality created by the "accommodating authority figure" is such that they convince you that they genuinely wish there was an alternative, that they lament the situation just as much as you do, but they have looked at all of the potential outcomes (including retribution etc) and there is no way out of this thing, the thing you must now do. It is similar to the general concept of ideological framework that I think I have seen discussion of on the rhizzone -- a closed system of thought is created where there is no alternative to such-and-such capitalist process because it literally cannot be conceived inside of the complete system of possible thoughts. Not even acceptable thoughts, but possible thoughts -- anything outside of it is treated as mental disease. Accommodative authority is a little microcosm of how a totalitarian ideology functions, an example of which to Zizek would be late capitalism.
Fine, but he doesn't actually say that, and frankly the connection between this point and his stated topic - political correctness - is tenuous. the quoted passage is a setup for his discussion, which i discuss later in my piece, of how political correctness is a poor response to "reactionary racism", which should instead be fought with "progressive racism" - not genuine racism, but the sharing of vulgar stereotypes and taboo humour in order to develop social bonds across racial groups that are impossible with the distance created by political correctness. if he meant to provide an insightful and useful critique of capitalism somewhere in all of this, i'm not seeing it!
drwhat posted:So your objections:
a) this is only totalitarianism if you only look at psychological conditions: I would argue he is only describing a psychological condition, so, sure, yes, but I think he would also say (and I agree) that psychology is society and society is reality, so it's not really a useful criticism to say this is "only" psychology, since it is meant to illustrate how the broader social system - which is also "only" psychology - functions in totalitarian ideology.
well, i disagree. in my view it is a terribly shallow critique of social relations, for two reasons. first, the psychological is at best a 'how' of social relations, and does nothing to explain the 'why' - your boss behaves in this way to induce you to behave in that way, but what is the nature of the relationship - what is a boss? well, in zizek's argument, the boss seems to be a simple stand-in for authority, for the state, and the politically-correct regime is then unfavourably compared to "totalitarianism". this "totalitarianism" is not a concept based in material analysis either, but a liberal chimera, which leaves zizek in the position of agreement with the far right, that political correctness is an oppression akin to 'stalinism' - and this alignment of zizek's actual stated position with the far right is a recurring theme of my broader critique, that his attacks on left/liberal values do not actually come from the left, but are rightist critiques dressed in leftist academic jargon.
drwhat posted:b) this is not a description of the effects of political correctness on oppressed people: I don't see how what I am describing here doesn't match up with the Stewart Lee bit. Imagine a Conservative party message towards people they're being racist to: An apologetic description of the status quo, open commiseration with the people socially installed as below you in a power structure, lamentation at the lack of other options. "there is no alternative." sad!
what you describe isn't political correctness though. what stew points to is the fact that in trying to stamp out bald racism, political correctness has taught conservatives to instead use the dog whistle to signal essentially the same message, a message which is about lower-class minorities and is addressed to a predominantly white middle class. my point is that in the course of a comedy bit, stew makes a genuine leftist critique of political correctness which contrasts starkly with zizek's ultimately reactionary pining for a world where political correctness is abandoned in favour of him being able to call his black friends 'nigger'.
toyotathon posted:hey petrol i liked the excerpt and might i suggest posting what you've got and asking the community here to edit or fill in blanks, to help make it the piece you've envisioned? i'm so curious to read the rest.
thanks. i probably will not do this, at least not any time soon, because i don't currently have the time i'd like to devote to making this thing worthy. zizek is a difficult target because, as noted above (and this is not directed at dr cat but a broader observation or conversations i've seen out there in the cyber world), his defenders will always find sympathetic ways to restate zizek's position and explain what he really 'meant to say', while picking apart any little perceived deficiency, and deliberately misread every possible ambiguity, in the argument of his critic. it takes time and effort to craft a sufficiently robust critique of such a figure; it is even more complex and difficult to do so while incorporating humour, which has been my goal. i will happily continue the discussion above and i'm sure this will be very helpful in honing my efforts but please don't expect me to share much more of my drafts any time soon.
shriekingviolet posted:There's a certain kind of dweeb whose internal world is so blissfully uncomplicated that they just think surely I would never do something wrong, the ethical guidelines are just obstructive bureaucracy.
The oil and gas industry owns academics in every field out here, so you have things like generous "philanthropic" research grants from oil companies to do a cozy ethnography (to show they really care) about the reserve community downriver from a tailings pond with a tragicomically high rate of cancer and birth defects (which will not be mentioned,) or whose land is going to be expropriated and bulldozed next week to make room for a theoretical future pipeline that isn't even approved yet.
Out of context interview segments from these projects have this weird tendency to show up without the participants informed consent in propaganda campaigns to fabricate fake local support for oil megaprojects and undermine indigenous solidarity. Which is not to say that these are never contentious things within communities, but corporate money happily funds research that will give them means to tilt the scales, essentially turning it into espionage.
That's repulsive. Please PM me links whenever it's convenient.
in real life news:
i ended up staying home all day today and fell into a black hole of reading the original source code of bitcoin, reading papers about bitcoin, reading investigations into who Satoshi Nakamoto is, reading everything i could find written by all the people who might be him, and whoa boy is that a pandora's box of insane bullshit and now my brain is full and i ate all the food in the kitchen and i can't think about anything anymore ugghhghghghg
shriekingviolet posted:There's a certain kind of dweeb whose internal world is so blissfully uncomplicated that they just think surely I would never do something wrong, the ethical guidelines are just obstructive bureaucracy.
The oil and gas industry owns academics in every field out here, so you have things like generous "philanthropic" research grants from oil companies to do a cozy ethnography (to show they really care) about the reserve community downriver from a tailings pond with a tragicomically high rate of cancer and birth defects (which will not be mentioned,) or whose land is going to be expropriated and bulldozed next week to make room for a theoretical future pipeline that isn't even approved yet.
Out of context interview segments from these projects have this weird tendency to show up without the participants informed consent in propaganda campaigns to fabricate fake local support for oil megaprojects and undermine indigenous solidarity. Which is not to say that these are never contentious things within communities, but corporate money happily funds research that will give them means to tilt the scales, essentially turning it into espionage.
this tracks with what i've heard from ecology people about the extent to which ecology jobs often amount to presenting legitimate statistics in a deliberately misleading way to show that whatever industry project is in fact fine for the local environment and probably wont poison all the people that live there. and also all of the critical theory/other humanities people who go directly into marketing after their phds.
palafox posted:That's repulsive. Please PM me links whenever it's convenient.
Catchphrase
Gibbonstrength posted:I am keen to get involved in Socialist Stuff in the new town I'm living in, but the only org in the entire region is a Trot group. Which I guess I could swallow and just contribute to whatever useful local causes they fight for especially since most members are just random harmless pinkos, but from a bit of contact with them it seems the small band of dedicated leadership people are super dogmatic and will rave endlessly about how China is worse than Hitler. Not sure what to do tbqh
Very carefully
The latter are remarkable in having the worst possible theory and practice.
It might be good to join them to see exactly what not to do