Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Twitter is SO Fucked: A Case Study

Censorship isn't going to bring down the social media monolith ... but selective, agenda-driven censorship certainly will.



By: Jimbo X
@Jimbo___X

You kids might be wondering why I ain't on Twitter no more. Well, it wasn't because I was banned, it was because I chose to get rid of my account when I realized - firsthand - just how incredibly biased the platform's community standards monitoring really was.

By now, we all know Twitter - as does Facebook, as does Periscope and as does Reddit and as does seemingly every other Silicon Valley-spawned app out there - has a profound, pronounced and possibly protruding liberal bias. Several social experiments have demonstrated the enormity of Twitter's double standards, including one where posts with the exact same content - only with disparaging words about "white people" and "black people" subbed out - resulted in a ban for one account but not the other. I guess you don't need me to tell you which one, either.
How dare a black man make his own decisions! Clearly, only
Uncle Toms engage in independent thought.

It's not just that Twitter is apparently choosing to censor content they don't agree with, politically, it's that they're not even giving users a rational explanation as to why the are suspended. Unable to deem some anti-liberal utopian thoughtcrime rhetoric as explicitly homophobic, racist, transphobic, xenophobic, ableist, sexist, Islamophobic or anti-Semitic, the platform recently made Orwell roll in his grave by announcing they were going to start censoring content for being - and this is a direct quote - "low quality." Naturally, they never defined what categorically makes something "low quality," which essentially makes such content literally anything they don't like.

Even worse, the Twitter algorithms are highly susceptible to what could be called the Internet equivalent of "the wild beast of populism." The more people who flag a specific comment, the more likely said comment is going to be deemed "offensive," regardless of the content. Therefore, all that's really needed to get something off Twitter is enough people chiming in at the same time saying they don't like what somebody has posted. I'll show you a primo example of this - and in many ways, the herd dynamic of today's keyboard warrior liberals - in just a bit.

But even the platform's censorship protocols are set up to benefit liberal tweeters and put conservative tweeters at a disadvantage. Thus, a high-profile liberal user like Leslie Jones can literally tell someone to "kill themselves" online and face no recourse while a conservator commentator like Kassy Dillon had her account locked for literally posting Jones' aforementioned tweet verbatim

That's why Twitter can mass-suspend a litany of alleged "alt-right" users just out of principle while doing absolutely fucking nothing while a Hispanic Trump supporter receives death threats and none of her online abusers get flagged.  

Twitter's news feed is obviously meant to agenda-set for the liberal/globalist/multiculturalist cause like a motherfucker. For all the incessant chatter we've heard about the deleterious effects of "fake news" on discursive democracy, funny how the media hasn't - and perhaps never will - embark upon a jihad against the socially corrosive effects of promoting op-eds as if they were impartial news.

There's this thing called "agenda-setting," and if you haven't heard about it by now, it more or less explains - in full - why "journalism" today is so shitty. What's trending on Twitter isn't decided organically (meaning, based on an objective aggregation of the things the most users are discussing.) Indeed, there are people working for Twitter whose very jobs is to select what's going on in the world that is noteworthy enough for its users to discuss. And - needless to say - what Twitter wants you to think and talk about can hardly be considered neutral.



Here's a snapshot of the top Twitter "moments" mid-day on June 9, 2017. These are the things the agenda-setters at Twitter think its users ought to be discussing:
  • Some Nickelodeon wash-up claims she's off drugs and wants to start acting again. 
  • The conservatives in the U.K. lost a lot of seats in the latest election.
  • Some actress you've never heard of is dead.
  • You can watch golf LIVE (which is about as much fun as watching golf DEAD, I can firmly attest)
  • The Olympics is getting 3-3 basketball in 2020.
  • J.K Rowling sounds off on sexism, misogyny and rape culture (more on this in just a bit)
  • There's a trailer coming for Black Panther 
  • Bradley Manning in Taylor Swift red lipstick has an interracial, homosexual mancrush on ex-Presidente Barack H. Obama. 
Now, do you kids notice anything out of the norm there? That's the site's top 8 stories, yet they all revolve around black male entertainers or white women (plus a white dude that thinks he's a woman, which I guess sorta' kinda' counts.) Now, hold on to that thought, as we explore a couple of other world events that happened during that same 24-hour-news-cycle.
Now, why oh why, does the Twitter non-algorithm want its users to talk about Black Panther and J.K. Rowling's opinions instead of hard news stories about women terrorists, government health care regulations and defensive gun use homicides? Surely, it can't be the fact that young, white women and young black men are the most active users on Twitter, and that the platform's agenda-setters are intentionally showcasing content that appeals to the notoriously liberal, notoriously misandrist and notoriously leukophobic personal biases of its two biggest user bases, right? Right?

Gimme a break. Twitter, by design, isn't meant to be a virtual forum of free debate and exchanging of ideas. It's trending mechanics are built to perpetuate and promote tweets that garner high support and clickthroughs from its bread and butter user demographics. In short, Tweeter is literally engineered to be an echo chamber, one in which the popular ideas and prevailing opinions of its most active users more or less dictate the site's content. Thus, all the usual stuff about "muh racism," "muh patriarchy," "muh rape cultue," "muh cops killing black people" and "muh Fuck Donald Trump" always trend towards to the top of Twitter's feed, while the comments giving the standard American liberal party line always get the most shares and retweets. 

Yep: saying people deserve to die because of
their skin color is the exact opposite of
"racism."
Now, it would be one thing to have a social media platform that's engineered to heavily favor the typical liberal musings of your dime a dozen 25-year-old black dude or 18-year-old white girl, but it's a totally different thing to ACTIVELY campaign to penalize users who a.) are outside those demographical groups and b.) dare question, and perhaps even challenge, the values and perspectives held dear by Twitter's dueling white girl/black male monarchy.

That's why a whole bunch of supposed "alt-righters" can have their accounts gassed for literally nothing while a user like Leslie Jones can literally dox another user and COMMAND her followers to attack her in real life and not even receive a slap on the wrist from Twitter's higher command. Perhaps it's more for economic reasons than ideological ones (although, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a combination of both), but Twitter doesn't want people using its platform whose opinions or comments could potentially cost it users from its precious white girl/black male-industrial-complex. Of course, they'll cloak it with some smug, self-celebratory claptrap about "hate speech" and "misogyny," but at the end of the day, Twitter is still a business. And if what Twitter's most frequent users want is an anti-white, anti-right apartheid state, by golly, old boy Jack's gonna' do his best to give his "best costumers" exactly what they want.

And if you don't follow the primary user orthodoxy, it's only a matter of time until the powers that be find SOME convenient excuse to lock your account.

A few weeks ago, I tried to log into Twitter only to find a note saying my account was locked for ... something. I had to wait 24 hours to log in, and even then they would ONLY let me access my account if I put in personal information. Regardless of the reason for my suspension, right then and there I knew I was done with this shit. In today's cyber-whorehouse of a culture, there ain't now way I'm letting any platform know my phone number and track my whereabouts. Indeed, so much has been written about the dangers of giving social media sites your personal data that I feel it's one of those things that goes without warning, like having to tell somebody to not stick their dicks in a campfire. But still, I was curious: what was it that *I* posted that was so shocking, outrageous and socially corrosive as to warrant my banning from the platform?

Well kids, feast your eyes:

Sorry, but deleting a tweet still doesn't make that guy's mom any less of a ho.

Apparently, some broad didn't like me talking shit about the new Wonder Woman movie, so naturally, that drew the wannabe white knights who would never have a shot of fucking her (despite the fact she's barely a 3 ... photos provided shortly) out of the woodworks to defend her honor. Naturally, this led to a game of the dozens, which apparently, more than a few people found distasteful (more on this, and it's important.) 

So imagine my surprise when I found this little message when I momentarily unlocked my account:

Much like the dreaded "n-word," apparently it's OK to use the "c-word" just as long as you are one.

Hmm, that's odd. As offensive as the term "slut" may be, I've always assumed the term "cunt" was even more offensive. And although my "offensive" post contained no directly aggressive messages, this one profane rebuttal certainly was meant to be taken as an unmistakable user-to-user personal attack. Interestingly, getting in someone's face in real life and calling them "a cuntmuffin" and asking them to kindly "fuck off" would almost certainly constitute a form of assault, whereas delicately declaring that other people consider one's mother an easy lay is simply reiterating a factual statement. Objectively, this VampVixxenX broad's statement is far more abrasive, far more caustic and far more objectionable than my initial statement. My comment was FCC-acceptable, whereas her same statement uttered over public airwaves would constitute a federal fine

The difference is, she had a whole hell of a lot of white knights and sycophants liking her comment while those same white knights and sycophants were reporting me for my comment. Since Twitter's judge of character bots rely more on sheer aggrieved numbers than actual message context, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised my post got flagged. And I really shouldn't have been surprised that when a couple of white female users used the very same "disparaging term" I used in their tweets, they didn't get their accounts locked ... indeed, they got nothing but affirmation from the Twitter hoi polli.

How dare you use the word "slut!" Don't you know impressionable children are on our site, watching uncensored foot fetish pornography!

That alone proves Twitter's moral watchdogs don't rely upon content-neutral censoring policies. If that's the case, all content with the word "slut" would get the ban-hammer, especially the hardcore interracial porn spam. Alas, per Twitter's guardians of taste, some guy saying "LOL, your mom is a slut" is somehow intolerable while black-on-white foot-fucking that describes an actresses as a "fantastic blonde slut" is A-OK for mass consumption.

But just you wait, apparently that wasn't the only thing I said that was SO OFFENSIVE that Twitter decided I needed to sit in virtual timeout. By golly, the masses were outraged by this following provocation, too:

Actually, I'd like to apologize to actual retards for even mentioning them in the same context as liberals.

Again, this can hardly be considered an "aggressive" or personally-directed tweet. I simply made a declarative statement that suggested individuals who engage in one activity are worse than another population. You learn that shit in high school - it's called compare and contrast

Granted, the tweet does include the word "retarded," but nowhere in said tweet do I ever give a value score to people who are actually retarded. Indeed, the very definition of the word "retarded" revolves around individual understanding and awareness, so in this context I was actually criticizing the cognitive capabilities of non-retarded people who think emojis constitute actual arguments. The "target" of my comment wasn't retarded people - in fact, the context of the comment actually posited the mentally retarded as superior thinkers compared to the comment's direct target. Furthermore, I never said WHAT emoji users were actually worse than retarded people AT. Skiing? Crossword puzzles? Being able to hold an Etch-a-Sketch perfectly still? If this is a "discriminatory" or "prejudiced" tweet, it's one that's suspiciously devoid of either discrimination or prejudice. So just out of curiosity, I decided to type "retarded" into Twitter, and lo and behold, take a good gander at the first response:

LOL, it's funny because he's the same color as peanut butter, I think.

Well, hell. When *I* make a comment that declares mentally retarded people BETTER thinkers than the aggregate Twitter user, I get slammed for teh hate speech. But when BLACK COMEDY TWITTER MAN © uses it as direct insult to the mentally retarded ... complete with a crude, FCC-punishable slang reference to the female anatomy ... is his account locked? Nope, he gets 103,000 likes and almost 60,000 retweets. So what's the difference between what I said and what BLACK COMEDY TWITTER MAN © said? Objectively, his comment is far more prejudiced and insensitive, but since he has so many followers (henceforth referred to by what they really are, sycophants) the Twitter algorithms raise the bar on what constitutes "offensive expression" and keeps his account safe and sound. And since you don't have a horde of white knights rushing in to report his account - what, do you honestly expect white liberals to deprive a BLACK MAN of his constitutionally guaranteed free speech? Why, that's inconceivable! - Twitter doesn't force him to manually scrub it from his feed. Meanwhile, I'm literally forced to take down my comments to even get to the screen where I can physically delete my account. Just think about that for a minute - Twitter actually holds the account hostage until the user physically erases the content their "algorithms" find objectionable. But why? Well, it's pretty much because of the following:

But seriously, that dude's GF is so ugly, Bill Cosby would have to drug himself before taking advantage of her.

If you ever wanted insight into the liberal hive mind, this might as well be the picture next to the dictionary entry. It's kind of ironic - yet mostly sad, seeing as how the thought surely never crossed any of their minds - that they deemed *me* the bully when there were about 30 of these sycophantic social justice warriors swarming my lone account. You see, these Twitter liberals thrive on a mob mentality. They're emotionally fragile pack animals to the core, completely and totally unable to function without a small armada of like-minded sycophants affirming their every utterance. As collectivist/parasitic organisms, they leech off each other's avowals and - because the aforementioned Twitter "algorithm" does such a bang-up job of keeping contrarian views from popping up on the radars of the platform's "sweet spot" users - they almost never encounter criticism instead of comfort, they almost never have their views challenged instead of celebrated and they almost never have their egos bruised instead of inflated. So fearful of even the slightest resistance to their overarching liberal Tao - which explains why they deem anything they don't like as rancorous "hate speech" that's too dangerous to be circulated around the Internet's digital membranes - that they feel the tribal, collectivist need to not just attack counter-ideologies, but destroy them. These ugly-ass, pasty-skinned limp-wristed, hyper-white, pug-faced, multi-bellied, pissed-off Clinton voters are unquestionably the most insecure people on the planet, perpetually unsure of not only the veracity of their political ideals, but their basic value as members of the human race. They clump together like overweight, emotionally fragile Corn Flakes and just mire in their liberal whiteness, because it's the only thing - I repeat, the only thing - that gives them any kind of identity whatsoever. Without the great identity politics Tao, they're just a bunch of chunky, balding, unathletic, unintimidating and just plain uninteresting people sans any remarkable traits, characteristics or especially thoughts.

Apparently, these people felt the need to barrage my locked account for two days afterward with what they thought were disparaging remarks. But you see, that's the thing these people will never understand - as an in individual, non-liberal, non-SJW non-pussy, I don't give a fuck what complete strangers think about me. The opposite of love ain't hate, you know. Hate means there is still something stirring within you, that makes you afraid, that makes you feel threatened, that makes you feel disempowered, and ESPECIALLY makes you feel like *you* might be the one in the wrong so you have to keep fighting a battle to simply save face and assuage your frazzled widdle ego. I don't hate any of these Twitter users because I don't care about them. I give their opinions no value, merit, or credence, and don't see them as an existential or philosophical threat to my well-being. I know what they believe is stupid and wrongheaded, and the joy for me is watching 'em try to convince themselves their prima facie bullshit is legit. They're all the same to me - a bunch of harmless idiots who I am certain will do more longtime damage to themselves than I ever could in a million years. 

Twitter: where hatred is A-OK, just as long as
you're hating on the right kind of people.
But the Twitter liberals don't have the same feelings about monkey cage rattlers like me. I don't give a shit about them, but they wallow in their resentment of me and my ilk like obsessed ex-girlfriends. Their egos are so fragile and so self-deified that the moment their ideals are questioned, condemned or mocked, they go fucking nutso. Rather than use logic or reasoning or facts to prove themselves superior, they employ the old numbers game approach to smother dissent. Surely, if we have 40 of our hive-minded idealists type curse words and post memes directed at this *one* user, that will demonstrate the righteousness of our convictions, right? Folks, let me tell you one thing - if it takes 40 people to snub out just one other person, there's a pretty strong chance the guy fighting the battle hisself ain't the one that's suffering from inadequacy issues.

On the Twitter-sphere, Afro-centric, feminist-centric and especially liberal-centric ideology reigns supreme. Just take a look at Twitter's June 15th front page - one that's glutted with stories about Beyonce, DeMario Jackson, Rihanna, RuPaul and Kylie Jenner's lipgloss. The lone "hard news" item listed isn't an update on the June 14th mass shooting perpetrated by a Trump hating Bernie Bro, but rather a suspicious "poll" conducted by the left-leaning propaganda distributor The Hill suggesting a majority of Americans don't think the President "respects" the country's institutions. And if you think all of that is just "coincidence," I've got a bridge in London I'd just love to sell 'ya. 

But people are getting sick of this shit, even centrist Democrats (you know, the ones in Michigan and Wisconsin who turned their back on Hillary and voted for The Donald instead ... i.e., what really cost the Dems the election instead of all that "Russian hacker" hubbub.) All the classical F.D.R. and J.F.K. liberals are souring on new-wave leftism, and when they see Huffington Post writers tweet about the "righteousness" of shooting conservative politicians, all it does is make them question their allegiance to the liberal cause they thought they knew. The identity politics-obsessed variety pack of Black Lives Matter extremists and LGBT grievance hustlers and psychotic feminists and open-borders dope smokers known as the "Democratic Party" isn't what they signed up for, and all it takes is a few minutes thrust into Twitter's liberal echo chamber - one where death threats against the political other are par for the course - to get them to reconsider their ideological alignment. 

And Twitter's bottom line shows the platform's bread and butter - pissed off, hyper liberal women, black males and their white knight enablers - are costing it a ton of money. Twitter may have gained two million new customers last year, but it also lost nearly half a billion dollars in declining ad revenue and had to lay off almost one-tenth of its employees. Advertisers and emerging businesses aren't going to invest money in a platform literally built around ceaseless, partisan hatred and they sure as hell aren't going to invest money in a platform whose primary user audience isn't going to buy their products. The Twitter circle jerk is just an Internet abyss for progressivist types to spew their anti-right rancor - and there's simply no way for any company to commodify that.

Alternative social media sites like Voat and Gab.ai may never reach the numbers acquired by Twitter or Reddit, but at least they're trying to do something different. Granted, such sites may be nothing more than refuges for right-of-center users irked by the nonstop bombardment of leftist propaganda on the big brand platforms, but tomorrow's culture is always dictated by yesterday's counterculture. Right now, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and their unabashedly liberal agenda points are undoubtedly the "mainstream" perspective, and one that is shoved down our throats at every possible opportunity. The generation growing up right now sees that as the boring old zeitgeist, the new machine to rage against. Report after report predicts Gen Z will usher in a new age of conservatism, and that's thanks in no small part to the perpetual media indoctrination of sites like Twitter that they encounter every single day.

If Twitter had done something to make the platform more ideologically diverse, there's a chance it could have made itself self-sustaining for another decade or so. Alas, the kids of tomorrow see the old guard of social media as painfully uncool, and that pronounced liberal bias is utterly inseparable from the rest of the package. Pepe the Frog is the new "anarchy" sign, the contemporary symbol of "fuck everything popular and conventional." These Gen Z kids have grown up in a web of liberal hyperbole and insanity, and the new right offers them the only kind of idiosyncratic cultural currency on the Internet. They view the relentless multiculturalist, "fuck Donald Trump, everybody smoke weed and get gay married" social media milieu as chintzy, lame and emblematic of everything wrong with the adult order. In a world where hyper-liberal P.C. dogma is the guiding cultural diktat, of course they're going to want to rebel and celebrate their cultural climate's chief Tao's ideological opposite. Traditional, patriarchal values created the free-love movement of the sixties and the Moral Majority movement of the '80s gave us the one-two fistfuck of punk rock and heavy metal culture. Every major youth movement is a defiant reactionary statement to the most oppressive and thin-skinned bullies of the day, and - as evident by the hotbed of liberal nuttery on Twitter - progressivists today represent the epitome of uncool

If you're part of a major media organelle an you're hellbent on dominating the cultural dialogue (even if it means censoring the shit out of communications,) it's only a matter of time until something comes along to torpedo your enterprise. The awe-inspiring amount of progressivist rancor on social media will eventually hit critical mass, and when it does, it's going to take the message's primary cultural drivers down, too. The Twitter-sphere can only handle so much one-dimensional liberal antipathy before its virtual support beams start buckling - and as the media itself implodes, so does the message that, for a time at least, sustained it. 

Twitter's days are numbered, folks. And with it, so is the cultural reign of the leftist hatred that made it a cultural pillar to begin with.

Monday, November 10, 2014

Seven Ways Social Media Has Destroyed Society

Ten years after the MySpace Revolution, the damage is all but irreversible.


The term “the genie is out of the bottle” became a popular expression to describe the proliferation of nuclear testing shortly after World War II. The same idiom holds true for the proliferation of social media in the wake of the Great Housing Crash -- only unlike the atomic arms race, society as we know it actually WAS obliterated by the latter technological advent.

To some, it may sound hyperbolic, but the rise of social media -- in tandem with the rise of the mobile web -- has utterly destroyed the social fabric of the United States. It’s altered our behavior, our perspectives on what’s culturally relevant and perhaps most importantly, how we choose to view each other as social system cohabitants.

How so, and to what extent, you're likely pondering? Well, here are seven irrefutable examples of the negative impact social media has had on our personal beliefs and behaviors...

1. It encourages, celebrates and rewards us for our conceits

In 2013, a trio of generic, gum-smacking blonde girls decided to rush the field during the College World Series. Prior to the stunt, the three posted numerous tweets asking their friends and families to chip in for bail money -- they then proceeded to interrupt the game, all the while holding their smart phones in front of their faces and web-casting their exploits to the world at large through, you guessed it, social media.

For their incredibly juvenile behavior, the self-absorbed, fame-obsessed threesome received heaps of retweets, Facebook postings and Vine tributes. Poetically, they then saw their shameless attention-seeking backfire on them, as scores of Internet haters and creepers ascended upon them like locusts on Egypt.

The advent of social media allows insecure people the constant ability to seek, beg and pander for affirmation and in-group approval. Each like on Facebook and every thumbs up on a YouTube video has become popularity quite literally commoditized, the new currency of a generation that perpetually demands to be told how great, special and unique they are. The ethos of the social media generation? Nothing means more than attention and acknowledgement ... even if it means being arrested in order to garner it.

2. It has nothing to do with interpersonal communication anymore

One could argue that when social media sites like MySpace, YouTube and Twitter began, they were intended for niche, localized communication only. Indeed, that was the precise point of Facebook, whose initial academic e-mail address requirement was built around who wasn’t on the service as much as it were the people who actually used it.

With the widespread popularity of such services, social media has most certainly lost its “localized” appeal. And with the entire world essentially serving as one’s in-group, it’s arguable that Facebook and Twitter can no longer be considered true avenues for interpersonal communication whatsoever.

When an individual posts something on Facebook or Twitter, the intended recipient of said message isn’t a single person. Indeed, it’s an electronic all-call to the entire planet, designed to garner as much attention and admiration/agreement as possible. Social media users aren't posting to specific people, they're broadcasting to a faceless, nameless culture-at-large -- more or less, the disembodied collective they seek to placate at all times.


3.  It gives us a false impression of what human interaction actually is

Social media communication and actual communication are about as similar as talking to another human being and muttering to a malfunctioning toaster. Sure, there’s a message, a channel and a recipient, but through the depersonalization Internet medium, it’s almost impossible to gage feedback adequately.

As a communication major, I can tell you firsthand how nuanced the art of discourse is. It’s an interpersonal activity that feeds into virtually all of the humanities, and it’s an absolute fundamental for all careers -- a skill that, more so than IQ, determines one’s success in society. If you don’t know how to talk to others, you’ll never have a job, find a spouse, be able to purchase a home or even order a meal; in essence, live a normal life.

The problem with social media, obviously, is that it’s diminishing our abilities to vocally communicate with others. Texting, e-mails and Twitter posts don’t require the same instantaneous feedback that face-to-face communication requires, nor does its really allow people to learn and understand the mechanics of communication, such as tempo, code switching and asking questions. Ours is becoming a culture that’s less sociable, and the Internet certainly plays a massive role in that. Not only are we losing our abilities to talk -- to externalize our thoughts and express needs and wants to others -- we’re also losing our ability to understand what others are saying. We can’t determine what’s serious and what’s not, what’s sincere and what isn’t, or even grasp the central content of other people’s oratory. Human communication is all about our individual subtleties … and unfortunately, those are almost entirely filtered out in social media interactions.

4. It deceives us into thinking our opinions actually mean something

The wide open public sphere it is, the Internet has allowed a diverse array of opinions and beliefs to flourish in fringe, online communities. The interconnectivity of social media, obviously, has given these nobodies the venue to share their madness/banality with the totality of humanity; subsequently, its all given us the illusion that our personal lives are astoundingly more significant than they actually are.

Bloggers and YouTubers think they have the social impact of mass media conglomerates and legitimate authors and journalists. The nominal connection to the masses Facebook, Twitter and Reddit provide also erroneously goad social media users that they, in some incarnation, are personally linked to media outlets and celebrities. In short, it's given the social media faithful a major delusion that they are indeed broadcasting something worthwhile to the world at large, when really, all they are doing is shouting wholly irrelevant nonsense into virtually insignificant pockets of online space.

By and large, people post things on social media -- from their lunches on Snapchat to political diatribes on Google Plus -- because they want others to think their musings or opinions are important. Hell, the whole reason social media has been the success it is is because global society has become obsessed with in-group approval and mass affirmation. Eventually, these people will come to the conclusion that their online gibberish has been utterly insignificant to the whole of humanity -- and the end dividends, I am afraid, could be rather ugly, indeed.


5. It’s decimating the English language … and our attention spans

Something very interesting has happened to SAT scores over the last 10 years. For all the hullabaloo we’ve heard about U.S. students lacking science and math skills, the overall STEM subject scores have been on an upward trajectory in America for quite some time. Conversely, the nation’s verbal test scores have gone down considerably over the same timeframe.

It’s apparent that more children and teens have a better grasp of numbers and technology, but at the same time, it’s also apparent today’s youth are less deft with conversation, the mechanics of written English and, perhaps most troubling, contextual comprehension.

Reading, and understanding content, requires an attention span. To really grasp the context of the written word, you have to focus in on the wording and assess passages as standalone thoughts and ideas and components of larger contexts. Social media communication doesn’t result in the same narrative -- indeed, it’s just a jumbled mishmash of  random thoughts, YouTube videos and GIF images that tell no real story or make any sort of central statements about anything. The mandated brevity of sites like Twitter hasn’t made us wittier and more concise -- it’s just led to us mashing out banal messages, littered with hash tags and at-symbols, that more closely resemble lines of corrupted computer code than human-typed messages. The term "tl;dr" isn't just a popular Internet maxim ... indeed, it's the culture at large  attempting to downplay -- and in some ways, even embrace -- its own cognitive deficits.

6. It deindividualizes users and reinforces herd dynamics

The perceived anonymity of the Internet allows users to do and say things they probably would never do in real life. As a result, social media has led to the entire nation developing disassociate personality disorder -- we are no longer just ourselves, but ourselves as real life self and Internet self.

Forget about Gen Y’s infatuation with webutations, its today’s elementary schoolers who concern me the most. To them, the world wide web is more important than the world itself, their online spaces and communications having far greater weight than their real life environments and interactions. As mobile technologies become more advanced, I imagine an entire generation of youths such as the kid featured in this New York Times story becoming the norm. Consider this a harbinger of an impending culture, utterly dependent on technology, unable to perceive the reality around themselves without a machine doing the interpretation for them. If today’s social media obsessed throngs are deindividuated by the web, than Gen Z will be utterly atomized by it.

Another concern is the hive-mindedness social media creates. By design, it rewards populist opinions and ideals (in Facebook-Land, with a common currency, even -- likes), while sites like YouTube and Reddit are more or less dictated by ideologues who flag and vote down everything that doesn’t jive with their own convictions. Instead of expressing our own opinions, we find ourselves responding to criticisms and complex input with meme images and infantilized webspeak. The more social media we participate in, the less personal identity we seem to hold onto ... what some call "collective immersion," I would prefer to call "individual suffocation."

7. It has convinced us that doing nothing is an actual activity

Web activism is the ultimate oxymoron; the celebration of inactivity as some kind of legitimate, meaningful personal behavior. We all remember the mass movement, where everybody changed their Facebook profile pic to that of a cartoon character to combat child abuse, right? Well, do you care to take a guess as to how much capital that little cyber-demonstration raised for actual child advocacy groups?

If you guessed "absolutely fucking nothing," you sir/madam/transir/transmadam, would be right on the money. That, in a nutshell, demonstrates everything wrong with social media as cultural movement -- it's highly depersonalized and highly ineffective behavior perceived to be individualized and influential. The reality? All it is is the mere submersion of the self into an amorphous culture, hardly any different from passively watching television or listening to a car radio.The only difference is, social media users think they're doing something by doing nothing, that their online postings constitute some sort of legitimate, valuable commentary. We literally celebrate our own laziness, having convinced ourselves that simply placing a hashtag in front of the political term du jour constitutes a real response to something. 

Social media use, effectively, is nothing more than public masturbation, only with a far worse outcome. It's a vehicle for us to spit out our most insignificant thoughts, and a medium whose primary use is quickly transforming from meaningless chatter to more nefarious uses -- stalking, harassing and even facilitating actual crimes, among them. Instead of a social tool, Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat are probably only a few years away from becoming social weapons, online libraries of our worst behaviors visible to anybody with the interest. Today, social media  is mostly pointless babble, but tomorrow? Expect it to make all of our lives a real living hell.

Alas, social media appears to be here to stay, I fear. We can't eradicate it, so the best we can hope for is to contain it, keep it in check, and just pray that the worst case scenario -- could you imagine a Target / J.P. Morgan sized breach of all Facebook users? -- doesn't come to pass.

Still, it may be that the absolute worst has already happened, that all that social media irradiation has caused malignant polyps to surface on our communal body now.

And the worst part? Unlike an actual tumor, this is a cancer we can easily share with each other.

Monday, March 10, 2014

When Social Sciences Triumph Over ACTUAL Sciences

Gender identity, pseudo-science and the semi-fascist pitfalls of political correctness


In February, Facebook struck a pivotal (read: completely pointless) blow for so-called "gender nonconformist" rights when they introduced more than fifty different options for social media users to describe their sex -- or lack, or mixture, or rejection -- thereof. No longer oppressed by the tyrannical social constructs based on irrefutable chromosomal sciences, all of the world's transfeminine, pangender and non-binary FB junkies can FINALLY boost to the world that their personal definition of self is social media official. And for those of you that refuse to catalog yourself as agender, cisgender or genderqueer or even "two-spirit," Marky Zuckerberg went the extra mile and even gave users the ultimate post-post-modern retort to the question of 21st century sex -- an option simply labeled as "other."

If that's not enough, Facebook also gave users the choice of three sets of pronouns, including the completely linguistically incorrect "their and they" to describe singular individuals. Nothing says cultural progression, I muse, quite like literally destroying the English language in order to satiate niche political bases.

Of course, the "preferred pronoun" bandwagon has been trucking along at full speed for quite sometime, with the Associated Press making the not-at-all dictatorial decision to force journalists to describe "trans-people" in accordance to their requested gender identities -- in effect, making reporters completely ignore biological reality if they want to get published.

As this semi-entertaining blog post reminds us, the control of language indeed equates control of debate. The same way the fascist state of Oceania manipulated public opinion through the co-option and restructuring of language, perhaps one can see just an teeny bit of crypto-fascism sneaking through all of this "trans-language" personalized-pronoun hubbub.

The entire trans-language argument rests upon the acceptance that gender isn't a biological fact, but indeed a social construct -- which, of course, was forged and controlled by a predominantly white male hegemony. The problem, however, should be quite evident: gender is indeed a biologically-determined aspect of the human condition, and nothing short of supreme willful ignorance of science rivaling that of the Flat Earth Society can supplant the oh-so obvious knowledge before us.

In many ways, perhaps the trans-language argument itself can be satirically perverted to mean "the rejection of the letters X and Y in the Roman Alphabet." From a biological standpoint, defining gender is pretty damn simple: if you have at least one Y chromosome produced by functional SRY proteins, you are a male. If you lack this, you are most likely a female. Granted, there are a few women out there with 46, XY karotypes, but they lack ovaries or uteri; similarly, Turner Syndrome and Klinefelter Syndrome, two of the more common XX/XY chromosomal abnormalities, are specifically locked betwixt the sexes -- meaning that only biological men are susceptible to Klinefelter Syndrome, while only biological women are susceptible to Turner Syndrome. True hermaphrodism and mixed gonadal dysgenesis are both incredibly rare, yet the chromosomal structure for those with said abnormalities are still "gender-locked" between various XX (female) and XY (male) karotypes. Outside of just one reported case of an individual with a predominant 46, XY karotype and a smattering of true hermaphrodites with mosaic XX/XY chromosomal structures, these supposed "intersex" individuals are wholly incapable of giving birth. So that means that even if an individual has both sex characteristics, he or she, chromosomally, is still genetically "male" or "female" hinging on the presence of that aforementioned functional SRY-protein.

As clearly explicated above, there is indeed an exact science in place to describe, determine and (perhaps most importantly) verify gender as a biological construct. Or, as a bunch of really smart South Korean dudes put it, "sex determination is not from a simple hierarchical cascade of gene action but from a complex network of gene expression and protein-protein interaction in which SRY, SOX9, WT1 and SF1 are involved."

Now, I'm no gene theorist or molecular engineer, but that statement seems to authenticate the existence of a thoroughly complex, natural biological process which posits "gender" not as a socially-manipulated ideal, but an indisputable chromosomal reality. In today's ironically antagonistic hyper-P.C. culture, however, we've been brainwashed enlightened with the fantasy sociocultural theory that describes what people who give a shit about actual science homophobes call "sex" as a culturally-indoctrinated set of norms and values that an individual comes to accept or reject. Of course, applying the same socially learned theorization to "sexuality" is denied, Denied, DENIED by the same proponents, but that's a matter to wrestle with at a later date, I suppose.

By redefining "gender" as a personal choice, we're giving the A-OK to a form of pseudo-science really no different than creationism or phrenology. Instead of embracing the mathematical and empirical realities in front of us, we're rejecting them in favor of a more palatable ideal that behooves our political agendas. Not that I really need to remind you or anything, but generally, whenever political regimes start telling you that their kind of science is better than actual science, you're pretty much guaranteed to encounter some bumpy, bumpy roads ahead.

The older I get, the more I begin to ponder if anti-prejudicial pogroms are really any less dangerous and counterproductive than the clearly prejudiced pogroms of yore. Yes, yes, I understand the technical good that comes about via equality and egalitarianism and all of that, but is it really worth denying scientific evidence and co-opting the goddamn language itself in order to get there?

The trans-people "liberation" movement is, at least to some capacity, fascistic in the sense that the most hardcore and prominent crusaders of the cause aren't just rallying for oddly unspecified rights, but for the totality of the culture itself to accept their ideological conditions and reject all others, including that troublesome philosophy known as "actual biology."

As far as public accommodations go, what more could the trans-folk want? Outside of unisex bathrooms (including the inalienable right for six-year-old boys with government-sanctioned identification labeling them as females to use girls' rest rooms in elementary schools), I can't think of a single public amenity that's off-limits to them. Trans-folks can vote, they can sue for discrimination and I'm pretty sure they have they right to wed in states that have already given the thumbs up to gay marriage. Really, what these people are striving for is something beyond civil rights, because truth be told, they already have them. The quite literal trans-valuation of language is indicative of something a little more concerning, that being a clear political putsch to promote -- or even enforce -- a bizarre, authoritarian sense of anomie among the masses.

If there's a central plank to the trans-platform, it's the neo-modernist ideal that labels don't mean anything, and only the individual him or herself can adequately describe who or what said individual is. In that, all forms of mass social labeling is bad and need to be discarded, even those social labels that appear to be rooted in biological truth. Yes, we could argue all day long about how "sex" and "gender" describe two separate ideas, but the fact that so many societies, throughout history and across the globe, have considered the two so entwined as to be inseparable as constructs is something the trans-crusaders conveniently ignore, or simply chalk up as yet another "oppressive" edict from the much-maligned "patriarchy" that's responsible for all wrongdoings in the world.

As "oppressive" as language may be, the lack of language is inherently more despotic. The recent logorrhea shat out by Facebook isn't so much an enhancement to the English vernacular as it is a blatant attempt to dilute it, to take away any kind of descriptive language under the guise that such terms are "proscriptive." By transforming the finite question of "sex" into something that entails an infinite number of answers, the power of  language, its collective meaning, is reduced to mere lettering on a page, of etchings that can only be deciphered by the individual interpreter him, her or their-self.

The hypocritical (and some would say impossible) demand here is enforced relativism, a sort of reverse-totalitarianism in which the masses are unified not by common beliefs, but a rejection of
beliefs. The endpoint here is a completely befuddled system where nothing has definite value and subjective personal benefit completely trumps objective reality -- in short, the (inadvertent?) goal line here appears to be the breakdown of shared meaning as a desirable component of the public sphere.

Ultimately, what becomes of a social system when something as important to culture as sex itself becomes a matter of opinion instead of a concrete variable? Even more concerning, what becomes of a social system when the questioning of absolute sciences becomes less tolerable than the simple "acceptance" of abstract social science ideals?

Ultimately, there's only one kind of state that emerges when an entire culture rejects biology and other hard sciences: and this time around, it looks like we're eyeing a theocracy of political correctness instead of religious fundamentalism.