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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Yeah I think of the YouTube shooter as a kind of weird unsung hero or patron saint of those who are slaves to social media view counts. A uniquely 21st century kind of disgruntled.

She was mildly autistic vegan "influencer hopeful" and seriously disgruntled by being on the shit end of algo-censorship. TBH her actions are exactly the kind of response that's deserved by people on google's scale who use giant monolithic algorhythmic censorship without even the possibility of your petitions being seen by a human. Being unilaterally destroyed by a faceless mechanistic org in the pursuit of ever more fractions of a cent of AD money is one of the most infuriating ways to be dehumanized in our internet age.

TBH her actions are exactly the kind of response that's deserved by people on google's scale who use giant monolithic algorhythmic censorship without even the possibility of your petitions being seen by a human.

I definitely don't think that anyone deserves to die over it but I absolutely understand this sentiment. Getting a ~10 year old account banned by some power reddit admin for something that isn't against any written rules and not even getting a ban message, just having your password no longer work and the password recovery system lie about the recovery and there being zero ability to talk to a human about it is so much more dehumanizing than you'd expect it to be. I think the people who design these systems don't really understand what they're inflicting on people and it is unsurprising to me that it would drive someone who was already mentally unwell over the edge.

I'm told this is a standard practice now, it probably does improve some KPIs that make some executives feel good but it is absolutely an abomination.

Less infuriating than claims that one deserves to be shot?

You are treating the people who work for Google as interchangeably damned. If that’s not dehumanizing, I don’t know what is.

TBH her actions are exactly the kind of response that's deserved by people on google's scale who use giant monolithic algorhythmic censorship without even the possibility of your petitions being seen by a human

No, people do not deserve to be shot because the algorithm doesn't favor every creator equally (never mind the fact that the people she shot at weren't responsible for the YouTube algorithms in the first place). That's an insane position and if you truly believe it, you ought to defend it with arguments.

This wasn't a case of a person being wronged unfairly by Google, as happened in the past with people who had their accounts inexplicably suspended. Aghdam's account was never banned, but her videos were suppressed by the algorithm because they were cringe and weirdly sexual (example 1, example 2). This is exactly the kind of content YouTube discourages, partially because filling the frontpage with thirst traps doesn't fit its image, and partially because big advertisers only pay for brand-safe content. If you don't want to play by the rules, you shouldn't be on Youtube.

Whatever algorithm is used for recommendations, it will never be possible for every creator to become popular. It's no different with musicians on SoundCloud or aspiring actors in Hollywood. Any algorithm will therefore have winners and losers (including “completely random” or “newest only” feeds). There's no justification for the losers to go on a killing spree because they couldn't succeed within the ecosystem as it exists.

Oh no, the shooting isn't about "not succeeding". It's about being fed to the algo-wood chipper. About being denied human review. She did have videos explicitly highlighting the still monetized even more sexual videos of major brands (VEVO/etc) in some of her videos where she airs her grievances with youtube. That's her own main stated reason for shooting up the place, being censored by algo shit.

That's an insane position and if you truly believe it, you ought to defend it with arguments.

I'm not FfoC and I don't think I fully agree with him, but I think it's pointing at something that's worth at least a token defence.

Random murder is an important disincentive against systematically being an arsehole, especially white-collar abuse. Even if only 0.01% of people will murder you for being an arsehole, if you're an arsehole to someone new every day you're probably going to get murdered sooner or later, and this is a powerful disincentive even if murder is harshly punished (the arsehole is still dead regardless of what happens to the murderer, and that last fraction of a percent is very, very hard to deter).

One could see the rise of bureaucracy and remote action via the Internet as an erosion of this organic guardrail; by making it impossible rather than merely illegal to murder people for their transgressions, those transgressions are not deterred and increase drastically in frequency (and in the case of white-collar abuse, legal relief is systematically difficult to apply).

So one might conceive of this kind of contempt as perhaps not worth a whole murder but, say, a 0.01% chance of being murdered, and think a low but nonzero amount of revenge-murder is optimal even if revenge-murder itself is still wrong and punishable. That more moderate position would still be edgy, but I wouldn't call it insane.

Even if only 0.01% of people will murder you for being an arsehole, if you're an arsehole to someone new every day you're probably going to get murdered sooner or later

Any possible algorithm on Google or YouTube will have winners and losers. If 0.01% of losers commit mass shootings, then any possible set of choices by Google YouTube will result in barely directed murder.

And there are losers on Amazon. Someone feels aggrieved that their product is on page 2. If 0.01% of them respond with murder then any possible manner of sorting products will result in slaughter.

This principle breaks when it comes up against hundreds of millions of Americans and some portion are aggrieved by some algorithm.

Random murder is an important disincentive against systematically being an arsehole, especially white-collar abuse.

I think the critical issue is whether or not this is indeed "arsehole" behaviour. I don't think that curating the content that gets promoted on your own website makes you an arsehole (either as a corporate entity, or as an individual employee) and I suspect anyone who understands why Youtube uses algorithms to curate its website would agree with me. Even more so given that what is going on here is demotion of sexual content on a site which is very public about demoting sexual content. "This rule is almost never enforced, but you enforced it selectively against me" is a reasonable callout of what is probably arsehole behaviour. "This rule is almost always enforced, I demand you jump through an expensive hoop to explain why I am different to the small number of people who get away with it" is unhinged.

Given that the vast majority of people who will randomly revenge-murder an arsehole (and even more so people who will shoot up the offices of a corporate arsehole with inevitable collateral damage to innocent grunt-tier employees) are unhinged, using revenge-murder as a stochastic disincentive for arseholery doesn't create the correct incentive - behaviour that actually makes you an arsehole can be very different from behaviour that makes an unhinged person think you are one.

Isn't the standard Criminologist line that people respond more to a more certain punishment, even if it is lesser, than an unlikely but stern one? So it would be better to normalize punching arsehole.

Ideally, certainly, but to make it reliable you need control of the legal system (as most people can be deterred by punching being illegal, and because if being punched entitles you to full compensation it's no deterrent to doing punchable things), which is not reliable against white-collar arseholes (citation: every Western law code). You can't compensate a murder victim, though, so murder's still a deterrent even if murder's illegal.

What's the alternative? Before you just had production companies that were and still are very nepotistic and also push whatever they think will sell. Now we have algorithms that just push whatever they think will get views. I guess not making it, because you lacked the connections or wouldn't put out for a Harvey Weinstein esq producer is less dehumanizing. But, only in the sense that the previous system was more humanly terrible. She wasn't making it in either terrible system.

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