Fiddling While Rome Burns
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140 Characters of Hate
Years ago, then-CEO Dick Costolo declared Twitter to be “the free speech wing of the free speech party”. At the time, Twitter was facing pressure from various governments to reveal the identities of users amid civil unrest, from protests in the UK to the Arab Spring and made the right call to protect Twitter’s users.
Around that same time, as happens on any online space with even a small number of people, Twitter started to become a vector for harassment. They built a trust and safety team, rolled out and enhanced some tools like blocking and muting, but the steady stream of trolls, griefers, misogynists, and racists continued unabated.
Then Gamergate happened. Emboldened by the anonymity of an egg avatar and fueled by alt-right hatred, resentment of modernity, and a loss of identity, whole swathes of Twitter devolved into a cesspool of humanity’s most base impulses.
Julieanne Smolinski, a truly hilarious and original voice, was very clear why she felt she needed a reprieve: “I keep getting bothered by assholes and perverts and Twitter doesn’t seem willing or able to do anything about it. I’m quitting Twitter the way you quit your favorite restaurant when it suffers an E. coli outbreak. I’m quitting Twitter for the simple fact that Twitter’s been bumming me out.”
At the eye of this shitstorm of human terribleness is Milo Yiannopoulos, a one-time tech journalist turned Gamergate flag waver and provocateur at Breitbart. That Yiannopoulos has amassed an enormous following, not to mention stature amongst the neoreactionaries hoping to return the world to a pre-enlightened age when only #WhiteMenMatter, is no accident. Brexit and Trump are merely offshoots of the kind of deep resentment and racially-fueled animosity that have agitated an angry, (mostly) white, (mostly) male army. And this week they turned their collective ire on a Ghostbuster.
By late Monday night, comedian and actor Leslie Jones was so fed up with the disgusting stream of human sewage being streamed into her mentions that she left Twitter for good. Her fellow actors have endured plenty of hate and harassment but Jones, as a black woman, was the target of a particularly virulent strain. It was an exaggerated and extreme version of the torrent of abuse women of color face online every day.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey reached out to Jones personally, if feebly . Then Twitter finally, finally, after years of allowing @nero to stand as an avatar for hate and abuse, banned Yiannopoulos for good. His barely decipherable retort does make one crucial point, if only obliquely: “This is the end for Twitter.”
The kind of abuse that Twitter has allowed to fester for years may be unstoppable and is now an existential threat to the company. By insisting on being “the free speech wing of the free speech party”, Twitter used the same tortured logic that @nero and his band of idiots did: that free speech means free to speak without consequence.
Hiring and Firing in Silicon Valley
Facebook released a new diversity report and the results are mostly unsurprising. I say mostly because the actual numbers haven’t moved much since their last report but they did try on a new excuse: there just isn’t enough diversity out there to be hired!
Like all excuses, this one is not only shameful and lame but complete bullshit. Kaya Thomas, writing for NewCo Shift, dismantles Facebook’s cowardly rationalization in expert form. Microsoft’s Dare Obasanjo puts numbers to the big lie of diversity at tech companies.
Whenever this happens, the rage that wells up inside me wants to lash out and say the Facebooks of the world don’t deserve the brilliant people of color they refuse to hire. That the shitty culture that they’ve built should suffer by just perpetuating itself. Of course, that’s a voice of extreme privilege speaking, not to mention a company of Facebook’s size and influence needs that diversity, if only as service to the hundreds of millions of people out there who use Facebook.
It turns out, hiring isn’t the only part of the job Silicon Valley sucks at. Expensify, which makes a website for filling out TPS reports, published a post by their CEO bragging about how they fire people. (Expensify CEO David Barrett worked alongside Travis Kalanick at their P2P startup and Kalanick was one of Expensify’s earliest investors you might be shocked to learn.) Barrett’s post is full of disproven canards about 10x programmers and how he was determined to only hire the very best and how Expensify owes it to the team to cut out anyone who’s underperforming.
This is nothing more than rationalization for bad management but even if it were all true, the fact is Expensify is a web app that helps people categorize pictures of their receipts from business trips. They’re not actually solving any hard problems of computer science, they’re just a SaaS company, which is a perfectly alright thing to be. But don’t be an asshole about it.
Sidebar
• My wife and I watched the documentary “Zero Days” by Alex Gibney (who also made the Scientology exposé “Going Clear”) this weekend and I believe in my soul this is one of the most important films of the year. Please see it — it’s streaming, you don’t even need to hire a babysitter. I consider myself reasonably well informed about issues like Stuxnet and cybersecurity and this film was a revelation. Imagine living during the Cold War but nobody knowing about the kind of destruction nuclear weapons are capable of and no government official being willing to discuss it. That’s the world we live in right now.
• The United States finally has a new Librarian of Congress! We’ve only had 14 of these, mostly because they tend to be pretty non-partisan and their tenures span presidencies (now limited to a decade). Our last Librarian in Chief was appointed by Reagan, which makes Carla Hayden the first of the internet age (by a few decades now). She’s also the first woman to hold the job and the first African American. Writing for n+1 magazine, Kyle Chayka argues the LOC has failed in the information age.
• Ever wonder how those online mattress companies pack something so seemingly huge into an impossibly small box. Wonder no more!
• Buzzfeed’s Buzzbot, a Facebook Messenger app they built for covering the RNC convention, pushes and pulls news.
• An Old tries to limit his news diet to Snapchat Discover. There’s a bit of the usual “what’s the deal with that UI?” but this quote seems to get to the heart of the matter: “Many of the Snapchat providers never ventured beyond the fluff that news company execs seem to believe millennials want.”
• Why there are fewer Pokestops in black neighborhoods. Decisions and prejudices from decades ago continue to have repercussions, even in the supposedly meritocratic digital world.
• Elon Musk has updated Tesla’s master plan (possibly interesting? He posted Wednesday night, a bit of counter-programming to his fellow PayPal-mafioso Peter Thiel’s speech at the Republican convention). It reads more like speculative fiction about our automotive future than anything we’ll actually be living in. I truly, truly hope Musk can pull this off because his vision sounds pretty great, it’s just that the real world tends to get in the way a bit.
• Big data show the six emotional arcs of story telling.
• Warren Ellis has a new novella called Normal that he’s serializing via Kindle Singles. I read the first one the other night and it’s great. Ellis’s writing style is already like a bullseye right into my brain but the subject of Normal hits so close to home it’s painful. Robin Sloan interviewed Ellis for their publisher, Tor, and it’s just perfect.
• William Saletan has written an epic piece for Slate calling out the fraudulent research behind opposition to GMO foods. While the Right certainly has embraced willful ignorance, they certainly don’t (yet) have a monopoly. What climate change and evolution are to conservatives, GMOs and housing policy are to liberals.
• Love this in-depth, magazine-like Buzzfeed article on the humans behind the playlists at every streaming music company. “It’s not about us projecting our personal opinions on people — it’s about us kind of being good shepherds.”
