Someone mentioned this term in a lower post where I was being harassed for refusing to argue with someone who I think is an obvious alt-right troll. I’d never heard of it before so off to urban dictionary I ran and man… It’s right on.
You do not have to engage with people like this. You don’t owe every person in your path an explanation.
This happened to me around Christmas. A guy messaged me, called me a dumb bitch, etc. I didn’t engaged with him because, why would I? He kept messaging me demanding why I didn’t respond. Citing his language to me I asked why would I want to.
He said he’d apologize if I would debate with him and answer his questions. I tried debating with him on and off for about a day. Finally it was Christmas Eve and I just realized I was getting no where so I told him that we had to agree to disagree. That angered him and said I’d promised I’d answer his questions. I’d felt like I had as best I could.
I told him again I was done.
He immediately took back his apology, resumed his insults, and essentially said that since I wouldn’t endlessly defend my case I was worthless and everything I said was worthless.
I realized then this whole conversation has been a mistake. He was willing to swear at and insult me and only apologize and show respect if I did everything he said no questions.
That was not respect and it was my mistake for not recognizing it earlier.
I’ll say again… You don’t owe everyone in your path an explanation. If you do decide to engage someone it can be on your terms.
Your worth and your beliefs don’t have to be validated by every troll under the bridge.
Now I have a word for it!
In my experience with fandom, people would come with what seemed to be very reasonable questions, but they would transparently try to set me up for “Gotcha!” moments. I could always tell because when I didn’t answer them in a way that sprung the trap, they would keep asking the same question again and again.
Best example – a questioner asked me “Why do you think Tyler Posey has had trouble getting roles as compared to his co-stars?” My response was “I don’t think he has had trouble getting roles.” This obviously wasn’t the answer they were looking for, so they kept asking the same question, again and again, and then accused me of refusing to answer. They wanted me to get into an argument where they could demand I acknowledge that he wasn’t a good actor.
Sea-lioning. I like it! Do you have a link to that comic strip?
alli did was start up an au fanfic series about getting therapy so i could tell my personal crazy person stories in peace and my inbox was full of sea lions for months. Fucked my life up for a good long while, and my recovery too, but by god i learned my lesson. Never humor these people, they live to drain you.
three internet trends i will (regrettably) probably never grow out of:
• typing in a cresCENDO TO EXPRESS EXCITEMENT
• …………..unnecessarily……. long……….. ellipsis’
• puttinfh a typo in eveyr other word to shwo u dont really give a fukc but u actually do
also unnecessary!!!! punctuation marks??????? like…… ??? what is going on here????? i!! am!!! so!!! excited!!!!
and™ totally™ unneeded™ trademark symbols™
personally I enjoy Random Capitalisation to show things are Very Important
can we also talk about starting a sentence and then kind of just
stating something reblog if you agree
dude this isn’t even a collection of memes, this is a demonstration of internet grammar… anyone who says that when you type and communicate on the internet you lose too much inflection to get the real meaning just doesn’t understand internet syntax. the evolution of language in action.
the Rosetta Stone of the twenty first century
Also 🙂 doing 🙂 this 🙂 to express 🙂 bottled 🙂 pain 🙂
or,,,,,using commas,,,,,, for elipsis’ ,,,, bc,,, it sounds better,,, in your head,,,, than periods,,,,,,,
pu t ting sp a ces in your wor ds at r and om time s because w hat the fu ck
Is it just me, or did anyone else read all of these with different tones of voice, volume, and inflection?
Don’t forget the B I G S P A C E S F O R E M P H A S I S
Of all the skills that futurists predicted would become valuable in the era of constant communication, I don’t think anybody saw “conversational multithreading” coming.
No, I don’t mean holding multiple conversations with different people at the same time. I mean holding two or more completely separate conversations with the same person, via the same medium, at the same time.
Like when you’re texting, and the person on the other end asks you a question, then mentally eight-tracks and asks a different, unrelated question before you’ve finished keying in your response to the first one. So you answer the first question, and a conversation based on that answer ensues; then you answer the second question, and a totally different conversation based on that answer ensues, and now you’re having two separate conversations with the same person at the same time, and have to keep track of which responses pertain to which conversation purely from context.
Sometimes I wonder what the generational cutoff for that seeming unusual is – I didn’t pick up the skill until I was like thirty, so there’s always that undercurrent of generational novelty there.
“ewwwww he thinks that the self is something more than just a bundle of correlated qualia”
You ever just realize that, pre Internet, maybe even pre social media, none point none none percent of us fucks would have ever even heard the word qualia before?
I mean, okay, maybe some of us would’ve taken an intro to philosophy course in college. But probably very few of us would’ve bothered to seek out knowledge that would lead us to run into this topic.
I saw this meme and I instantly knew what it meant. Anyone using the internet while having an almost completely passive level of curiosity about human existence would be exposed to the word qualia in less than a decade. Maybe less than 5 years. Based on my own experience.
That’s just wild to me. Having that word. Being a person who knows what that word means. A thing doesn’t exist as a known concept until it is described and attached to a word. And I can just apply that concept to other ideas any time it feels applicable. I can associate that idea with other concepts.
The internet as a thing that fosters interdisciplinary understanding is maybe my favorite invention that humans have created. (Besides obvious life saving stuff.)
Imagine it. Memes fostering the sharing of concepts between academic disciplines by putting those concepts into the lexicons of young people. That’s some future shit. That’s some 2037 shit.
That’s an interesting quale.
why are Americans so obsessed with quale? I’ve tried it a couple of times, and I just can’t see how it competes with spinach.
Kale is way better than spinach, wtf are you talking about. It doesn’t bruise and get gross at the slightest touch even when raw, and you can cook it in a sure and end up with softened by still discrete and reasonable-textured kale instead of a bunch of goop.
okay, sure, qualia are nice, but consider all the p-zombies sitting around starving because yuppies think they need qualia.
‘that’s pornhub, simba. you must never go there.’)
we all see plenty of posts about how adults on the internet need to remember that ‘kids’ (read: teens) are around and we must bear that in mind. and these posts are not entirely without merit. It’s important to keep conversations being held with teens carefully teen-friendly and appropriately distant. but the entirety of tumblr and twitter aren’t designed to cater to the safety of minors, and all the adult self-policing in the world won’t make all the kid-unfriendly content go away.
not all teens believe the internet should have gutter bumpers for them, either. but those that do have mystified me for a while … until I started to understand just how pervasive ‘helicopter parenting’ is in parts of American (and UK) culture, and how that affects the adolescents and young adults of today.
anonymous asked:
a thing worth noting re anyone who pulls the ‘you can’t blacklist on mobile, minors can still see it’ thing to say even tagged content isn’t okay: even if washboard didn’t exist, the tumblr app is rated 17/18+ in app stores. if people under that age get on the app and see things they shouldn’t, that’s on them and their parents/guardians, because they shouldn’t actually have been using the app in the first place.
agreed.
Honestly, though, the argument has moved past this in some ways. It’s not so much about whether or not teenagers are allowed to see this thing or that thing; it’s a well-known fact that most teenagers will break rules if it suits them and they can get away with it, and internet time is a prime space wherein they can do so.
What’s happened is that some adolescents – teens with parents that are overly protective and crowd their schedules with supervised activities, usually – have been taught by their life experience that:
all adults in their vicinity are there to protect them. and no wonder: the large majority of their contact with adults will have been as supervisors. Teachers, teacher assistants, instructors, daycare employees, and coaches are all adults who are paid to watch their activity and will be held responsible for the teen’s wellbeing by their guardians. when have they ever spent time with adults who aren’t in charge of making sure they’re safe?
any space they are in will be designed and maintained with their safety and comfort in mind (no matter how they obtained access). all spaces they enter are specifically meant to revolve around them: schools, sports, playgrounds, etc. The few occasions that they have to enter spaces not meant specifically for them (stores, etc) they are closely watched by adults and any harm they experience will be blamed on adults as a result.
if they can get access, it must be a space that’s safe for them. Having spent very little of their lives unsupervised, they have always been actively prevented from entering spaces that are not meant for them. They’ve never had to learn to set boundaries for themselves, so they naturally reason that if a boundary is not actively enforced, it must actually be a space they’re meant to enter.
they are not responsible for themselves. adults around them are responsible for them. if they come to harm, it’s because an adult wasn’t doing their job properly.
for teens of this mindset, ‘18+ ONLY’ warnings are merely a suggestion. Nobody is stopping them, after all, and it has never been their job to stop themselves. and if they can get access, the space is now theirs – because all spaces they are in are theirs. they couldn’t get there unless it was meant for them; that’s how it works, right?
This is why some teens are utterly flabbergasted by the idea that adults on the internet want to interact with fellow adults on an adult level in a space the teen can access. They’re here! That means the space is specifically meant to cater to them! The adults are automatically tasked with their safety! If teens do get into trouble, it’s because the adults weren’t responsible enough! that’s how this has always worked.
And when adults say ‘no, I do not take responsibility for your actions, the internet is full of things that may frighten or harm you and you must set your own boundaries,’ it’s distressing and scary all at once.
(no wonder so many people in their late teens/early 20′s want to still be considered as children.)
This explains a lot. I grew up with sane parents a long time ago, and as a result, I tend to assume that the world is full of things that could potentially hurt me, but that are very unlikely to if I exercise reasonable caution. This has worked out quite well.
Hey remember in the very early 2000s when ppl would like put *brick’d* or *shot* at the ends of their own sentences, like, they’d cut themselves off preemptively by roleplaying a third party who was preventing them from finishing their sentence… by physically harming them… ???? ?
that was some next level shit tbh
its just the 2000s version of ending a text post in the middle of a sentence and waiting for someone to reblog it w “they fucking killed him”
Right but you take th e fucking initiative yourself instead of lazing about expecting some other guy to come along and do the work FOR you like people do nowadays…. smh where is this generations work ethic…. in my day we had to walk up implying someone had killed you mid-sentence both ways
When I was a teenager on the internet looking at adult content, the fear was that some “concerned” parent would stumble across any of the relatively small fan communities and raise hell with the ISP until it was shut down.
Now I’m a grown-ass adult, and the fear is that the teenagers themselves will threaten, doxx, bully, and harass content creators off of large social media sites who have entire legal teams dedicated to covering their asses because their parents have done such a shit job teaching them internet saftey that they operate under the delusion that the entirety of the worldwide web was created as some “safe space” for minors rather than the godamned seedy back alley it has always been.
I don’t like overgeneralizing teenagers, I mean many anti-antis are teenagers, many of my followers are teenagers. But when talking about broad generational differences I believe Roach Patrol or one of their friends once said something kinda potent about how being born after the world trade center attack could shape the beliefs of some people into thinking it’s normal for any freedoms or potential dangers to be squashed in the name of public safety.
The rational here being that they were kinda born into a world where that is widely the response to danger.
But I think many people now are aware that a lot of the extra security we’ve put in place since 9/11 is mostly for show so that people feel safe, ie; security theater.
So sometimes what antis are asking for amounts to security theater for the Internet. Where they think that if we can squash these fan fictions, fan arts and pairings the world will have less rapists, domestic abusers and child molesters.
I may have been responsible for the ur-post of the 9/11 Generational Hypothesis. Or one iteration of it, anyway; I assume it’s been suggested independently multiple times. I’ve seen some of the critiques that have emerged since, many of them sensible, others not so much, but the one that’s stuck with me is: the people who are old enough to remember 9/11 are just as susceptible to the black-and-white fear mentality; hell, we’re the ones who inflicted it on the next generation. The difference is that we have an alternate mental model available. If a bunch of the kids who are just starting to graduate college have trouble conceptualizing it as anything but Bad People Danger World, well, they’re not the ones whose choices brought that about.
I’ve grown fond of that description of the problem because I like problems that suggest their own solutions.
In any case, “security theater for the internet” is a fucking brilliant summation of this particular instance of the problem.
You can’t just tell people to ‘get a VPN (Virtual Private Network)’. Buying a VPN is like buying a house. It’s very very important. Having no VPN or having a ‘wrong’ one can seriously damage your life. Especially for Americans because their privacy laws are garbage. I am going to try explain why you should get a VPN but bare with me, I am from Germany and my English is far from perfect.
Let’s start with a simple test. Click this link here: https://whatismyipaddress.com/ It will tell your IP adres, your ISP (internet service provider), and your location. The location might not be very accurate, but then again, it’s just a simple website. Imagine what the government can do!
So basically, everyone can find out where you live. But there is more danger. Your ISP. Your ISP logs your every move online and they are required to keep it in case the government wants access to it (or if a 3rd party wants to buy your data (yikes). They have everything. What websites you visit. How long you stay on a website. What you download. Your search terms. European laws are more subtle on this but if you are from the US you are #@*#&, especially because Trump doesn’t support the open internet. It’s scary but maybe in the future you can’t get a job because the recruiter knows your searched on ‘how to deal with depression’ or anythings else that’s supposed to be private because it’s your f*cking right. Or you get a $100k fine because you pirated a movie 15 years ago. You need a VPN. You’re dumb for not using one. but what does a VPN do?
A VPN encrypts all your data so if it were be intercepted no one can ‘crack the code’ and damage your privacy.
Usually being online goes like this (simplified): Your computer —-> ISP (—–> keeps data —–> sells it)
But with a VPN it goes like: Your computer —–> VPN (encrypts data)—–> ISP (ISP can’t see shit)
Furthermore, a VPN hides your IP address and location by giving you another IP address located in Spain for example (you can often choose from a list and change as many times as you want).
Now that you know why you should get a VPN and what is does it is important to educate yourself because people often choose the wrong VPN. VPN providers are also businesses and have to obey the law. If you choose a VPN provider located in the US then you are throwing your money away because the laws in the US shits on your privacy. If the US gov wants the provider to give all their logs they have to obey. The ISP still can’t see what you are doing online and sell your data but the US gov can interfere with your VPN provider so NEVER CHOOSE A PROVIDER LOCATED IN THE US.
I just wanted to make that very clear so my followers don’t buy false security.
There is still more danger! Who says your VPN provider isn’t selling your data? You need to check their logging policy. Do they keep logs? If yes, what for? For how long do they keep them? Tip: Choose a provider who doesn’t keep logs
More about law The US is part of the Five Eyes program (the worst):
The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY, is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are bound by the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence (source)
There is also a Nine Eyes (bit better) and Fourteen Eyes Program (better). You don’t want a VPN provider who is located in one the Five Eyes countries. If you had to choose go for a provider located in a country that’s part of the Fourteen Eyes Program or even better, go for a country that isn’t part of any program!
I know this is a shitty explanation and please pardon my english but now it’s time to do your own research. Take your privacy seriously. Maybe WWIII breaks out and you get killed for liking the ‘wrong’ FB-page.
Make sure that your future VPN provider both has green boxes for Privacy Jurisdiction and Privacy Logging.
I recommend ovpn.se and trust.zone. ovpn is located in Sweden so they are part of the 14 Eyes Program and they keep minimal logs. Their business ethics, however, are alright.
Trustzone is located in the Seychelles. No country can interfere and their privacy jurisdiction is the best you can get. The US want your data but needs to get it from Trustzone? The Seychelles will simply give them the finger and wave them goodbye. However, this makes this provider very appealing for people who torrent and criminals because they keep no logs (and that is how it shoud be) Also, there are almost no marketing efforts so this provider is one the cheapest)
Also, often providers such as ExpressVPN are being called ‘The Best’ on websites about VPNs but know that this is just marketing which also makes those provider more expensive (and they too shit on your privacy)
This must be the worst article you have ever read but please, please take your privacy very seriously.
I am also with Trustzone but I think you forgot to explain one of it’s most important features. It protects you when you are using someone else’s Wi-Fi. If you are at Starbucks and you use their Wi-Fi your privacy is at risk. Anyone with ill intentions could steal your information. Especially if you are using an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot. With a VPN your data gets encrypted so no one can steal it.
Wait, what’s going, on? Did trump destroy internet privacy with a bill or something? Where’s the news? Oh wait, why am I getting visions of Alex Jones and selling water purifiers?
He hasn’t yet but he says he wants to. And if he is serious about it it would be really easy to do. Since all our data is already recorded, as the person above explained.
Trump wants more surveillance of Muslim Americans. This in a country where internet privacy is already close to non-existent.
To all my friends in the US, please read this entire post. Making everyone aware of VPNs is going to be my mission. Your privacy matters. Please reblog this post.
Don’t tell me you just wanted to scroll past this. Stop looking at pictures of cats for a moment, okay? Don’t you realize how important this is? This is dangerous! ‘America, the best FREE country in the world’ my ass.
With this new law your ISP can sell your Internet history which could include passwords, usernames, religion, credit card numbers, race and much more to the highest bidder. So here is what I want you to do.
You are going to read the whole thing and before you think ’this is so important. Let me reblog this real quick and go back to admiring cats again-’ NO! Don’t reblog this. Take action first. Then reblog. Sign up for a free trial! Trust.Zone offers one (here). Yes. It might be difficult to set up a VPN for some people. But is that going to stop you from protecting yourself and your family? 30 minutes. 30 minutes is all that it takes. 5 if you know how to install software. The problem with some of you is that you see ‘difficult’ as something negative. I want you to see difficult differently. I need you to push through this stuff. You are going to protect yourself. There is nothing negative about that.
VPNs are fun and costsaving too! A VPN bypasses geographical restrictions so you can access websites you normally can’t or you could start Netflix’s one month free trial over and over again- forever. And it’s legal! (unless you use it to buy weapons etc.,)
Don’t tell yourself that you are too tired and that you will do this tomorrow. Because that isn’t going to happen and you know it. You have to do this right now. You only have to click on it.
Don’t let this/shit/life just happen to you. Take yourself seriously. Get a VPN.
Privacy is not a privilege, it’s a fundamental human right
I’m trying to get through this but with every paragraph I finish the screaming in my head gets louder.
For everybody who doesn’t want to read the whole thing – do, it’s really eye-opening – here some key paragraphs:
Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so
to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a
series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate
change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute);
and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of
the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve
Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he
gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting
“liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger,
and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at
the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.
It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a
rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a
Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo
Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic
views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands
after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the
29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s
bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than
PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on
Twitter.
…
But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name:
because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics
company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was
spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in
“election management strategies” and “messaging and information
operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and
Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological
operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)
Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign.
…
In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a
database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting
population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post
reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington
office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s
administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in
engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly
if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.
…
One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of
thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have
tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a
trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together
to drown out all other sources of information.
Like zombies?
“Like zombies.”
Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then
exported everywhere else. “You have these incredible propaganda tools
developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy
with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.”
The last sentences:
(…) a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the
60s. “World War III will be a guerrilla information war,” it says. “With
no divisions between military and civilian participation.”
By that definition we’re already there.
I’m gonna break it down further because seriously, holy shit.
1. Billionaire white man is spending millions to “disrupt mainstream media.” He’s very conservative and backed Trump with $13.5 million in donations, and has close ties to Steve Bannon.
2. He funded Breitbart.com with $10 million, which is now more popular with U.S. Internet users than HuffPo or PornHub.
3. He also has a large stake in a company that specializes in psyops, also known as propaganda and other forms of psychological warfare, refined in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Russia.
4. This company lent its software both to the Leave side of Brexit and Trump’s presidential campaign.
5. This company claims to have a database with information on almost every eligible voter in the U.S.
6. This information is then used to target people with ads, websites, and headlines in a way designed to control their thinking and change their minds on political issues.
7. There are thousands, maybe millions of cookie cutter “news” websites and Twitter bots designed to spread a specific message to make it seem legitimate and drown out actually legitimate news.
Other important quotes:
“Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.”
“The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.”
“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”
“It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.”
“There are different arms of SCL but it’s all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.”
““Look at this,” he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he’s a consensus.””
Hydra and Project Insight are real. Terrifying to know.
… so that’s what happened to 4chan. I could tell it was being used as a testing pool for propaganda – free human test subjects! – but I was stuck using forensic linguistics to catalogue “insincere posters” and check for patterns in the things they said. It’s already known that people are paid to post on there, but the overarching motive was unclear.
I have been witnessing this happening on Facebook and Reddit with my own eyes and struggling to describe it in coherent words that don’t sound alarmist, but I’m not sure there are any.
^ This has been happening for a very long time. I would estimate this started around 2006, aka, “the summer that never ended”, but it was absolutely in motion by 2009. I’ve been watching it happen. My friends have been watching it happen. It’s not “oh no, this is happening”.
We finally found the wallet. This has been the proverbial serpent in the frog garden for a decade. It has devoured the internet.
Yeah, 2006 sounds about right. I was talking about this with my partners the other night.
The rise of Facebook is a linchpin because it’s the best implement anyone’s ever had for delivering individually tailored propaganda to a large number of people. (Peter Thiel was its first funder…)
Account signup opened to the public in ‘06 and the userbase started expanding dramatically around 2009-10. This was also when they started turning a profit. I don’t have a timeline for the development of their manipulative algorithms, but it seems a reasonable inference that that’s when they figured out how to get people hooked and also convince them to buy things, so…
the internet is a reverse monkeys-on-typewriters things where we learn that if we get enough people typing coherent phrases, eventually many will produce incomprehensible bullshit
just moving along like everyone else 