As I continue to dig through the RN playlist I’m unearthing albums that I’d fully missed in the deluge of 2020. Prime example: Honey Harper’s Starmaker, released on March 6 (bummer). On his debut album, the Georgia-bred, UK-based singer said he was looking to “revitalize country music for people who don’t like country music” by including more contemporary elements like synths, dissonance, autotune, and negative space. With a clearer news slate, his effort might have found more success, and when he sings about his dreams of stardom, you sort of wish he had knocked it out of the park as a reward for his vulnerability. But even if a star is not yet made, you can enjoy his subdued tales of longing on your own. Do that here.
I hate to be the one to bring it up, but who would have thought social media could be such a negative force in the world? JKJKJKKKKK, but boy, do we suddenly care. For the hottest take on how the online and the physical worlds are not in fact separate, see the latest NYT column by Buzzfeed Ben about a former Buzzfeed staffer who grew the original Tasty accounts and in the years since has radicalized enough to storm the Capitol. After learning how to grow audiences around irresistibly offbeat videos, Anthime Joseph Gionet, whose former colleagues describe him as a “sad character” with an emotional hole at his center, leveraged those skills toward building a following as an alt-right influencer called “Baked Alaska.” (This is the point at which you stop feeling surprised.)
Numbers fuel the soul, you see, the same way they juice a business deck, and those things in tandem are why we have a problem. For Smith, perhaps the world’s most powerful media columnist at present, this story “leaves me wondering what share of blame those of us who pioneered the use of social media to deliver information deserve at this moment.” He doesn’t really answer that question— maybe because, as he says for the millionth time, he still owns shares in Buzzfeed— but the answer is implied. At one point in the story, Smith refers to “truth” as a “constraint” to Buzzfeed’s content business, which tells us everything we need to know about the integrity of numbers-driven media.(Truth is less appealing than the unrelenting reinforcement of your views, turns out.) But saying more on that would be… too radical?
Twitter, Facebook, and all the other platforms that spun us to the extremes are finally sort of recanting and it’s A LITTLE LATE. As any parent would tell us, random and unpredictable slaps on the wrist don’t tend to prime anyone to understand or abide by rules, and they predictably haven’t helped curb the spread of fascism online. Now that that’s Quantifiably A Problem, the tech giants are doling out bigger slaps on bigger wrists, which I’ll reiterate is better but still not a solution.
Two reporters at First Draft have been keeping a
chart of the various platforms’ steps to temper insurrectionist mobilization, tracking the specific policies each company cites for, say, suspending accounts or removing content. But you’ll see that in many cases, companies haven’t cited any policy at all, because they don’t have clear policies around this kind of thing. This brings us back to the classic complaint that social platforms
haven’t decided what they are.* Are they public commons where discourse flows freely? Well, no, because they’re privately owned. And being private, they are well within their rights to moderate (not censor) content in accordance with some sort of moral compass. But they won’t, because again, being private, they do what’s best for their bottom line, not for the public good. This is your periodic reminder that Twitter is not your friend.
*Linking here to an essay by Allegra Hobbs that you can only access if you’re on the Study Hall listserv. I include the link to credit her, not to frustrate you.
If you haven’t already, this might be the time to jump into the NYT’s Rabbit Hole, in which the tech reporter Kevin Roose traces one guy’s radicalization through years of his YouTube history. Come for the sensationalism, stay for the Gamergate throwbacks.
(FYI, on the podcast, Roose is closely accompanied by the producer Andy Mills, who is now known for some pretty virile misogyny at Radiolab, where he used to work. This all came to light during the investigation of Mills’s contributions to the retracted episodes of Caliphate. Now you know.)
