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Harassment and misogyny had been problems in the community for years before this; the deep resentment and anger toward women that powered Gamergate percolated for years on internet forums. Robert Evans, a journalist who specializes in extremist communities and the host of the Behind the Bastards podcast, described Gamergate to me as partly organic and partly born out of decades-long campaigns by white supremacists and extremists to recruit heavily from online forums. “Part of why Gamergate happened in the first place was because you had these people online preaching to these groups of disaffected young men,” he said. But what Gamergate had that those previous movements didn’t was an organized strategy, made public, cloaking itself as a political movement with a flimsy philosophical stance, its goals and targets amplified by the power of Twitter and a hashtag.

The hate campaign, we would later learn, was the moment when our ability to repress toxic communities and write them off as just “trolls” began to crumble. Gamergate ultimately gave way to something deeper, more violent, and more uncontrollable.

Police have to learn how to keep the rest of us safe from internet mobs

When Devo formed more than 40 years ago, we never dreamed that two decades into the 21st century, everything we had theorized would not only be proven, but also become worse than we had imagined

May 4 changed my life, and I truly believe Devo would not exist without that horror. It made me realize that all the Quasar color TVs, Swanson TV dinners, Corvettes, and sofa beds in the world didn't mean we were actually making progress. It meant the future could be not only as barbaric as the past, but that it most likely would be. The dystopian novels 1984, Animal Farm, and Brave New World suddenly seemed less like cautionary tales about the encroaching fusion of technological advances with the centralized, authoritarian power of the state, and more like subversive road maps to condition the intelligentsia for what was to come.

a philosophy emerged, fueled by the revelations that linear progress in a consumer society was a lie

Belfast Friendship Club meets every Thursday evening, and over the months and years meaningful connections and friendships have been forged, irrespective of our backgrounds or identities. The club’s strength arises from an ethos of solidarity, equity, respect and the huge, loyal and expanding membership draws newcomers into its warm and welcoming space.

In a country still wrestling with its history of intolerance and suspicion of the ‘other’, introducing the table hosts as my friends immediately sets the scene and makes way for connection on a basic, human level. As table hosts share their purely personal perspectives about how they’ve coped with their lives as migrant workers, asylum seekers or refugees, participants are prompted to wonder how they, too, might fare if placed in similar situations.

Culture of Fear argues that media and political fear-mongering teaches consumers and voters to see problems in terms of stories about heroic individuals, rather than about social or political factors.  The contexts get set aside, replaced with more relatable tales of villainous criminals and virtuous victims, which Glassner calls “neurologizing social problems” (217). There is also a curious, quietly conservative politics of the family involved.  Such fears emphasize stranger danger, which is actually statistically very rare.  Instead, they minimize the far more likely source of harm most American face: our family members (31).

fake fears reveal cultural anxieties, much as horror stories do

“news is what happens to your editors.”  By that he means “editors – and their bosses… [and] their families, friends, and business associates”(201)

I also learned a metric crap-tonne about how online communities of angry young nerd dudes function. Which is, to put it simply, around principles of pure toxicity. And now that toxicity has bled into wider society.

In a twist on the "1,000 true fans" principle worthy of Black Mirror, any alt-right demagogue who can gather 1,000 whining, bitter, angry men with zero self-awareness now has a self-sustaining full time job as an online sh*tposter.

Social media has been assailed by one toxic "movement" after another, from Gamergate to Incel terrorism. But the "leaders" of these movements, a ragtag band of demagogues, profiteers and charlatans, seem less interested in political change than in racking up Patreon backers.

How and why do well-educated, well-intentioned scientists produce biased AI systems? Sociological theories of privilege provide one useful lens.

Their training data is biased. They are designed by an unrepresentative group. They face the mathematical impossibility of treating all categories equally. They must somehow trade accuracy for fairness. And their biases are hiding behind millions of inscrutable numerical parameters.

fairness can still be the victim of competitive pressures in academia and industry. The flawed Bard and Bing chatbots from Google and Microsoft are recent evidence of this grim reality. The commercial necessity of building market share led to the premature release of these systems.