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Javier E

The Ugly Honesty of Elon Musk's Twitter Rebrand - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674875

internet adolescent immature juvenile sexism bias psychology social media

shared by Javier E on 08 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • Sexual desire and frustration, familiar feelings for the outcast teenage nerd, pervade the social internet. S3xy-ness is everywhere. Posts by women are dismayingly likely to produce advances, or threats, from creepers on all platforms; at the same time, sex appeal is a pillar for the influencer economy, or else a viable and even noble way to win financial independence. The internet is for porn, as the song goes.
  • In all these ways, online life today descends from where it started, as a safe harbor for the computer nerds who made it. They were socially awkward, concerned with machines instead of people, and devoted to the fantasy of converting their impotence into power.
  • When that conversion was achieved, and the nerds took over the world, they adopted the bravado of the jocks they once despised. (Zuck-Musk cage match, anyone?) But they didn’t stop being nerds. We, the public, never agreed to adopt their worldview as the basis for political, social, or aesthetic life. We got it nevertheless.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • I’m kind of tired of pretending that the stench does not exist, as if doing otherwise would be tantamount to expressing prejudice against neurodivergence. This is a bad culture, and it always has been.
  • If the X rebrand disgusts you—if, like me, you’ve been made a little queasy by having the new logo thrust upon your phone via automatic update—that feeling is about more than Musk alone. He has merely surfaced what has been there all along. The internet is magical and empowering. The internet is childish and disgusting.
  • Musk’s obsession with X as a brand, and his childish desire to broadcast that obsession from the rooftops in hoggish, bright pulsations, calls attention to this baggage. It reminds us that the world’s richest man is a computer geek, but one with enormous power instead of none
  • It calls attention to the putrid smell that suffuses the history of the internet
Javier E

George Orwell: The Prevention of Literature - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...655342

literature journalism truth freedom free speech press

shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of antisocial selfishness
  • the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy over the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies.
  • What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias, and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • it is necessary to strip away the irrelevancies in which this controversy is usually wrapped up.
  • The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism.
  • The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.
  • the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist, He is accused, that is, either of wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current, of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privileges.
  • Each of them tacitly claims that “the truth” has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of “the truth” and merely resists it out of selfish motives.
  • Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and fell, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.
  • known facts are suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be written.
  • A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened
  • Then, again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revaluation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but clearly it is likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment.
  • The friends of totalitarianism in England usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that modem physics has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism.
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