Hacker News Reader

Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

This might as well as be "Against Tidal Force", because suppressing meme activism is about as tall a challenge.

First, admit that it will never happen by voluntary action. The rumor mill, at least, will keep grinding until the last free-range human is gone, who will tell it to a volleyball if there is nobody else. Then imagine the scale of intervention that would be required to significantly suppress it. It would mean continual monitoring, punishment, isolation, and we'd find ways to signal our discontent through masks and straight jackets. If instead you just opt out, go your own way, plug your ears, you've exited the arena, and the memes will happily steamroll along without you, and with you having less warning to get out of the way.

I too have a beef with meme activism, and also the gravitational constant, and the speed of light. Those are all equally winnable battles.

View on HN

What changed is that the bulk of human communication now is happening on the Internet. And the Internet itself is concentrated in the hands of few companies. And there is an increasing sophistication of actors who play the system.

This means that political and societal activism is now manipulable at scales that were inconceivable some time ago.

So the human factor has always been there (and arguably helped us when the memes were like "kill the sabertooth tiger!"). But the problem is growing because of technology, which is another thing that cannot lightheartedly be slowed down.

So the least we can do is to be aware and minimize the damage

> What changed is that the bulk of human communication now is happening on the Internet. And the Internet itself is concentrated in the hands of few companies.

As opposed to TV, Radio, or Newspaper? Corporate control of media has always been a problem. We are just have less political will to regulate these massive media conglomerates now than we did in the past. This includes the old media companies too. Rupert Murdock has stomped all over American discourse.

yes. Larger scale; faster speed; larger populations

Those are differences of degree, not kind.

The solution to this is to make the war these companies are waging on personal computing illegal, but it might be too late for that.

Not every issue is about general-purpose computing.

Whether you have control over your own device or not, you still can't craft an Algorithm For Truth, because there isn't one. The information that you would want to know from a news site, like "Was the election stolen?", "Was Iraq actually hiding WMDs?", "Did Russia actually invade Ukraine?", "Did the moon landing really happen?", "Were these leaked documents forged?", those all exist outside of your computer. The closest you can possibly get is by establishing a chain of custody from whoever gathered the information leading to you, which your HTTPS connection already does. Figuring out whether the site you're connected to is actually telling the truth or not isn't something that having root access would help with.

Isn’t this well documented by folks like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman with Manufacturing Consent (1988)? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

So, as a serious question, what would Facebook do if it's owners woke up tomorrow and decided their only priority was providing thoughtful, substantial discussion and helping people avoid an unbalanced relationship with social media? Could they "manipulate" their user base to achieve this? Wouldn't they simply loose their users to other venues that would provide a vacuous engagement fix? Moreover, a lot of FB is based on user generated content? How do you prevent that from being trolly/provocative/etc?

Edit: my point would be the manipulation happens but it's much more a product of the generators of provocative content than the forums, which give a certain spin but can't help but provide a forum for what is viral. As an "exception that proves the rule", FB and mainstream social media successfully suppressed Guilliani's one, big hit-piece last election. They got tremendous heat for this and it was clearly something they couldn't keep doing for every bit of content. Just consider, the NY Post still gets a wide forum despite, imo, being the tissue of lies and a river of filth.

Edit2: And FB provides rebuttal like for some number of overtly fake stories. Is that enough? Is that itself manipulation?

They already have emotional algorithms. Tilt the scales to happy stories instead of outrage porn.

> So, as a serious question, what would Facebook do if it's owners woke up tomorrow and decided their only priority was providing thoughtful, substantial discussion and helping people avoid an unbalanced relationship with social media?

In the case of Facebook, it's not immediately apparent to me how the platform might be changed to facilitate more thoughtful conversation. But on the other hand, Twitter is an easy case: get rid of the comment limit and let people express their thoughts using more than pithy snippets.

But those snippets (like 7-second videos) are optimized for the attention economy in a way longer-form media is not. Even if Twitter made this change the traditional short pithy tweets would beat any long-form thoughtful comment.

Giving people the opportunity can only improve the situation. On social media platforms that permit longer comments, people often leave longer comments. And if nobody wanted to leave longer comments, then the twitter limitation would serve no purpose at all.

Put another way, sloganeering, and the brain-dead adoption of slogans, has always been a thing. Someone less lazy than me could probably dig up examples going back to ancient Rome. "Meme Activism" is just the latest iteration of "I Like Ike" or "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too." What has changed to some degree is the speed and intensity with which the slogans can impact public figures.

Perhaps it was thought or believed that an increased availability of education, in general, had curbed the effectiveness of these types of persuasive methods. Although, it's probable that you are right and they never subsided; only adapting to a new environment and mostly dismissed as outdated in hindsight.

"Elect Gaius Julius Polybius to the office of aedile. He provides good bread" - graffiti found at Pompeii

Just because there isn't a top-down solution that eradicates the source of the issue doesn't mean it shouldn't be observed and discussed. You pointed out that you can't "beef" with the gravitational constant, but if you are aware of it you can avoid its negative affects and potentially use them to your advantage. Gravity will collapse a building, but if you are aware of it you can engineer a building so it doesn't collapse.

"Gravity, at least, will keep grinding until the universe is compressed into a single point. To eliminate gravity completely it would require constant destruction, compression, agitation, and elimination of all physical laws. Instead, just plug your ears and scream "LALALALA" a pretend gravity doesn't exist because you will stick to the surface of the planet regardless."

Not entirely sure that's how Gravity works, btw, as it's relative to this planet rather than the universe.

The universe is expanding.

There are many things in society - scratch that, nearly everything in society - that I both dislike for one reason or another, but also accept they will never change. Still, it is nice to hear other people express similar opinions. Imagine where we would be if there was never any pushback against bad ideas.

The bulk of pushback against bad ideas, especially sinister ones that come with societal blowback, occurs in the form of ignoring them.

It's whats happening right now with CRT. You can't speak out against it, without risking reputation or livelihood so you hope to just ignore it until it goes away.

> It's whats happening right now with CRT. You can't speak out against it, without risking reputation or livelihood so you hope to just ignore it until it goes away.

I find this absurd as someone who had an interest in critical theory (including CRT) about 7 years ago.

Nobody had even heard of CRT until like 3 years ago and what people call "CRT" isn't even an actual category. It is certainly not being taught in highschools.

It's a boogeyman produced by conservative media. I actually am not a fan of many subbranches (ie. afro-pessimism is BS, IMO) and would have no fear about stating that publicly.

All that speaking out against "CRT" as a general phenomenon demonstrates to me is that you spend a lot of time reading the conservative media bubble.

Yeah, my favorite bit is the whole freakout about teaching CRT in K-12 education.

(If anyone was proposing that, it might be worth freaking out over, but not for the reasons being cited, but more for the same reasons you’d freak out over proposing Quantum Chemistry as a high school graduation requirement. Except moreso, because QChem is at least reasonably common in undergraduate curricula.)

> Nobody had even heard of CRT until like 3 years ago and what people call "CRT" isn't even an actual category. It is certainly not being taught in highschools.

This to me sounds like someone dismissing the harms caused by a Church by saying that it isn't technically part of scriptural canon, and that if we could only adopt True and correct orthodoxy, these abuses would not happen.

The problem is that kids are being taught to not be friends with each other because of what they look like.

> The problem is that kids are being taught to not be friends with each other because of what they look like.

That's always been true, and CRT has nothing to do with it.

> That's always been true, and CRT has nothing to do with it.

I have seen it happen to preteens first hand. Children that a year ago were comfortable hanging out, are no longer so.

CRT encourages kids to engage in paint-swatch racialism.

It is heartbreaking to see first hand children who used to just be able to play together, worry about whether they should include or exclude other kids because of what they look like.

Teaching children to pre-judge people because of where their pigmentation is on a paint swatch is grotesque and it is child abuse.

If your ideology leads you to hurt children, then your ideology must be wrong.

So, pre-judging people is wrong because it erases their identity by making unfounded and unfair presumptions about who they are because of arbitrary physical characteristics that they can not control. Racial pre-judgement is a dangerous bronze-age heuristic that society should try to be moving past, but CRT encourages it.

Implanting racial self hatred (and racial pride) is a pernicious and dangerous thing to do, and if you can't see that I don't have time to educate you. Reducing human beings down to being "black and brown bodies" is disgusting. The correct response to that kind of dehumanization can only be disgust. And again, people in positions of authority imposing that in CHILDREN. At least adults have more agency to push back.

I don't care if that isn't "real" CRT. It doesn't matter if what I am talking about isn't textually correct. If the CRT you are talking about only exists in the minds of obscure scholars and texts, then it is just a fantasy, and doesn't really exist. The only real CRT is what is actually being implemented in classrooms across the country.

> Children that a year ago were comfortable hanging out, are no longer so.

Yeah probably no lurking variable there...

> If the CRT you are talking about only exists in the minds of obscure scholars and texts, then it is just a fantasy, and doesn't really exist. The only real CRT is what is actually being implemented in classrooms across the country.

Imagine replacing CRT in this sentence with quantum physics or advanced macroeconomics. It doesn't make sense, and leaning heavily on "oh but the children" doesn't really win any points if you don't have a rational explanation of how this is happening.

> Yeah probably no lurking variable there...

You are teaching kids to be uncomfortable with each other based on what they look like. You are telling kids that they are fundamentally different from each other. You are telling kids that "race" is the most important element of their identity, and that they are wrong for trying to overlook how they are different.

That is child abuse.

I've heard fire and brimstone priests who turn people against each other use exactly the same defense for traumatizing kids. It is something like: It's not my fault that I'm giving 6 year olds nightmares; I'm just exposing them to reality. I'm actually helping them!

Telling children that they are terrible people and need your permission to be good is a horrible thing to do. And I think that in the future you will end up being seen as no better than abusive clergy.

> Imagine replacing CRT in this sentence with quantum physics or advanced macroeconomics. It doesn't make sense, and leaning heavily on "oh but the children" doesn't really win any points if you don't have a rational explanation of how this is happening.

It makes perfect sense. If everyone is learning a flawed or incomplete version of quantum mechanics, then that is what quantum mechanics effectively is. The fact that a "better" version of it exists somewhere is meaningless. Physics isn't right because feelings and because a majority of people say it is right. This is basic epistemology.

If you can defend any ideology by simply saying that the version being widely taught is wrong, and somewhere, there is a correct version of it.

You can try to defend CRT abuse by saying that it isn't "real" CRT, but that again means almost nothing. The problem is not about textual adherence, it is about abuse of people.

I'm equally not impressed with people dismissing stuff like The Killing Fields as "not really Communism", as if that even matters. People aren't complaining about the text of CRT, they are complaining about harm done to people.

And yes, if you are hurting children, you are prima facie wrong. It is an incredibly short chain of reasoning.

> CRT encourages kids to engage in paint-swatch racialism

No, it doesn't; paint-swatch racialism is solidly embedded in American culture, abd CRT is quite distant from it. Not, again, that anyone is actually teaching CRT to kids.

It’s true that “CRT” is the label to which the American Right has attached their longstanding slander against the anti-racist elements of the left, that by opposing institutional racism that favors whites they paint whites as racist based on their race, but the Right changing the label they attach that lie to doesn't make it either the broader lie or the new association true.

> If your ideology leads you to hurt children, then your ideology must be wrong.

Well, yes, that's among the many reasons why a reflexive defense of white supremacy that leads you to invent a whole false narrative around Critical Race Theory to justify mandated teaching of whitewashed history to children is wrong, sure.

> I don't care if that isn't "real" CRT.

You should care, because caring about being lied to about that would tell you to look behind the lie and see that CRT has been around for decades, no one has tried to teach it to kids, no has proposed teaching it to kids, and there's been no change in that or anything adjacent to it recently that could explain any of the things which have been blamed on it. The only thing that has changed connected to CRT is that in the last year, the American Right, out of the blue and with little connection to reality, adopted it as a label to which they attached the same lins which the anti-anti-racist segment of the Right has used against contemport anti-racists for generations (even before CRT existed).

And that might lead you to consider the actual causes of the tensions you see, rather than the self-serving narrative of a political faction that has had strategic leverage of disaffected White racist as a central strategy since...well, just a little earlier than CRT was first developed.

> This to me sounds like someone dismissing the harms caused by a Church

Hm. It does? My point is not saying anything is not part of "scriptural canon", merely that "CRT" as described is not actually taught in schools nor is it a clearly defined category.

But honestly, philosophical schools of thought are not very reminiscent of the Catholic church, which you seem to be making allusions to.

Sometimes analogizing can obscure the point, I think you have reached this point here. (:

> Hm. It does? My point is not saying anything is not part of "scriptural canon", merely that "CRT" as described is not actually taught in schools nor is it a clearly defined category.

I think that it is an accurate enough label. Clearly this stuff is heavily inspired and informed by CRT. From what I can tell, it contains the essential elements of CRT, just distilled down for easier consumption.

I think it is fair to call a curriculum authored by a confessed CRT advocate like Ibram Kendi Critical Race Theory.

But again, people are not complaining because it is Critical Race Theory. People are complaining that it is harmful.

I do not appreciate or even care for social media callouts, but personally I thought it was “nice to hear” a politician apologize for shamelessly defending Israeli apartheid for once.

I sympathize with Americans who are unfamiliar with foreign politics, so I am not saying this to fight or shame anybody, but this was not just a twitter event. It was more a result of the study released by Human Rights Watch days earlier than it was a result of social media shaming. This event held important historical significance far beyond Twitter.

An individual can fight "meme activism" by creating a practice that isn't it and spreading that practice.

But I agree you can't "fight" it by shaking your fist at it and you can't expect it to go away by some choice as long as the forces that put it in place are here.

It's true that memes have a life of their own but they are currently fueled by social media companies that operate on advertising revenue. This is a fixable problem but it requires changing the model that generates meme worthy content. As long as publishing every thought is "free" there is no viable solution to stopping meme activism because advertisers like it when people scream and shout at each other because it keeps them on sites like Twitter and Facebook longer than they would stay there otherwise. And since they stay longer because they're angry it is easier to show them ads for some product that will cure them of their ills. Commercial interests are fundamentally the root cause of this problem.

"just don't engage" is not a solution. When BLM burns down cities and Trump supporters storm government buildings, these memes become something much larger. "just don't engage" is the modern day equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns.

These "memes" have serious effects on society that can't just be ignored.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com