Social Media – The Renegade Coder

As someone who spends a lot of their time explaining algorithms, I find it interesting to think about all the ways they influence our lives. For example, social media algorithms create little echo chambers for people like us. For fun, I went down a rabbit hole on Twitter of rightwing propaganda. Let me tell you something: it's really depressing. Have you ever tried exploring outside your echo chamber? STEM Is Political When I write, I try to remain as apolitical as possible. Ultimately, I just want to be able to provide valuable information without exposing my ideological beliefs. After all, if I expose myself for who I actually am, I'm bound to lose some followers. And in this attention economy, that's equivalent to setting your business on fire. Of course, as I progress in my PhD, I become more and more exposed to valuable quantitative and qualitative research that helps me understand the world a bit better. In fact, I'm currently interested in exploring ideological beliefs as a reflection of tech culture. Oddly enough, as someone interested in ideological beliefs, I find myself constantly reflecting on my own. For example, I often get caught the trap that computer science is apolitical, and yet it very much isn't. Every day, tech is being applied in new ways that help and harm various groups of people, and it's up to us to make sure that tech is being used in a way that benefits the most people. Unfortunately, even suggesting the idea that STEM is inherently political brings out the worst in people. Recently, I found myself venturing outside my own echo chamber to find a set of "intellectuals" that not only refused to believe that STEM is political but also argued that believing so is somehow destructive. Now, I could go into a rant about how STEM is entirely constructed by humans and therefore is susceptible to the same biases as any other human creation, but I'll let Gabrielle Budziszewski do that: …science cannot be separated from what is political because it arose and is performed within an imperfect society. The society in which we do science, marred by bias against Black and minority groups, manifests itself in everything that scientists do, from deciding what topics are important enough to be researched and funded to hiring the next generation of scientists. Shutdown STEM highlights that endeavors like science exist within a racist system, and are too often complicit in perpetuating racial biases. Claiming to be an “apolitical scientist” feeds into the denial of these structurally racist systems. The only way to combat structural racism is to actively train oneself to recognize and combat it. Denial only upholds the oppressive system.Gabrielle Budziszewksi, July 20, 2020 in Opinion: The Fallacy of the Apolitical Scientist Instead, I thought it would be more fun to just describe what I found from the other side. In other words, let's laugh a little bit! Leaving My Twitter Echo Chamber So, I was on Twitter recently when I saw this tweet grace my feed: https://twitter.com/ChuckModi1/status/1317499588975230976?s=20 When I saw this, I really didn't think twice. After all, I believe fascism is already here in America. For example, we have a police state that is actively trying to silence the first amendment rights of its citizens, and a disinformation campaign that is trying to rationalize it by claiming every protest is a riot and our cities are burning. All that aside, it was particularly interesting to read through the comments. After all, I tend to spend a lot of time on leftist side of twitter, so I was expecting the comments to be supportive. Boy, was I wrong! Here's the first comment: https://twitter.com/Swampfox2020/status/1317543226493063168?s=20 Obviously, this sort of question isn't asked in good faith. That said, I figured the answers would be interesting. One of the responses that really got me chuckling was this one: https://twitter.com/BSerp445/status/1317544854348566529?s=20 Which, if you follow the thread, results in a conversation that goes likes this: They can't because that would require them looking in a mirrorAnd an understanding of what fascism is.They use to teach what it actually was in school years agoYepThey used to teach in school Now, I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I read a thread like this. After all, depending on which era these folks went to school, there's a good chance there wasn't any learning happening. Thanks to behaviorism, there was an era of teaching in this country that could only be describe as rote memorization. That's why you have parents today that get upset about Common Core because their brains never got passed times tables. Rant aside, if you keep digging around in this thread, you'll be greeted with this masterpiece: https://twitter.com/nivratsmom/status/1317547638766657536?s=20 While I don't really have anything to say about this comment, I have a lot to say about one of the responses: https://twitter.com/purisomniapura/status/1317566739522138117?s=20 Apparently in the conservative brain, if you don't want a president who separates children from their parents at the border or sends federal agents into protests to incite violence, you're the actual fascist. Somehow, electing Joe Biden will cause actual fascism because he might raise taxes on rich people or something. All kidding aside, this thread gets really weird. In response to Kathleen, Dan shows up with an oddly worded threat: https://twitter.com/dajones115b/status/1317568214956675073?s=20 In this context, I'm assuming that rightwing gun owners are the people to fear here. Because, you know, those guys that are supposed to be defending us against a tyrannical government thought it was actually cool when the federal government was pulling people of the street in unmarked vans. But they're right, wanting women to make as much as men is actually bad. Naturally, this thread gets worse. Our friend Kathleen decides to invoke the "post-modern neo-Marxist" argument by Jordan Peterson: https://twitter.com/purisomniapura/status/1317599594541387783?s=20 Ignoring the fact that this argument seems like some QAnon conspiracy garbage which ignores what's actually happening—people wanting a base level of quality of life for all—the language here is really weird and feels sort of bot-like. Of course, when I investigated their profile, it seemed genuine which is somehow more scary. The group of people claiming that "woke teens" are going to destroy society are so brainwashed by alt-right rhetoric that they don't even know how to do anything but parrot talking points from "experts" who are never actual experts. But hey! Kathleen cooks a mean stew: https://twitter.com/purisomniapura/status/1317173389627478016?s=20 Anyway! That thread from earlier keeps going. That said, I wouldn't read it unless you want your brain to turn into Kathleen's soup. Discovering James Lindsay Fortunately for you, I read the thread which lead me to another mouth-breather: https://twitter.com/purisomniapura/status/1317601906030727169?s=20 I don't think I need to tell you how problematic it is for someone to call themselves "ConceptualJames," but I figured I'd point it out. Interestingly, if you go to the tweet that Kathleen was so generous to share, you'll find yourself another 10' outside of your echo chamber. To be honest, I didn't quite understand the context of James' tweet. That said, the responses were all pure gold. Of course, I'll leave those up to you to explore. What I found a lot more interesting was James' profile. Here's his headline: Not-NYT Bestselling author. Math PhD. Founder of New Discourses. Apolitical. Woke interpreter. Glitched the Matrix. When you ironically say "Glitched the Matrix," you have brain worms. I don't make the rules. Also, he tweets A LOT. In the process of trying to find a link to his latest article (Yes, he writes too), I had to dig through this post history: 1 min ago19 min ago20 min ago3 retweets (no timestamp)24 min ago25 min ago27 min ago28 min ago30 min ago30 min ago1 hr ago1 hr ago1 hr ago2 retweets (no timestamp)2 hr ago3 hr ago Finally, I found this post: https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1317588901008199680?s=20 Against my better judgment, I decided to give it a read. In general, the content is pretty thin. In total, there are less than 1000 words, and most of them are different forms of the word "woke." Also, the website is a bit link heavy and low quality on the whole. When I tried to do some exploring, I noticed that basically every article used the same royalty-free featured image. Apparently, James does a bit of syndication because it looks like he mainly publishes to Roca News before republishing on his own site. I'm not familiar with either site, but both seem pretty low quality. If I had to guess, he's probably paying for his following. Hell, I took a peek at his YouTube channel which has amassed 30,000 subscribers, and I just don't understand how. The videos are lower quality than my own, and I don't even know what I'm doing. I mean it's pretty wild you can amass a following that large when all your videos are 90-minute audio-only rants about wokeness. Even the like to dislike ratios are pretty suspicious. For instance, there's this one video titled Two and Two Make Four which is almost two hours long. It has 20,000 views with 1,100 likes and just 17 dislikes. Then you go to the comments, and you're greeted with these braindead takes: 2+2=5 is literally in 1984 lol When you check out his channel, you'll notice that he's only been posting since 11 months ago. Obviously, it's not impossible to hit 30,000 subscribers in a year, but there are only 25 videos. What's weirder is that some of the older videos looks staged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSHL-rSMIro I remember seeing a Coffeezilla video awhile back about fake gurus who paid for fake sets to pretend to give talks at Harvard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwftRRc7EbI Does this not look exactly like that? That said, he does list out that these talks were held in the Gladstone Library in the National Liberal Club of London for a Speaking Truth to Social Justice event. As far as I can tell, this was a real event. For instance, here was the only proof/critique I could find. Of course, I really ended up down the rabbit hole because this same idiot also found himself on the Joe Rogan podcast. Suddenly, things started to make sense. Joe Rogan is platforming brainlets like this guy on a daily basis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtNW3I1FZ5o&ab_channel=PowerfulJRE The weirdest thing about him is almost no one knows who he is except people in his echo chamber—like I couldn't even find opposing viewpoints of his work. It's like he's completely invisible to the left, and I suppose that's for good reason. Why platform a guy who is just trying to grift? Ultimately, the only information I could find about him was that he wrote a fake article with a couple other grifters and tried to get it published. Apparently, it got accepted by a handful of journals which allowed them to take a victory lap. Empathy Is Bad Or Something Overall, I'm very confused by this person's existence, but none of that is really important. What is important, however, is this amazing tweet which I found just below the article we chatted about earlier: https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1316947807186673664 To me, this post seems rather innocuous. After all, I think it would benefit a lot of white people to reflect on their privilege. Not because I think white people should walk around feeling guilty but because a little bit of empathy can go a long way. Of course, my boy James is a major grifter and relies on crying to make money, so it comes to no surprise that he'd screenshot a 2-year-old post instead of retweeting the source: https://twitter.com/Angela_Watson/status/1025507654825922560?s=20 Oh right! Inviting any sort of criticism would crumble his grift, so he has to be edgy in his echo chamber. Anyway, I love this tweet because the comments are amazing. I'll just list off some of my favorites: https://twitter.com/earlkralik/status/1316948164402941952?s=20 https://twitter.com/graceisforyou/status/1316950398100439041?s=20 https://twitter.com/swcrisis/status/1316949715863437312?s=20 https://twitter.com/peterboghossian/status/1317559689245126656?s=20 https://twitter.com/atheniaris/status/1316955459165868032?s=20 https://twitter.com/isomerik/status/1316948211811143680?s=20 https://twitter.com/Lupinator101/status/1316949342251552769?s=20 I could go on but we'd be here all day. Almost every response to this tweet is the same. Every single one of these people are about as skeptical as my cat when I come home from a short trip. Like listen buddy, I'm your friend here. Did you really forget that quickly? Shitty joke aside, what I'm trying to say is that these people are incapable of understanding empathy. Not only that, but they completely lack self-awareness. In that last tweet, my dude is simultaneously complaining about "smug condescension" while using words like "masquerading." Ultimately, I'm a huge fan of the objectivism ideology that all of these people obsess over. It's the "facts don't care about your feelings" form of brain worms that can never be criticized. Ironically, providing a reasoned argument for why that statement doesn't make any sense would probably spark a lot of "feelings" from these mouth-breathers. That said, as much as I enjoy poking fun at edgy white people, there was definitely one comment that made me uncomfortable: https://twitter.com/Peonichka/status/1316951737325047809?s=20 When I read this comment, I had literally no idea what is being implied, but it felt weird. Like, does this person think they're being an intellectual by trying to draw some strange semantic difference between two similar words? By the reception of this tweet, I assume being an educator is bad. Maybe they think the word is close to indoctrination or something like that. There's just something about these people that rubs me wrong. You ask them to consider their fellow man, and they start playing the victim. Yes, helping people is bad, actually. Crawling Back to My Echo Chamber All that said, I think I'm done for the day! We're over 2,000 words and that's just from me sort of exploring a space outside of my own echo chamber. It was scary, and I don't recommend it. I'll go back to watching Hasanabi where I can feel hopeful for the future. Since this is "premium" content, I don't have much to ask. If you enjoyed this, feel free to share it with a friend! Or, at the very least, show then my list of ways they can help out. Small writers have to grow somehow! Otherwise, thanks for stopping by! I appreciate it.