💾 Archived View for idiomdrottning.org › echo-chambers captured on 2024-05-26 at 15:17:20. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Echo chambers

Part one

Since I hate the world, I try to think of everything in terms of how it worked pre-internet. We had libraries and magazines and we didn’t have to worry about a chapter from some messed-up book suddenly appearing in an awesome book, or off-topic rants showing up in magazines, at least not normally. We even had a “by topic” shelving systems for books.

Broadcast media like TV and radio were the exceptions, not the rule.

We didn’t have forty thousand sea lions every day.

Part two

On the other hand, as I’ve been writing about this whole farewell anarchy stuff, people are coming at me with “hey, we’re building a super federated place, a great free little corner for us where we can do whatever we want, ain’t that great?”

For climate change purps: No. It’s not great. Unlike, say, sexism, where if there’s one node where all the sexists gather up and smoke cigars and enjoy sexism, and another node where all the feminists gather up and enjoy their women’s liberation… with climate change, if there are nodes where there is fossils drilling and burning, they can still leverage that to wreck the entire Earth. Like, the whole thing. (They’ll make drill/burn/profit loops right over the tipping points.)

Imagine a multi-apartment building where every single apartment has their own button that lets them explodify the entire building and kill everyone inside (but they’re tempted to push it because if you just nudge a little, you get cash).

If I’m in that situation and you’re like “Hey, Sandra, I’ve come up with a way to make communication between the apartments even more difficult so every apartment can reign completely freely within their own walls”, I’m not happy. It’s bad enough that it can be lethal to everyone if even a single apartment pushes it too hard, but it becomes even more likely to be lethal the more apartments push their button. And with every apartment separated, there’s no way to prevent any of them from smashing that smithereen-o-matic.

Farewell, anarchy