Notices by Dr. Johnathan Flowers (shengokai@zirk.us)

Next semester, I get to teach Philosophy of Technology, and I have only one objective: teach students that "social media" does not "cause" anything.

Yes, you heard that right, I'm going to teach them that social media does not have agency, but is instead given agency through how users use the platform and interact with one another on the platforms. Hopefully, this will cut down on the "social media causes..." or "due to social media" takes.

I like these kinds of responses because I can say a thing from MLK about the value of legislative solutions:

"It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important also. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless, and this is what we often say we have to do in society through legislation."

https://mastodon.social/@johniac/109423635385621195

On my reading, King Jr. is not presenting legislation, or legislating morality, as an ultimate end. Rather, King Jr. recognizes that legislation can be used as a tool to prevent violence through the imposition of sanctions, or the threat of sanctions. It is a tool that can ensure people live long enough to engage in other kinds of transformative acts.

This is, as King Jr. says "pretty important also."

Pragmatically, it is nigh impossible to engage in any moral transformation when you're constantly under the threat of violence, when you can be killed with impunity. You need to restrain the capacity to do violence before you can enact cultural change to end the causes of violence.

Now, King wasn't alone in this: Paulo Freire had a similar perspective articulated through the "violence" of the oppressed against the oppressor.

What's interesting about my use of "violence" here is that, for Freire, the attempts by the oppressed to restrict the oppressor's capacity to oppressed are experienced AS violence because they enact a restriction on a way of life predicated on the oppression of the oppressed.

In modernity, we can see this experience of "violence," or the reality of what Freire is saying, through the vocal complaints about "censorship" online.

Still can’t believe that I live here.

If I had maybe five dollars every time someone suggested "build your own instance" as a solution to any problem encountered on the fediverse, I might not need student loan forgiveness.

That aside, before you're tempted to respond to a critique of the fediverse with "build your own instance," consider that the suggestion is a polite way of saying "go the fuck away?"

I call this "history as interpreted" drawing on the work of John Dewey and Thomas Alexander who call this a "mythos." For Alexander, a "mythos" isn't a false story, but an organizing narrative of where something came from, where it is going, and its assumed place in a social world. A mythos gives us context for how we can and cannot transact with it.

Mythoi don't need to be narratives, they can be slogans: "move fast and break things" is a mythos which animates Meta/Facebook.

Now, having said that, Mastodon's history as interpreted, which is to say that the history of mastodon as understood by long term mastodonians as giving shape to mastdodon, explicitly argues that masdoton was designed from the ground up to be a safe haven from the kinds of nonsense found in "white tech bro" spaces, and on twitter.

As such, this history as interpreted has been deployed as a defense against the whiteness and ableism of the platform.

Further, if we take up Sara Ahmed, a history orients us towards the platform in specific ways. Mastodon's history is supposed to orient us towards the platform as a "twitter alternative" and "the future of social media" by virtue of how this history should predict a certain kind of future. Put another way, this history is a promise of happiness for users who join the platform, specifically marginalized users.

To this question, I want to say no. Actually, let me be clear, based on the history as interpreted and as supplied by long term mastodonians, this should not be the case.

As has been communicated to me in defense of mastodon, this is a history of a protocol and platform developed by LGBTQ and other marginalized groups to avoid the kind of harassment found on Twitter AND in "white tech bro" spaces.

https://mastodon.art/@wackomedia/109378068756171367

To this end, when marginalized people are not made happy by the things that they should be made happy by, that is, when they are not made happy by the actuality of a platform that promises freedom from the abuses they found on twitter, but does not live up to the actuality, they are viewed as getting "in the way" of the happiness that everyone else takes in the platform.

Examples of this abound in my mentions and replies.

Which gets me back to the platform "shouldn't we expect white tech bro culture here?" And my answer is still "no." Because of the history as interpreted, because of the promise of happiness, we should not EXPECT white tech bro culture here because that's not what we've been told by -other marginalized persons- and that's not what we've been sold by the history.

This, point of fact, is a problem for people coming to the site.

It is a problem because they will expect a safe-haven on the basis of the history they've been sold and then discover the same old bullshit in a new package. They will be promised happiness in the form of a platform free of abuse, only to discover new kinds of abuse cloaked in the kinds of "nice" whiteness that Jessie Daniels describes in her book "Nice White Ladies." It is, in the words of Admiral Ackbar "A Trap."

And it is an interesting trap because mastodon, despite all of its claims to be different, hasn't learned any of the social lessons that Twitter should've taught it.

But that's a whole other thing. So my answer is that we do expect things to be done differently, and they are, but they don't result in a different experience. Just abuse in a different name.

There is a difference between "rules" and "norms," my guy. Norms are social expectations that are not codified by any regulatory structure. Rules are regulatory, they provide the expectations and guidelines for participation within a space and have explicit consequences for violation.

Each site has RULES and NORMS, where the NORMS are often unspoken modes of conduct and the rules are spelled out when you join the instance.

https://theblower.au/@david/109363504521702476

@Pineywoozle @lorenzlm @jeffjarvis @vowe

Couple of things. Much of my discourse is in the context of people saying that marginalized communities could replicate their communities here on Mastodon. Given that context, I don't think that this is the case because the affordances of twitter that enabled Black Twitter to come into being do not exist on Mastodon in a robust sense.

As for your solution, screenshotting + hashtag has a very different cultural function in black digital practice.

@Pineywoozle @lorenzlm @jeffjarvis @vowe

Again, for @vowe specifically, I'm using "black digital practice" to describe how black users make their identities present using the available tools of a platform and, in doing so, come together in a community based on how offline cultural practices translate online through the tools of the platform.

Here, the screenshot + hashtag has been taken up in a specific way by black users to avoid certain kinds of interactions.

@Pineywoozle @lorenzlm @jeffjarvis @vowe A QT, enables call and response and INVITES the response through the very mechanisms that many of you describe. Insofar as the QT actually pulls the other user into the conversation or adds something new to it, the QT invites a participatory exchange that the screenshot + hashtag does not.

This is how the QT enables the call and response I've been talking about in a ways that your proposal does not, and which mastodon was not designed for.

Okay, this is something that is worth linking to as it will take a longer post.

https://mastodon.social/@HelloAndrew/109351796734280182

I would say that @Gargron should consider implementing quote tweets only with an eye to how the function will change behavior across instances and how adding the feature could introduce new and unique forms of abuse as it interacts with the unique nature of the fediverse.