Rynling R&D

How 'Karen' Became a Coronavirus Villain
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/05/coronavirus-karen-memes-reddit-twitter-carolyn-goodman/611104/
This is a relatively short article, and it's worth reading to the end. I would say that it goes to a surprising place, but at this point I'm not actually all that surprised to learn that some of the more high-profile Karens on Twitter were manufactured by right-wing content farms.

Yesterday I made a strong pot of black tea so that I could sit down and do a social media audit.

I went through my follower list on Instagram and reported and blocked a dozen accounts that are almost definitely bots, and I also blocked business accounts (for restaurants, mostly) and “follow for follow” promotion accounts associated with specific tags.

I also blocked a small handful of people who are obnoxious and annoy me.

I then went through the same process for the list of people I’m following Twitter, blocking anyone whom I’ve come to associate with various types of hate speech or chronic obnoxious behavior.

At the end of the day, I still follow several hundred people who manage to live their lives without telling anyone to commit suicide, and I think it’s probably healthy to focus my attention on them.

My mother had a “cardiac event” this week. She’s fine, I’m fine, and everyone’s fine, but for a day or two it seemed like she might not make it. I had to have a few serious conversations about whether or not to take her off a respirator so that someone else could potentially use it. Like I said, everyone’s fine now, but that was intense.

The other day I got off the phone with a doctor to see that I had gotten another DM from someone who essentially wanted me to apologize for publishing a book. In that moment I received a clear flash of enlightenment. “I don’t have time for children right now,” I thought, and I blocked the person like it was a reflex. I think there’s a strong pressure for people to be “accessible” on social media, but there’s no need for me to make myself accessible to assholes.

TLDR: We only have so many days on this earth, so just block the motherfucker already and get on with your life.

My book has a strong title and a gorgeous cover, and it's about things like Sailor Moon and Steven Universe. There's no getting around the fact that it's an academic monograph written by a professor, but I tried to make it as accessible as possible. The chapter titles and subtitles are catchy, and it has a lot of gorgeous illustrations.

So people on social media are interested, which is great! I have decided, however, to no longer respond to anyone asking where they can get my book. The actual answer is simple:

(1) You can order it directly from the publisher. The link is right there in the tweet.

(2) You can order it from any major online retailer, from Amazon to IndieBound to Waterstones to Kinokuniya to Walmart. A quick Google search for the book title will fetch the relevant links.

(3) You can ask your local library to order a copy. Most libraries have simple request forms on their webpages, or you can send an email to the general reference desk.

(4) You can send a DM to me, the author, to (politely!!) ask if I can get you access to a discounted copy or a free promotional or review copy.

I mean, how do you get any book, right? This book in particular is tricky, because the hardcover costs $80. I know how that sounds, but that's just how academic publishing works. Most people don't understand how academic publishing works, because why would they, but that's just how it is. This is not a popular-audience book from a popular press; but, even if it were, hardcover books still cost money, and there's not much the author can do about that.

( Read more... )

By the end of the day, what I realized is that anyone who asks me a question like "Where do I get a copy of your book" probably:

(1) Doesn't know how links work
(2) Doesn't know how Google works
(3) Doesn't know how libraries work
(4) Doesn't know how to talk to an adult

And not to be elitist or anything, but a person like this probably isn't the target audience. What they want isn't the book itself, but the attention and emotional labor of me, the author.

So I guess the lesson I learned on Twitter yesterday is that, just like Tumblr, you just have to ignore the random children with anime avatars. It feels heartless not to respond to young people who are excited about my work, but there are only so many hours in the day - not to mention that I am depressed as shit right now and would rather be playing video games.

I'm not going to link to this post, but I want to preserve it. Since the conventional wisdom is "don't feed the trolls," it's rare that anyone has the courage to be frank about online harassment.

What I've personally experienced was nowhere near this level, but I don't think Corseque is rounding up these numbers. When people talk about online harassment, they're not talking about one random asshole sending a mean anonymous message. Rather, once people start to dogpile you on social media, dealing with it becomes your entire life until that particular group gets bored and moves on.

I should probably mention that I'm a huge fan of this writer and artist. I don't care about Star Wars, and I don't know anything about Dragon Age, but I always enjoy reading Corseque's essays. In fact, my real and honest goal as a writer is to create the sort of story that Corseque would appreciate and write meta about.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff review – we are the pawns
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review
I'm not sure I'm up for reading the actual book, which sounds miserably depressing, but this is an interesting review. Two paragraphs are devoted to a blunt deconstruction of Pokémon Go, which is fair.

Even though most of the people (especially artists) I used to follow on Tumblr have moved to Twitter and Instagram, I still feel a bit weird about engaging with those two platforms. Despite its flaws, I appreciate that Tumblr is relatively chaotic and isn't making money for anyone. Activity on the site has dropped off since the beginning of the year, and I'll miss it when it's gone. Also, as much as Discord annoys me for being exclusive, inaccessible, and difficult to use, I've found myself spending more time on art and sketch channels during the past few months.

Meanwhile, AO3 remains the Gold Standard of Internet and continues to be my happy place.

It's true, though. Especially on Twitter.

You'd think that not using hashtags on Twitter would protect you from what are essentially anonymous asks, but I've encountered a lot of stranger danger.

Most of the time I have no idea what's going on. I'll screencap whatever bizarre comment I got, set it aside, and then try to figure out what's going on later a day or two later. Sometimes I still can't figure out what the person thinks they're responding to, but usually some YouTuber has said something stupid.

The other week I posted a tweet about how much I like Knives Out, which is not a controversial opinion, and some rando responded with an assertion that I'm a toxic abuse apologist. I was like, ?????, but then I remembered that Rian Johnson is also writing Star Wars, which is tied to the Reylo ship, which is "abusive."

Like the OP says, this sort of thing is essentially unavoidable at this point. For every person or keyword you block or blacklist, another rises in its place. It's just, idk, something in the water.

I should mention that I like the OP a lot, and I spend a few minutes scrolling through their blog probably once every two weeks or so. They're a normal, sane, healthy person whose response to fandom discourse is "don't be an asshole," which I appreciate.

Yesterday a very talented student told me that she'd been rejected from an internship at a midsize game development studio because she doesn't have a substantial "voice." When I followed up on this, I learned that, essentially, she doesn't have enough followers on social media.

This is disturbing but not surprising, as this person is the seventh student to tell me a similar story during the past calendar year.

That's not what "finding one's voice" by means of social media is supposed to mean, first of all; and second, how many Twitter followers is a 20-year-old college student supposed to have? The average active Twitter user has about 500 followers,* but the average active Twitter user is also 40 years old and presumably comfortably settled in their career.

My university has one of the larger visual arts programs in the area, and some of my artist students do in fact have thousands of followers on Twitter. Based on my experiences with these students, however, I can say with confidence that a high follower count does not translate into a reliable work ethic or the sort of personality that can accommodate high-pressure professional interactions. I say this not as a bitter professor who resents young people, but rather as someone who has seen talented people fail because they were given too much responsibility too early in their lives and careers, which is not a pleasant or uplifting thing to watch happen to someone you care about.

I'm not sure what conclusions I can draw from this, except that it seems counterproductive to hire someone based on the number of followers they have on social media, especially when you're hiring them for an internship or other entry-level position.



* Although I haven't been able to confirm this, I suspect the median number of Twitter followers is much lower, as less than 1% of active Twitter users (meaning accounts that have posted at least one tweet) has more than a thousand followers.

Last night I had a dream that I was reading the synopsis of the new Star Wars movie on Wikipedia. It was both very detailed and very boring. Also, Adam Driver himself came to me in my dream and told me that Reylo is canon. I had to tell him that he is a very sweet man but that I don't care about Reylo. He seemed disappointed, and I felt bad. That was it, that was my dream.

When I was in college I drew a comic strip for the university newspaper about how I had never seen a Star Wars movie in one sitting from start to finish. The running joke was that I couldn't keep the plot straight or differentiate between Star Wars and other big American sci-fi franchises like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, which I had also never seen in their entirety. The real joke was that, as a real person and not a fictional version of myself, I had somehow managed to acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of all of these franchises and was therefore able to play metafictional games with their worldbuilding and narrative elements that were borderline clever enough to be amusing to a few other people.

I'm not sure that "pretending not to know things about Star Wars" is a joke that would translate well into the present, and I'm grateful that this comic doesn't exist online, but I enjoyed myself. The fact remains, however, that I'm not emotionally invested Star Wars, and I probably never will be.

Still, it's a lot of fun to watch people get excited on Twitter, and I'm genuinely happy for them that they have something to be excited about. As much as I don't care about Star Wars, it's a wonderful experience to see people actually being nice to each other on social media.

When I express concern about people on Twitter getting upset about chunky otters or Marie Kondo, I always feel the need to attempt to explain that I'm not trying to tone police anyone. I understand why people are upset, of course, and there have been some important discussions on the subject of Marie Kondo in particular. Still, there really does need to be a serious and public conversation about covert white supremacist messaging, and I'm not sure that constant casual accusations of racism are helping us to have it.

To give an example of what I mean by "secret racism," back in 2016 or so I followed a few people who occasionally reblogged lovely nature photography. When I started "liking" it, Tumblr's algorithm began recommending all sort of weird gender essentialist and white supremacist posts. What I was eventually able to figure out is that the nature photography was of scenery in Germany specifically, and that the blogs posting it had tagged these posts as "featherwood," a term that may have once been associated with female prison gangs but has since spread to people who have embraced a Quiverfull-style ideology concerning race and gender. As soon as I blocked the keyword "featherwood," the problem was mostly fixed. I also had to unfollow three or four people who reblogged these posts - often alongside Steven Universe photosets and "are the cishets okay" memes.

What I'm trying to demonstrate with this example is that there are in fact codewords and ideological patterns that are strong indicators of veiled white supremacist leanings, and I wish the huge public conversations about race and representation happening on social media would touch on this sort of thing.

Another example is the expression "the coastal elites," which has been a white supremacist codeword for "the Jewish global conspiracy" since I was in college (and long before that, I'm sure). When people associated with the American left wing started talking about "coastal elites" during the lead-up and aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, that was a huge red flag for me. There were people on Tumblr reblogging all sorts of authoritarian craziness in the name of social justice, and I had no idea how to tell them that the ideological purity they were advocating was using the language of hardcore white supremacy while wearing a #BlackLivesMatter hat. When I tried to explain my understanding of what was going on, the response was inevitably something along the lines of "well you're racist for not understanding that Hillary is just as bad as Trump."

It's 2019, and you'd think we'd have figured this mess out by now, but that's not the case. Recently on Twitter I've seen my friends and contacts - like, university professors and professional journalists and editors and translators of literary fiction - retweet things coming from people who advocate #humanscience and #humanbiodiversity. What these people are specifically referring to is "race science" (here's an archived webcapture of a widely circulated "human biodiversity reading list" for reference), whose main guiding principle seems to be the "scientifically proven" assertion that melanin is a chemical that causes violent and antisocial behavior. The message these people (many of whom are writers whose work has been published in respected tech journals) are advocating is that, if we accept that science tells us that climate change is real and that we need to vaccinate our children, then we must also accept it when science tells us [some racist bullshit].

When I've messaged a few people whom I know personally and have been friends with for years with a gentle note of caution, the response has been along the lines of "So you're an antivaxxer then" or "I wouldn't have pegged you for a climate change denier." It's like, "Hang on there friend, I was just trying to give you a heads-up that the person you've been constantly retweeting for the past week is a secret white supremacist!" Except it's not even a secret, because all the codewords are right there in their profiles.

What I'm trying to say is that some people are indeed "secret racists," and the reason that most decent people don't see them for what they are is because most of us don't have any exposure to white supremacist vocabulary or online spaces. The only reason I know a tiny fraction of what's going on is because I grew up in the rural Deep South (where people tend to feel more comfortable with being openly racist) and then started spending time on gaming forums where MRA-style misogyny often serves as a gateway to more radical belief systems. My first instinct is to block and avoid this sort of thing when I encounter it, so I'm not an expert, and I still experience the occasional unpleasant surprise when I realize that something I thought was silly and harmless is, in fact, deeply disturbing.

This is why I wish the conversations people had on Twitter about "secret racism" would focus more on identifying and explaining codewords and exposing and calling out creepy individuals.

If you've watched the Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, then you can confirm that its appeal is a combination of three things: One, judging other people's lives, two, psychoanalyzing other people's damage, and three, Marie Kondo's facial expressions. The first two are standard reality television, but the third is really special. I don't say this ironically; Marie Kondo is an interesting person, and it's a pleasure to watch her interact with people and move through space.

As far as I can tell, the reaction to the show on Twitter has been humorously nihilistic, like, "How do I throw myself away" and "The joke's on you, Marie Kondo - I no longer know how to experience joy." In print media, the running joke about The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up has been that none of us can escape the awful capitalist hell we've trapped ourselves in, and not even Marie Kondo can save us now. (See, for example, this cartoon that ran two years ago in The New Yorker.) Also, some people have gotten passionate about not wanting to throw away their books, and other people have mocked them for their performative intellectualism, and this exchange has become a meme in and of itself.

And then, after two weeks of people having fun with a silly show on Netflix, other people started bringing race into the equation. If you watched the show, you're racist. If you didn't watch the show, you're racist. If you make fun of Marie Kondo, you're racist. If you respect and appreciate Marie Kondo, you're racist. If you have no idea who Marie Kondo is but still insist on folding your shirts in a certain way, you're racist and you don't even know it.

The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up was originally published in translation in 2014 by Ten Speed Press, a small outfit in California that specializes in "healthy lifestyle" and crafting books. They have a good list of nonfiction and autobio comics as well; and, if you've ever seen one of those ridiculous "How to Draw Manga" books in a chain bookstore, they probably published it. The press commissions a lot of translations, and their scope is fairly international. When they put out their translation of The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, they gave it the subtitle "The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing" not because they were playing to some sort of "Oriental mysticism" but because there is a huge market for books like The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living and The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter and Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. Essentially, people in the United States want to escape the awful capitalist hell we've created for ourselves, so we want people in other "developed" countries to tell us what we're doing wrong and how to fix it.

I won't deny that racism may play a part in this, because we live in a system of global white supremacy in which racism plays a part in everything, but what the publishing market has done is to group Japan with what I think it's fair to call "fancy Europe," which is problematic but not, I think, overtly racist. In the book itself, which is a translation of something originally published in 2010 in Japanese (人生がときめく片づけの魔法), Kondo does indeed talk to her Japanese readers about "ancient Japanese cleaning rituals." Japanese writers have been doing this before America existed, however, and they will probably continue doing this after America fails. I therefore don't think it's fair to make American conceptions of Orientalism the center of a conversation about what's going on there.

This is what bothers me so much about the application of American configurations of race to who Marie Kondo is and what she's doing and how her work has been received - America is not the center of this particular transnational cultural phenomenon, and assuming its centrality is not "racist," exactly, but extremely arrogant. Within the specific context of American conversations about the Netflix show on Twitter, there are so many different voices from so many different people that you would specifically have to go looking for white people being racist. They exist, obviously, but who does it benefit to treat their gross fringe options as the most important voices while ignoring everyone else?

Meanwhile, speaking of Japan-America relations, the nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project is (still) under St. Louis, and it's still giving people cancer; and, if you care about such things, it's still disproportionately affecting African-American communities. Flint, Michigan still doesn't have clean water, and we're still imprisoning the children of refugees, and the federal government is still shut down because of a legitimately racist pissing match over a "border wall," and... I mean, you know, everything. I feel like such a Republican Grandpa when I bitch about people (mostly white people, let's be real) getting upset about inconsequential things on Twitter, but I also feel that we're all constantly under assault during the administration of POTUS45, and the sort of incessant angry buzzing noise generated by endless waves of thinkpiece articles about how some innocuous Netflix show might be covertly racist only makes everyone more exhausted without actually doing anything to help anyone.