Each year, I mentor one student from my Alma Mater. I wonât reveal their identity or what we discuss, as these are privileged, but one thing that became apparent today is how each generation might think that young people are on to it. That they wonât fall for the same bullshit that we did because they are more savvy and can build on whatâs gone before.
The student I am working with is smart and does see through a lot of the BS. Theyâre working on an assignment at the moment about Facebook and they were asked in class whether Facebook should be regulated. Turns out that the majority of the class didnât know about the scandals that had happened, and that most donât even take in the news via traditional newsmedia (or even websites), but get their info via social media. In other words, they were quite content to be bubbled and fall victim to the subjective feeds provided to them by social media.
A generation ago, I remember when older people thought we were on to it, that we could see through the BSâbut we are the ones who created this latest lot of BS. We created the mechanisms where people are fed back their own opinions and told that the other side is wrong. Empathy went out the window partly because of social media. And now that these have been created, weâre not admitting we ****ed up. Mark Zuckerberg avoids summons, for Chrissakes, and his company, and most of Big Tech, lie like sociopaths. But weâve tied up the next generation as well into this web where they donât know the lack of substance behind what theyâre seeing. Because maybe itâs just all too complicated to figure outâwhich is probably how the powers-that-be like to keep it, so we keep consuming the mainstream, easily digestible narratives. The few who break out of this will find allies, but then, they, too, are in a new bubble, convinced that surely with some like minds their thinking must be right, and why on earth donât others find it as easy to grasp?
Itâs why movements like #DeleteFacebook havenât really taken hold beyond idealists, and even though we have young people smart enough and aware enough to organize global climate-change protests today, I wonder if weâll wake up and exit the Matrix. I have hopeâhope that those with sufficient charisma to be within the system will be selfless and say the right things and cause others to realize whatâs happening. There are glimmers here and there, but, like all movements, it needs a lot of people doing the same thing at the same time. Maybe they can be found ⊠via the same tools that are being used to divide us.
That didnât take long. Iâve been on NewTumbl 15 days and already a trollâs been by (the above is in reverse chronological order). I guess this is the internet in the late 2010s: people donât believe in exchanging views, and that trolling is the new normal. You see it all the time on Twitter and Facebook, though it surprised me to see it happen so quickly on NewTumbl.
Usually, it takes a lot longer for the unthinking to join a platform. Online, where opinions count and your bank balance doesnât, we are looking at an intelligence gap. This was predicted long ago; by whom I donât recall, but it wouldnât surprise me if it came up in the late Norman Macraeâs writings many years ago.
It took a while for spammers to ruin email for me. I was on email for years before I received my first spam. Twitter and Facebook were pretty nice places to be 12 years ago. Even there, it took a while to descend.
You can blame certain politicians if you like, but the fact is we would have got there on our own, because most of us have seen the quality of debate declining on social media. Mansplaining, whitesplaining, trolling, abuse, the list goes on. The intelligence gap means that there are those incapable of having a reasoned argument without resorting to one of the above methods.
The disappointment I feel about one NewTumbl user is simply the speed at which itâs happened, since their comment was pretty tame. Tumblr, for all its faults, actually never got political in the 12 years I was there. If you didnât like a political view, it was usually too much trouble to comment, so you did what you might do in real life if you overheard a political comment you disagreed with: you moved on.
Many NewTumbl users are ex-Tumblr, so itâs disappointing that one person decided not to carry forth the old platformâs culture, and infected the new place.
So what do you do at a platform which is your unwinding social medium? You block.
Normally I wouldnât block. My Dadâs uncanny ability to call US presidential elections was down to, at least for 2016, his reading of the comments on their political blogs. The more views he read, the better an idea he had of which way the wind was blowing. On Twitter I block only a very few people; certainly a differing political opinion is not a reason to do it. In fact, I used to live by the mantra of âThey who lose an argument block firstâ but lately Iâm revising my opinion.
Some people are just lost causes. An analysis of the intelligence gap tells you that theyâre too far along the path to hell that no amount of reasoning can help them. If others canât resort to a civil disagreement from the outset, then they might be lost causes, too. Their opinion is actually not worth hearing.
But the most important thing is your time. It is precious. Is engaging with a troll or a racist or a nutjob really something you wish to do?
I realize some might think that blocking is âletting them winâ or that they âget off on itâ. I suppose even trolls have their fans. We congregate to those on the intelligence ladder who are closest to us. This has the inherent risk of us not hearing viewpoints we mightnât like.
But does it? If you donât block based on opposing political views, and you donât block because someone is either richer or poorer than you are, then what are you really missing? (And I doubt anyone blocks based on gender or sexuality.) Surely that still gives you a sense of where the world is, and allow you to get opposing viewpoints so you can refine your own thinking.
And you can always block differently for each platform. Do it more in online places where you want to relax. Do it less in places where you want to engage and debate.
Today, I did my first NewTumbl block. Our wee troll should be delighted.
The descent of software seems to be a common theme among some companies. You get good ones, like Adobe and Fontlab, where (generally) successive versions tend to improve on those gone before. Then you get bad ones, like Facebook, which make things worse with each iteration. Facebook Timeline launched to much fanfare at the beginning of the decade, and I admit that it was a fantastic design, despite some annoying bugs (e.g. one that revealed that Facebook staff had no idea there were time zones outside US Pacific time). It was launched at the right time: a real innovation that helped boost my waning interest in the platform. But then they started fiddling with it. I equated it to what General Motors did with the Oldsmobile Toronado: a really pure design upon launch for 1966, with that purity getting spoiled with each model year, till the 1970 one lost a lot of what made it great to begin with. Donât get me started on the 1971s.
Facebook had, for instance, two friendsâ boxes when they began fiddling. The clever two-column layout eventually disappeared so what we were left with was a wide wall, a retrograde step.
Theyâve spent the rest of the decade not innovating, but by seemingly ensuring that every press announcement they make is a complete lie, or at least something not followed up by concrete action.
When they bought Instagram, they began ruining it as well. First to go in 2016 were the maps, which I thought were one of the platformâs best features. Instagram claimed few used them, but given that by this point Facebook owned them, any âclaimâ must be taken with a grain of salt. Perhaps their databases could not handle it. Back in the days of Getsatisfaction reports, there were more than enough examples of Facebook’s technical shortcomings. In December I had to replace my phone after the old one was dropped, but now Iâm wondering whether I should have spent the money getting it fixed. Because the new phone is running on a skin over Android 7, and it looks like Instagram doesnât support this version, as far as videos are concerned. So you could say that videos are no longer supported. Since December Iâve had to Bluetooth all my videos to my old phone, peer through what I could make of the details on a dodgy screen, and upload that way, if I wanted a proper frame rate. User feedback on Reddit and elsewhere suggests the cure is to upgrade to Android 8, not something I know how to do.
It might have been a bug, or it may have been a case of trialling a feature among a tiny subset of users, but for ten months I could upload videos of over eight minutes. As of February 2019, that feature vanished, and Iâm back to a minute. I notice others now have it as part of IGTV, but I canât see anything that will allow me to do the same, and why would I want vertical videos, anyway? God gave us eyes that are side by side, not one above the other. Frankly, when youâve been spoiled by videos going between eight and nine minutes, one minute is very limiting.
Now I see with the latest versions of Instagram that the filters donât even work. For the last few versions, no preview appears for most of the filters; and now itâs constantly âCanât continue editingâ (v. 90) or âYour photo couldnât be processed correctlyâ (v. 89).
Instagram is a steadily collapsing platform and I shudder to think what itâll be like when they get to the 1971 Oldsmobile Toronado stage. I almost wonder if Facebook is doing the digital equivalent of asset-stripping and taking the good stuff into its own platform, to force us into their even shittier ecosystem. At this rate, others like meâlong-time usersâwill cease to use it and go with the likes of Pixelfed. I stay on there because of certain friends, but, like Facebook, at some stage, they may have to get accustomed to the notion that I am no longer on there for anyone else but a few clients. And they may bugger off, too, sick of every second item being an ad. Weâll have foretold this bent toward anti-quality years before the mainstream media catch on to it, as we have done with Google and Facebook, and all their gaffes.
How quickly an opinion can change.
I have been on Tumblr for 12 years, signing up in 2007, with my first post in January 2008.
For most of that time I have sung its praises, saying it was one of the good guys in amongst all the Big Tech platforms (Google, Facebook) that are pathological liars. Even a few years back, you could expect to get a personal reply to a tech issue on Tumblr, despite its user base numbering in the millions.
Last year, as part of Verizon, Tumblr enacted its âporn banâ. I didnât follow any adult content, and I didnât make any myself, so it didnât affect me muchâthough I noticed that the energy had gone from the site and even the non-porn posters were doing far less, if anything at all. As mentioned yesterday, I had been cutting back on posting for some time, too. It had jumped the shark.
While I didnât agree with the move, since I knew that there were users who were on Tumblr because it was a safe place to express their sexuality, I didnât kick up as big a stink about it as I did with, say, Googleâs Adsâ Preferences Manager or the forced fake-malware downloads from Facebook.
But what is interesting is how Verizon ownership is infecting Tumblr. I see now that Tumblr can no longer say it supports ânet neutrality because its parent company does not. This isnât news: the article in The Verge dates from 2017 but I never saw it till now. Of course Verizon would have wanted to keep this under wraps from the Tumblr user base, one which would have mostly sided with ânet neutrality.
And now, after posting about NewTumbl on Tumblr last night, I see that Verizonâs corporate interests are at the fore again. Tumblr returns no results for NewTumbl in its search, because itâs that scared of a competitor. Apparently this has been going on for some time: some NewTumbl users in February blogged about it. I was able to confirm it. This isnât censorship on some holier-than-thou âmoralâ grounds, but censorship because of corporate agenda, the sort of thing that would once have been beneath Tumblr.
If I was ambivalent about leaving Tumblr before, this has made me more determined. I still have blogs there (including one with over 28,000 followers), so I wonât be shutting down my account, but, like Facebook, I wonât update my personal space any more after my 8,708 posts, unless I canât find a creative outlet that does what Tumblr currently does and am forced to return. Right now, NewTumbl more than fulfils that role, and itâs doing so without the censorship and the corruption of long-held internet ideals that seem to plague US tech platforms. Tumblr users, see you at jackyan.newtumbl.com.
Tumblr is dead, long live NewTumbl.
I came across NewTumbl (formally newTumbl) a few days ago, after finding my Tumblr feed just wasnât what it used to be. Itâs not that the dirty pictures are goneâI only ever followed one blog where the images might be considered sensualâbut that the energy was. Those friends whose posts interested me werenât posting much any more, and it wasnât just them: my posting had diminished significantly. Platforms, I imagine, have a shelf life, and when announcements such as Verizonâs last year, which became known, perhaps incorrectly, as Tumblrâs âporn banâ, it was bound to affect the platform. It was the language that opened Verizon up to ridicule: apparently, they had a problem with âfemale-presenting nipplesâ, and some innocent content was flagged for removal.
What Verizon had really underestimated was that among the adult imagery were communities that were having free and safe discussions about sexuality, and sex workers themselves had a place where they, too, could post. It wasnât an âadultâ site per se, considering the overwhelming majority of the content was family-friendly. That perhaps kept the place relatively safe: you could have these private discussions while coming across general posts featuring interesting photography or good political viewpoints. Tumblr also hadnât descended into the political divisiveness that plague platforms such as Twitter.
I liked Tumblr for many reasons. It became a fun place to post interesting graphics for me, and to put anything that I didnât want to structure into long-form thoughts. It was image-based. Every now and then I would put up a quotation. The Font Police blog is still there, with over 20,000 followers.
I liked the fact that for years, someone would get back to you when you posted a query. This was true even after Yahoo acquired it.
But during the Blogcozy experiment, which sadly resulted in that platformâs closure, I cut down my time on Tumblr, because I had found a more suitable place to put those brief thoughts and to share with friends. Had Tumblr been a greater draw, I wouldnât have considered it. After Blogcozy closed, I didnât really resume my Tumblring to the same extent. Social seemed to be dying, since it was being run by Big Tech firms that lied as their main position. Even if Tumblr was more honest (and it was), the age of social media seemed to be at an end.
I may have been wrong, because since posting on NewTumbl Iâve been impressed by the sense of energy there. Yes, it has attracted a great deal of the adult posters who left Tumblr. But if you donât want to see X-rated stuff, you say so in the settings, and adjust to M (for mature), O (for office), or even F (for family). You won’t see anything coarser than what you chose (with the occasional exception when posters did not have a clue how the ratings’ system works). The interface is familiar-but-different-enough for Tumblr users and Verizon lawyers. Yet it goes beyond what Tumblr does, with the smart use of Interstate as the body typeface, and photos in multi-image posts actually appear in the order you load them.
Itâs not perfect: I couldnât link a video but I could upload; and I managed to stumble on a 404 page by following links, both of which Iâll report, since they make it so easy to do.
But hereâs the really good thing: the transparency. One of the main developers, Dean, talks to users and provides feedback. Heâll even post when an error occurs during developmentâthatâs something youâll never see Facebook do when its databases die.
He and I have already exchanged notes via DMs after I joined for two days, and I said I saw so many parallels between what he was doing and what I saw with Tesla when Martin Eberhard was running it (transparency over ego), or even in the days when Jerry and David were building YahooâIâm old enough to have been submitting sites to them while they were still being run out of a garage. Thereâs an exciting sense with Dean and the small NewTumbl crew that theyâre building something useful for the world, celebrating free speech and humanity. Am I being overly optimistic? I donât think I am: I enjoy the UI, I like the openness and honesty, and these are just what the tech sector needs. I see a draw for spending my time here even though I have zero followers to my blog. The buzz feels similar to when I discovered some sites back in the 1990s: it seems new and exciting.
Itâs also rather nice being the first person to populate some fandom hashtags, though I was second for Doctor Who, and for anyone ever searching for The Avengers, they will see, rightly, a photograph of Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee.
Iâll see you there at jackyan.newtumbl.com. Lucire also has a NewTumbl at lucire.newtumbl.com.
Above: The one thing I posted to Tumblr that went viral, in 2011.
As someone who read Confucius as a young man, and was largely raised on his ideas, free speech with self-regulation is my default positionâthough when it becomes apparent that people simply arenât civilized enough to use it, then you have to consider other solutions.
We have Facebook making statements saying they are âStanding Against Hateâ, yet when friends report white nationalist and separatist groups, they are told that nothing will be done because it is âcounter-speechâ. We know that Facebook has told the Privacy Commissioner, John Edwards, that it has done absolutely nothing despite its statements. This is the same company that shut off its âView asâ feature (which allowed people to check how their walls would look from someone elseâs point-of-view) after share price-affecting bad press, yet when it comes to actual humans getting killed and their murders streamed live via their platform, Facebook, through its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, essentially tells us, âThere are no problems, nothing to see here.â
Weâre just a platform
We take no responsibility at all for what gets shared through us. You can say what you like, but we think we can weather this storm, just as we weathered the last one, and just as weâll weather the next.
Kiwi lives donât matter
White nationalist groups make for great sharing. And sharing is caring. So we wonât shut them down as we did with Muslim groups. The engagement is just too good, especially when weâre only going to upset fewer than five million New Zealanders.
Hate is great
Hate gets shared and people spend more time on Facebook as a result. Whether it’s about New Zealanders or the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, we’ll be there to help distribute it. Genocide’s fine when it doesn’t affect our share price.
Facebook users are âdumb fucksâ
Our founder said it, and this is still our ongoing policy at Facebook. Weâll continue to lie because we know youâre addicted to our platform. And no matter which country summons our founder, we know you wonât have the guts to issue a warrant of arrest.
Actions speak more loudly than words, and in Facebookâs case, their words are a form of Newspeak, where they mean the opposite to what everyone else understands.
#Facebook: we had better turn off the âView asâ function, it could be open to abuse.
Also Facebook: live-streaming is fine, nothing to see here.#Facebooklies
Quite simple, isn’t it? I sense my parents’ generation (who were kids during WWII) would have understood this, but I worry about my generation and the ones following.
After the last 11 months, only two Instagram usersâmyself and an Indonesian user called TryAinkâuploaded videos of over a minute (his were up to four). It looks like he and I were experimenting to see how much Instagram would really allow. I guess we were the guinea pigs before IGTV was launched, though unlike those using that service, our videos were all landscape.
Youâve seen plenty of mine, so hereâs one of his.
It does seem that all good things come to an end, and neither TryAink nor I have access to the longer video uploads any more. I can try, but Instagram refuses to make the video live.
Mind you, we were the first to get long Instagram videos, then the public got them. Maybe Instagram is going to phase out videos, as we’re the first to suffer an inability to upload them? (I jest for the most partâas stranger things have happened with Facebook-owned properties.)
What is interesting is that with life being so busy, and with the massive increase in ads, Instagram has not been holding my attention. I also became very spoiled with the longer videos, so much so that 60 seconds feels bizarrely short. Then thereâs the problem of Instagram videos being incompatible with Android 7, so all my videos had to be Bluetoothed to my old, damaged phone for uploading.
The result of the above is that I have reduced my time on the platform considerably, because why am I jumping through hoops created by the incompetence of boffins when it is technology that should be serving me?
The loss of Instagram maps all those years ago was an inconvenience, but the loss of a feature that I regarded as the norm, plus advertisements that are irrelevantânot to mention undesirableâare turning my cellphone into a cellphone, rather than a portable leisure device where I shared and enjoyed photos.
Speaking of Facebook incompetence, I caught a few minutes (while cooking) of a documentary called Inside Facebook, airing on Aljazeera English. An undercover reporter secretly films a moderatorsâ training session on what Facebookâs standards are.
Did you wonder why so many of the Christchurch terrorist attacksâ videos remained online? Turns out Facebookâs policy is that screened deaths are OK. The default position is that theyâre marked with a warning, not removed. As to child abuse, none of those videos are removed as a rule.
This is a sick company that appears to prey on the inhuman impulses some have, for the sake of monetizing them. I cannot be high and mighty about this, because I havenât deleted my account, and keep saying that Iâm on there for a few clients who ask me to look after their social media. When I think more deeply about this, it ainât good enough. I need to find a way out, including for my clients who receive DMs for their businesses on there.
Above: Flowers at the Islamic Centre in Kilbirnie, Wellington on Monday.
On 9-11, I wrote an editorial in Lucire immediately. It was clear to me what I needed to write, and the editorial got quite a few readers at the time.
Today is March 20, five days after a terrorist attack on our country, and itâs only now Iâve had some idea of how to put my thoughts into a longer-form fashion, rather than a lot of Tweets, some of which have had a lot of support.
I guess itâs different when the attack happens to your own people in your own country.
One of the earliest points I made, when the death toll hit 49, was that this was âour 9-11â, at least when you consider the per capita loss of life. When it hit 50, it actually exceeded the number of lives lost per capita in 9-11. This helps put the matter into some context.
While the terrorist is a foreign national, who was most likely radicalized by foreign ideas, it has generated a great deal of soul-searching among New Zealanders. Even the right-wing talking heads have suddenly changed their tune, although, if a friend and colleagueâs experience as a waiter in New York City in September 2001 is anything to go by, they will return to their regularly scheduled programming in two weeksâ time. Certain media bosses, especially among foreign-owned companies, would have it no other way, since they are not here to benefit New Zealanders, only their foreign shareholders and their own pockets. Stoking division is their business and I do not believe leopards change their spots.
Therefore, the majority of right-thinking New Zealanders are not complicit, but a minority of us harbour bigoted thoughts, and enough of that minority infect the commentsâ sections of mainstream media websites and social networks to make it seem as though they are more numerous in number. The outpouring of support for our Muslim community highlights that the good far outnumber the rotten eggs in our society. And I think more of us are now prepared to call out racism and bigotry knowing that, in fact, public opinion is behind us.
So many Kiwis, myself included, say that hatred toward Muslims is not in our national character. But it is sufficiently in our national character when Muslim groups have pleaded with government agencies to step up, to be met with endless bureaucratic roadblocks; and many political parties have stains on their records in appealing to Islamophobia, something which indeed was foreign to this nation for all of my childhood.
I grew up with a Muslim boy and we remain friends to this day, but I never thought of him by his creed. If I was forced to âlabelâ him I would have called him a Pakistani New Zealander. I am willing to bet many Kiwis were in the same boat: we probably knew Muslims but never thought once about their religion.
It takes certain people to make changes in mainstream thinking. I thought I might be labelled a âChinese New Zealanderâ till Winston Peters, now our deputy PM, droned on about âAsiansâ out of some fear about the weakness of New Zealand culture; and we might have only become aware of Islam to any degree after 9-11. But these are, in fact, foreign ideas, adopted here by those who lack imagination or a willingness to do some hard work. They have been imported here through the sharing of culture. While I support the exchange of ideas, in some misguided utopian belief that dialogue is good for us all, I certainly did not anticipate, during the first heady days of the web, that we would have so much of the bad come with the good. I believed in some level of natural selection, that educated people would refrain and filter, and present their countryâs or community’s best face. But as each medium boganfied (yes, I am making up words), the infection came. Newspapers changed thanks to Rupert Murdoch cheapening them, eventually morphing into publications that sensationalized division, especially against Muslims after 9-11. Television went downhill as well largely thanks to the same bloke and his lieutenant, Roger Ailes. The web was fine till each medium became infected with negativity, but Google, Facebook and Twitter were all too happy for it to continue because it increased engagement on their properties. Each fuelled it more with algorithms that showed only supporting views, deepening each userâs belief in the rightness of their ideas, to the exclusion of everyone elseâs.
Most Americans I know believe in civility. Iâve spoken often enough in their country to know this. They donât believe their freedom of speech is absolute, and personally draw the line at hate speech, but their big websites act as though this is absolute, and allow the negative to fester. It seems it is for profit: we see Twitter remove Will Connollyâs (âEgg Boyâ) account but not racist Australian politician Sen. Fraser Anning. It is tempting to believe that Twitter is following the dollars here without regard to their stated policy. We have, after all, seen all Big Tech players lie constantly, and, for the most part, they get away with it. We let them, because we keep using them. Mark Zuckerberg doesnât need to say anything about Christchurch, because weâll keep using his websites (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp) and heâll keep finding ways of monetizing us, dehumanizing us. He wonât show up to the UK when summoned, and Facebook will continue to lie about removing videos and offensive content when we know many reports go unheeded. Umair Haque wrote in the wake of the Christchurch terrorist attacks: âFacebook and Twitter and YouTube etcetera really just bring the American ideal to life that there should be extreme, absolute freedom of speech, with zero consequences whatsoever, even for expressing hate and violence of the most vile and repellent kinds.â
As people become dehumanized through words and campaigns, it makes it easier for people to commit violence against them. They no longer see them as deserving of respect or protection. In the foulest version, they no longer see them as having a right to life.
Now, I donât believe that this absolute approach can be branded American. And I do believe Big Tech has very different values to Americans. Their newsmedia have, too. When regular people are censored, when big money talks more loudly than their laws, then there is something very wrong with their companiesâand this is the common enemy of both Republicans and Democrats, not each other. And this wrongness is being exported here, too. Iâve said it for years: we are a sovereign nation, and we have no need to copy their failed idea of a health system or even their vernacular (on this note: retailers, please cease using Black Friday to describe your end-of-year sales, especially this year). We do not need to import the political playbooks, whether you are a political party, a blogger, or a local newspaper. There are Kiwis who actually talked about their âFirst Amendment rightsâ because they may have watched too much US television and are unaware we have our own Bill of Rights Act. Even the raid on Kim Dotcomâs home seemed to be down to some warped idea of apeing their cop shows, about impressing the FBI more than following our own laws on surveillance and our own beliefs on decency.
I honestly donât see the attraction of turning us into some vassal state or a mutant clone of other nations, yet foreign-owned media continue to peddle this nonsense by undermining the Kiwi character and everyday Kiwi unity.
Did the terrorist see any of this? I have no idea. I equally have no idea if the people he came into contact with here cemented his hate. However, I think he would have come across sufficient international influences here to validate his imagined fears of non-whites and women. By all means, we should call out bad behaviour, but when we do, we shouldnât restrict it to individual cases we see in our daily lives. There are entire institutions that are doing this, strings pulled from faraway lands, and to them we must also say: enough is enough. The way you do business isnât in line with who we are. We need to be aware of who the non-Kiwi players are, often masquerading under locally grown brand names (such as âNewstalk ZBââa quick peek of shareholders suggest the majority are as Kiwi as Ned Kelly), and, if need be, vote with our time and money to support those who really understand us. Be alert to whoâs really trying to influence us.
