I can't has cheezburger

Tech companies hit a turning point this week and have actually started wielding power against far right groups aiming to incite violence. Most dramatically, Facebook and Twitter both permanently banned Donald Trump, and Parler, a “free speech” social network that minimizes moderation and has become a favorite among white supremacists, has been removed from Google’s and Apple’s app stores, and in an unprecedented move, Amazon will no longer let Parler run on Amazon’s AWS infrastructure in the cloud, forcing the entire service offline (as far as I know, Amazon has never banned a company of this size because of the company’s own lack of handling its users’ misconduct).

This has inevitably led to conversations about whether Big Tech has gone too far, and conversations about the role big tech companies should play in moderating what’s on their platforms.

I don’t want to get too in the weeds about whether tech companies made the right move; my longstanding opinion has been that these are their platforms and it’s up to them what they decide to let people do on them, and that I wish they prioritized the safety of their most vulnerable users. I will also acknowledge that as much as Parler had it coming, when you see the entire business get pulled offline in just a couple of days because of a few external companies, it’s only natural to have the panicked realization that these big companies could just as easily do this to your business if they really wanted to. As much as conservatives have been pretending to be oppressed by tech companies (and that’s a whole post unto itself, but I can guarantee you that “anti-conservative bias” is 100% bullshit), it really is true that for most of the tech companies you interact with, they could pull the plug on your account if they wanted, and you would have little to no recourse.

I do agree that it’s complicated for owners of big platforms hosting user-generated content to effectively come up with a set of policies that govern what people can talk about on these sites. These are hard questions because a huge chunk of the world’s communication happens on networks like Facebook and Twitter. If Facebook and Twitter get really strict about what you can say and do on these networks, they could be stifling much of the communication that occurs on the internet in general.

These will never stop being hard questions, but there is one straightforward way we can make these questions less necessary to even ask: take the “Big” out of “Big Tech”.

It’s the Scale, Stupid

Put simply: our society and institutions are not equipped to correctly handle the existence of massive tech companies that have literally billions of users.

Social networks aren’t a super new development; they’ve existed in one form or another since before the internet, and while there has always been some concern for fringe groups online, none of these groups or networks had previously posed an existential threat to democracy in the US.

But that changed when companies that run social networks hit real scale. And when I say “real scale,” I’m talking tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and even billions of users.

Facebook isn’t just a community; it’s a community of communities that is centrally managed by Facebook itself, where Facebook has an incredible amount of data about you. In the US there was a national debate for years about creating a new national ID card to replace state-issued IDs but there was this concern about centralizing control with the federal government. And yet, here Facebook stands as a central entity that tracks the identities of more people than the most populous countries on earth.

A network as large as Facebook is essentially a government. Facebook’s CEO has said as much on the record. But unlike most democratic governments around the world, Facebook’s policies don’t get determined by its users or people its users choose to represent them; Facebook is free to make these decisions unilaterally, and its users don’t have much recourse. “If you don’t like it, leave” is a tough sell when the network has pretty much every online user in the world on it.

Automatic radicalization at scale

On massive social sites like Facebook, you don’t need to find new communities; new communities will find you. Facebook will analyze your profile and activity and recommend new groups to join. On the surface, that sounds perfectly innocent; Facebook helps you find new groups you might like. But in a world where Facebook is home to all of these non-publicly visible extremist groups, that’s super dangerous, because now Facebook is doing the heavy lifting of recruitment for these groups. Facebook knows what those group members are like, so it can identify other people that might be sympathetic to these extremist causes and just casually recommend the hidden group to them. And just like that, Facebook just unwittingly became a tool to radicalize people at scale. Whoops.

It’s not a problem unique to Facebook; I just keep referring to them because it’s easier to point to a concrete example. It also isn’t just a problem unique to social networks. YouTube’s got a similar issue where if you follow recommendations on certain innocuous videos for long enough you go down a rabbit hole that often leads to increasingly extremist videos.

Critically, these tools to radicalize people through recommendations are only possible because companies like Facebook and YouTube have absolutely enormous numbers of users.

Facebook and YouTube are so big, when they make tweaks to their algorithms that promote content, it can destroy businesses and livelihoods. And individual bans can be useful (Twitter banned Milo Yiannopoulos a few years ago and he and his toxic fan base haven’t resurfaced meaningfully since), but individually banning people is at best a band-aid when your network overall is continuously producing new extremists.

Scale is hard

For years, there has been sizable public pressure on these companies to do more to moderate. Initially companies seemed to hope they could handle this kind of moderation automatically, but in practice that works poorly; algorithms are bad at understanding the full context behind the content of everything posted and can’t make accurate determinations.

So now Facebook’s moderation is powered by an army of humans that must toil away around the clock, slogging through deeply disturbing content and trying to make human decisions at the pace of a machine. It’s a mentally taxing job.

In reality, the viability of tech companies running networks of user-generated content at scale is a myth. Moderation is a nightmare, and these companies are barely even trying to pretend they can keep up with it, and they really only tread water with moderation by subjecting a team of people to terrible working conditions.

But big tech companies want you to ignore that and just continue to let them exist because they don’t want you to even fathom that it’s possible for the world to exist without companies with billions of users.

But that scale, and that scale alone, is the very core of this problem. If we stop having companies with billions of users, we suddenly stop worrying that there are companies that function as pseudo-governments. If we stop having companies with billions of users that are breathlessly handing out recommendations to get those users to join new communities that are trying to overthrow democracy, democracy can be safer.

The question, then, is how we might do that, and what a world that rejects scale might look like.

I read Aubrey Gordon’s What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat a few weeks ago, and it was deeply healing for me. And if you are a fellow fat person considering reading this, it’s a great read, but this review really isn’t for you.

Instead, it’s for the more conventionally sized people who are both living in and helping shape a world that is culturally disgusted by fat people, and it’s a fantastic primer on institutionalized fatphobia with a relative emphasis on the US (since that’s where the author lives).

The book isn’t a book of personal anecdotes; it is instead focused on the ways that we systematically target and harm fat people. It is, however, sprinkled with a number of personal stories from the author’s own life where she was harassed by strangers, and in some cases she talks about sharing these experiences with her friends, only to be met with skepticism or utter disbelief.

But I can pretty well assure you that she’s not lying about her personal experiences, and I say that because I’ve had experiences similar to these. I’ve had total random strangers approach me on the street and offer up workout advice, or just yell an insult from a moving car as I’m walking to work.

And lest you think it’s just randos that do this kind of thing, one of my earliest memories of being reminded that my body is different dates back to second grade, when an older kid was making fun of me for being fat, and when I approached a guidance counselor about it, his response was “okay, and you think you’re skinny?”

Even good friends aren’t immune from this. Friends are tactful enough not to ever directly criticize me for being fat, but they will quite eagerly explain to me how much they don’t want to gain weight.

But I digress. This book isn’t about individual aggressions or microaggressions toward fat people, and this review isn’t about my experiences.

The book uses these personal stories as a good jumping off point to better understanding the deeper issues, though, and it does dive into some of the excuses people give themselves for mistreating fat people and explores why they’re total bullshit (my favorite trope: when people decided to use concern for one’s health as an excuse for fat shaming).

But the issue of fatphobia goes more deeply, and in this book you will learn some of the ways it’s baked into our society. It discusses public spaces whose designs are hostile to fat bodies. It covers the massive industry behind dieting and explains that it’s not only almost completely ineffective, but in many cases actively harmful to our health. It covers the obstacles fat people face in getting healthcare. And it covers the fact that in the mainstream, making fun of fat people remains a completely acceptable practice, even a practice people will fervently defend when they’re called out about it.

I strongly recommend you give this a read, but as with any book that introduces you to issues of social prejudices, the world’s not going to get better by you reading this book. And even if you take the lessons from the book to heart and you examine your own behaviors to eliminate your own fatphobia, there’s still an entire world and culture that very much is happy to continue with it. And even if you take it a step further and take a strong stand against fatphobia, speaking out when you see it, it will remain an uphill battle, and you’re likely to just be depressed by the inertia you see when you tell someone they’re being fatphobic.

It’s a book that ends with some discussion of what a better world might look like, but it’s a book without a happy ending. There’s a good chance you’ll feel worse after you finish reading it. But reading this is a good first step.

I made a bold goal that in 2021 I would post 100 blog posts throughout the year.

Given that I only posted 30 things in 2020, you might be wondering how I aim to more than triple my output on this blog.

Well, it starts off with fluffy posts like this one where I don’t post any actual content, but tease some other stuff I’ve been working on.

A taste of what’s to come:

• A review of Aubrey Gordon’s What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat
• A series of posts called My Sweet Setup, which will be a spiritual successor to my Favorite Things series where I talked about some of my favorite wares. This one will be more extensive than ever; I will go deeply into some of my specific tool choices, and will discuss most all of the hardware and software I use on a daily basis, as well as some other notable products. The goal here is not blatant consumerism, but rather to help people pick out tools that are great for the long haul.
• I will finally write up a series of posts on The Case Against Scale. I think I have at least half a dozen short essays’ worth of material to discuss, most of which I dug up as I was preparing my Empex LA talk last year
• I have two small tech projects that I absolutely want to finish in the next month or two, and I will write about both of them.
• After I finish those tech projects I want to reflect on why I spent so much time procrastinating on these really small projects

Finally, I have a mind map built up containing a lot of thoughts I have gathered up about the current state of diversity, inclusion & belonging at tech companies today, and why none of what we’re doing is enough to address the actual concerns. I’m still on the fence about whether I want to post it, wavering between “literally the last thing we need is another cis white dude opining on the state of diversity in tech” and “I feel a mandate to share my thoughts on this specifically because cis white dudes in tech need to be stepping up”.

Obviously the year has sucked big time for the world, so I’m not really going to dive much into that. I entered 2020 hoping for things to look up; I was expecting to end 2019 on a high note, having just gotten engaged to the love of my life, but just days after I popped the question, I got the terrible news that my brother had passed away unexpectedly.

I don’t want to rag on the global events of 2020; it’s been done plenty by now, I’m sure, and it’s really remarkable just how many notable and globally traumatic events happened this year.

I’m not a fan of gratitude exercises as a general thing, because I mostly see them being used nowadays as a way privileged people try to come to terms with the fact that they are unfairly advantaged (not to mention these kind of threatening “you could have it much worse” undertones that you can read between the lines of expressions of gratitude).

I don’t want to dismiss the entire year as a loss, though, because there is more to it than that. But here are some highlights, both good and bad, for me personally from 2020:

• As I was sending off my 2019 tax documents to my accountant in February, I cheekily told him it would be the last year I would be filing single. That… didn’t pan out. Still engaged, though, and currently I think there’s about a 50/50 chance that one afternoon we’re going to make an impromptu run to city hall and tie the knot.
• I gave a https://icanthascheezburger.com/swiper-online-casino-bonus/ at Empex LA, my second time speaking at the conference, and the talk was about something I’m deeply passionate about: the case against the existence of truly massive technology companies (or even just massive companies in general). After months of being mostly confined to home, it still strikes me as wild that that trip to LA happened this year.
• After returning home from LA, I had a lovely Valentine’s Day dinner with my valentine at a great little restaurant called Mae in Portland. It was one of the last times we dined out together before the pandemic made dining out difficult.
• We got into gardening! We weren’t amazing at it, but it was a nice thing to do outside and I was able to grow some delicious tomatoes. We also have a delicious raspberry bush, and we had some volunteer potatoes from the year prior.
• I read a lot more this year than usual. I finished a few books that I had been meaning to finish for years.
• I practically resurrected icanthascheezburger by actually posting to it this year!
• I hit my year-mark at GitHub! I low-key was pretty sure that i was going to get found out as an impostor and get fired by the time I hit the year mark, but in fact they seem to like me, so I’m hoping they keep me around!
• I joined a gym and was actually really starting to enjoy going! Then the pandemic hit so I froze my membership until the pandemic is behind us. Working remotely now, it’s actually really nice to have an excuse to leave the house on a daily basis for something that isn’t food-related.
• Health overall was a major struggle for me in 2020. I’m thinking about it differently now than I did at the start of the year, and I experimented with a lot of new things. I actually took a sizable leave of absence from work just to focus on health by itself.
• We had a little work done in the house that finished up just in time for lockdowns to begin!

I’m ready for 2021. I’m not really thinking much about new years’ resolutions; I’m always on the lookout for ways to make things better, and I don’t need a time of the year as a reason (though it is admittedly a great time to try out new habits if you want). I’ll be spending more of 2021 thinking about what I can do to make the world better. I’m probably going to give money to organizations that provide direct financial assistance to people who need it, because a lot of people are hurting. I will look for more independent creators to support. I would like to make a few things and share them with the world.