in This Present Time I can have regular interactions with my adolescent celebrity crush that I *actually* would not be able to convince my 14-year-old self are real. not because of their significance but the opposite.

calling her mom is like... the only even remotely reasonable outcome, btw. she *is* a mom several times over, now. and 46.

and by "crush," i mean... at least 30% of my total cumulative mental energy was spent repeating "I am so in love with Sienna Guillory" for *years.*

imagine telling that person "one day, you're gonna wish her happy mother's day every year in a text box. she will call you 'bub.'"

I'm pretty sure it would make him suicidal.

(but the outfits would save his life at the last moment.)

AMERICANS:

FINALLY HAVE ENOUGH 'FREEDOM' YET?

I am so fucking sick of Freedom. Freedom sucks. Freedom doesn't work. I'm tired of trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing. PRISON would be refreshing!!!

swap me out for a family of immigrants. it is long past my turn to serve some time.

you are all screaming about how you feel your "Freedom of Expression" is in danger so much that it has become the entirety of what you have to express. am I really gonna have to be the one who shuts you up?

here's a VC pitch that actually aligns with the public interest: give me $20 million and I will erase the digital presence of hate groups on the web within 18 months via weaponized DDoS. the free exchange of ideas has fucking failed dude. it's time to try a muzzle.

the UK doesn't have these issues. their response to the WBC? *banning them from the country and blocking their website* cbsnews.com/pictures/banne…

somehow "Personal Freedom" equates to "you must give me what I want or you're breaking the law."

sorry I'll stop...

i just don't know how folks continue to dwell on these ridiculous abstracts from 250 year old documents. they should have been allowed to turn to dust.

Notably missing from both the film and this interview: not only have these issues been discussed and researched for decades, now, but a biome of alternatives to EVERY SINGLE CRITICIZED COMPANY/SERVICE EXISTS and HAS EXISTED for years. bit.ly/3fd3Xxn

there is a search engine that is basically just Bing except most of the profit generated by the adtech goes to PLANTING TREES. (Ecosia)

there are decentralized social networks (Mastodon, Diaspora) that often OUTPERFORM the proprietary big boys because they're still incentivized to craft the HIGHEST QUALITY experience rather than the most lucrative.

the only reason you haven't heard of them is that the Big Bad Monopolistic Incs OWN AND OPERATE the tools you'd normally rely on to search them out and Tech Journalism has literally moved in with the people they're needed to keep in check. (they all live in California)

it's ridiculous that we're still listening to the people who created the problem as they ruminate on solutions to the problem. (I would've just commented on Medium, but OneZero is paywalled so... sorry.)

and uh yeah... once again, I did my best to articulate these arguments and more in my most recent Post. bilge.world/the-social-dil…

still working on my post about Facebook. it's over 7500 words now...

sorry.

so far, I've used the word "Facebook" 135 times.

I'm pretty sure I'll have it up before the end of the week. and then I will never have to write about Facebook again...

10,000 words now... I think I need to take a break. definitely should be able to wrap up, polish, and publish tomorrow.

I COMPLETELY missed the Twitter hack... guess this means I'm already doing much better about not getting distracted.

well... I forgot to discuss VK, so it might actually be tomorrow before I get it up... I know hundreds of thousands of you were counting on this essay... I know you've spent three whole days now just refreshing my blog... I'm so sorry.

update:
so I was just about ready to conclude what I had to say about VK when it occurred to me that I should try searching for the original Russian expression of the word (ВКонта́кте,) which revealed a whole new story...

turns out, the only conversation about VK in American media, at least, is as a haven for Nazis who've been banned from Facebook. apparently their pilgrimage began around 2016. theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

this investigation by bellingcat (which is absolutely CHOCK FULL of Nazi imagery - please take care) examines a whole host of neo-Nazis who maintain profiles on both sites, and are just way more explicit about their ideology on VK. bellingcat.com/news/2020/02/1…

imo, the fact that NONE OF THIS was visible in search results for "VK" and "VKontakte" indicates that search engines are still kindof dumb.

to be honest, I have no idea what to do now. literally all of the Facebook alternatives I've argued for have an association with terrible people for one reason or another.

in some cases, it's the fault of the services, I agree. VK should definitely not be allowing some of those fucking images.

in Mastodon's, though, articles like this really let it down. Gab stole the PLATFORM - the SOFTWARE, not the network. the vast majority of instance admins came together within hours of the announcement to make sure their servers didn't federate with Gab. vice.com/en_us/article/…

and yet the headline still uses the term "home." something like this would've been way less misleading: "The Biggest Far-Right Social Network Moves to Nazi-Free Twitter Alternative's Platform."

very discouraged. as of this moment, retirement looks great.

here's a draft if you'd like to read it early for whatever reason. documentcloud.adobe.com/link/review?ur…

and here are my notes so far. cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/10…

what is the best answer, going forward, to combat the tendency for alt-right, neo-Nazi, and other hateful groups to seek refuge on "alternative social media?"

well, I took a break from writing about Facebook... to write about why I'm taking a break from writing about Facebook. extratone.vivaldi.net/covering-faceb…

WELL. I do love the burn in this comment:
"Complaining about how it operates is a little like going to someone’s house party because all the cool people were there and then complaining that the bathroom isn’t ergonomic or you wish their pool was deeper and had a diving board."