Tantacrul's Libslop

Alright this is going to be a very off-the-cuff write-up on Tantacrul's "How I Fell Out Of Love With Facebook". It's going to be difficult because I don't think this video is worthy of any sustained thought or treatment, but here we go.

The first part of the video is just him remininiscing on how Facebook was significant in his life and then went full corpo and hollowed out the user experience. Neato. Happened before, it'll happen again, and the lack of core analysis here of what actually wrong shows the fundamental flaw. The historical story makes it seem like there's some knowledge to be gleaned here, but there's no more depth here than just rote retelling of a sequence of facts. The implication is that there were some meaningful choices made at Facebook that made it horrible, and that if we just got some virtuous company in charge, that would solve all of our problems. Sure thing bro.

Then there are a bunch of criticisms that can only really be categorized as a consumer complaining about a product, and as a result I don't really have much to say about that. I don't care about your product review. The algo sucks and it's lame that your parents are here. Aight.

Amplification of polarizing content. Yup, it sure does do that. It shows people the slop they want to see. Humans do gruesome things to each other, and it's no surprise that they use the internet to facilitate and further those ends.

Free Basics: you're telling me a company would promote its self interest under the guise of charitability? :o. Again, the product sucks, is ill-conceived, and is exploitative of the third world. More at 11.

"Now I'm not a big lover of the copyright holders of this world, but I can tell you for sure I'd rather a world where those guys are still holding the aces rather than the entirety of earth's artwork be subsumed by the likes of Meta." This is retarded. For the same reason copyright is retarded. They are non-scarce goods, Meta having a copy doesn't matter. You morally object to AI because the logic of property is so deep-seated in that thick skull of yours.

Poor little girls have eating disorders and body image issues, and they talk to other poor little girls with mental illness. Idk why you're so dead-set on policing that. Oh nvm, you're a patriachal piece of shit.

The privacy stuff is weak. Or rather, I don't see why I should care, or why I would be uniquely outraged. I don't know why anyone would assume their data is meaningfully private in any way when interfacing with a platform like that. I wasn't really around for it, but yea that switch of defaults to public was pretty shitty. I just don't know why I'd expect anything different. As a historical matter, I can understand people feeling betrayed because they hadn't seen this play out a billion times before, but yeah man platforms aren't your friend. That Elliot Schrage interview is entirely correct: when you press a like button you are affirmatively communicating that you are associating yourself with what you're liking. Facebook is the medium and possessor of this communication, and will do with that information what it pleases.

At the end of the day the entire conversation comes down to power. Who does what to whom for whose benefit. Tantacrul wants the superstructure to change without the base, and demands legislation to attempt to counter-act the core nature of platforms. They are a centralized hub that stores, delivers, and moderates data. They have complete discretionary power over their users, and I don't expect legislation to meaningfully change that relation. And Tantacrul doesn't really want to change that power relation anyway, he just wants to leverage it for the Good ends. Centralized power is desirable if you want to moderate ED girlies and right wing disinformation!

A fundamental change in the power relations, and therefore a fundamental change in technological relations, is required to meaningfully resolve any of the above. The first step is obviously to use a protocol rather than a platform, but a second important step is to shift where the data is stored. Hosting data on someone else's computer is basically always going to have the issue of excessive intrusion. Self-hosting is less reliable, a chore, and requires more know-how. If you'll indulge me, my reasonable proposal is that everyone is allotted an unmoderated server to store data and interface with a variety of protocols, and each platform would basicly only facilitate and aggregate data from these servers. Any moderation would be done there, and records and users could be delisted while maintaining data integrity. But yknow, haven't really figured out a way to anonomyze users or grapple with the power relations of ownership, or how that owner would not be incentivized to moderate. But yknow, you can see the start of a vision there, even if it doesn't really make sense with existing institutions. Maybe we do a Starlink type thing where we just huck a data-center into space with RAID 6 and see how long it lasts unmaintained [1].

But I guess that's the irksome thing - this Tantacrul guy isn't interested in finding some way out of this predicament, even if the attempt is some pathetic and confused attempt like the above, because he misidentifies the problem. He just wants to shuffle the pieces around on the board, and have his morals enforced. There's nothing worthwhile here.