Good God how much damage has been done to the world through carelessly/callously and poorly designed algorithms https://twitter.com/kwimiku/status/1200221029110616071

And again, this is why I feel like it’s not only super important to push back firmly against anti culture, but we have to do work to acknowledge real hurt and *identify the entities actually responsible for it*.

“Yes, someone did hurt you. It’s not who you’re being directed toward by people who do not in fact have your best interests at heart”.

People deserve platforms that have guards in place to keep them as safe as possible.

Not to mention that while both projects aren’t easy, it’s far easier and more practical (and less toxic) to push for spaces that keep upsetting content away from people who shouldn’t see it than it is to try to eradicate that content altogether.

The problem is that part of what anti culture does is emphasize helplessness and deny that people have power and agency. It puts people in a mindset where they feel they have the power to scream and be abusive but not agitate for real structural change.

I suspect this is part of why you almost never see them doing things that would actually help create the world they say they want, like push hard for actual anti-obscenity laws and demand changes to age-of-consent policies. It literally may not occur to them.

I may have missed it but I don’t recall any anti campaigns in support of FOSTA/SESTA. You’d think they’d be backing that legislation super hard.

FOSTA/SESTA is absolutely terrible and literally kills people, I’m just saying.

The constant implicit message that I see is basically “you cannot affect structural change in any way whatsoever, you have no real political power, you are weak and fragile and all we can do is band together and attack people on an individual level.” It’s weird.

But when people are more inclined to be self-reflexive enough to consider what power they have and how they can affect real change, I think they’re generally less inclined to waste time on anti tactics, because it’s clearer how useless they are.

So it doesn’t serve antis to seize that kind of agency and do that kind of social-structural analysis. It doesn’t serve them to think in that way. One of the things these group cultures do is carefully block off avenues of thinking that might separate one from the group.

When people start going “hey, what a minute, what about X”, they tend to drift out of whatever cultish group they’ve become trapped inside. Thinking is dangerous to the group and the group by instinctive nature disincentives it.

People who have escaped extremist religious groups or hate organizations describe this process. Actually starting to *think* about the absurdities, the way the narrative they’ve been fed doesn’t hold up against the stress testing of the real world.

“You are not powerful. Only the group is powerful. Only the group is safe.” That’s the message.

The denial of that agency means they can’t identify where the real dangers are and who is actually directly responsible for their harm.

Which is part of why spaces like Tumblr can make themselves incredibly unsafe for their users without any consequences. Their users often don’t even realize the full scope of what’s happened.

But the thing is that antis don’t actually *want* the space to become safe.

Because then they have no reason to exist.

All the group impetus is biased in favor of not understanding the problem and not seeking a meaningful solution.

It’s not great.

By the way, a note: when I say that antis “want” something, I’m usually not speaking about conscious desire on the individual level. I’m talking about them “wanting” something in the way that states “want” something: a natural tendency, a hill they flow down.

We sociologists tend to be immediately suspicious of saying anyone is “wired” a certain way but human beings are basically programmed to create groups and then endeavor to make sure those groups continue to exist, sometimes at all costs.

So group behavior will flow naturally toward whatever acts to keep that group in operation.

Often there are people behind it consciously guiding aspects of it, but a lot of it is aggregate unconscious.

So antis “want” to do these things because we want our groups to keep going, because losing that sense of belonging is terrifying.

That’s what I mean when I say they want a thing.

And addendum to my earlier point: a lot of what we have to do is introduce the notion that *these spaces are possible*. Because when all you’ve ever known is fucking Tumblr, it’s hard to imagine than anything except Tumblr can exist.

We’re like “LJ” and that doesn’t *mean* anything to them because the way LJ worked is so alien. They don’t see why it might be a better kind of space unless it’s explained to them, and even then. It’s hard to imagine something you’ve never had to think about.

“Honest to God, we once occupied spaces where you hardly ever saw upsetting stuff unless you went looking for it” is like. What. How is that possible.

But it is.

People in fundamentalist Christianity are taught that there is no life apart from God, that even non-Christians and unbelievers aren’t acting in good faith and secretly know that God is real and Christians are right and are therefore just bad and evil for refusing the truth.

What helps get them out of the pews is becoming capable of imagining an alternative. That another world is possible.

I really think most antis do not at a deep level comprehend this.

We can make these better, safer spaces without entirely eradicating content. They can truly happen.

You just need to chose. What actually matters to you? Creating a safer space? Or feeling morally superior to the outgroup?

We constantly observe that anti-abortion crusaders refuse to back the policies that actually have been proven to drastically minimize abortion. Because it’s not actually about abortion.

Antis need to confront what truly matters to them.

Once that happens, they can start to make spaces safer. But only then.

Oh, one more thing: the other big problem is plain ol extremist thinking. “Either we do it 100% or there’s no point”. Partial measures, even measures that are almost totally effective, are never good enough, because it’s about moral purity, not harm minimization.

It will never ever be good enough to create a safER space, because the sin will still be there lurking in the shadows and the space will be impure and will taint everyone in it merely by virtue of existing. The space must be 100% pure and will only then be safe.

Impossible.

So even if a world where people are much safer but the Wrong Bad content also isn’t eradicated is possible, it’s not desirable. Gotta have all or nothing.

Which means nothing happens and people get hurt.

Utopias are fabulously destructive, y’all, that was my dissertation.