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5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people
(privacy.thenexus.today)
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
FYI: I'm posting a non-sneer without an NSFW tag. I suspect that you might want to post this sort of article in the sister community !NotAwfulTech for non-sneering feedback; this community is explicitly for "big brain tech dude" authors who are posting "yet another clueless take."
While it would be pleasingly recursive to look at this article as such a "clueless take," I think it's clearly more well-researched than that. Also, while I personally don't like the concept of white allyship, I understand why it emerges: it takes longer to let go of one's beliefs than to embrace the people around you, and so it takes longer to let go of whiteness than to be okay with non-white folks. So, I'm not going to take that angle. I don't think it's okay to be white, but I also think that it takes a while for white folks to realize that they can stop being white.
With that all in mind, I think that it's worth pointing out that while all five suggestions are laudable, none of them address the structural and reputational problems at the heart of Mastodon. @[email protected] had a killer comment on the last draft (which I can't permalink because Lemmy is trash; it's in this tree) about how ActivityPub structurally allows harassment by allowing pseudonymous interactions. In my personal conversations with ActivityPub's architects, I got the sense that they didn't understand what we call The Reputation Problem: the paths via which you give reputational incentives to participants will be reinforced according to their rewards. This is also the root of my pessimism about related projects like Spritely Goblins.
(This reminds me that I need to flesh out the bullet point in my notes headlined "The Reputation Problem & A Theory of Generalized Fuckwittery". This generalizes the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, Homo economicus, etc. It's all obviously connected from a distributed-systems perspective: bad actors are getting paid for their bad actions by the system's structure!)
Further, it's not clear that the community's adaptations are sustainable. TBS can't seem to shed its TERFs and it should be obvious that any similarly-structured project will be too authoritarian for a large chunk of the community. Hashtags aren't private or moderated spaces, and any sort of hashtag usage council would immediately run into the same authoritarian issues. One of the disadvantages of Balkanization is that your neighbors, safely separated from you by geographic obstacles, will start talking shit about you, and you don't want to let them police your lands.
Sorry, what? Race isn't something you can change, and nor is it something you should feel ashamed about/be discriminated against
There is no such thing as biological race. Race is a purely social construction. People are "white", not because of some imaginary gene or imaginary scientific classification, but because their skin is pale enough to be socially privileged.
So, while it's true that "white people" can never stop being "white" in the sense of social privilege, it is absolutely possible for pale skinned people to recognize that "whiteness" is a phony racist category and thus to disassociate and dis-identify with this completely unjust and irrational system.
The alternative that you're promoting is "race realism" which is discredited fascist/rascist pseudo-science.
If you want to call it skin color instead of race you can, but that's just a semantic argument, which I don't care to engage with.
time for you to fuck off
and of course their recent post history is just sealioning
e: and, fucking amazingly, they posted this in a different thread at almost the same time as their reply here:
so they really didn’t fucking read what they were replying to