Week of February 2nd, 2020

Happy Birthday! What week it’s been, starting with the Super Bowl, then the Iowa Caucuses, then the State of the Union address, the President’s acquittal, and Yang returning to the debate stage. And in my life, I’ve had everything from filming the movie I wrote to debating creationism with a youth pastor. The ridiculous letter project is still a long ways away, so I’m thinking of sending you a collection of BS every once in a while by email as opposed to immediately emailing it to you whenever I see it. I hope you enjoy. Don’t feel obliged to click every link or whatever. I’m wondering if your semester’s heat is turning up. Mine is around now, so I’m strapping in.

First is a video essay from Big Joel, a leftist YouTuber who I go back and forth with regularly on Twitter. I like his essays, even though I usually don’t agree with him on anything, that is until now, I guess. Never thought I’d stand side by side with a utilitarian, but this criticism of ethics rooted in empathy made relevant to the social media age, and Twitter leftism in particular, is really powerful.

Harvey Weinstein? In my 2020? Actress Jessica Mann, one of his accusers, testified that he has both a penis and a vagina and no testicles, apparently intersex. Her description is fascinating and remarkably improbable. Intersex people are super rare, and their extremely low levels of testosterone mean that they are rarely sexually aggressive. But the real question is the following: How do we not know at this point? If it’s not true, Mr. Weinstein could just drop trou and save himself from prison. It’s not like his genitals have historically been deeply private objects… This should be easy to confirm or deny! If you told me in 2017 that I’d be this curious to see inside Harvey Weinstein’s pants, I’d have thought you’d grown a second head, something that Harvey Weinstein just might have at this point.

CNN received a bomb threat! It involved a Wii Sensor bar, a watch, some AA batteries, and a ceramic grenade shell shoved into a pocket pussy. This was deemed newsworthy.

Let’s discuss the Super Bowl. No not the game. I didn’t watch it this time. The commercials. I approach this topic with a degree of care, because I find the web articles about the hilarious advertising sports fans get subjected to each year to be generally insufferable. But advertisers get to decide things about our national culture, and they present ideas about who we are and what we like. I still think that there’s something interesting about high-profile advertising.

I’ll start with Audi’s baffling Frozen X Game of Thrones pandering climate change themed ad??? Supremely strange. I do not understand this and do not have much to say, but people apparently like this. The song has nothing to do with the theme, no ideas are communicated. It’s just a hodgepodge of somewhat recognizable motifs with some branding. I commend this ad for totally understanding that the heart of the commercial is the aesthetic, not the substantive, and this is the humorous result of that understanding.

Then, Facebook has the gall to present itself as prosocial in a clear attempt to make do after Dwane Johnson turns down being in its commercial. Props to Dwane Johnson, if that’s the case. I wonder if anyone buys this. I’m so deeply rooted in my anti-social media circlejerk (probably my longest-lasting character trait) that I sometimes think that everyone is kind of on the same page, just less passionate about it. But then I see stuff like this… Facebook wouldn’t make it if they didn’t think there weren’t people open to this vision of what Facebook is, and I’m sure its marketing people know better than I do. They’re blasting this thing all over YouTube right now.

John Legend and Chrissy Teigen pretend to be relatable in one of this year’s most fascinating ads. The premise is that the couple are the cool, young, West Egg rich, just like the Genesis GV80, and unlike the old, boring, fake rich. It’s message about wealth is staggeringly direct and brazen. There’s a good rich and a bad rich and the difference between the two is purely aesthetic, and Legend, Teigen, and this luxury car all fall on the good rich side. I think I could ramble for hours about how this frames the American Dream™ and dictates how we should understand social hierarchy, but instead I’ll just take mild offense at the jab at the guy in the loud suit. In my experience, a loud suit does not create a personality, but it certainly indicates one. I think that this Bud Light commercial with Post Malone tells a better message about wealth—money means you can buy more stuff. That definitely checks out.

Finally, There was a Rick and Morty X Pringles ad which desperately wants not to be an ad. Pringles is literally the bad guy and at no point is the product endorsed.

There was also, of course, the halftime show, hosted by Jennifer Laurence and Shakira. It doesn’t seem like something that should have happened this decade, but it was actually pretty well put together. It’s one of the better shows in a long history of flops, especially after Adam Levine’s abysmal showing last year. They did, however, push the line a bit. There was a lot of skin, even for Super Bowl halftime standards. There were poles. There were butts. I don’t really care, but I can respect how some parents weren’t fans. However Coach Dave Daubenmire is taking it one step further. He is suing the NFL for $867,000,000,000,000 dollars. For real. He claims that the show put his soul at risk of hellfire. I suppose JLo lit up his loins or something because damn does he have a high valuation on his wretched soul. You have to watch this. THEY WON’T EVEN LET YOU TALK ABOUT HOMOS ON FACEBOOK!!

This ridiculous week in politics began, but did not end, with Trump posting a shockingly normal tweet showing his “exercise” regimen. This was followed by Andrew Yang proposing a ban on killer robots. This is the future, I guess. The real insanity began with the Iowa Caucus disaster, which has shot the entire Democratic party in the foot. Before the Caucuses, began Yang joked about knocking elderly voters unconscious, and dragging them to the polling place. Unfortunately, the old people put up a fight, and he only got 5% of the first-alignment vote… once it was actually counted.

The action inside the caucuses was entertaining, as Biden continually failed to make it to the realignment, and at least one Buttigieg voter felt cheated upon discovering the former mayor’s homosexuality. This video is hilarious and very worth watching.

Apparently the cause of the embarrassing counting trouble was an app used to count totals. You’d think that counting could be done in-house, but apparently not. No one knows who made this app or how it works. The developer literally calls itself Shadow. This was immediately after the Iowa Democrats had touted new security measures. Along with that, it was reported that many leading the caucuses did not understand the rules and counted wrong. These people want to run our healthcare, and every Democrat ought to be upset about this process. Also, apparently, /pol/ tried to interfere by clogging the phone lines. To investigate this, reporters went to /pol/ and started sharing contact info to get interviews. God I hope this produces some stories.

But 0% results on Tuesday did not deter everybody. Pete Buttigieg, who did end up winning by a narrow margin (and losing the popular vote) due to his heavy Iowa campaigning decided to declare victory with NO VOTES IN. He literally says “an incredible result” when there are 0 reported results. The results that we did get were game changing. Now Buttigieg and Sanders are surging, and Joe “kisses his granddaughter on the lips” Biden is in deep trouble after barely campaigning in Iowa and achieving only 15% of the vote. His campaign was so shocked, it filed an injunction questioning the accuracy of the results.

The President had a very strong State of the Union address, exclaiming his significant economic achievements and avoiding the whole “withholding funds from Ukraine so they’ll investigate Rudy Giuliani’s conspiracy theories” thing. In it, he gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh, which was a pretty good meme.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, Limbaugh announced his cancer diagnosis this week, and it looks like he doesn’t have long to live. I don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks about his politics or his sleaziness, no one deserves cancer… and I do mean no one. Twitter disagrees. Democratic Congresswoman Gabbard posted her prayers for the Limbaugh family and got raked over coals for it. I’m still thinking about the vileness that I saw and my personal ethical philosophy. The celebration of suffering is evil, and I think I need to take a stronger stand against it. 

Then Trump was, predictably, acquitted but, as I’m sure you know, not evenly on party lines. Based Mormon Mitt Romney wrecked his entire political career to go against the circlejerk. Lou Dobbs, perhaps the nuttiest dude on Fox News, rated this as a betrayal worthy of Judas and Benedict Arnold. Following acquittal, Trump had an unhinged address in which he swore on National TV and described Steve Scalise getting shot in graphic detail with finger guns and sound effects and everything. Supremely entertaining and a bit disturbing.

As for me (if you even made it this far down… I don’t blame you if you didn’t), my atheist club had a guest, and I got to debate creationism with a youth pastor! It was like old times. What an idiot though… My classes have taken off, and I’m embarking on a project to build a Linux shell. Wish me luck. I got to see the second screening of the feature film I worked on. It’s coming together. I can’t believe we managed to pull it off. My movie’s production is kind of a mess at the moment, but that’ s usually how it goes. I’m really just trying to stay sane this time around. Take it a little easier. Write more, even if its in the form of unrequested emails. I hope you’re doing well,

Thanks,

Jacob Morris

How Computing Can Contribute to Ethics

This post was originally written for an assignment under a different name.

It should not be surprising that the rise of digital computing has initiated conversations about ethics regarding autonomous systems. Autonomous systems have crept into many facets of our society, often improving our quality of life, but also holding unchecked power over us. But the relationship between ethics and autonomous systems is not unidirectional, and automation affects ethics even as ethics inform our social understanding of automation.

Autonomous systems are our tools, but they differ in a deep way from the tools of our past. One might say it is trivial to understand the ethical reality of a hammer. A hammer is wielded. Whether it is used to build or to destroy, fundamentally it is used by a moral agent. One does not praise the hammer for its creations nor condemn it for its part in destruction. Instead, we praise or criticize the hammer, and perhaps its crafter, for its capacity to be used for its intended purpose. The hammer is ethically trivial in the sense that it neither takes on nor approximates moral agency and the true moral agent wielding the hammer for good or bad is almost always clear. This ethical understanding of our tools does not clearly apply to our newer autonomous tools.

Autonomous systems can at least approximate moral actions, if not truly take them on, and these moral questions are not purely hypothetical. We rely on the moral (or apparently moral) behaviors of autonomous systems regularly in the modern world for our privacy, finances, and safety. And as we prepare to delegate more of our moral decision-making to our machines, allowing them to drive our cars and diagnose our illnesses, these issues become even more pressing.

Some issues in this space have straightforward answers most of us can endorse, particularly in cases with explicitly bad actors who disregard the rights or well-being of the people whom the systems which they create affect. But it may not always be fair or rational to always assign the moral responsibility, good or bad, of the actions of an autonomous systems to those who created it. These moral issues do not have a single, future-proof solution, but they demonstrate that our ethical understanding of the world is mutable, and that our tools can change not just in form or utility, but in moral meaning.

Week of January 26th, 2020

How is monarchy a thing? Sure it’s less of a thing now, but it’s still a thing. At some point I should go on a rant about how “ceremonial” monarchs have a lot more power than you probably think they do. This guy got sentenced to 40 hours community service for insulting Queen Maxima of the Netherlands.

I cannot believe that this video is real. High school internal student news videos are a cringe goldmine (you remember the weird dude with scrap metal in the pocket of his coat), but this… this is something else. Richland High School in Washington has a mascot—the Cloud, named for the mushroom clouds created by the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their team name is The Bombers. They have Japanese students. Holy shit.

What the fuck happened to irony? We’ve had this conversation ad nauseum. Let’s continue it. I think that this YouTuber’s content is supremely interesting, and he reminds me quite a lot of my mindset when I started Duckpond back in the day. This video breaking down the layers of irony is worth a watch.

Reddit is a greasy place. I’ve been there for a while, and, from time to time, it can still disappoint me. This was a real post in /r/AskReddit. I thought it was a joke. It is not. People in the thread are answering unironically. The horror.

Continuing their practice of incompetence, the Verge heralds ThinkPad’s latest creating as “The World’s First Foldable Laptop!” I just…

We had our first shoot day today. I was semi-in-charge, which I’m not used to, and the whole thing hinged on my ability to act. A strange experience. It’s honestly incredible to see so many people come together to bring something that I wrote in a waking fever dream to life. When you see this movie, I’ll tell you more of the ridiculous backstory.

Hope you’re doing well, and I’ll email you next Saturday!

Thanks,
Jacob Morris

Anarcho-Capital Communism: A Proposal

Question: What does an AnCapCom entail? Isn't that a contradiction?

As an anarcho-capcom, I might be able to shed some light on the concept. I believe that people should divide themselves into communes with shared resources and communal ownership. I do not believe in very large communes because as communes grow they require an authoritarian state just for the sake of organization. As an anarchist, I see that as tyranny. Everyone in each commune should be able to know one another so that collective property is actually meaningful. Each commune decides the law of their land (laws must not violate the NAP) as defined by a form of adverse possession. Membership to any commune is entirely optional.

Since these communes are small, they will be equipped to specialize in a select few products rather than producing everything which is consumed. The free market facilitates efficient trade between communes. Communes will without force of state agree upon currencies to maximize trade. There will be glorious large, unrestricted corporations spanning communes. If you work for a corporation, your wage is paid to the commune to which you are a member. Hell, a corporation might hire an entire commune for its efficiency in producing a key product. It's worth noting that a corporation cannot buy a commune outright any more than a corporation could buy a person. (That would violate the NAP.)

Because resources are shared, there is no class inside a commune. Everyone is free to live a life with equals. No one must live among those judged by capitalism to be above them. However, to create the necessary capital differential (and to avoid state-mandated redistribution), different communes would have different wealth. This makes economic sense. The communes most capable of transforming their collective labor into a marketable product other communes wish to buy would control the most capital. And as the communes first form, people will prefer to band together primarily by class (which would of course be eliminated inside of every commune.)

Of course, individual rights cannot be infringed even if collective rights create a better society. Anyone is free to leave a commune at his discretion and join another commune if its laws allow it. Or many people could leave one or many communes and form a new commune with their own rules. An individual is even free to choose to live in no commune at all. Of course, that person could not take any of the commune's property with him. Claiming what is the collective's for one's own, much like taxation, is theft. As nearly all people would be raised in a commune and since commune membership would generally require the relinquishment of all personal private property, this person would be left with nothing. Hey, don't leave your commune expecting some kind of handout. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, bucko!

Also, a person without a commune would find himself isolated. Since communes are the only social groups most people would have, he would be truly alone. Corporations might hesitate to hire him. Living without a commune shows that you're not a team player, something which would likely be stigmatized. Also, it would probably be difficult to just figure out how to file the paperwork to just pay one guy. So while one is free to live without a commune, for most it is undesirable. After all, anarcho-capital communism would create such abundance, social stability, and high quality of life, that very very few will want anything about the system to change.

I hope this helped!

The Insidious Hug of Mental Health Memery

Content advisory: This post contains discussion of depression and suicidality.

This post was originally written for an assignment under a different name.

Dying has a 100% rate of solving the problems. Forcing people to live against their wishes only enables a proportion of people to improve their lives. On the other hand, it still leaves them vulnerable to the conditions which caused them to be suicidal to begin with. It isn't fair to force the ones who won't have a "happy ending" to continue enduring a life that will never bring anything but pain and misery. The matter is exponentially worse when done for the sake of people who might have otherwise experienced happiness that they'd never have been deprived of had their wishes been respected when they were suicidal.

The above paragraph is not my own. It's a quote modified in this post for grammar, style, and context. It was posted in a discussion in response to a post featuring the following image.

^{Original Image: Stranger Things}

The image was posted on /r/2meirl42meirl4meirl, a Reddit user-created community or "subreddit" named for two communities before it. /r/me_irl is a subreddit originally intended for self-deprecating humor. /r/2me_irl4me_irl is a derivative of /r/me_irl for self-deprecating memes rooted in self-loathing. /r/2meirl42meirl4meirl is takes the concept another step further with over 100,000 users sharing memes about depression and suicide. It is one of many communities on Reddit and elsewhere in which people come together from all around the world come together to laugh at their depression.

The social internet has given unprecedented focus to mental health issues. Anonymity and pseudonymity break down the barriers of cultural stigma, and user-created subforums provide safe spaces for people everywhere to discuss their lives and mental health. However since the popularization of online life, mental health among young people is worse than ever, and use heavy use of social media is strongly correlated with depression. And a study conducted by Michelle L. McNicol, BPsych(Hons), and Einar B. Thorsteinsson, PhD found that discussion forum usage in particular was a strong predictor of unhealthy internet addiction among adolescents.

These issues are complicated. Certainly, negative depression meme communities are a symptom of a much larger problem which lacks any easy solution. But those vulnerable to toxic messaging about mental health can benefit greatly from understanding what these communities are and how they work and avoid unhealthy online environments.

Following are a few of the lies many mental health meme communities try to spread.

It's hopeless

These communities often find humor in the advice given by those who aren't struggling with depression or anxiety or in vain attempts to cure depression or anxiety. However, often this mockery of a lack of understanding by outsiders becomes a mockery at all attempts to get better. A great example of this phenomenon is /r/wowthanksimcured, a community dedicated to mocking unhelpful mental-health advice. This community rightly mocks advice like "just cheer up" or "happiness is a choice," but also often mocks advice known to mitigate the symptoms of depression in many people such as improving exercise, increasing time outdoors, and expanding one's social circle. Sometimes, even the idea that depression or anxiety can be mitigated at all is met with mockery.

Even when silly social media posts about smiling more are being mocked justifiably, mental-health communities dedicated to dismissing hope aren't healthy. Time can be much better spent supporting one another and focusing on advice that can actually help people. There is hope. It just doesn't make for a great meme.

It's not a big deal

We use comedy to put ourselves at ease about the problems in our lives and the world around us. Humor can be confessional in nature, revealing little secrets we don't share and feel ashamed of. For instance, a self-deprecating joke about eating too much junk food could be relatable to an audience and temporarily relieve the social pressure surrounding healthy eating. This kind of humor can be a positive part of mental health discussion. It can break down some of the mental health stigmas that hurt so many people.

However, if taken too far or not balanced with productive discussion about addressing mental health issues, this kind of humor can minimize the severity of the mental health crisis and rob some people of much-needed urgency in getting help. Mental health humor online often depicts extreme social isolation, dissociation, and suicidality as more common than they actually are, normalizing extreme mental states in echo chambers of misery. It's okay to use humor to call attention to our society's mental health problems, but not to dismiss them.

Medication is the only solution

Medication is a great tool for many people who suffer from many mental health conditions. For many, medication is a necessity. But medication is not the only way to mitigate the effects of many mental health issues. And medication alone is rarely a complete solution. Some mental health humor communities see anti-depressants as a panacea, after dismissing all other advice as unhelpful nonsense. Lifestyle often contributes both positively and negatively to mental health issues. Cynically ignoring lifestyle change as a means of becoming happier helps no one.

Alternately, some communities present medication as a cop-out that cannot help. These communities suggest that only once one accepts depression at its worst can he live with it, and that medication is a means of hiding from the real problem or numbing oneself. These attitudes keeps some people from getting the medication they need.

Ultimately, humor is a useful tool for de-stigmatizing and starting conversations about mental health. However, communities built around mental health humor without support can promote toxic mindsets around mental health and mental illness

Just Write! No, Not That.

If you want to be a writer, you don't need any fancy degree or giant vocabulary. Hell, you don't even have to have ever read a book. The first person to ever write a book couldn't have possibly read a book before writing theirs, and without them, books couldn't have ever been invented!

All you need to do is write what you want to say to the world! Oh no not like that. This is very poorly written. Take the story that's in your head and share it with everyone! This is actually offensive. I really disagree with this. Everyone has to start somewhere, and every writer has something worth saying! This is abhorrent. Is this document representative of your actual political views? And even worse...you're showing rather than telling! Don't worry about act structure or chapter length. Focus on telling the story that's in your head. All the rules are just guidelines! Is that a fucking adverb? And, holy shit, the passive voice is being used here! What the hell?

How Anonymity and Irony Online Make Communities that Isolate

This post was originally written for an assignment under a different name.

The world at large is just beginning to discover that it's a lot more than just memes. Over the past few years, many have been discussing what's been called the internet's “radicalization engine,” a collection of online spaces and behaviors of content-selection algorithms which have been leading some young people into extreme political ideologies. Those discussing this issue focus on explaining how people are unwittingly introduced to extremist content and communities and how that content and those communities present arguments that appeal to young people, particularly young men. In a world where arguments for extreme ideologies have become increasingly effective, this is a very important area of discussion. However, this conversation often fails to explore the many forces which enable such communities to spawn and thrive and which prime some lonely young men to be influenced by arguments that most people would find abhorrent if encountered in everyday life.

Often, these forces get dismissed. Some say that anger is the nature of young men, and that this is just another manifestation of that prehistoric angst. Others argue that radicalization is bound to occur when people are able to talk freely with like-minded people without moderation and that the internet has merely accelerated the natural process by which people have always formed tribes. Sometimes, these forces are identified as part of the nature of the internet, but not explored. Nevertheless, there is great value in understanding the particular elements of the social internet which are causing problems we observe in the world at large.

One of these is irony. Irony pervades internet culture, from ubiquitous ideas as basic as the “dank meme” to totally irony-dominated spaces like many 4chan boards and subreddits. Of course, irony is no invention of the information age, nor is it harmful by itself. However, irony plays a unique role in some anonymous and pseudonymous spaces online. Irony online, while sometimes used straightforwardly to mock ideas, is often used to shock and to confuse outsiders with a barrage of insincere ideas that can only be interpreted by those very familiar with the population of the space, if anyone. In many spaces it is impossible to distinguish between the ironic and the unironic. Often, the distinction ceases to even matter in what’s referred to as postirony. Online irony itself can serve as a path to extremism. Consider imageboards such as 4chan's infamous (and very NSFW) politics board, which are built on expressing the most repugnant positions conceivable, usually with a degree of irony. This creates a space where actual political extremists can comfortably congregate and hide behind a veil of memes if ever called out, insisting that outsiders just don't get the joke.

But online irony also has more indirect negative effects on the denizens of the darker corners of the social web. It fosters environments where genuine ideas and feeling cannot be discussed and wholehearted attempts at connection and discussion are met with mockery. Together, users around the world come together to create nihilist hell after nihilist hell. Why is irony such a dominant mode online? Certainly one factor is the demographics of the users. Many of the spaces most steeped in online irony are populated primarily by teenage boys and young men. Their propensity for edgy nihilism is hard to deny. Irony as a rejection of the wholesome is a suitable tactic for adolescent social rebellion.

It's also due to the nature of anonymity online. Many have discussed how anonymity frees people from social consequences permitting them to express unsavory beliefs and tell off-color jokes which they never would IRL. But there’s much more to the phenomenon. First, anonymity often negates the idea of a personal relationship. Most forms of social engagement are personal. People want to communicate with those whom they know and with whose identities they are familiar with. Larger-scale communication is usually less social in the colloquial sense. Consider an announcement or a book or a movie, for examples. But while these online spaces are very social, they are often bereft of personal relationships. This is particularly true on forums and imageboards and less true in spaces such as Twitter in which users follow one another. Instead of communicating with individual people, everyone is talking to everybody, and that to any user, all others are somewhat indistinct.

Second, anonymous community impacts individual identity. There are many reasons people use anonymity, some of which have more to do with security than identity. But in an anonymous community, users are socializing. They are finding communities they personally identify with. Because attributes of users cannot be distinguished, in the context of this social situation, users are only the words that they say. This goes beyond users not knowing the backgrounds and identities of each other; it informs the role each user takes in the space.

If with one group of friends, I dress conventionally, and with another I don clown makeup and slapstick antics, in the second case, I'm' not a conventionally dressed guy disguised as a clown. In that space, I’m just a clown. By existing in a space where I take a clown's role, I become one. Similarly, in an anonymous online space, users don’t have the same identities or even concept of identity. In that space people are only meaningfully a hivemind of words on a screen. When they participate, users take on part of that identity. That doesn’t mean that users cease to have personal backgrounds and ideas of their own, only that these things must be expressed in the anonymous collective consciousness if they are to be meaningful. And when individual identity and ideas are gone, it should not be surprising that truth becomes murky, a perfect recipe for postirony. For a collective mind, insincerity is an easy meme. When you’re insincere, you can say anything. It's a strong meme too. By its mocking nature it is difficult to criticize the messages of ironic media without appearing to not understand it. Irony encourages others to respond ironically in turn.

There are certainly benefits to anonymous spaces, but discussing them without their downsides is dishonest. When communities reject truth and replace it insincerity, its members become unable to support one another, and negative and shocking speech become both powerful and regular. Users with no prior bad intentions become used to seeing repugnant ideas and symbols posted in jest which makes it more likely that they won’t bat an eye when similar ideas and symbols are presented to them without mockery.