Weiszklee

Let's remember what social media is these days: an advertising and surveillance system, and a system for compiling data sets that feed into neural networks which are intended to replace you at work and in life. In what world is it even ethical to use these things at all? The fact that social media has become so central to our collective life at all is a travesty.

The latest trend of social media, becoming algorithmic purveyors of short-form video, has wreaked havoc on our attention spans, subjected us to more and more advertising, and has the potential to be used as a propaganda vector just like TV, which (in comparison to radio and newspapers, which are relatively less capital intensive to get into) serves nearly exclusively as a propaganda dissemination machine.

What liberatory potential social media has had has been a byproduct of the people who use it, who will not disappear if teenagers, for example, are barred from using them.

And how are teenagers supposed to find these people when they are barred from accessing their content? Or without social media, how are these people supposed to reach anything close to their current audiences?

(in comparison to radio and newspapers, which are relatively less capital intensive to get into)

How can you say that and then shit on social media? Do you think running a newspaper is less capital intensive than running an instagram account?

There are a lot of legitimate grievances to have with social media, but you seem to prefer to focus on your aesthetic irritations. Well, you did mention the one:

subject to the vagaries of the capitalists who control it

There is a persistent confusion that is evidenced perfectly by your reply that "social media" and "the web" are the same thing. They are in fact not. You can build communities outside of these websites. Hosting your own website, you can read other people's websites, you can follow their websites with feed readers, and this is actually a great way to liberate yourself from the tyranny of the censored algorithmic feed. This is less costly, as a matter of fact, than trying to create a competing social media platform that is not dependent on advertising revenues and which does not become a vector for censorship like every social media website that we know of has become, which is what I have to assume you mean when you refer to "the market entry of competitors".

I obviously do not agree with the idea that the government should "cut young people off from information online and from communicating with each other away from supervision", and I will personally never give a social media website my ID, but I also do not think that a social media ban for teenagers even amounts to cutting young people off from information online or communicating without supervision (and obviously all of this social media communication is supervised, albeit most times mechanically, by the companies in charge), and if we do assume so, we assume that we depend on these privately owned and privately censored mass surveillance social media websites to get our message out. This is a defeatist mentality for obvious reasons. The web is not social media. Social media (excluding programs based on ActivityPub, which is not what anyone's talking about) is a handful of websites, nearly all of which have been used more commonly as vectors for abuse, race hatred, queerphobia, what have you. The only reason that these sites are useful to us politically is because there are people on them to reach, and if the demographic we're targeting is no longer there, we go to where they are, as we have always done. No rebellion, in the first place, has depended on (or had lasting success because of) an online presence on facebook, instagram, tiktok, whatever. It's too easy to turn the internet off altogether. An online presence is at best a spark that gets people involved in physical space where rebellion really happens.

The most effective medium for communicating "alternative" viewpoints remains face-to-face communication, being an influential person in the physical space you inhabit and within your community, and I don't see this changing. Reading groups, protests, socialist meetings, what have you. Social media has been a way to publicize these things, but we don't, and shouldn't, depend on them as organizing or messaging vectors, and you can take one look at the comment section of a facebook post by your local news about a protest to see how effective social media posts are at changing people's minds. Our socialist organization has had more success getting people out by blogging, door-knocking, and flyering in community spaces than we have had with our social media presence. That presence is only useful to begin with, again, because these websites are where people currently spend their time. They are decreasingly useful because social media websites (and this is dictated by their technical, material, structure, it's not something you can abstract away with magical thinking, a social media website is costly to run as cohost amply demonstrated) depend on advertising revenue, VC capital infusions (if not already profitable because of advertising revenue), and/or the sale of personal data to data brokers to run at all, and these incentives push the left out of sight and out of the way, either through active censorship, or by a constant deluge of reactionary posts (the nu-twitter strategy), or by serving as a threat to our privacy amid a government crackdown on left-wing wrongthink.

As for my "aesthetic" concerns, I don't see the ones that are merely aesthetic, unless you think advertising does no psychological harm to anyone ever and is merely ugly (which, sure, it is ugly), that advertising doesn't create want and distress, that advertising has not always been an excuse for censorship (the threat detailed by Ed Herman for example of companies pulling advertising on networks that broadcast programs that threaten their brand image), or that short form video hasn't harmed our attention spans, or that social media is not one of the most pervasive techniques of mass surveillance ever devised. Young people are actually more tuned in to the reality of these harms than millennials, who seem to exist in an eternal 2010, when the Arab Spring and Occupy made us think we would use websites to bring about a real democracy, and before the owners of these websites showed their real class interests.

The most effective medium for communicating "alternative" viewpoints remains face-to-face communication, being an influential person in the physical space you inhabit and within your community, and I don't see this changing.

Face-to-face communication did not swing the public opinion on Israel. Nor could it have. The news from Gaza met the most hostile possible media environment, including a hostile social media environment. And they they still made it through on precisely these hostile channels, not by word-of-mouth.

The only reason that these sites are useful to us politically is because there are people on them to reach, and if the demographic we're targeting is no longer there, we go to where they are, as we have always done.

I don't believe that we will. Because I don't believe that everyone is reachable. People live content, quiet lives, and they are not seeking out information that disturbs them. Without social media, they will retreat to more censored media, not to less censored ones. I have always been a weirdo who goes looking for the challenging new ideas, but for a mass movement you can't depend on people like that.

Let's remember what social media is these days: an advertising and surveillance system, and a system for compiling data sets that feed into neural networks which are intended to replace you at work and in life. In what world is it even ethical to use these things at all? The fact that social media has become so central to our collective life at all is a travesty.

The latest trend of social media, becoming algorithmic purveyors of short-form video, has wreaked havoc on our attention spans, subjected us to more and more advertising, and has the potential to be used as a propaganda vector just like TV, which (in comparison to radio and newspapers, which are relatively less capital intensive to get into) serves nearly exclusively as a propaganda dissemination machine.

What liberatory potential social media has had has been a byproduct of the people who use it, who will not disappear if teenagers, for example, are barred from using them.

And how are teenagers supposed to find these people when they are barred from accessing their content? Or without social media, how are these people supposed to reach anything close to their current audiences?

(in comparison to radio and newspapers, which are relatively less capital intensive to get into)

How can you say that and then shit on social media? Do you think running a newspaper is less capital intensive than running an instagram account?

There are a lot of legitimate grievances to have with social media, but you seem to prefer to focus on your aesthetic irritations. Well, you did mention the one:

subject to the vagaries of the capitalists who control it

Yes. Obviously. He characterizes these fans as self-absorbed, socially deficient, intellectually incurious, emotionally dependent on formula, and “excruciatingly boring.” That is not neutral description. It is a negative judgment about their character and the way they live.

2. Does Ebert imply that a depth of knowledge about a fannish subject is inherently bad on its own?

Not quite. His stated objection is to people using expertise as a display of devotion, a source of status, or a substitute for broader interests and spontaneous social interaction.

I would argue that the rest of the review makes his position a little more clear, though.

3. Does Ebert state that this pattern of behavior is a quality of all fans?

No. He says “a lot of fans,” “extreme fandom,” and “such people.” He is identifying a type of fan, not making a literal universal claim.

4. Did the reader see a mildly critical opinion containing the word ‘fandom’ and immediately succumb to an emotional reaction rather than fully read and engage with the passage?

Calling people socially inept, intellectually empty, self-absorbed, and excruciatingly boring is not “mildly critical.” It is openly contemptuous.

A person can understand the passage perfectly well and still object to it. Disagreement is not evidence of failed reading comprehension, no matter how many condescending bullet points one wraps around the accusation.

5. Did the reader see the words ‘socially inept’ and immediately assume this refers solely to autistic people? Why or why not?

“Socially inept” does not mean “autistic,” and Ebert does not explicitly mention autism.

But the behaviors he associates with social deficiency overlap heavily with stereotypes about autistic people: intense specialist interests, encyclopedic knowledge, reliance on predictable conversational scripts, and difficulty improvising socially.

The word “solely” is doing dishonest work here. The relevant question is not whether the description refers exclusively to autistic people. It is whether Ebert treats traits commonly associated with autistic people as evidence that someone is socially or intellectually defective.

6. Is the job of a cultural critic to ‘let people enjoy things?’

No. Critics are allowed to criticize fandom, fan culture, consumer identity, nostalgia, and the social uses people make of art.

Readers are equally allowed to criticize the critic’s assumptions, generalizations, and contempt. “A critic’s job is not to let people enjoy things” does not mean every hostile remark made by a critic is therefore insightful.

There is also a rather important contextual omission here. Ebert did not write this as a general essay about fandom in the age of twitter, harassment campaigns, shipping discourse, or whatever present-day fandom behavior the quotation is now being aimed at.

He wrote it in his February 4, 2009 review of Fanboys, a road comedy set in 1998. So this is a late-2000s review discussing a particular stereotype of 1990s fandom. The film follows a group of friends who plan to break into Skywalker Ranch so that their terminally ill friend can see The Phantom Menace before he dies. Ebert’s argument is that the movie identifies too closely with its heroes and should have mocked them more. The rest of the review makes his position much less ambiguous. He calls their fandom “an idiotic lifestyle,” describes them as “tragically hurtling into a cultural dead end,” dismisses their knowledge as having “no purpose other than being mastered,” and ends with a joke about their mothers cleaning up after them.

18 years. this is enough time for the work to grow to adulthood and begin to care for itself