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TANGLED_NETS

                                                   April 23, 2021

I'm feeling a little depressed of late at the state of
the current thinking about social networks...

In the moderation of discussion groups and the management of
open source software projects, the dominant thinking is
leaning towards that nicey-nice fascism that's been bugging
me for decades.

My opinion: there isn't much you can say for this
trend except that the actual right-wing facists are      That and the fact that
so much worse the liberal/left tone police look good
in comparison.                                              NOTHING_WORKS

As it stands at present, there's a contest where the
person who does the job of acting weakest wins--

                 For some definition of "winning".
                 Really I suspect no one gets much
                 of anything out of this debate.

This it the liberal/left equivalent of "karenism": you
get people flying of the handle at what are relatively
minor problems-- any critical remark is potentially
grounds for accusations of "harassment", "bullying",
or my favorite, the all-purpose catch-all of "toxic".

In these realms, "toxic" is the analog of "terrorist":
it's a "I know it when I see it" category that's nearly
empty of any concrete meaning, except that it always
applies to the opposition but never to your own tribe.

And if you try to point out the problems here, it's
likely you'll be met with complete head-shaking denial--
you'll be told what you see plainly happening isn't
really happening (some people call this behavior
"gaslighting", but that's another one that only applies
to the opposition).

It often seems to me that the underlying problem with
the Karen phenomena is a deep conviction that they're
Normal, everything about them is Normal, their own
reactions are the standard by how everyone else should
be measured.

You can say the same thing about the tone police,
casting their accusations of "incivility" at the
opposition.



Myself, I think we could use some serious thinking
on how we want to run our organizations, and what          Which is not to
kind of world we want to live in...                        claim that I'm
                                                           up to the job.
A brief list of some phenomena I think we
should watch out for:

  imposing top-down control in the
  guise of neutral facilitation

  management tries to shut down communication channels

       "This kind of discussion is
        not helpful right now."

  dishonest claims at transparency

  dishonesty justified as diplomacy 

  deploying euphemism to hide issues

  using complaints about tone to distract
  from the substance of complaints

  mission creep: technical organizations
  asked to play behavior cop--

      not exactly their core competency






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