So perhaps what we need are electronics that exploit and expand on the cracks, the failures, and the garbage, as a way to move toward the creative and ethi-cal aspects of electronics and electronic waste, as a way to imagine new material relations.

the persistence of waste occurs in part through the unavoidable remainders that do not easily recycle into new systems of production or that are left behind as the pollution and residue from previous activities. W

Rather than encounter waste, failure, and transience as conditions in need of elimination, it may be possible to consider these conditions as constitutive elements of material processes

From thin screens to tiny chips and from dispersed net-works to rapid rates of exchange, many of the qualities of electronics convince us that they are relatively free from material requirements. Yet the term dematerialized does not necessarily mean “without material” but may, instead, refer to modes of materialization that render infrastruc-tures imperceptible or ephemeral. This is electronic technology’s sleight of hand, its magic.

A miniature device that performs seemingly immaterial operations, the chip, in fact, requires a wealth of material inputs.

A dump registers the speed and voracity of consumption, the transience of objects and our relation with them, and the enduring materiality of those objects.

How does one preserve media that have a built-in tendency toward their own termination?

here focus on a number of key sites in which the remains of electronics can be stud-ied. Fieldwork conducted in the gathering of these spatial stories has ranged from Silicon Valley to Singapore and from the Bronx to London. Superfund sites and museums of the electronics industry, shipping yards and electronics recycling facilities, computing archives, and electronics superstores and repair shops inform the content, texture, and structure of this study, which takes up natural history as much as a method as a theoretical point of inquiry.

The material culture of electronics discussed here is not cen-tered on users as manipulators of media content but, instead, focuses on how materialized workers, technologists, and consumers all emerge in relation to processes of electronic obsolescence and decay.

Obsolete objects returned to a kind of prehistory when they fell out of circulation, at which time they could be examined as resonant material residues—fossils—of eco-nomic practices.

electronic devices shrink to the scale of paper-thin and handheld devices, they appear to be lightweight and free of material resources.

expanded definitions of what constitutes electronic waste, as well as inventive methods for gathering together stories about that waste.

studying waste might also account for more than empirical pro-cesses of waste making.

Electronics often appear only as “media,” or as interfaces, apparently lacking in material substance. Yet digital media materialize in distinctive ways—not just as raw matter, but also as performances of abundance—often because they are so seemingly immaterial.

The theory of waste developed in this book describes processes by which electronics end up in the dump, as well as what happens to electronic remainders in their complex circuits prior to the dump.

In fact, Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of Superfund sites in the United States. What is perhaps so unexpected about these sites is that the pollution is not a product of heavy industry but, rather, stems from the manufacture of those seemingly immaterial information technologies.

Electronics are bound up with elaborate mechanisms of fascination, with driving economic forces

What is “ spam ” ? Spam is the use of information technology infrastructure to exploit existing aggregations of human attention.

What this means is that search engine spammers running their vast stables of spam blogs and sites are not anomalous.

Litspam obviously does not work for human readers, aside from its occasional interesting resemblance to stochastic knockoffs of the work of Tzara or Burroughs (with a hint of Louis Zukofsky ’ s quotation poems, or Bern Porter ’ s “ Founds ” assembled from NASA rocket documentation). If anything, its fractured lines and phrasal salad are a sign that something ’ s suspiciously wrong and the message should be discarded.

What the spammer needs is natural language, alive and in use up at the front of the curve.

Bayesian filters destroyed email spam as a reputable business model in three ways, each of which became a springboard for spam ’ s transformation.

If filtering made it much harder to make money per number of messages, spam messages could become much more individually lucrative: rather than sales pitches for goods or sites, they could be used for phishing, identity theft, credit card scams, and infecting the recipient ’ s computer with viruses, worms, adware, and other forms of dangerous and crooked malware.

filtering spam by adopting a system based on na ï ve Bayesian statisti-cal analysi

the public and private mailing activities of 158 people in the upper echelons of a major corporation, frozen in place like the ruins of Pompeii for future researchers. They were not slow in coming.

Clearly the necessary starting point is some kind of agreed-upon spam object, something like a spam meter or spam calorie, on which and against which things can be tested — a corpus.

The only workaround for spammers would be to build their own artificial societies — which is, in fact, exactly what they did.

By bringing together the technical-objective and the social-subjective, Google could eliminate the “ junk results, ” the spam that could fool machines but not humans with its stack of keywords

The damping factor is underappreciated as an antispam strategy. It ’ s the subtle gradation of how rank passes through links, how far reputation can go before its effect decays into nothing. The source of the damping factor models is boredom.

At the most abstract level, search engines have three elements from their inception to the present day: a spider, an indexer, and a query handler.

To understand what happens from now on in spam ’ s history, we need to start with the gradual and momentous transition of the relevance of text into something robot-readable, particularly how that happened with search on the web, and thus how search engine spamming came into being — which means talking about Google.

Suddenly, it becomes the responsibility of everyone with an email address to opt out, over and over;

On NANAE, system administration tools became the starting points for increasingly elaborate campaigns of surveillance, following the track of messages and the ownership of accounts to trace and identify spammers.

com-puters as gardens rather than bodies, with diverse software populations to be tended and pruned by attentive and self-reliant users, potentially capable of weed resistance in their interdependence, with the professionals as agronomists, breeders, and exterminators rather than doctors at the cordon sanitaire.

Usenet, by contrast, is a protocol for handling the storage, retrieval, and forwarding of messages among a set of computers in a network.

One of the manifestations of this uncertainty is the struggle over metaphors, a struggle with very practical, physical, and technological consequences. What was spam like? To decide the answer to that question was to decide indirectly what the network itself was like and how people and their machines should behave on it. This question was played out to great effect in the shaping of law.

ACCESS TO RESOURCES

These 5 MB are like a geologist ’ s road cut, a sectional slice across the enterprise of a midlevel spamming crew hard at work.

The Brutal files are the best, and therefore worst, instance of charivari shaming as an antispam strategy, a deeply invasive and unsettling act of social pillory. When does a criminal forfeit all right to his or her privacy? Especially, it must be said, a “ criminal ” who has not been convicted of any crime by anyone other than a mysterious hacker-consultant and a bunch of strangers on the Internet?

The so-called Brutal materials include photographs of Garst in various states of undress in the office and at home, as well as what appears to have been a private boudoir photography session for a Premier Services employee and two erotic stories allegedly found on one of the servers.

The first chunk

The board is alive, now, and the story has become enormously complex

The story of spam was through 1994 largely a story about building community and managing scarce resources on networked computers and in the process defining misbehavior, marking it, and stopping it. From 1994 on, the threads of the concept of community and the capture of attention entwine with issues of money, collective organization, and the law.

“ NO COMMERCIAL ADVERTIS-ING, if you please. Imagine what this vulnerable medium would look like if hundreds of thousands of merchants like you put up their free ads like yours. ” 142 “ This vulnerable medium ” is an interesting phrase, at once an overt plea for responsibility presented from a position of weakness and a more covert assertion of the need to maintain the status quo in favor of the people who already run it. It recalls the very real and cogent concern for the networked commons but also the all-too-common threat language of groups in power who would like to stay that way — the rhetoric of a vulnerable democracy in a dangerous world used by the Bush administra-tion in its erosion of civil liberties, for example.

In March 1994, AOL enabled what it called the “ Usenet feature. ” Its massive subscriber base, which had been functioning inside the enclosed space of their proprietary network, were abruptly turned loose onto Usenet.

As the argument about whether to freeze or delete the topic dragged on, other users began bombarding the topic with enor-mous slabs of text, duplicated protests, nonsense phrases — spam — to dilute Mandel ’ s hateful weirdness in a torrent of lexical noise, rendering it unus-able as a venue for his emotional breakdown.

What we are discussing here is a kind of complex political performance that is built out of mocking laughter, insults, masking and anonymity, and the mingling between active crowds and passive audi-ences. It is a performance that is at every turn tangled up with the question of who is allowed to participate in political discourse and the extent and role of the law and its representatives.

What I am calling the charivari is a distinct network-mediated social structure, a mode of collective surveillance and punishment for the violation of norms and mores.

More remains to be written about the role of graduate student poverty and parsimony in shaping the hacker ethos, which obliges you to repurpose scavenged equipment, invent workarounds, and maximize limited resources and how this ethos shaped the networks built with those resources.

After thirty years of rhetoric of the Internet as everywhere nonlocal, disembodied, virtual and cyberspatial, it can be dif-ficult to remember how local, relatively speaking, early networked comput-ing was.

In general, an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior. ”

Before you make serious inter-ventions into the rules governing a consensual space, you must be precise about what you are trying to stop, and you have to work with the users of the space to determine what intervention reflects your collective goals.

About that word: Spam

A physical chip was needed so you didn ’ t have to work solely in capital letters.

Spamming is the hypertrophied form of the very technologies and prac-tices that enable the virtual communities that loathe and fight it. This nature is why it is so hard to define, so hard to stop, and so valuable to our understanding of networked digital media and the gatherings they support.

— spam provides us with reactive publics. Obliged, suddenly, to be aware of the means of their own existence and to create deliberate mechanisms that blur between technical, social, political, and legal, these reactive publics must manage themselves and their infrastructure.

“ contextual integrity, ” in which our friends, family, and professional domains operate in distinct contextual partitions and conversa-tions. 23

A network of networks, for reasons that combined utility, efficiency, and budget with a concept of “ human community ” : this was the vision for a new project, christened ARPANET,

There was not one network,

Spam survived and prospered by operating in the edge cases around these big ideas, in the friction between technical facts and the root paradigms that are expressed in them where powerful concepts like trust, anonymity, liberty, and community online were reinvented, modified, and sometimes discarded. In following spam, we will explore how these ideas evolved and, above all, how human attention online, and the strategies for capturing it, changed over time.

Root paradigms

“ counterartifact ”

technolo-gies are statements about the distribution of needful things such as power, status, access, wealth, and privilege, for good and for ill.

This term, “ technological drama, ” is from the work of Bryan Pfaffenberger

spamming is the project of leveraging information technology to exploit existing gatherings of attention.

(In fact, many of the early cases of spam provoke groups of people on computers into the task of self-definition and self-organization as communities.

This is a book about spam for anyone who wants to understand what spam is, how it works, and what it means, from the earliest computer networks to the present day.

We fund and enable it with choices we make and trade-offs we are willing to accept because the benefits to the network outweigh the costs.

Our primary contribution here is to examine the interaction between the asymmetric architecture of the American media ecosystem that we discovered in our own work and the presence of the Russian efforts

Despite extensive efforts, we were unable to find an example of disinformation or commercial clickbait started on the left, or aimed from abroad at the left, that took hold and became widely reported and believed in the broader network that stretches from the center to the left for any meaningful stretch of time.

The commercial bullshit or clickbait sites are the most familiar challenge. They are simply a new breed of spammers or search engine optimizers.

Practically, this means that professional journalism needs to recalibrate its commitment to objective reporting further toward transparent, accountable verifiability and away from demonstrative neutrality.

nstead of these technologically driven dynamics, which are novel but ultimately less important, we see longer-term dynamics of political economy:ideolog y and institutions interacting with technological adoption as the primary drivers of the present epistemic crisis.

Changes in technolog y (satellite and FM radio, cable transmission, and only later the internet), institutions (the deregulation of cable, repeal of the fairness doctrine, reduction in ownership limits, and reduced antitrust enforcement) and political culture have shaped the emergence of a network of media outlets, including radio, cable television, and internet sites, that operate in a distinctly partisan propagandist mode.

These facts are as inconvenient to academics seeking a nonpartisan, neutral diagnosis of what is happening to us as they are to professional journalists who are institutionally committed to describe the game in a nonpartisan way. Both communities have tended to focus on technolog y, we believe, because if technolog y is something that happens to all of us, no partisan finger pointing is required. But the facts we observe do not lend themselves to a neutral, “both sides at fault” analysis

Here we sketch out a framework for understanding the differences in the incentives, mechanics, and practices between the two parts of the media landscape.

Outside the right-wing ecosystem, we did not see a leftward polarization but its opposite—an increase in the authority of, and attention paid to, the traditional professional media that occupy the center and center-left, at the expense of the left.

Network Propaganda—What we observe in our broad, macroscale studies as well as in our detailed case studies is that the overall effect on beliefs and attitudes emerges from the interaction among a diverse and often broad set of discrete sources and narrative bits.

Ellul’s now-classic work reoriented the study of propaganda from understanding the practice of intentional management of beliefs and attitudes at the population level to understanding the structure of consciousness in technologically mediated market society. Propaganda was no longer something an actor perpetrates on a population (although it is that too), but the overall social practice and effect that normalizes and regularizes life and meaning in modern, technologically mediated society.

Indeed, our own detailed study of the American case suggests that it is only where the underlying institutional and political-cultural fabric is frayed that technolog y can exacerbate existing problems and dynamics to the point of crisis.

e suggest that each of these “usual suspects” acts through and depends on the asymmetric partisan ecosystem that has developed over the past four decades.

Our own contribution to debates about the 2016 election was to shine a light on the right-wing media ecosystem itself as the primary culprit in sowing confusion and distrust in the broader American media ecosystem.

hese meme campaigns had significant impact on the campaign.

In our observations, Facebook appears to be a more polluted information environment than Twitter or the open web.

first, the list of actors who have been described as potentially responsible for disrupting American political communications, and second, precise definitions of the terms

We take a political economy view of technolog y, suggesting that the fundamental mistake of “the internet polarizes” narrative is that it adopts too naïve a view of how technolog y works and understates the degree to which institutions, culture, and politics shape technological adoption and diffusion patterns.

The bulk of this book comprises detailed analyses of large data sets, case studies of the emergence of broad frames and particular narratives, and synthesis with the work of others

attacks on Hillary Clinton that we document in Chapters 3, 4, 6, and 7 were intended precisely to reduce that dissonance

Our work helps to explain how a media ecosystem that initially helped the GOP gain and retain power ultimately spun out of control.

All of these professions organized themselves into their modern national, institutional forms in roughly the first 20 years of the twentieth century.

Some shared means of defining what facts or beliefs are off the wall and what are plausibly open to reasoned debate is necessary to maintain a democracy.

Something fundamental was happening to threaten democracy, and our collective eye fell on the novel and rapidly changing—technolog y. Technological processes beyond the control of any person or country—the convergence of social media, algorithmic news curation, bots, artificial intelligence, and big data analysis—were creating echo chambers that reinforced our biases, were removing indicia of trustworthiness, and were generally overwhelming our capacity to make sense of the world, and with it our capacity to govern ourselves as reasonable democracies.

consequential discussions about the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome are happening not in the conventional realms of literatu re, theater, and scholarship, but on the internet.

The idea of a vibrant, radical, intersec-tional feminist Classics—one that uses the ancient world to enrich conversations about race, gender, and social justice—is anathema to them. And that is why feminist Classics to day is more exciting and necessary than ever.

This is an idea that we ought to take seriously, because it is not far removed from the attitude of some on the poli tica l left. The men of the Red Pill believe that the Classics are only (or at least espe-cially) meaningful to reactionary white men, and th ose with pro-gressive politics who seek to upend or replace the Western canon tacitly cede this point. Both sides of that debate agree that the study of ancient literatu re perpetuates white male supremacy; they differ only on the question of whether that is a consequence that should be celebrated.

they are aspirational. Even more disturbingly, their online vitriol suggests that they believe they deserve such a society, and that our society—one in which women are allowed to vote and to choose with whom to have sex and whom to marry—re presents a deep systemic injustice against white men. They use ancient litera-ture to justify their sense of entitlement to female bodies and to political power over them

a rape culture exists within a social group that normalizes rape to the degree that consequences for rapists are minimal or nonexiste nt and punishing rapists is seen as more barbaric than rape itself

The men of the Red Pill who write about the ancient world would have their readers believe th ere is a straight line from antiquity to today, a continuity of male and female behavio r

Ovid’s text may have only limited value when used to validate modern game advice, but it works beautifully to illuminate the flaws and dangers in pickup-ar tist ideology. Taken alone, the Ars Ama-toria has often been treated by scholars as an amusing literary game, and seduction manuals are excused as common-se nse tips for how to win the game between the sexes. But when placed alongside each other, each text appears in a diff erent light. Ovid’s casual references to sexual assault seem far more sinister and less ironic when one realizes that similar ideas are widespread in the seduction commu-nity today. And Ovid shows that, for certain men, the most seduc-tive idea of all is that mastering the art of love—that is, learning how to violate women’s boundar ies in a socially acceptable manner—ca n function both as social commentary and as poli tica l resi sta nce

In contrast, he is extremely sparing with detail about any of his conquests, with the exception of Lisa, the woman he falls for at the end of the book who inspires him to leave the community. Aside from her, most women are identified by their first names, their occupation, and their hair color

To an outsider, it may look like a group of men talking about women, but often the women become li ttle more than a means to the end of es-tablishing authority and social capital among a group of male peers.

. In parti cula r, the similarities between the ancient and modern seduction guides highlight two parallel tendencies: the prizing of male subjectivity over female subjectivity, and a projec t of gradually intensifying the violation of women’s boundar ies.

eception theory holds that the reader con-structs the meaning of a text in the moment of reading.

Pickup-artist readers of the text generally ignore the ironizing element of the narratorial voice in the Ars and instead read the text as straightforward advice.

The most common Engl ish translation of Ars Amatoria, The Art of Love, masks the text’s true nature and makes it sound much more flowery than it re ally i

Treating the premise of this poem as fundamentally playful or subversive, as some scholars do, becomes irresponsible when th ere is a community using it today to normalize an attitude to ward consent that would not be out of place in ancient Rome.

At its heart, learning how to have game requires conceptualizing and internalizing ideas about gender that lead to devaluing women and relegating them to the status of sexual ob-jects.

f you agree with this interpretation of the philosophy, then both inter-sectional feminists and members of the Alt-Right can embrace Stoicism freely and without concern

But rationality may itself be a product of privilege, so access to the cosmopolis might not be equally available to all

Tomassi is not alone in this belief: the men who frequent Red Pill sites are confident that they are more rational and less emotional than anybody el s

However, hidden just beneath the surface of Stoicism’s ap-parent protofe minism is a gender politics easily adaptable to Red Pill ideology.

In their musings about Stoic philosophy’s value to the modern man, they reveal why Stoicism continues to exert such appeal over the men who have “swallowed the red pill”: in short, it justifies their belief in the intellectual supe-riority of white men.

Holiday puts racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and a host of other prejudices into a box, labels it “disadvantage,” and then makes it vanish by proclaiming disadvantage universal to the human condition.

Multiculturalism is the avowed enemy

The most famous of th ese is the praemeditatio malorum, a practice of envisioning possibl e outcomes so as to be inoculated against negative reactions

Stoicism focuses explicit ly on self-improvement, so it can be blended easily into the self-help aspect of Red Pill communities.

For the first aim of this chapter

Red Pill writers who discuss Stoicism are interested only in Stoic ethics from the Late Stoa.

So antifeminist readings of th ese texts in Red Pill communities should not be dis-missed as misreadings or shallow interpretations: they may be re-sponding to and drawing on parts of Stoicism that advocates of the philosophy would prefer to ignore.

Sto-icism, the philosophy beloved by the Red Pill, has a reputation among scholars as one of the most feminist of all ancient philoso-phies.

Stoicism, a philosophical school founded in Athens around 300 bce by Zeno of Citium, teaches its adherents that nearly everything usually perceived to be harmful (including hunger, sick-ness, poverty, cruelty, and death) is only harmful if one allows it to be

Epictetus advises taking responsibility for our perceptions and ac-tions; Valizadeh claims that women forced him to act in a certain manner.

claim that study of the classic texts of the Western tradition is under attack by progressives, who wish to ei ther throw out the canon or read to day’s corrosive identity politics into it.

The bond that keeps the Red Pill community together is ideo-logical sublimation: racial to gendered, gendered to racial.

egacy of slavery

Choosing not to engage with th ese men directly, however, does not preclude critiquing their views.

Arguing with them is nearly impossible, because these men have a set of established rhetorical tricks that they use, consciously or unconsciously, to misdirect and derail opposing views. Since this book is dedicated to exposing how Red Pill rhe-toric works, th ese tricks deserve some explication

This argument, much like th ose of the Red Pill writers I men-tioned earlier, is a straw man: nobody denies that our society owes a debt to the Greeks.

However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text. As a result, the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-pr eservation

The Columbia Spectator op-ed was met with bipartisan scorn in outlets from The Wall Street Journal to Salon

But th ere is no denying that producing feminist readings and uses of the Classics can be a bit like trying to use a normal pair of scissors when you are left-handed

l women, over all historical periods, share the same negative characteristics

it is only the latest development in the millennia-lo ng use of classical antiquity to promote reactionary ideologies.

hifted their focus from videogame politics to national politics and became out-spoken supporters of Donald Trump,

the Alt-Right was denounced by Democr atic nominee Hillary Clinton in an August 2016 speech in Las Vegas.

no universality or even commonality, and that lacking manifests in how we tear ourselves, and each other, down, and always have.

In this chapter, I will map out the contours of the Red Pill com-munity and its various subgroups. By identifying what each of th ese internal factions is trying to achieve and how they operate, we can better understand why they feel compelled to position themselves as the inheritors of the classical tradition and how the ancient world validates one of their most cherished, deeply held beliefs: that all women throughout history share distinct, immutable qualities that make them promiscuous, deceitful, and manipulative.

I have decided to focus primarily on the gender politics rather than the racial politics of Red Pill communities for two reasons.

Social media has el-evated misogyny to entirely new levels of viole nce and virulence.

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the conflation of speech and act that’s inevitable in any computer-mediated world, be it Lambda or the increas-ingly wired world at large.

But it was also having some unsettling effects on the way I looked at the rest of the world. Sometimes, for instance, it grew difficult for me to understand why RL society classifies RL rape alongside crimes against person or property.

In a few days, Haakon announced, he would build into the database a system of petitions and ballots whereby anyone could put to popular vote any social scheme requiring wizardly powers for its implementation, with the results of the vote to be binding on the wizards.

He had committed a MOO crime, and his pun-ishment, if any, would be meted out via the MOO

Peaking in number at around 30, this was one of the largest crowds that ever gathered in a single LambdaMOO chamber,

technolibertarians.

but only implement whatever decisions the community as a whole directed them to.

it would require the services of a nobler class of character. It would require a wizard.

whether we present that body to another as a meat puppet or a word puppet is not nearly as significant a distinction as one might have thought.

LambdaMOOers are allowed a broad freedom to create -- they can describe their characters any way they like, they can make rooms of their own and decorate them to taste, and they can build new objects almost at will.

LambdaMOO

information superhighway

lackness as a dynamic core of narrative gravity (pace Yancy) sustained through intentional, libidinal, historical, and imaginative Black agency in the context of navigating American racial ideology.

These practices are optimized for communicative efficiency on their respective media, drawing from a pleasure in creative linguistic expression and the historical, discursive practices and experi-ences of evading white racial surveillance in plain sight

This is why cultural theory needs to stretch its conceptual capacities beyondrepresentational analysis and come up new notions and ideas in order to bet-ter grasp the technological constellations and networked assemblages of“anomalous media culture.”

Anomalies transform our experiences of contemporary network cultureby intervening in relational paths and connecting the individual to newassemblages

express the topolog-ical features of the social and cultural usage of media technologies.

British cafebecomes exposed to the transformational force of spontaneous events ratherthan the static essences or signs of identity politics

an assemblage theory of media

capacities

George Gerbner,

Instead, the dangerous anomaly has long been regarded as a functionof the homogenizing powers of popular media.

For us, judging a computer virus as a metaphor of a biological virusall too easily reproduces it to the same fixed terms conjured up in themetaphor in itself and does not provide any novel information concerningthe intensive capacities of, for example, a specific class of software program

hat makes this collection standout, however, is notonly its radical rethinking of the role of the anomalous in digital culture, butthat all of the contributions in the book in one way or another mark animportant conceptual shift away from a solely representational analysi

anomalies are continuously processed and rechanneled back into the every-day of network culture.

This junkfills up the material channels of the Internet, transforming ourcommunications experiences on a daily or even hourly basis.

More importantly, examination of sustained harassment campaigns shows that they are often coordinated out of another online space.

Harassment can’t evolve into litspam because then it wouldn’t be harassment anymore.

ezebel writers were expected to moderate the comments and delete them so the readers didn’t have to see them.

arbage can be mitigated by and disposed of through architectural solutions—in other words, by code. Manual deletion, manual banning and legal action are not the only tools in the toolkit.

Large-scale sustained campaigns also resemble tiny, crude, handmade botnets. At the center is an orchestrator, who perhaps engages in harassment from multiple “sockpuppet” accounts—the corollary to the burnable domains and email addresses that are so highly sought after by spammers. But the really bizarre phenomenon is all the low-level mobbers, who have little-to-no real investment in going after the target, and would not manifest any obsessions with that particular target without the orchestrator to set them off. Here they resemble the zombie nodes of spam botnets, right down to the tactics that have been observed to be deployed—rote lines and messages are sometimes made available through Pastebin, a text-sharing website, and low-level mobbers are encouraged to find people to message and then copy/paste that message.

repeated difficulties that MoveOn.org

For small and intimate communities, the question of balancing speech and user safety is relatively null. But large-scale platforms are different.

A user doesn’t have to have a real change of heart to decide to simply go along with the norms that are being enforced.

simply deleting or filtering offending content is not the end goal.

The context in which the publicly information gets posted matters.

When complex internet pile-ons like Gamergate get heated, the term “harassment” is flung back and forth like an accusation, with each side convinced that the other side is the real harasser, and that their opponent is now using the term in bad faith to apply to mere criticisms or mildly unpleasant language.

Jon Poste