Before the Internet, bullying ended when you withdrew from whatever environment you were in. But now, the bullying dynamic is harder to contain and harder to ignore. If you’re harassed on your Facebook page, all of your social circles know about it; as long as you have access to the network, a ceaseless stream of notifications leaves you vulnerable to victimhood.

— How the Internet Has Changed Bullying – The New Yorker

Frightening. As a victim of bullying, the Internet used to provide an avenue of escape from the horrors of real life. For bullied kids growing up now, there is no escape. The Internet is real life. “Cyber-bullying” is as real as schoolyard bullying. The sooner we adults realize this, the better.

SXSW’s response at first was simply to assure us that the public vote was only one part of the panel approval process and we wouldn’t be automatically disqualified if flooded with downvotes, which was nice but not my primary concern. My primary concern was that every time a shitstorm develops around a harassment target and lots of people start joining in the fun, gamified activity of mobbing the target increases the chances of it jumping out of the current venue into a more dangerous one—someone getting a little too excited and starting to make phone calls or send nasty packages.

I was, not to put too fine a point on it, blown off.

— This Is Not A Game: How SXSW Turned GamerGate Abuse Into a Spectator Sport

Arthur Chu details not only the events leading up to South by Southwest’s cancellation of a panel on anti-harassment technology, along with a GamerGate panel, but also the shameful disregard SXSW organizers have towards online harassment, starting with their own system for organizing panels. An important read for anyone concerned with the continuing saga of online abuse.

Here’s my tiny theory, in a word. Abuse. And further, I’m going to suggest in this short essay that abuse — not making money — is the great problem tech and media have. The problem of abuse is the greatest challenge the web faces today. It is greater than censorship, regulation, or (ugh) monetization. It is a problem of staggering magnitude and epic scale, and worse still, it is expensive: it is a problem that can’t be fixed with the cheap, simple fixes beloved by tech: patching up code, pushing out updates.

To explain, let me be clear what I mean by abuse. I don’t just mean the obvious: violent threats. I also mean the endless bickering, the predictable snark, the general atmosphere of little violences that permeate the social web…and the fact that the average person can’t do anything about it.

— Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It) — Bad Words

This rings so, painfully true. I have a decent Twitter experience because I aggressively curated follow list paired with massive mute filters and blocklists. Most people aren’t going to put that much work into a service, nor will they want to. What good is a global agora where nobody listens, but everyone yells? Or throws fists?

“As an advertiser we were paying for eyeballs and thought that we were buying views. But in the digital world, you’re just paying for the ad to be served, and there’s no guarantee who will see it, or whether a human will see it at all.”

— The Fake Traffic Schemes That Are Rotting the Internet – Bloomberg Business

If you want more evidence that online advertising is heading for a reckoning of biblical proportions, read this. What good is a directly targeted ad when the only person that will “see” it is an AI? That is, if anyone sees it at all.

“I spend so much of my day having information pushed at me, yet I spend almost no time to actually process it. Doing so would require a pause in the flow of information. And I’m afraid of what I might miss.”

— The Death of Thought — 500ish Words — Medium

Some excellent thoughts on constant connection by M.G. Siegler. Something that hits home as I sit and write out a description for this while a podcast blasts into my ear…