People Want To Use Things But Not Own The Consequences Of Its Use.

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨JTode@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

On the list of people I describe in the subject, I place myself first. If you’re here to defend yourself by showing me your receipts, congratulations, you win, I just saved us who knows how much time. I’m typing this out in an attempt to describe phenomena, not persuade you of anything in particular, other than, this is a thing I see happening a lot; too much would be my take.

I’m just gonna grab the most egregious example, but I would like to talk about this, not as a horrific fail, but as an exemplar; at the moment I believe that most people categorize it as the former.

That example being, Facebook Acted As The Main Propaganda Outlet For A Genocide Of The Rohingya In Myanmar, and therefore, Anyone Who Uses Facebook Is Using A Tool That Has Bloodstains On It And Are Somehow Not Horrified.

To more easily conceptualize this, it’s much the same as me needing a shovel, and having a neighbour that I happen to know murdered someone with their shovel, but has not been arrested for it, and right when I need the shovel, they walk over with their bloodstained shovel and offer to let me use it for my non-murder task. And I just go “Wow how convenient that you happened to be here with that bright-red shovel just now, I think I’ll use this one one of yours with the little spatters of brain on it, instead of walking over to my shed and getting my own shovel out!”

We are talking about murder here, Facebook was used to foment mass murder and in a world that made sense, Zuckerberg would be handed over to the ICC years ago, along with Henry Kissinger and a number of others who instead hang out at the Nobel Peace Prize club where Barack makes a mean Mai Tai.

The problems that people use Facebook to constructively solve is connections to family and close friends, event and interest group organizing, the marketplace, and for the avid user it constitutes a daily journal.

These problems could each be solved using something else that is also just as gratis. It might be a small amount of effort more, but then you maybe don’t ever have to touch the remains of a human life that once existed and now does not, due to this particular device being used to end that life.

But it seems that it’s more convenient, easy, zero effort, to simply ignore the gore.

That’s what I see on the internet. I don’t think anyone has ever accepted a bloodstained shovel and set to digging a ditch with it who didn’t also feel that their life was next if they didn’t, but as long as there’s no visible bloodstains, as long as it’s just a few articles and podcasts from known radical leftists, eh, look at little Jimmy’s recital, isn’t he cute?

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jocanib@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This springs to mind.

Individual choices are constrained. Admonishing people for living in this world that we live in is straight from the Big Carbon playbook.

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- manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  true but there is more to it, remember consumption and carbon production is just something everyone needs to do to survive in this world.
  
  expecting your friends and family to use a billionaires network as one of the sole ways of communicating is not really the same thing as being stuck buying your food with too much plastic on it.
  
  one of these you really do have control over its not a forced choice its just one people think is.
  
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  - CloverSi@lemmy.comfysnug.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Social media’s whole thing is the social aspect - if a community and/or its users are entrenched somewhere, they’re not likely to move because a minority has issues with the platform. It’s not unreasonable to want people to move away from Facebook/etc., but it’s not really true to say that’s a choice everyone has, if friends, family, and the communities or activities someone wants to engage with are there; if the options are communicating with loved ones on an ‘unethical’ platform or not communicating with them at all, it’s unreasonable and unfair to expect everyone to choose the latter.
    
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  - jocanib@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I know, everyone in the world who is not on the Fediverse is an evil, lazy scumbag and the absolute best way to get them to switch is to sneer and scold. No matter what communities they have built, what access to information they need, how difficult it is to rebuild that elsewhere, they’re all just terrible people compared to you, polishing your halo in the corner.
    
    This line of argument is bogus and self-defeating. Quit it.
    
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masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

That example being, Facebook Acted As The Main Propaganda Outlet For A Genocide Of The Rohingya In Myanmar, and therefore, Anyone Who Uses Facebook Is Using A Tool That Has Bloodstains On It And Are Somehow Not Horrified

I think you’re naiive if you look around the world and see a bunch of tools without blood stains. Newspapers have caused immense harm, books have caused immense harm, road networks kill thousands and thousands of people every single year, our meat based diets kill millions of animals and we love watching big movie star beef cakes who got big eating those animals. Hell do you have a job, do you work and participate in capitalism? Congratulations you’re participating in a system of artificial scarcity that kills millions a year.

We all use blood stained tools on a literal daily basis, it is not a new or surprising phenomena it is a necessary part of how we survive our day to day lives.

And quite frankly Behind the Bastards is a podcast that knowingly Streisand effects people like Andrew Tate and Ben Shapiro when they need to crank out low effort content for Clear Channel Communications, even “radical leftists” as you refer to them aren’t blood free.

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manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
im often astonished at what people will mentally lock themselves into to save a click.

ux is so important, its almost impossible to understate. it does not just provide a way to access an application, it shapes your neural patterns.

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YourHuckleberry@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
In 1993 Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) started broadcasting hate speach in Rawanda. They used technology presumably manufactured and sold by multi-national corporations who had no mechanism to prevent abuse of the platform they created. Should we blame the manufacturers of radio broadcast equipment for the Rawandan genocide?

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PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This is just standard (and good) criticism of capitalism. “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” as they saying goes.

But there’s the question of whether the mass murder in Myanmar would have happened without Facebook. That’s impossible to know for sure, admittedly, but I still believe it’s possible to think about it meaningfully. Because my answer is mass murder would have probably happened without Facebook.

The core of my argument is that technology merely allows humans to act more effectively and amplifies what we already do. What humanity does is not fundamentally changed by technology in most cases. And Facebook is one of the cases where the previously existing social division was amplified, where bad faith actors could act more effectively. Yes, Facebook had an important role to play by trying to make the platform addictive via algorithms that emotional content could hijack and spread like wildfire. However, while that doesn’t absolve Facebook’s instrumentality to mass murder altogether, it contextualizes it enough for me to treat it as any tool.

In other words, a murder-shovel digs just as effectively as a non-murder-shovel, and I don’t really see an intrinsic problem with using the murder-shovel.

The analogy of the tool fails when it comes to Zuckerberg’s role in directing Facebook to act as it did. A shovel doesn’t have a CEO dedicated to digging as much as possible; Facebook does have a CEO dedicated to making the platform addictive, the mechanism by which social divisions were amplified. I think his responsibility is complex…but he absolutely shares some responsibility for the tragedy.

And so, that’s why I believe your post is a good, moralistic criticism of capitalism: it demonstrates how market relations obfuscate moral responsibility. Facebook mediates and helps satisfy our social needs while allowing us to ignore our role, however small it is, in perpetuating the means by which others can influence others to commit tragedies.

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Pandantic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
To be fair, what you’re asking is for normal people to step outside the media they normally consume and seek other (sometimes untrusted) media to come to these conclusions. Some would say, “If this really happened, why isn’t the media reporting on it?” I know why, you know why, but the regular person out there thinks it must be an extreme view if their preferred media outlets are not reporting on it.

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jet@hackertalks.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s going to be a difficult life if you avoid every tool that a bad person has ever used. Purified drinking water has been used to hydrate villains who then do terrible things. So you shouldn’t drink purified drinking water. The printing press has been used by evil people to spread evil ideas so you shouldn’t read or write. Ascribing intent to a technology is a very slippery slope. I don’t think it’s a tenable way to live a life.

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- Pandantic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  What you are talking about is not the same as what OP is talking about. Following the analogy, it’s not like you should stop using shovels (or knives, or water) because someone bad used them (hell, Hitler was a dog lover, and I’ll be damned if I stop loving dogs because of that asshole). Rather, it’s that you shouldn’t just use the shovel you know murdered someone because the person murdered didn’t matter to you. Stepping out of the analogy, it’s not about the tool used (though the case could be made for some things) but about the companies who made them and how they used them or knowingly allowed them to be used.
  
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