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Articles filed under Politics.
The logic of capitalism is reproduced in online communities as circlejerks, where quantified affirmation supplants monetary profit. Like capitalism, democratized Internet culture is inadequate to its own promise of freedom. Originally published in 2017.
Some conservatives claim that the free market saved Korea from COVID-19. I argue that it was Korea's Confucian democracy and technological environment that helped them contain the pandemic, not the lack of supply side regulation.
Sites of content production in Web 2.0 are strategic assets which make up the terrain of political conflict in hyperspace.
On Park Geun-Hye, Choi Soon-Sil, Ilbe, meme magic, and the rage of watching Korean democracy dragged through another cult of power.
We have seen in recent months the blossoming of a protest movement in Weird Facebook, a Meme Alliance of users and memepages wearing pink profile-pictures -- Facebook flags upside-down, signaling S.O.S. -- demanding satisfaction for Zuckerberg’s censorship of their content via automated moderation systems. Though their efforts have served as a coming-out of sorts for meme-scene activists, the failure of the Meme Alliance’s tactics to register demands a reconsideration of the terrain of struggle.
We are faced not with a conflict of political affinity, but instead a problem grounded in a disagreement over whether the design of platforms can substitute for social norms: does digital freedom find its limits at the codework constraints of social media sites, in their manmade spaces of programmed possibility, or can digital freedom only exist in the presence of a robust, just, and enforced set of social norms?
The problem is causality. And no: shouting at me won’t make it less true.
