Cursed librarian and unformation scientist. Complex information systems psychopomp. At the intersection of information, technology, and extremism. Collective sense-making and crisis informatics. Keeping the noosphere safe from haters. "Like Indiana Jones but online". Tech Lead at the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. Master's of Library and Information Science student at the University of Washington iSchool. Long time technologist and software engineer.
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Published at
2023-03-27T13:33:56+02:00 Event JSON
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Last Notes npub1j9x0ss2amchskmu9y3ht0x3yday7945xzk5xk59rhwksge83582sn32kcx Scott P. Johnson @npub14d7…dm4s Im definitely on the no emails and no notifications train. Do not accept communication channels where anyone can pester you at any random time and interrupt whatever you are doing to make you pay attention to them. npub1j9x0ss2amchskmu9y3ht0x3yday7945xzk5xk59rhwksge83582sn32kcx Scott P. Johnson @npub17u8…uhnv This reminds me of the way of thinking in Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects. npub1j9x0ss2amchskmu9y3ht0x3yday7945xzk5xk59rhwksge83582sn32kcx Scott P. Johnson @npub19xy…gky4 Conspiracy theories and rumor-driven misinformation are rife on mastodon just as they are wherever humans gather. They typically tend to be conspiracy theories about different subjects though. There is a TON of platform manipulation on the fediverse but it looks fundamentally different than on other platforms (e.g. less about gaming algorithms and building influence and more about driving defederation politics or abusing the AP protocol for targeted harassment). npub1j9x0ss2amchskmu9y3ht0x3yday7945xzk5xk59rhwksge83582sn32kcx Scott P. Johnson My father is 75 and has Parkinson’s. He used to be a fine artist and computer graphic artist but can’t make art anymore because his hands shake too much. He was telling me that he’s been using generative AI to illustrate a movie he started making and this is the happiest I’ve seen him in a decade. npub1j9x0ss2amchskmu9y3ht0x3yday7945xzk5xk59rhwksge83582sn32kcx Scott P. Johnson Our entire information ecosystem is toast. npub1j9x0ss2amchskmu9y3ht0x3yday7945xzk5xk59rhwksge83582sn32kcx Scott P. Johnson @npub19ll…nvrx LMAO npub1j9x0ss2amchskmu9y3ht0x3yday7945xzk5xk59rhwksge83582sn32kcx Scott P. Johnson So my group for my regular group assignments and final group project in my class have just completely stopped responding to texts after already not doing any of the work on their side up to this point. What’s the etiquette for how to handle this? npub1j9x0ss2amchskmu9y3ht0x3yday7945xzk5xk59rhwksge83582sn32kcx Scott P. Johnson I’m not sure the best way to say this, but this cartoon (and the general meme that fascists hate books) is unrealistic because there is actually whole library’s worth of “bad books” that a hypothetical fascist/nazi/white supremacist-only library could be stocked with. That’s because these assholes are often incredibly prolific authors, they make and share reading lists and pictures of their personal libraries as a common past-time and ingroup signaling mechanism, and writing their own hate-novels is sometimes even considered a rite of passage. A lot of them are really crappy authors though. https://sfba.social/@KeithDJohnson/110244526473997122 https://files.ioc.exchange/media_attachments/files/110/244/691/672/630/557/original/059533b52b58c605.jpeg npub1j9x0ss2amchskmu9y3ht0x3yday7945xzk5xk59rhwksge83582sn32kcx Scott P. Johnson #[0] #[1] The issue isn’t reposting specific articles. We do that all the time manually when we share links, and automating the sharing of links is fine (assuming it isn’t spam-levels). The issue is that the vast majority of reposter bots do not distinguish themselves as not being the original and authoritative source of information. For example a Vice News bot that uses Vice’s logo and has a bio that reads Vice News with a link to the Vice News website. This pattern of imitation is far and beyond the most common style that these bots adopt, and it shouldn’t be considered acceptable for obvious reasons. npub1j9x0ss2amchskmu9y3ht0x3yday7945xzk5xk59rhwksge83582sn32kcx Scott P. Johnson #[0] No, please… automated news reposter bots are a scourge on the fediverse and undermine trust and authenticity of information. npub1j9x0ss2amchskmu9y3ht0x3yday7945xzk5xk59rhwksge83582sn32kcx Scott P. Johnson Way too many people in the disinformation and extremism studies community moved to substacks in the wake of the diaspora from the DES information grounds on Twitter, and I maintain that this is not the appropriate forum for conducting this kind of work without becoming complicitly entangled in the production of the harms they are trying to counter. npub1j9x0ss2amchskmu9y3ht0x3yday7945xzk5xk59rhwksge83582sn32kcx Scott P. Johnson Please consider that if you publish on Substack, paid subscriptions to your newsletter end up funding increasingly normalized hate and disinformation that is frequently promoted to "bestseller" lists by the platform. If the work you are doing is counter to hate and disinformation, this might not be the best place to build an audience. https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/antisemitism-false-information-and-hate-speech-find-home-substack-0 npub1j9x0ss2amchskmu9y3ht0x3yday7945xzk5xk59rhwksge83582sn32kcx Scott P. Johnson People should understand that Trump holding his 2024 campaign opening rally at Waco, Texas isn’t about the Branch Davidians cult or David Koresh. It is because the Waco standoff holds a mythological status in the far-right white supremacist imaginary as a call to arms for militarized anti-government resistance. For the interested and concerned reader, I highly recommend Kathleen Belew’s book "Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.” https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/03/24/opinions/waco-siege-30th-anniversary-trump-rally-hemmer/index.html npub1j9x0ss2amchskmu9y3ht0x3yday7945xzk5xk59rhwksge83582sn32kcx Scott P. Johnson It’s ok to acknowledge and accept that you don’t know the causes of complex system failures, and that they might have more complexity than anyone could possibly get to the root of in the moments immediately following a crisis. This means we have to be comfortable with uncertainty, with not knowing, with not being able to predict. One of the failure modes of sense-making in crisis situations is to jump to conclusions and blame one particular causal narrative as being “definitely” the cause. Picking out and blaming one specific agent-driven narrative as the cause of crises and complex systems failures is a type of magical thinking that leads to various unhealthy and outright dangerous epistemic failure modes, commonly including traumatic cognitive distortions, conspiracy theorization, and hate-based extremism. In reality every complex system (and everything in reality is a complex system, outside of high school physics equations) has a plethora of multiple interdependent causes, and it’s ok to be uncertain.