Social cooling is a really frightening concept: https://www.socialcooling.com/
@nolan same. it really sucked
@nolan yeah i don't participate in tech at large like this bc of this kind of stuff
i'd rather be myself than fit in
@nolan Oh, good, someone came up with a term for it.
@nolan that, in a sense, is cowardice. Nobody needs to be a hero, but if we all not cower in fear, things will be different.
I recently went back to the twitter account I opened in high school and removed anything that might remotely imply I have opinions.
I have a video editor friend that purges his public portfolio of anything too close to controversial when he looks for work. If it's appropriate for the employer, they get a private copy, otherwise it's all "brand safe."
@nolan No doubt you’re aware of it but isn’t social cooling a bit stronger than self-censorship to appease the town gossips (or in your case, Twitter people twisting your dank tweets)? People have always sought to avoid reputation-destroying scandals by being good (aka hiding their misdeeds).
Social cooling is more powerful as an idea if it’s about the largely *automatic* quantification of people, by business or government, for mere lucre or social control.
@nolan this ... it's really nice when you read something like this and realise you're not just seing things :D
@nolan Everyone has multiple personalities based on who's in the room with them in each compartment of their lives. We are who we are in that moment as part of a synergy ... a trouble with social media is tailoring yourself to hundreds of people is burdensome; now add the FBI and other interested neoliberal or Fascist elements to that mix and who are we???
@nolan I have always wrestled with this (occasionally sweeping out political tweets from my twitter) but I've gotten rather exhausted with doing so... I don't like this ultimate self-censorship... I do consider everything I post, and I don't post anything outrageous, but I wonder if even just having political opinions is "too much" for employers. I sure hope not.
@nolan And now we're learning that you really should assume that anything you do online is going to go into your permanent record: https://gizmodo.com/before-you-hit-submit-this-company-has-already-logge-1795906081
@nolan Terrifying and accurate. I saw that in myself quite a bit, particular when I still used Twitter regularly. I feel it on Facebook a fair amount, too. If only people knew my real politics...
On Mastodon, I feel freer. That's the power of an open Internet that resists the corporatization that's become the norm online.
@nolan it's a real thing
even Jeremy Bentham acknowledges the beginnings of it in his conception of the Panopticon, though iirc he argues it as a good thing due to the construction of the panopticon as a basis for prisoner reformation/control
@vahnj Yup, the scariest part of the Panopticon is not that you're constantly monitored, but that you modify your own behavior to avoid arousing suspicion. Basically:
@nolan the most horrifying thing about Bentham's work is that people realized it worked so well that its structure could be applied to more than just prison reformation
*shakes fist* damn you jeremy bentham
@nolan this is paranoid
@nolan because I'm not out publicly, I have certain safety proceedures that guarantee only people I trust can see my posts, and that all public data points away from me. None of my coworkers follow me on social media, nor would I let them.
@nolan I didn't know this term before and I think might be a good word to describe the effects of hate speech: ie. social cooling is also how hate speech works. "If you feel like your background / race / ethnicity / gender is under threat and that threat is socially accepted you're less likely to speak out up make yourself known"
@nolan really understandable and well done piece on this - thank you! xx
surveillance culture, data harvesting Show more
@nolan it is very problematic. It's am extension, of course, of the traditional personas that people adopt when they are at work, in public, in close social situations. That's very human. What's new is the blurring, the total lack of forgetting, and the corporate intrusion.
But let's not decieve ourselves: small towns are mythological for snooping and social consequences. This isn't that different, just at scale(but everything is different at scale).
@nolan I very intentionally curate what I say in public and online. Always have. It's being recorded, even if it's just on the server which transmitted it.
I have online and offline journals under various nyms. So it goes(I'm a 90s kid...)
These days, my private thoughts - the really private ones - don't leave my skull, ever.
@pnathan @nolan I know too many people who know InfoSec better than me who say that maintaining privacy online is basically oxymoronic these days. :/
But I think that there's degrees of hardness there; How private, to whom, about what. So yes, totally agree, just that at the hard end of the spectrum the best InfoSec principle is not to get involved at all (and then get flagged as an interesting-exception to be investigated further. wheels within wheels seems my theme today..)
@nolan "If they say they don't sell your data, ask if they are selling theirs." Oh.
@nolan reading stuff on the phone instead of cooking is just bad. #mustreadlater
@nolan funny how this is fearmongering against its own cause
feels like they're gonna sell you privacy like it's an added bonus
Take another example: If the algorithm knows, the person using a search is a woman, and therefor ranks results higher which deal with fashion than football and childrend instead of cars - why should the algorithm treat all persons identical, if they don't behave identical? Shall men see more results or ads for fashion and children? What about an age bias, nation, fitness, every attribute which correlates somehow with interest?
> "Old-boys Algorithms" create feedback loops that perpetuate current inequalities.
Women, which buy fashion articles, which search for easy jobs perpetuate current inequalities. Blaming it on old-boys is perpetuating inequalities too.
@nolan very interesting read (both the article and the comments).
@nolan this is why communities such as KDE, which I'm part of, are working towards a vision of "A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy."
Privacy isn't just for paranoid nerds. Everyone should care about it, far too few people do.
@nolan wow. Yes, very frightening concept!
@nolan it reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Nose dive"
@nolan Black Mirror had a very similar idea: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/?ref_=ttep_ep1
@nolan This is absolutely chilling.
I've definitely found myself affected by social cooling. On Twitter, I wouldn't tell jokes or make controversial statements because I knew all my colleagues and present/potential employers were on there. In my field (webdev), your reputation on Twitter can determine which jobs you land and which conferences you get invited to. Best just to be bland and cheerful if you want to fit in with the crowd.