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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27856 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Six years ago, Sarah A. Hoyt coined "roll hard left and die".

Years ago, watching science fiction magazines and newspapers of various sorts come and go, I identified a process I called “roll hard left and die.”

When a magazine or a newspaper or any news or entertainment media was in real trouble, they went hard, hard left, then died.

It took me a little while to realize this was a sane strategy. In a field completely controlled by the left, when you knew that your job was in peril be it through missmanagement or whatever, your last hope was to go incredibly hard left, so you could blame the failure on ideology. And instead of not being able to find a job, you found yourself lionized by all the “right” (left) “thinking people.” New jobs were assured.

In his December 15th newsletter, Josh Barro wrote the following about Elon Musk:

Some people are spinning out baroque theories of what the underlying business strategy is, but my strong feeling is that there isn’t one. I think what’s happened is that Musk has greatly overpaid for this company, he’s not running it in a way that’s likely to produce financial returns that come close to justifying the price he paid, and leaning into the idea that he is serving a great social mission (vanquishing the proprietors of the “woke mind virus” who were trying to destroy our society) helps him feel better about the unpleasant business position he’s gotten himself into.

If you’re going to lose money, it’s best to feel like you’re losing it for a cause [...]

The difference here is that I can't see Musk's root motivation as "not being able to find a job" when all is said and done.

And if that's the case, it makes me reconsider how much of "roll hard left and die" really does boil down to Hoyt's lifeboat theory, and how much is "losing money for a cause".

I do want to note one thing that Josh said:

I also said in October that Elon Musk can’t possibly unbias Twitter

This is only the case for a rather strict definition of bias (where it applies to any assumption about what is acceptable or not). Musk could say something like "Hey, you aren't allowed to glorify violence, spam, post illegal material, or generally insult and harass someone". It would take lots of effort to get people who aren't going to give either side a pass for what they say, but it could certainly be done. Think Zorba but moderating Twitter - not impossible, just unlikely.

The problem is that Elon isn't interested in doing this at all, and instead wants to fight with the left. There's no justification for Elon banning the ElonJet account or all those journalists other than him waking up and saying "Today, I want to flex my power against people I don't like".

There is a justification. Doxxing is bad. Just like libel isn’t curtailing free speech, doxxing need not curtail it either. It is also worth noting that Elon’s jet wasn’t as publicly known as most people thought. So elonjet guy wasn’t just signal boosting. The journalists were signal boosting elonjet.

It's one of those debates "Is making it easier to find publicly known info the same as doxing?"

It's one of those debates "Is making it easier to find publicly known info the same as doxing?"

Yes, that's exactly what it is.

My street address is not private. It's in the phone book. But if a journalist with 50k followers tweeted it with the implication that I'm a bad guy, that presents a hazard that didn't exist by my address merely being the in the phone book.

That is, Doxxing is a two-ingredient recipe: 1. The information, 2. The reason for calling attention to the information to a specific audience. Neither ingredient is necessarily a hazard on its own.

Honestly all I need is the intentional malice, everything else is just rules lawyering. If someone unintentionally lets my address out because the posted a photo we took together in front of my home that's not even the same universe as someone doing something intentionally harmful.

I think this is right. Intent matters. Of those 50k the vast majority will not do anything but all it takes is one crazy person...and also employers, family, etc.

I've always come down on the side of "yes, absolutely that is doxxing". Because we have a bunch of legal and technical systems that are not designed with privacy in mind at all. The DMV sells off driver license information. House ownership is listed in public court records. Websites often require real life names and addresses just in case an unlikely legal incident requires the website owner to need those things. Phone numbers and addresses are also routinely scooped up by advertising companies and resold.

I think Musk made the point that if someone has been posting these reporters' home addresses all over twitter they would rightly be screaming bloody murder at twitter for allowing that doxing to take place.

I do think that the government should get its fucking act together and start allowing a bunch of these public records to be privatized, or at least hidden from easy public view. At least that will end this silly aspect of the doxxing debate. Though it will probably make things worse in terms of actual consequences for people, since the government routinely scoops up a bunch of private information, stores it in an unsecured way, and gets predictably hacked. The idiots had the whole security clearance database hacked and leaked to the Chinese.

It is precisely because all of those things are historically public information that associating them with someone's real name is not doxxing. Doxxing is specifically and exclusively the act of exposing the real name of a pseudonymous person.

A reporter's home address is not dox unless that reporter is Deep Throat.

That is not what doxxing is. Doxxing is exposing personally identifiable information (PII) about a person online. PII is not just someone's name. It also includes phone number, address, and SSN.

I'm not making these definitions up, search for the definition of doxxing and it will be much closer to my definition than yours.

If only FDR had thought to add "freedom from inquisition" to his Four Freedoms. I wonder what the corresponding Rockwell painting would look like.

It was all public to begin with, however. It might not be easy to find, but the account wasn't publishing information that would not have seen the light of day. This isn't a case like Scott Alexander's, the law requires that planes be identifiable to the ground and to each other.

Not really getting how this is doxxing. Is it bad? Probably. Should you signal boost such accounts? Probably not. But Elon Musk isn't the modal private citizen either, he's got lots of attention on him by default. If it was his home or something, that might be different, but I don't think you inherently have the right to not have your private jet identified by people and posted online when you fly.

I don't think it's accurate to say that the information was "all public to begin with", because Musk had enrolled in the FAA privacy program that periodically rotates tail numbers. ElonJet was deanonymizing it by correlating with other information, then publishing that non-public mapping.

Jets that fly with the temporary identification number can be easily found on the ADS-B Exchange, as shown by a screenshot shared with Insider that shows the jet that Sweeney says is Musk's was flying on May 7 with no callsign, no tail number, but had "PIA" flagged.

ref. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-appears-use-faa-tool-block-jet-tracking-twitter-2022-10

(even this quote is conflating two definitions of "easily found" - yes, the plane appears on the public list of all planes, but there is no indication that it is Elon's without the additional deanonymization performed by Sweeney.)

I think a useful analogy is Bitcoin transactions. In some sense they're "all public to begin with", because the record of all transactions and their corresponding addresses is in a public ledger. But someone who analyzes transactions and correlates them with other information, then publishes a mapping of addresses to their owners, isn't "just publishing public information", any more than someone who publishes a mapping of Twitter account names to their physical addresses is, since the set of all physical addresses in existence is public.

There seem to be a lot of mental gymnastics going on to try to make Musk look like a hypocrite. Maybe the location of Musk's plane is not, technically, doxxing but it's worlds away from censoring scientific information or unpopular political opinions. Twitter is free now in ways that it definitely wasn't before. And it's because of Musk. This is why people are upset, not because they think there is a legitimate reason to track his plane on Twitter.

Well, yes, if Musk changed the bias at the top, Twitter is free as it wasn't previously. You're free to be Alex Jones, you're not free to be someone Musk happens to dislike (not as easily, anyways). The complaints about Musk can definitely be seen as partisan whining, but we shouldn't take that to mean he's any better than the people he replaced. The only way to judge him as being better is to see how he acts against people he doesn't like. Hell, Bari Weiss even said as much, leading to a rift between her and Musk despite their Twitter Files collaboration.

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