neutral

Yeah I honestly forgot he was in on this nonsense.

We really should have upgraded to Nate Platinum

Yeah, I'd say a good chunk of it is just that, but I think a lot of that is also hand-waved apologia by saying "we're not like Twitter!" because a lot of the criticism, maybe the term itself, came from there.

Growth without telos, without any governing idea of what it’s for, is indistinguishable from malignancy.

Man, you know what grows endlessly? Cancer.

acc/acc

Oh, you mean like, personal brands are maintained through selective consumption and perpetual self-mythologizing through capitalism of the self? And that when currency is visibility every tool eventually becomes a soft form of collective enforcement? Lol.

Technocratic cruelty thrives not on ideology but on paperwork

It’s perversely logical: systems addicted to coherence can only tolerate humans as long as they act like extensions of the system.

Human actions aren’t banned; they’re simply deprecated.

This is why humans are increasingly crowded out of the picture entirely. It's not even that they're always consciously shoved aside or written off. It's that the rough edges aren't programmatically compatible. They break the illusion of coherence those systems depend on.

It’s not that these systems hate incoherence, it’s that incoherence threatens their metaphysical right to exist.

Their survival strategy is to colonize contradiction: absorb dissent, parody, irony and critique as proof of responsiveness.

This is why alignment rhetoric in AI sounds so much like corporate ethics training: both are exercises in smoothing the unacceptable into policy-compatible phrasing!

Both corporations and generative systems are machines that mistake internal consistency for truth.

You could say they're ontologically addicted to coherence.

The fun thing is, this is the broader problem with generative everything (algos, LLMs), but ALSO with legal fictions like corporate personhood. They all operationalize continuity as survival; they exist not to be true but to remain legible.

Arguably this is why federation here couldn't ever fully decentralize power, as the core logic persists: the platform must preserve the story that the platform is capable of managing itself.

Anything that threatens that narrative gets reclassified as instability.

An institution will always insist upon itself.

The prime directive for any org isn’t stability or truth, it’s self-continuity. Even when it admits fault, that admission is structured as proof of its own legitimacy to arbitrate fault.

Although in the case of the meta-moderation by platform, perhaps I need a third option: moderation that isn’t about harm or order; sometimes it's about saving face or perception management. What I'd called stealth epistemes when "safety" is applied to technology applies equally well here.

Where does this fall?

What's funny is that this isn't just a question for T&S/platform operators. Because we can all create moderation lists here? This is a question for all of us.

It's arguably not algorithmically gamified, but it's still it’s entirely socially gamified.

Kind of worse in a way because it replaces coercive incentives with performative authenticity.

I think that the user mythology aspect is is the greater sin here; it's not like it's as metrics driven as twitter. They don't show ads. The only numbers people are about are their own, and that's clearly in the category of user self-mythologizing.

Safety moderation would actually mean changing affordances, visibility hierarchies, network topology. All of which tends to threaten engagement metrics and, perhaps worse, user mythology.

I think platforms actually love behavioral moderation because it’s quantifiable: easy to show a policy update, metrics like a ban count, bots blocked, tangible deliverables like having an ML-assisted filter.

This was buried midway in that giant thread that I did when I couldn't get back to sleep this morning, but I think it's maybe the key point.

lol,don't I know it. I have problems trying to explain here just how materially disconnected social media is to everything else. Like explaining hyperreal water to fish.

And if I could sleep, I would have. Eventually, I did.

Any true utopia cannot contain me

Yeah I mean, I'm still here, aren't I?

No amount of technical architecture can save you from your founding mythology.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This is maybe like how the US was shaped by puritan exiles from England except in this case it’s foundational waves of Twitter self-exiles lol

The moral humidity, the preemptive blocking, the contamination fears, none of that required federation to exist.

It just happened because that’s what the userbase brought with them and started reinforcing.

And culture is generative and viral in ways that code isn’t.

People bring their Twitter trauma, their Reddit habits, their Tumblr callout patterns. Importing wholesale cultural practices from other platforms and start performing them immediately.