Being Jewish has really saved me from unhealthy radicalization because most extremist factions in western politics have been entirely unsubtle about there being no place for me in the world remade by their eventual revolution
#phm#ryland grace#rocky the eridian#project hail mary spoilers




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Being Jewish has really saved me from unhealthy radicalization because most extremist factions in western politics have been entirely unsubtle about there being no place for me in the world remade by their eventual revolution
I think this TikTok ban is going to be the thing to radicalize me bc wdym the US’s top priority for the last five years has been banning a foreign social media app that doesn’t steal any more of your data than Meta, but not gun control or women’s rights to their bodies or the economy crisis or global warming or homelessness or world hunger or literally any fucking thing that actually matters?
The online community trilemma
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/16/fast-good-cheap/#getting-up
The digital humanities are one of the true delights of this era. Anthropologists are counting things like sociologists, sociologists are grappling with qualitative data like ethnographers, computational linguists are scraping and making sense of vast corpora of informal speech:
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/24/because-internet-the-new-linguistics-of-informal-english/
I follow a bunch of these digital humanities types: danah boyd, of course, but also Benjamin "Mako" Hill, whose work on the true meaning of the "free software"/"open source" debate is one of my daily touchpoints for making sense of the world we live in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBknF2yUZZ8
Mako just published a new ACM HCI paper co-authored with his U Washington colleagues Nathan TeBlunthuis, Charles Kiene, Isabella Brown, and Laura Levi, "No Community Can Do Everything: Why People Participate in Similar Online Communities":
https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3512908
The paper is a great example of this quantitative ethnography/qualitative statistical analysis hybrid. The authors are trying to figure out why there are so many similar, overlapping online communities, particularly on platforms like Reddit. Why would r/bouldering, r/climbharder, r/climbing, and r/climbingcirclejerk all emerge?
This is a really old question/debate in online community design. The original internet community space, Usenet, was founded on strict hierarchical principles, using a taxonomy to produce a single canonical group for every kind of discussion. Sure, there was specialization (rec.pets.cats begat rec.pets.cats.siamese), but by design, there weren't supposed to be competing groups laying claim to the same turf, and indeed, unwary Usenet users were often scolded for misfiling their comments in the wrong newsgroup.
The first major Usenet schism arose out of this tension: the alt. hierarchy. Though alt. later became known for warez, porn, and other subjects that were banned by Usenet's founding "backbone cabal," the inciting incident that sparked alt.'s creation was a fight over whether "gourmand" should be classified as "rec.gourmand" or "talk.gourmand":
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/altinteroperabilityadversarial
Community managers design their services with strongly held beliefs about the features that make a community good. These beliefs, grounded in designers' personal experience, are assumed to be global and universal. Generally, this assumption is wrong, something that is only revealed later when more people arrive with different needs.
I genuinely feel so radicalized now working at a grocery store. Every day I throw out pounds and pounds of food. Often perfectly good food. Food that is sometimes meant for the food bank but told to throw out because its easier then processing it. And I look in the bin and I see donuts, bread, apples, meat, pasta, pizzas. All perfectly good! But tossed out. But HEAVEN help you if you touch it. Thats against company policy. You cant take anything from the trash. You cant acknowledge the waste. You cant do anything except add to it or be fired.
People refuse to listen to nuance unless they can weaponize it for their radicalized extreme position
Because they know it includes positions, experiences, and proof that ultimately disproves their side so they also say "being in the middle" inherently means supporting the enemy.
It would be funny if it wasn't so genuinely harmful.
"i am not proship or antiship i am an adult"
I hope you still say that when you walk outside and see all the ADULTS voting to ban books, picketing outside libraries and schools, and saying certain books "groom children" so they need to be pulled from shelves because something something moral panic.
Just saying.
Brushing off moral panic as a "stupid jobless child fandom thing" is like... Do you also brush off bigots in fandom who radicalize kids into becoming terfs because it's happening in fandom. Do you get that fandom isn't a fucking vacuum. Do you get that just because fandom has words for being against moral panic, and supporting moral panic, that doesn't mean it's a fandom only thing.
Do you have a brain cell.