Bookmarks: December 2023
Trust and Safety, Trouble in Marvel, Thieves on Youtube, Texting Theory, To Boldly Go where no Woman has Gone before, and the TikTok Meme Complex
Hi, welcome to Dilemmas of Meaning, a journal at the intersection of philosophy, culture, and technology. This is December Bookmarks in our Discovery series. In this month’s post we’re highlighting running Twitter into the ground (yourself), The TikTok-Meme Industrial Complex, The Ethics of Replying, History of the Age of Consent, and Plagiarism on Youtube.
Keep your recommendations coming. See you all next month.
Trust and Safety Tycoon
Honestly, this deserves its own full on essay.
In social media platforms, the people are protected by two separate yet equally important services: Trust, creating an environment where users trust the company enough to feel comfortable using their platform, and Safety, ensuring that users, advertisers, and the company is kept safe. This is their story.
Trust and Safety Tycoon puts you in charge of a fictional social media platform (that certainly isn’t based on Twitter) balancing cultivating a good platform for users, their safety, advertisers, and the occasional knock from law enforcement asking you to give sensitive data. Often, we who criticise the policies of many of company and those who accept them wholeheartedly fail to see that they are choices, with a cause and an effect. It is something I have tried to make clear in my writing but there is something tangible about being asked whether to take down a livestream of a school-shooter or keep it up so the police can find them. Fun, insightful, and from the few Trust and Safety people who’ve commented about it, accurate. See how long you last and whether your minor choices early on come to bite you right at the finish line.
Crisis at Marvel: Jonathan Majors Back-Up Plans, ‘The Marvels’ Reshoots, Reviving Original Avengers and More Issues Revealed - Tatiana Siegel
Sharing this long read as it touches on a few of our recurring themes: workers’ rights in the digital workplace and media adapting to a tech-first world. Sharing this also because it is a valuable read, as a lapsed Marvel fan.
Plagiarism and You(Tube) - hbomberguy
It is rare I sit down for a 3 hour long YouTube video, it is rarer that the experience was worth it. I’m unfamiliar with hbomberguy, but found his deep dive into plagiarism on YouTube rewarding. Going beyond the usual copyright/content ID debates into the mechanism of seeking fame, respect, and a culture of churning out content allows thieves to profit from the work of others. The video also dovetails nicely with recurring Dilemmas of Meaning topics, the Youtube Meta encouraging content for content sake, the internet as a place for queer education and elite capture on the internet. If that wasn’t enough, know that I knew next to nobody discussed but could not pull myself away.
What was ‘replying’? Shouting into the void that answers aback - Mariah Kreutter
Once again, this deserves a Wish We Wrote. Kreutter does something between a personal essay and theory, dissecting and exploring the strange modern day phenomenon that is replying. I’ve had it on my to-read list for almost a month and I wish I got to it sooner. It talks about how we, not knowing how we ought to behave, have taken to theorising everything from commenting, ghosting, double texting and more. When we look back on our era or not-quite-private-not quite-public communication, this will be one of the foundational texts.
What Raising the Age of Sexual Consent Taught Women About the Vote - Kimberly Hamlin
A tale of intersectionality, political mobilising against adversity, and international solidarity all before global universal suffrage was the norm rather than the exception. An inspiring read no matter where you are
The Corny TikTok Meme Pop Phenomenon - Dev Limes
Digging into the phenomenon of making music for the sake of instant, algorithmic virality rather than music itself is Dev Lemons in this YouTube video. Recognizing that more and more ‘hits’ are just capitalizing off of a recent meme, with little more to say than a rehash of the meme itself, she questions their longevity and the connection to memes and culture music can and should have. Surely, referencing a meme in your music or art is not necessarily the mark of a superficial cashgrab — however, it’s worth pointing out when the only substance is a reference to the weekly TikTok zeitgeist.