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End of Transmission

I have to write this down. Now. I have to do this. Now. Why ? Because I’m experiencing some clarity right now, and it will not last. It might looks like a hasty decision, but it is something I’ve been torturing myself with for months now.

I quit twittering. Or micro bloging. I’m going to close my twitter account (or accounts, you’ll never know) and I’m not transferring it to another micro bloging platform.

There’s some issue I’m having with micro bloging, and the web of notifications as we know it. Most of them are due to the fact that it’s not a form of socialization that gave me enough space to breathe and to get on with my life.

ADD does not help. Depression does not help. Having followers liking your calls to help without investing themselves much does not helps – that’s also something I’ve stopped doing.

Getting my fix of data is the first thing I do in the morning, right after snoozing my phone’s alarm, before getting out of bed. It’s like listening at the radio or watching TV in the morning before breakfast I guess. And it’s OK for a lot of people, and it’s fine. But in the end it kills me.

It’s been almost ten years since I’ve been pushing bits around here. I’ve seen twitter without retweets or faves. Or likes. Or quotes. Or algorithmic filtering. I’ve been in touch with people who radically changed my life, in ways they do not suspect, thanks to this blue bird.

But things changed, and some of the dilemma I had, related to this platform, are less and less dilemmas. And this is were I’m going to throw a bit of politics in the mix. I’ve made a mistake for years, and this mistakes was thinking that the user base can change the platform. It was thinking that platform owner, even hegemonic capitalist monsters such as Alphabet, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft, that platform owner did care about letting minorities exists in the fringe of those platform.

It was thinking that me, being and acting on twitter, was bringing more to communities than being out of twitter. It was mistaking the potential reach for the actual impact i could have on the world.

I’m thinking a lot about hypercapitalism and how social interactions and reputations are more and more slowly becoming a currency. And how the value of this currency is less and less representative of the work done to get there. I could elaborate on this. And I will, but not here, not now. I need to mature this a little bit more.

The short story is that I’ve been entrapping myself in a permanent performative version of me, to which I’m not even sure to subscribe. Or to understand. Most of my feelings and moods are alien to me, I do not understand them, and it’s partly because I’m too much in the now, not enough in the later. Which cannot helps me to get better.

It also puts me under a microscope. And I’m a white male, I cannot relate to the perpetual figth it is to exist online for visible women. Which brings me to the next point. My mistakes was thinking that it is possible to have different culture coexisting close to each other, sometime interfering — for better or for worse — but most of the time minding their own business in the inifinite space of information that the cyberspace is supposed to be.

I really think that we need a diversity of culture, that we need to let our own cultures to evolve and change, to be influenced by others, to develop themselves and crawling out of our lives, making us bigger than our individual selves. That we should nurture them and experiment with them.

But you cannot do that on homogeneous platforms and protocols. You cannot do that in the perfect hypermnesia of the advertising driven surveillance system. You cannot do that using less than ten platform. We cannot because, on those platform, the mainstream culture, the one that is amplified, developed, reinforced and marketed as the only culture that exist, is the one of the entity who have power on the infrastructure.

Which means that the only cultural choices you have is the one that those people are willing to give you. As Audre Lordre once wrote, « The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. »

You can’t fight racists and homophobic people on a platform which actively support them, and makes money out of them. I used to think that, by being there, I could convince more people to try to take the power back, but the reality was that it was convenient for me. Enjoying my bit of celebrity to compensate cognitive dissonance. Persuading myself that using a platform which actively hurt people I care for, or myself, might be worth it in the long term.

It’s not, I was wrong. I want to get better, to get rid of this ghost of me that’s on my shoulders. I want to take time to write, read and think about the word. I want to go back at being active in a community instead of pretending I care and burning myself tweets after tweets.

So this is it. This is the end of me. It’s not an easy decision, but it’s a long thought one.If you want to get in touch, feel free. You have ways to reach me somewhere, or you’ll figure out. Or you’ll accept that I’m not that important in your life, and it is perfectly fine for me.

So long. And thank you for the tweets.


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Twitter and censorship

Twitter and the censorship

In a controversial post entitled Tweets still must flow((And they stole the third datalove principles, yay for us)), twitter said that they will now be able to censor some tweets regarding on the locality of the reader. That mean that someone in China won’t be able to see this tweet about Tien An Men celebration, or that a tweet with a svastika will not be readable in France or in Germany. And then, the whole twitter sphere get mad, yelling while running in circle.

And the storm will cease, people will forget and move on the next big thing. Twitter will expand and open a new office in China, because they’re doing business. It’s their objective remember? Business, after all twitter is a profit driven company that want money. They do not want your freedom or your safety, they want your money.

I always think that twitter wasn’t that bad, at least, toward my privacy. After all, my friend list is public (anyone can see it, even people without a twitter account), my lists and tweets are also public and they do not have any bits of personal information about me, except my pseudonym and an email to join me. Twitter is one of the few corporation that deal correctly about privacy (I can share my location, but it’s not active by default, I can use my GSM, but it’s not active by default, etc.) So, they provide a service to everyone (they even tolerates bots, even the one that only speaks to computers, that mean control command for botnets). It’s not purely neutral (it’s not distributed), but it’s a good start.

Then things changed

In the beginning (yeah, last year, maybe the year before), twitter had a great documented API that anyone could use to do anything they want, as long as they respect certain limitation in volume. Limitation a normally constituted human cannot be able to reach. So everybody could write a twitter client, or an app that use this twitter API. Then they decided they wanted more control over what people where doing with twitter. Things have moved since the green movment in Iran and, now that Twotter has grown, they want more control.

First things they do, was to forbid third party clients, like the one I’ve used to use to access twitter on my old Nokia phone. 2 years later, I still have no idea of how I can access twitter from the OVI store, so I cannot use it. They makes some huge change on the Twitter API too, without maintaining complete public documentation, this has break a lot of compatibility with, for instance, status.net. They still never explained how the trending Topics and they responds to legitimate questionning about this important future (that’s how you know what’s happening now and near you) with ‘trust us, we’re not censoring anything (and look at the support page about trending topics: https://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics/topics/111-features/articles/101125-about-trending-topics, there is no precise enough answer that could be used to infirm or confirm tweets.

I’m not saying they’re censoring Trending Topics however. They sell trending topics (you can see sponsored one in top of your list). They want control over the trends because that’s how they earn their lives and that’s what they sell to Nike, Disney or BlueCoat for instance. Since two years now, and after 2 major change in the interface and the way they display content, they have exerced a lot of control on how things are moving, they’ve penetrate a lot of new market (in Middle East, Africa, South America, etc) where activists use twitter to circumvent censorship because it’s a US based company, and then the US law are the only one that can be used to censor twitter.

The Wikileaks case

Look at wikileaks for instance. In November 2011, Twitter was forced by the US Justice Department to hand over all the information they had about three people, suspected to be linked to the organisation. A secret order in fatc, that would be revealed to the people under investigation once the investigation is done. Twitter defend the case, but they finally had to give out those information (but they could warn the users they were under investigation). The story is in the NY Times if you need more details. Google do not fight those, they just maintain a page where they put the request from a judge they received, ordered by country. For facebook, I’ve still never heard of such thing.

The things happening there is that a US Company own parts of your identity and they are under the US law (with the patriot Act). That gives to this governement a reach to all the twitter user. Including ones that are not even US citizen neither on the US soil. This is not a twitter problem, this is a legal problem. The centralized system everyone use fall under specific national laws that supersede the local one (amongst the target of the wikileaks thing, there were an Icelandic representative, from a country which have the strongest law arsenal to defend the source protection and the whistle blowers).

Things get big

Twitter has received a lot of money from different sources. They wnat to grow bigger. They want to get in Pakistan, Iran, China or India. They want to have local offices, or not to be banned by a country because ‘terrorists uses it’. So they say they will follow the law of each and every country they will be used. It means that, if Bashar el Assad, the still ruling dictator in Syria, aks for content he do not like must be removed in Syria, they will obey (they will follow the local law). You’ll still be able to see those horrible video and massacre live, but people on the ground won’t be able to talk to each other, because they won’t be there.

My point is, you’re yelling because you’re afradi Twitter will censor things. You should not be afraid of that. You should be afraid that twitter had previously censored tweets due to justice decision that should not apply to you. You should be afraid that all of those datas are centralized, teh same way megaupload, Google or Facebook are. You should be ashamed to reinforce it by using it to protest. You should be ashamed because you have not used a decentralised solution, either by using one that already exists such as https://status.telecomix.org or https://identi.ca, or by setting one up with friend (status.net installation is documented). I know it’s hard, and I am to blame to because I use twitter, but move to a free cypherspace, you’ll see, they’re some nice people hanging there, is you’re looking for me, I am just right here: https://status.telecomix.org/okhin.

Data must flow Enter the decentralized cypherspace

The version 1.0 of this post was written on 2012/01/27 by okhin. Relaesed under no licence or the WTFPL.