Online Outrage (Spam Mail #31)

💩 Cool Shit

Nestflix - This is incredible. Find all those films within a film, including such classics like Angels with Filthy Souls, and coveted Crying Monkey award winner, Satan’s Alley.

Interactive Earth - A visualization of global weather conditions; including ocean, wind and weather. Move the globe around and observe the macro weather patterns in action.

Search Atlas - Imagining the globe in an entirely different way is Search Atlas. A project that aims to show how search results vary in different locations.

All the passes - Drop the ball on the field and watch the visualization of every pass from 890 matches.

Upland - An NFT metaverse (with a commitment to blockchain sustainability).

No-Fishing - Another interactive globe. This time calling for an end to fishing nets.

Lord of the Strings - I won’t lie, the name of this hooked me. Name aside, this is a cool web app that can analyze a guitar playing and identify strumming patterns.

💎 Word gems

You Anon: Reconsidering pseudonymity and what it means to “be yourself” online (NY Times / John Herrman)

This piece has a great exploration of how the transition from online anonymity to using real names lead us to the current state of online abuse. Revealing our identities doesn’t stop abuse, but is pseudonymity a solution or do we just need to hold abusers more accountable?

A lot of common assumptions about anonymity are complicated by the literature on how people actually behave online, as noted by researcher J. Nathan Matias. In studies, for example, anonymous actors tend to be more, not less, sensitive to group norms. More than half of victims of online harassment already know their harassers. While there is scant evidence that “real name” policies mitigate abuse, there is plenty suggesting that asking people to expose more private information can intensify it. Researchers have found that, in some contexts, the most aggressive commenters have been observed to be more likely to reveal their identities.

The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage (Mother Jones / Kevin Drum)

This article doesn’t hold back any punches in calling out the role of Fox News in increasing affective polarization - the tendency to feel negative about people from the opposite political party.

The Fox pipeline is pretty simple. Fox News stokes a constant sense of outrage among its base of viewers, largely by highlighting narratives of white resentment and threats to Christianity. This in turn forces Republican politicians to follow suit. It’s a positive feedback loop that has no obvious braking system, and it’s already radicalized the conservative base so much that most Republicans literally believe that elections are being stolen and democracy is all but dead if they don’t take extreme action.

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