There will come a time, years from now, when it will be obvious to everyone that the basic mechanics of Twitter, of Tumblr, of Reddit, of Facebook, of all these Web2.0 catastrophes in the waning years prior to their Dot.Com.Crash2.0 cataclysms, were carelessly engineered in such a way that they rewarded inhumanity and gamified cruelty.

There will come a time when we look back and wonder how we managed to engineer social structures that emphasized our least filtered, most caustic emotions and rewarded the least emotionally stable among us with cachet, numerical validation and clout.

Some day, we will look back and we will wonder how we collectively allowed a culture that emphasizes attack and anonymity over community and connection to flourish, grow legs and crawl out into the real world where it could destroy lives.

I'm reading reclaiming conversation. It's fucking fantastic, but Sherry Turkle has been fantastic since I was eating paste. The amazing thing is that she legit starts a chapter with a quote from Louis CK:

And then she drops knowledge, studies, chapter and verse on it to back up every fucking point for like the rest of the book.

It's fucking STUPID that I know who Zoe Quinn is. It's RETARDED that I'm allowed an opinion about this. It's unspeakably TRAGIC that legions of misanthropes have aligned to destroy the life of a woman they'll never meet for transgressions they don't understand against a person they don't know and it's utterly predictable that 21st century problems are poorly handled in 19th century courts.

Honestly? I don't think gamergate is a problem for your industry. I think it's a problem for the social networks we've allowed to flourish, for the connections we've chosen to foster, and for the basic humanity we're foregoing. I think this is what happens when socialization is dictated by people with CS degrees that never took psych 101.

And I think it's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better... but I think it will eventually get better.