“The thing that scares me more than the high number of imbeciles in this country who wake up one morning and feel like they don’t like a statue or a word or parts of history and decide to start a war through social media or in the street is the lack of law and order. Police can barely defend a statue or a public institution being attacked by a bunch of kids, most of the time the small crowds have no problem toppling anything they want, nobody gets punished in the name of law after causing damage to public property, politicians inciting hate against institutions, police being seen as the enemy, schools changing long held names, corporations changing product names overnight, the opposition by either politicians or population against the extreme ideas and actions is very weak or non existent, people are scared to voice opposition because the slightest disapproval in social media will surely get them fired from work and ruin their lives. The level of madness is incredible and most of it is triggered by the extreme hate toward their own president. I immigrated here more than 25 yrs ago from Europe to the land of the free. I wish I never did. There is no difference between the persecution during communism in eastern Europe and what’s happening here. In fact here it is much worse because your life can instantly get ruined by the wrong post on social media. Your colleagues and “friends” can instantly hate you with no mercy you for the “wrong” opinion or expression. Terrible and tragic.”
Tag: mobocracy
We Live in Fear of the Online Mobs
Internet shaming spreads everywhere and lives forever. We need a way to fight it.
by
Megan McArdle
@asymmetricinfoMore stories by Megan McArdle
August 22, 2017 9:06 AM EDT
James Damore, the author of the notorious Google memo, has had his 15 minutes of fame. In six months, few of us will be able to remember his name. But Google will remember — not the company, but the search engine. For the rest of his life, every time he meets someone new or applies for a job, the first thing they will learn about him, and probably the only thing, is that he wrote a document that caused an internet uproar.
The internet did not invent the public relations disaster, or the summary firing to make said disaster go away. What the internet changed is the scale of the disasters, and the number of people who are vulnerable to them, and the cold implacable permanence of the wreckage they leave behind.
Try to imagine the Damore story happening 20 years ago. It’s nearly impossible, isn’t it? Take a company of similar scope and power to Google — Microsoft, say. Would any reporter in 1997 have cared that some Microsoft engineer she’d never heard of had written a memo his co-workers considered sexist? Probably not. It was more likely a problem for Microsoft HR, or just angry water-cooler conversations.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-22/we-live-in-fear-of-the-online-mobs