Simon Anderson
A dickhead with a camera: the Establishment’s dissident.
From now my weekly SimonTV LIVE broadcast will go out to a variety of social media platforms listed here. For the first time, 𝕏 is not one of them.
Here’s why.
𝕏’s automated systems locked me out of my account for this innocuous post. The fix is trivially simple: I can regain access to my account (and broadcast SimonTV later) if I agree to the arbitrary determination of the automated systems that I have indeed transgressed and accept the negative score that will be recorded against my account by Elon Musk’s social credit system.
I choose not to comply and instead invoke the power of the word “no”.
𝕏 employs nudge theory to entice me to acquiesce. While I can request an escalation to a review by a human (and have), I am blocked from viewing content on Mr Musk’s platform until this occurs, and there’s no guarantee the adjudication will fall in my favour. The review is unscheduled, and the inconvenience will continue for an indeterminate amount of time in the meantime. I can alleviate this inconvenience at any moment merely by agreeing to the ruling that the robots are right and I am wrong. This delay is, of course, deliberate – human workers are an expense and, philosophically, Mr Musk prefers his userbase compliant.
And it’s such a little thing. Do I really care about the content of this throwaway post? Not at all. Do I care that 𝕏 is the platform where most of the SimonTV audience resides? Very much. All I have to do is delete a post I don’t care about in order to broadcast content I do.
But there is a broader societal issue at stake. Sacrificing liberties to satisfy automated reputation systems is choosing to live on one’s knees, and I say, “fuck the robots”.
And the tyrannical bastards who preach free speech while imposing (and profiting from) them.
“No.”
I refuse to wear that digital face mask, Mr Musk. Impose your social distancing to flatten that AI curve, I’ll simply publish and consume content elsewhere.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
