Bonum Certa Men Certa

“Ignoring office politics doesn't avoid them. It makes you the target."

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 05, 2024

Red Cardboard Box

The quote is from Jennifer Brick

IGNORING attacks isn't a possibility. Well, technically it's possible, but it's unwise to do so, almost every time (Internet trolling and attacks aren't the same; one is a subset of the other). 2 years ago some people decided to silence us by all means possible (after I had already quit all social control media), even by doing illegal things, and here we are all those years later - stronger than ever.

Last Thursday we went on holiday. Despite not publishing whilst away (no computer taken with us), the Tux Machines Gemini capsule served 20,000 pages and Techrights served nearly 70,000 Gemini requests.

In the next video I'll explain why, based on what my old online buddy said last Wednesday, Gemini might be the way to go. Many people use it and it's more robust to censorship, too. It doesn't rely on Google or Clownflare and all sorts of "webhosts" (for nearly 3 years I hosted the capsule from my own home).

The political atmosphere has gotten a lot more toxic in recent years and censors like it that way. It makes it easier to attack and deplatform people. People tend to assume that political views they hold will attract no scorn or public condemnation. But they would be wrong. More people now recognise the societal harm of social control media, which serves the state, i.e. serves the powerful few.

I'd like to recommend this new post by Jacky Alciné (who also recorded the text as voice). To quote: "Some time ago, not that long ago, I made a post on my Mastodon account about feeling a sense of fear that social media itself is the true Torment Nexus; that its objective of attempting to connect people was one that would lead us to a failure state that we are not anticipating. I want to expand on that a bit more. The initial comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek; meant to stoke a bit of conversation about how and why people use social media. I've been on these spaces for a tremendous chunk of my life; from the early part of my high school life to today. It helped me find work, make friends I couldn't imagine my life without and grow my sense of understanding at speeds and depth I couldn't have imagined. Reading The Victorian Internet gave me a sense of relation to the people who used these systems to stay in touch with family and extend their sense of self beyond their local region. However, I think that, for some time, I kept ignoring how the flatness of social media has made it hard for me to find this to be something I can see as sustainable in the lines of work that I find myself in today and how I'd like to continue to express myself online. [...] This is making me reassess what I'm aiming to "get out" of social media. I'm choosing to treat it as it is; a machine of marketing that has been built as the such and doesn't seem to be changing pending a cultural shift/revolution. It can easily devolve into a silent shouting match and that doesn't help anyone involved. This is influencing my choice to ramp up my personal blogging, which I'm not totally sure can help. I can be selective about how I engage in a way that most social networks either explicitly prohibit or don't support; like limiting who I choose to platform on my own site or even choose to read. My local feed reader is where I keep longer form prose for reading and I'm working to keep social network clients only on my laptop; to make it easier to escape from scrolling mindlessly[5]. I have things I want to get out into the world that are meaningful to me and I resent, at times, the time I'd spend rolling down a feed when I could have spent it working on that instead, or going for a walk, or playing with my dog, calling a friend, writing a letter, playing a video game. So many things that I lose because I decided to hit reply. No longer."

The decision to blog more and avoid the groupthink of social control media is liberating. No more arguments and fights over unrelated nonsense. No more "office gossip" and "cancel culture". For some tasks, the "office environment" is subpar. People need their own space.

"Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone."

--Richard Stallman

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