markjamestwn1301

“No way to stop this” says the person actively making this happen.

Quite. I think that’s also why we’re on the Fediverse, right? While so many of our tech is captured by corporates, we still have room to not accept it all laying down. That’s what negotiation means, drawing your own boundaries, and as much as I hate saying it, picking your own battles, while realising not many will be willing or able to fight the same ones you do.

Maybe the Fediverse should just be for social media, and leave DMs to like, XMPP or something? I dunno, just a thought. Feel like we’re reinventing the wheel here.

Agreed. And as @noxypaws@pawb.social have said, it is important to realise and remain vigilant that humans can be capable of great harm, and that we ourselves are not immune if we’re not carefully with ourselves. Otherwise we might ourselves becomes grown complacent and reproduce those harms on others in some form or another.

So um, as a sociology student, there [i]is indeed no such thing as neutral technology or tool[/i]. Everything is created within systems of power, and its production will always require externalisation of some costs. Artefacts do have politics, because we live in a social world, use social language, etc.

[b]However[/b], this does not mean that it is a moral failing, cuz otherwise everybody existing in society would be evil. We live in an imperfect world, and our own position in it, legible through the symbolic order, is continually accepted, rejected, naturalised, de-naturalised, interpreted, re-interpreted, and negotiated.

Call out harm where you can, accept some difficulties to avoid stuff you find especially egregious if you can, but ultimately, don’t moralise it against yourself if you can’t.

TL;DR There is no neutral tool or technology, but that doesn’t mean you’re morally complicit by not resisting everything. Try to minimise harm where you can, but don’t beat yourself up if you can’t either.