Diversity & Inclusion
Brooklyn

Could this be a legit fix for the menace of online harassment?

Caroline Sinders is hosting an event at NYC Resistor that looks to combat the rampant bile of the modern-day internet. Maybe, she posits, the problem relates to its infrastructure.

Reaching for control of the computer. (Art by Jenny Holt)

GamerGate came and went, but like the Tea Party before it or the shamans of the ’60s or the face-tattooed, train-hopping gutterpunks of the ’90s, nothing truly dies.
Which sucks. Because unlike all those other things, except for maybe the Tea Party, GamerGate isn’t happy to just find its little community and stay there, enjoying the strange fruits of its own rage but not inflicting it upon others. Which is to say GamerGaters and other aggressive anti-feminist, anti-liberal bottom feeding mouthbreathers still proliferate on the internet.
But the internet is anonymous and any one voice can be heard or transmitted with the same power of any other, more or less. So Brooklyn’s Caroline Sinders is out to change, if not the movement or its causes or the misery on which it feeds, at least the infrastructure and design of websites and platforms to minimize the bile that splashes up against the sides of the modern internet.
Sinders is hosting an event July 23 at NYC Resistor called Radical Ethnography, which is going to try to minimize hateful speech in otherwise productive online venues.
“Does the design of a social media platform determine how language is amplified and how language is used and evolved?” the event asks. “Does the infrastructure of a site shape the identity of the site itself and users within the site?”
If this is a question or a problem that’s bugged you on the ‘net, we strongly recommend this program. Sinders is well-known in Brooklyn web circles, we’ve met her plenty of times, and she’s the real deal.

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