We’re members of a platform that houses an innumerable array of intersecting communities. The communities have their own lingos, visual and social grammar, rituals, and norms. The platform managers position themselves as upholders of these communities, but the communities are not their customers.

Advertisers are.

This important distinction explains the use of banning, purging, and silencing users based on a myriad of reasons. From hate speech to ‘inauthentic behavior,’ the potential violation of ‘community standards’ of these platforms has become a widely utilized tool to signal the platform’s cooperation with certain expectations, whether from Congress or from some of their vocal critics.

I was recently post-banned. Facebook requires you to log back in and shows you the post that violated their community standard, then tells you how long you are not allowed to post. First strike is 24 hours, the second is 3 days, third and beyond are 30 days. This time, I hit my third strike. I was sentenced to 30 days in Facebook jail.

In a way, it’s a form of digital incarceration. You get to see everything happening as you normally would, but you can’t react-response to anything, you can’t comment, you can’t message others, and you can’t operate any pages or groups that you admin. The only thing you can do is accept or reject friend requests, unfriend current friends, and allow tagged photos to show up on your timeline.

There is an almost beautiful order to this. The more invested you are into the Facebook platform, the more reason you have to police yourself and the greater reach you have on Facebook, the more people there are who can report and police your behavior. The punishment is intermingled with your value of the platform itself. The punishment is of human design, but its impact is considerably worrisome.

In the early days of social media circa-2006, this new era was being heralded from Silicon Valley to DC as the beginning of Web 2.0. The internet was going to be democratized and people across the globe would be invited to participate in their communities to such a wonderful degree. The spirit of the time was absolute excitement for a free and democratic future. Who could resist such an optimistic sentiment for open and free platforms?

But they missed the keystone to the structures of social media companies—who’s paying for it?
Advertisers, as much as I have interest and positive feelings for, are simple people. When it comes to social media communities, things are either good or bad: if it’s controversial, it’s going to make bad-feelings, and bad feelings are not what they want. Only good-feelings are allowed.

There can be some nuance here. Good-feelings can include a sense of purpose or righteousness that comes from a politically charged piece from Buzzfeed or NowThis, but ultimately, that too boils down to a matter of good-feelings for their specific audience. Any actually challenging brand is at worst, bad-bad-bad, and at best, simply too difficult to place into any audience. When you consider the kind of enlightened liberal ideals of rigorous discussion and democratic virtues of participation, the demands of advertisers are absolutely opposed to it.

A rigorous discussion is often painful to endure. Have you ever been challenged over beliefs integral to yourself and your vision of the community around you? It would categorically fit into the ‘bad-feelings’ branch of content. That’s not something Glade scented candles wants to pay for. More worryingly, it’s not something you yourself would want to pay for, either. In fact, the only people who pay for that kind of stuff are donors to academic institutions and nonprofits. They pay academics to go study and debate things—the academics themselves aren’t even paying to do it! They get paid to do it, and as we’ve seen, even their donors can be scant with whims of their own. Democratic values are indeed much more rare than we may assume.

Such ideals have only been achieved through absolute inevitability. You may crash into someone else who doesn’t see it like you do. Maybe it’s because you’re geographically locked in, like in a classroom, a team sport, a workplace, or an extended family dinner, but with Web 2.0, we now can curate a community entirely of our choosing. This removes the inevitability of encountering disagreements. This would be fine if only disagreements weren’t fundamental to sharing perspectives and growing from the experience.

It’s here that Facebook Jail becomes such a curious notion to me. It is a mechanism that is component to whatever reorganizing of social systems is already underway. It reinforces something—a sort of conformity towards some blurred social policy, but again, the policy is ultimately dictated by advertisers. I was handed a 30 day post-ban because I offended someone who saw a post on my 10,000-follower meme page. That instance of offense was all it took to tell an advertiser that I’m a bad-actor. At this point, I’ve already had to sit-out 1/12th of 2018.

The more our general society develops into a digital society, the more serious this becomes. Traditionally, we remove people from civil society through a system of due process for the purpose of protecting liberty and wresting the hands of power away from abusiveness. If we have a large component of civil society existent upon digital life, then will we have the same apprehension towards punishment, and not just punishment, but from actually removing people from society? Should we?

Marcin Walski is a non-descript guy. Hanging out with him at the Carnegie Club, his slight smile hints a glint of knowing. This is the guy behind several twitter accounts you might know. Today, he’s sold off most of them, but still owns the account “Typical White Girl.” These twitter accounts, with followers in the several thousand to several million, launched in the early days of Twitter and amassed their following far before legitimate companies and brands knew what social media even was. When did Walski start his? Sophomore year of high school.

And that was fairly common, says Walski. Remember the Will Ferrell twitter account? Launched by a kid in California, who at some point was raking in half a million a year. These kids had no idea what to do with the money.” Today, their business model is fairly common and well-understood by marketing companies and business undergraduates alike, but at the time, this was the bleeding edge of social media.

As he described it, there were just so many kids fabricating parody twitter accounts, amassing a following, and selling off to companies either the whole account or slipping ads into the content stream. Most of them didn’t need more than one person running them, with Walski himself being the sole manager of his accounts. All he needed was some software to analyze data and schedule posts.

Walski sold his first twitter account at 10k followers, and went on to launch the Ted ‘parody’ account right before the Seth McFarlane movie came out. At his max, he held 8 or 9 accounts, each with their own following, data insights, content, and content sales. With this money, he was able to pay for college and even start his own cryptofund.

Now that he graduated, he’s taken his steps away from the twitter parody account world. While he holds onto his “Typical White Girl” account for any potential need in the future, he’s set his sights on a new horizon: financial consulting. I asked him what he thought about the shifts in internet culture arising at the moment, what with the politics, censorship, and consolidation of companies. He noted that companies, like Facebook, had begun to aggressively shut down accounts, but after a bit of a pause, he responded in peak finance-fashion that it doesn’t really matter. “Culture evolved overtime with each generation. Just when you get old enough to appreciate what you grew up with, there’s constantly a new culture behind you.”

One thing he was excited about is the e-sports world, and that Twitch is the most exciting company online right now, a platform also populated with some of the internet community’s youngest stars. Perhaps that’s a lesson here; follow the youth.​

​The basic reality of memes in the modern era is that content creators and viewers alike inappropriately attempt to frame themselves as the main protagonist. Often, this results in the viewer being less likely to relate to the meme or falsely overestimating the weight of their own perspective. Worst of all, the oft-ignored perspectives of other characters in a given meme are never explored. We miss opportunities when we narrowly presume ourselves the “hero,” in what most of us believe to be our Hero’s Journey. As such, it’s imperative that we adjust our perspectives when creating content.

Win Bigly: Persuasion In A World Where Facts Don't Matter
Author: Scott Adams, 2017
Politics, Psychology, Non-Fiction
255 Pages

If I were to recommend one book to someone who hates Trump, or thinks he’s an idiot, this would be it.

Scott Adams describes himself as an Ultra Liberal, meaning liberals are typically too conservative for him. He has some weird opinions, like that men should sideline themselves on the abortion debate, and we should consider paying reparations to black Americans via a tax on the top 1%. That should be enough for many liberals to entertain the idea of reading this book. But it’s important to note that Adams is a trained hypnotist, and a “lifelong student of persuasion.”

​He’s also the author of the Dilbert comics. However, he authored this specific book because he was one of the first people to predict a Trump win in 2016, when everyone else thought it was insanity. This book is the election through his eyes. The question raised in ‘Win Bigly’ really is, if you open yourself to the idea that things may not be as they seem, or as the media portrays them, is it possible that Trump isn’t as dumb as you might think he is? (Even if you don’t like him.)

Everybody jokes about “7D chess,” but to what extent is that a reality? Trump literally wrote the book on negotiation, and people are still surprised when he acts it out. Throwing out an extreme and working back to the “middle” still has liberals AND conservatives terrified at the first offer. They can’t get past what it looks like on the surface, and that’s understandable. As Adams says, how could you recognize a business negotiation tactic if you’ve never studied business negotiation? It’s not 7D chess if it’s extremely simple. It’s just not what it appears to be at first glance. This book provides concrete examples and an explanation of how “7D chess” was being played during the 2016 election, and it isn’t complicated. It’s just persuasion-- and Trump is a Master Persuader.

‘Win Bigly’ not only shows Trump in a different light and through different lenses, but it’s also something of a self-help book. Adams’ persuasion tips are something that everyone can leverage. You don’t have to like Trump to read this and get something out of it. You can see what Trump got right, and where Hillary went wrong, from someone who predicted the outcome early. Or just convince your boss to give you a raise.

Here’s an example of one of the persuasion tips he offers. When you associate two ideas or images, people’s emotional reaction to them will begin to merge over time. Adams shows this with the examples of Trump aligning his brand with Reagan, and Carly Fiorina accidentally aligning hers with a dead baby. Visual persuasion is everything. Considering how the direction of Trump moving from “Hitler” to “incompetent baby” to “competent, but I don’t like it” is playing out, it doesn’t seem like an accident.

Whatever your opinion is of him, Trump is something different in politics. Scott Adams can help you understand why. Or maybe he just has me hypnotized.

A confession: I was pushed to tears about four times and was otherwise misty-eyed for the full 90 minutes. A documentary about a beloved childhood hero—my childhood hero? His loving gaze and soothing voice will have you lost in the folds of your past.

The film opens with the late Fred Rogers’ musings about modulations. He sits at his grand piano and plays a few chords to demonstrate an analogy. He talks about shifts, like C to F and F to F#. Some shifts are simple, some are complicated, but they’re always easier when there’s someone there to help you and guide you. This documentary is not about Fred Rogers, but it is about his ideas on self-worth, the need to face reality with love and care, and the need for children to know their emotions are real.

The parallels of his show and the world around him are deliberate. In 1968, the puppet Daniel Tiger asks Lady Elaine to blow up a balloon for him. As she does, Daniel builds up the courage to ask “What does assassination mean?” Days before, Robert Kennedy had been killed in Los Angeles. Lady Elaine takes a moment to think and asks “Have you heard that word a lot today?” She goes on to explain “Well, it means someone getting killed in sort of a surprise way.” Daniel Tiger pauses to interpret the words much like the many children in the documentary do whenever Rogers explained things to them. He ponders the words deeply and then tries to make sense of it. “That man killed that other man,’ then after a moment, “I’d rather talk about it some other day.”

Rogers knows that the thoughts of children are deep and that they need the space to make sense of things themselves. Recognizing that the child’s anxieties about the world’s big troubles are indeed important and warrant the help of adults, that was his true north.

History has a perennial nature to it. Though it may not repeat itself, children develop themselves everyday. When they encounter the world of grown-ups, they may not yet fit into that world. But then where do they fit?

Rogers’ story is about that journey of navigation—a journey we’ve all had to live through and one that it seems Rogers would argue continues into our adult lives with just as much need for heart as ever.

Beyond the 60s, beyond 2001, the end of the show, or the end of Rogers’ life in 2003, this story comes to us at a time of great American need. Perhaps we should feel bad for all the times we didn’t do something so simple as showing kindness—and it hits us as simple because Mr. Rogers was so able to do it. The kindness and caring feels so possible, especially when reminded that the Westboro Baptist Church protested Rogers’ funeral for being too tolerant (tolerant of homosexuals).
​
Won’t You Be My Neighbor reminds us that Mr. Rogers life is truly a part of American history, his vision about love and virtue is powerful and his legacy is a lasting lesson. Go and see this film.

Solo is a great movie. It's fun, exciting, and great time to spend with your kids. If you're in it because you wanted to experience the origin story of the real Han Solo, take a step back.

The story is solid. We're following Han as he makes his escape from the squalor of Corellia and into the stars to become the famous pilot we know and love. He spends time with the military and thieves, fighting all ends of intergalactic politics, and it's all very exciting. Some of the scenes are even among the best in the Star Wars canon -- to which prolific director Ron Howard deserves some major credit.

But the key to this film is in the title: who the hell is Han Solo and do I even care about him?

Alden Ehrenreich isn't terrible. He's got all those Han Solo Quirks™ and Smirks™, but that doesn't make him any more real as a character. It's particularly clear when he's playing Han Solo in the beginning just as coy and cool as Harrison Ford does as Han Solo several decades in advance. Where is the character development if he's Han Solo™ the entire time? Essentially, you're getting served with a Han Solo action figure for a movie.

The question of 'do I care' is a real one that audiences are going to have to ask. As the Disney machine continues to crank out films for multiple expanding universes, is another hour-and-a-half worth it if there's going to be another sequel, prequel, spin-off or reboot (How many people have actually watched the whole MCU?) The very same problem is going to show up right here at the feet of Star Wars. I can't honestly say Rouge One was worth it. Solo barely makes the cut, which is a problem since they end the story with a lingering question about the future of some of the characters.

Reviews often have a binary appeal to them: yes or no—go buy the ticket or not. I say yeah, sure. It's fun, it's energetic, and at the very least you get to see Donald Glover lay on the sex-appeal as Lando Calrissian intermingled with an fairly epic space drama.

Also, they end the story with a subtextual 'Han shot first' joke. Keep your eyes open.