Astral Codex Ten

Instagram

10 min read

Instagram

Article

Instagram is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between January 21, 2021 and December 22, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “the aspiring fashionista with an Instagram”; “The Instagram pages of the hippest, most counterculture people”; “a local Instagram account who preferred to remain anonymous”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, Google, facebook.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 8
  • Issue count: 8
  • First seen: January 21, 2021
  • Last seen: December 22, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Still Alive
January 21, 2021 · Original source
With all due respect to these reporters, and with complete admission of my own bias, I reject this entire way of looking at things. If someone wants to report that I'm a 30-something psychiatrist who lives in Oakland, California, that's fine, I've had it in my About page for years. If some reporter wants to investigate and confirm, I have some suggestions for how they could use their time better - isn't there still a war in Yemen? - but I'm not going to complain too loudly. But I don't think whatever claim the public has on me includes a right to know my name if I don't want them to. I don't think the public needs to know the name of the cops who write cop blogs, or the deadnames of trans people, or the dating lives of sexy cyborgs. I'm not even sure the public needs to know the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. If he isn't harming anyone, let him have his anonymity! I would rather we get whatever pathologies come from people being able to invent Bitcoin scot-free, than get whatever pathologies come from anyone being allowed to dox anyone else if they can argue that person is "influential". Most people don't start out trying to be influential. They just have a Tumblr or a LiveJournal or something, and a few people read it, and then a few more people read it, and bam! - they're influential! If influence takes away your protection, then none of us are safe - not the random grad student with a Twitter account making fun of bad science, not the teenager with a sex Tumblr, not the aspiring fashionista with an Instagram. I've read lots of interesting discussion on how much power tech oligarchs should or shouldn't be allowed to have. But this is the first time I've seen someone suggest their powers should include a magic privacy-destroying gaze, where just by looking at someone they can transform them into a different kind of citizen with fewer rights. Is Paul Graham some weird kind of basilisk, such that anyone he stares at too long turns into fair game?
The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
In 2014, armed with this model, I predicted that hip young people would go far-right. For the previous few years, the social justice movement had been the dominant intellectual paradigm in online spaces (and increasingly offline too). The movement had started with the same people who start all trends - starving bohemian artists, poor people on the fringes of society, hip college kids. Beginning around 2008 it spread like wildfire among all the most popular and clued-in people I knew - all my favorite slightly contrarian bloggers, all the most interesting people at my college. But by 2014, it was starting to get embarrassing. We'd already seen the beginnings of "woke capitalism", where Wal-Mart or Amazon or whoever would put their corporate logos in rainbow colors for gay pride day and then everyone would praise them and talk about how they were striking a bold blow against the entrenched forces of the kyriarchy. Hillary Clinton, 25-year-contender for America's least cool person, was giving speeches about male privilege and rape culture. The Instagram pages of the hippest, most counterculture people in the country sounded exactly the same as the lectures corporate consultants gave at mandatory educational workshops. According to Bell's theory there was no way this was a stable situation.
Links For December
December 30, 2021 · Original source
13: Claim of the first successful deepfakes based hacking. Looking through comments elsewhere, I think this claim falls apart, which means that AFAICT after several years of the technology existing I still know of no instance of any deepfakes actually fooling anyone and causing damage.
Inline links: Claim of the first successful deepfakes based hacking., this claim falls apart
19: Lots of people supported me when NYT doxxed me. I feel like I should pay this forward by signal-boosting when other people are going through the same thing. So: the news magazine Toronto Life doxxed some people running a local Instagram account who preferred to remain anonymous. I think this is bad. In the extraordinarily unlikely even that I ever care about anything in Toronto, I will try to find and link sources other than Toronto Life.
Inline links: doxxed some people
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#42: Publish Books On Architecture I am an architect based in India trying to build a research-based design practice. I am seeking funding of 4000$ to finish self-publishing two e-books on the Amazon marketplace that will form part of my PhD application in December 2022. The costs will cover printing of test dummies, sending a few copies to prospective guides, mentors and pay for miscellaneous fees. A validated writing practice is a desired application requirement that I am trying to full fill with the exercise. The theme of the work is to show how patronage has changed knowledge production of architecture across the four generations that have practiced, are practicing in the country. An attempt to fund the project is to prove the hypothesis that the creative economy is the only way ahead for architectural practices if necessary policy guidelines are not implemented for a sustainable future for the profession. If funded process of getting an admission and transition the research done to further work on architectural imagination may also be easier. I have complied a reading list of almost an entirety of Indian architectural design books from 1985 - 2019, around 100/125, that enables the project. These will be uploaded on my Instagram account starting here. Contents and introduction to the first book is accessed here https://isaacmathew.substack.com/p/daily-sentences-2111072039. Isaac Mathew 2201240945 . Contact me at isaac@spatialresearch.net
Inline links: here
Links For February
February 22, 2022 · Original source
36: An interesting recent spat between BMJ and Facebook: BMJ, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world) published some article about poor clinical research practices at a vaccine company. Some anti-vaxxers shared it on Facebook, and Facebook responded by adding their “missing context” tag to the BMJ article. This made the BMJ angry (well, this plus Facebook’s explanation which called the BMJ a “news blog”), so the editors wrote an Open Letter From The BMJ To Mark Zuckerberg, saying “actually, we are one of the most powerful medical establishment institutions in the world, you can’t do this to us”. The fact checker who Facebook subcontracts their censorship decisions to, Lead Stories, then wrote a surprisingly thoughtful response saying: they thought the BMJ article lacked important context, that was all they told Facebook, and they stand by their decision even after learning that the BMJ is much more prestigious and important than they thought. I’m having trouble figuring out what emotions to have here: on the one hand I hate censorship, but on the other hand seeing the BMJ seething at their inability to pull rank is oddly satisfying. Also, this same thing apparently happened around the same time with Instagram and the Cochrane Collaboration.
Inline links: Open Letter From The BMJ To Mark Zuckerberg, a surprisingly thoughtful, Instagram and the Cochrane Collaboration
Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse
February 02, 2023 · Original source
Very Bad Scenario: Half of your online friends - the people you’ve known for months or years, the people whose Twitter and Instagram accounts you follow and trust - are secretly propagandabots, designed by some company or movement to catch your interest. Most of their content will be really good. But every so often they’ll drop in a reference to how their grandmother got a COVID vaccine and died instantly, and the ordinary social reasoning we use to figure out what our friends and role models think will be hopelessly poisoned.
Links For March 2023
March 10, 2023 · Original source
12: Jonathan Haidt revisits whether social media is bad for mental health. Previous studies have said no, by lumping together different ages, genders, types of screen time, and types of mental health result. Haidt finds a subgroup where the answer seems to be clearly yes: teenage girls using social media seem more depressed and anxious. I don’t usually like subgroup slicing but he seems to have done a really good job proving that this subgroup does badly across many different studies. He thinks this is because teenage girls are using Instagram and worrying about body image. I wouldn’t have predicted that this in particular would be so much worse than all the other kinds of social media use, but I guess I’m wrong!
Inline links: revisits whether social media is bad for mental health
30: Facebook And Instagram Are Testing Selling You Bluechecks For $12 A Month. Musk’s two highest-profile Twitter changes - firing lots of people and selling bluechecks - seem to be going well and even getting adopted by other companies. I can see a case for everyone apologizing and agreeing Musk is doing a good job with Twitter in a year, although prediction markets haven’t shifted much since December.
Inline links: Facebook And Instagram Are Testing Selling You Bluechecks For $12 A Month, haven’t, shifted
In The Long Run, We're All Dad
December 22, 2023 · Original source
Parents are supposed to teach their children the skills they need to navigate the world. This already feels somewhat obsolete - where are the Google programmers who were taught Python by their fathers, or the Instagram influencers who learned content creation on their mother’s knee? Soon it will be completely hopeless. Where we’re going there are no roads. You’ll have to figure it out by yourself. If I am to pass on anything of value to you, it can only be the ultimate power, the technique that forms all other techniques.
Inline links: the ultimate power