Fifi Lamoura on Nostr: Post Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc) ...

Post
Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc)
‪@shengokai.bsky.social‬
You want an argument? Fine, I'll give you one.

First, we need to start with Charles Mills' observation that political philosophy and political theory has ignored the fact that white supremacy has functioned as an organizing political force for the past 500 years.
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Holmes Wilson post Dr Flowers is responding to: "Being able to choose your moderator is as basic a right as being able to elect your leaders.

Some people say neither democracy nor user-driven moderation will function at scale and make superficially appealing arguments. That's fine.

The work of society is to prove them wrong, or we are doomed.
December 13, 2024 at 2:59 PM"

‪Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean)
I mention this because the conversation you've initiated is a political conversation, especially when you're making an analogy between user-driven moderation and democracy and framing choosing a moderator in a liberal rights-based structure, the same structure Mills argues is shaped by whiteness.
‪Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc)‬ ‪@shengokai.bsky.social‬
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1d
Now for Dewey, all social structures are political structures. Everything from your church to your baseball team to your academic department is a political structure as Dewey take "politics" as the domain of how we create environments which enable collaborative effort towards a specific end.
‪Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc)‬ ‪@shengokai.bsky.social‬
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1d
If we bring in Ahmed, who argues that whiteness is institutional, it is inherited as we inherit the material conditions, the histories of colonialism that organize our social and cultural spaces, then it becomes clear that we need to take seriously whiteness as a structuring force in society.
‪Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc)‬ ‪@shengokai.bsky.social‬
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1d
I want to pause here and make absolutely clear that whiteness becomes a structuring force as a consequence of the colonial project (Mills, Ahmed) which sought to reorder the world in the image of whiteness. Part of this reordering was imposing a gender, sexual, and ability binary upon the world.
‪Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc)‬ ‪@shengokai.bsky.social‬
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1d
So the colonial project not only extended whiteness, but it also demanded cisnormativity, heteronormativity, neuronormativity, and imposed the racial binary upon the world. This is important to keep in mind when I'm talking about the organization of the world as a political project of whiteness.
‪Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc)‬ ‪@shengokai.bsky.social‬
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1d
I say all of this so that I can make this point: your liberal democratic framework ignores the ways in which white supremacy organizes the spaces we operate in, the ways that it ALWAYS runs ahead of our presence in these spaces, because whiteness is part of the material conditions we inherit.
‪Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc)‬ ‪@shengokai.bsky.social‬
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1d
It shapes the environments in which user-driven moderation happens such that the norms that motivate user-driven moderation AT SCALE are the norms of whiteness. They take whiteness and white digital embodiment as the default starting point from which the digital world unfolds. This is crucial.
‪Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc)‬ ‪@shengokai.bsky.social‬
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1d
I say "at scale" in the above because of how the presence of non-white users and non-white digital embodiments can disrupt the organization of digital space on the small scale. Andre Brock's work "Distributed Blackness" articulates this in the formation of Black Twitter.
‪Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc)‬ ‪@shengokai.bsky.social‬
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1d
Catherine Knight Steele's work "Digital Black Feminism" also points to how moderation structures and social media itself were not designed for Black users, much less Black Women, and how these intentional design choices that take whiteness as the default serve to maintain marginalization.
Continue thread...
‪Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc)
‪@shengokai.bsky.social‬
Put simply, whiteness as the material conditions which digital environments inherit serve to structure moderation, including composable moderation, at scale through how the digital environment is continuous with the broader cultural environment in which it is anchored and BlueSky is no exception.
December 13, 2024 at 3:00 PM