Clay’s post The failure of #amazonfail admits that over the weekend, he jumped to conclusions, “believed things that weren’t true” about Amazon and was “intoxicated” by the hashtag. He now thinks he was wrong. Most of the post is written in the first person plural, assuming everybody else reacted as he did. He concludes that “we” should apologize to Amazon. Here’s my reply, originally posted as a comment.
Update: aemeliaclare says it far better than me on Barely and Widely, as does Mike Edwards. Many of the commenters in Clay’s thread have good things to say as well. On Twitter, by contrast, the backlash is out in force, with many positive responses to “the great Shirky”.
Update on April 16: Janet D. Stemwedel’s Morality, outrage, and #amazonfail: a reply to Clay Shirky on Adventures in Ethics and Science, and Andrew Sempere’s Why Shirky Missed the Point on A repository of ten thousand indignities and the harbinger of God knew what are two more examples of “saying it better than me”. Nadia Cooke’s On the resolution of #amazonfail on The Ink Spectrum and Landon Bryce’s It’s Still On: The real failure of Amazonfail, Dubai, and Internet Outrage on Bookkake aren’t phrased as replies to Shirky, but make some very complementary points.
By contrast, Meg Pickard’s Spreading like wildfire: Twitter, Amazon and the social media mob focuses on what she sees as “ugly, prejudiced, underinformed, sneery, rude, kneejerk activity” on Twitter and sees it as “Destructive. Damaging. Virulent. Unapologetic. Unrelenting.” Sigh.
My replies to Clay and Meg below the fold.
If it had been a critique of those stupidities that circulated over the weekend, without the intentional mass de-listing, it would have kicked off a long, thoughtful conversation about metadata, system design, and public relations.
Nonsense. These kinds of stupidities are normalized in society and I rarely see them discussed. How often are their posts like Mary’s on TechCrunch?
Intention is what we were reacting to
Speak for yourself. Many of the people I talked to are reacting to yet another example of silencing the voices of LGBTs, feminists, and people with disabilities (who you don’t even bother to mention in your post). Many are reacting to Amazon’s dismissiveness in calling it a “glitchâ€. Many are reacting to Amazon’s ongoing lack of a real apology or executive involvement. Many are reacting to the revelation that Amazon has been manipulating their best-seller information. Many are reacting to the shocking fact that Amazon doesn’t appear to have any defenses against intentional manipulation (whether or not that happened in this case). Many are reacting to the impact of market dominance in ways that hadn’t quite struck home before. And so on.
Maybe none of those things matter to you. And maybe *you* assumed intentionality. Don’t project your beliefs on others.
I’m proud to have been a small part of #amazonfail, and grateful to those who put far more time and energy in than I did. I’m disappointed that somebody like you who’s championed social networks’ ability to lower the bar for organizing doesn’t see it that way.
jon
jon | 16-Apr-09 at 10:32 am | Permalink
In the first comment I Ieft on Meg Pickard’s Spreading like wildfire: Twitter, Amazon and the social media mob, I said
Meg replied, including
Here was my reply
__________________________________________________________
Meg,
sure seems like condemnation to me. And so does the framing in your headline and through the article, analogizing the “mob” to a destructive wildfire, and concluding that they’re “Destructive. Damaging. Virulent. Unapologetic. Unrelenting.”
By contrast, I’m proud to have been a small part of #amazonfail, and grateful to those who put far more time and energy in than I did. Yeah I wish people weren’t using the word “Nazi” so much … oh well, Godwin’s Law applies on Twitter too. Still, I certainly think this should be viewed as a major success for social network activists.
Really? See James’ comment above — or Mark Probst’s initial reply from Amazon (“too bad, you lose”). Seems to me to the extent Amazon has responded, and to the extent that the deeper issues have gotten coverage, it’s been due to the high-profile activism. When was the last time that TechCrunch had a front-page article about how heteronormativity and other biases are embedded in supposedly “objective” systems? How broad had the discussion been before about Amazon’s manipulation of their rankings? And so on…
Marginalized groups including queers, feminists, people with disabilities, erotic fiction authors, independent bookstores — and their allies — banded together using social network technologies to cast the spotlight on bad behavior by a large corporation known for being unresponsive, and much deeper structural issues that are usually swept under the table. This led to a swift (albeit very imperfect) response from Amazon, and already some excellent and relatively-high-profile discussions of these deeper issues. In the process, connections have been made that may well turn into alliances and lessons have been learned.
Sounds like a good thing to me.
jon
PS: perhaps “targeted” wasn’t my best choice of words. More precisely I meant something like “primarily and disproportionally impacted as a result of an explicit action and a system with embedded discriminatory assumptions.”
jon | 16-Apr-09 at 12:44 pm | Permalink
exceprts from a comment I posted on on Nadia Cooke’s On the resolution of #amazonfail
privileged people (from what I can tell/remember, both commenter #8 and the author of the article I can’t find (which I’ll link if I find it again—I swear I bookmarked it!) are white men, and quite probably straight) using that anger as an excuse to dismiss marginalized people’s points is distructive
Yeah really. This is part of why I bristled so strongly at Clay Shirky’s essay, and tweeted that I was disappointed that Tim O’Reilly, Dan Gillmor, and Ethan Zuckerman had expressed their support. All of them are deservedly well-known and well-respected as writers about Web 2.0 and in the online civil liberties and human rights community (in fact I introduced Clay when he gave last year’s closing keynote at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy). They really need to be more aware of their privilege.
The impact of Amazon’s fail fell primarily on LGBTQ, feminists, people with disabilities, and authors of erotic fictions. For able-bodied white male non-fiction authors to dismiss this, cast #amazonfail’s success as a failure, and turn the subject to “*I* overreacted, *we* were wrong” … gaah, my teeth gnash. [Not sure about orientation, but like you I suspect most if not all of them are straight.] And as aemeliaclare pointed out Barely and Widely, Shirky didn’t help matters by starting off with the unnecessary Tawana Brawley analogy….
Oh well. As with Join the Impact and Motrin Moms, #amazonfail’s yet another example of marginalized communities using social computing technologies effectively. So I guess it’s not surprising that its interpretation is contested. And perhaps once everybody calms down and looks at it more clearly, some of the people who were so quick to leap to conclusions will continue their self-examination. Hey, a guy can dream 🙂
jon | 18-Apr-09 at 7:05 am | Permalink
Nicholas Carr’s Hash mobs on Rough Type responds to BBC Technology correspondent Bill Thompson’s perspective that Amazon has “clearly broken the bond of trust with a large number of their readers, and it will take a long time to recover” with
Hmm, put it together with Meg’s and you’ve got a destructive, unrelenting, pillowfight. I kinda like that.
Personally I think Nick’s optimism that it’s over is likely misplaced. I’d like to discuss that with him, but he doesn’t allow comments on his blog. Clay does allow comments, but doesn’t respond — and also hasn’t responded to my tweets. Kinda like Jeff Bezos and Amazon, they don’t seem to want to talk about it.
#amazonfail and we’re not done yet: links and perspectives « Liminal states | 18-Apr-09 at 11:12 am | Permalink
[…] own My Reply to Clay Shirky on Liminal […]
Helen | 18-Apr-09 at 2:05 pm | Permalink
“If it had been a critique of those stupidities that circulated over the weekend, without the intentional mass de-listing, it would have kicked off a long, thoughtful conversation about metadata, system design, and public relations.”
Huh? It DID. There were a ton of such conversations going on. The one on Making Light is a good example.
jon | 18-Apr-09 at 2:11 pm | Permalink
Well said, Helen. I hope it’s clear that the paragraph “If it had been a critique” was Clay’s wording, and the response starting with “nonsense” was mine!
And really, as a succinct critique of a complex situation, it’s hard to do better than #amazonfail and #glitchmyass.
Helen | 18-Apr-09 at 2:29 pm | Permalink
Right, I should have put in an attribution for the Clay Shirky quotation, sorry. To me, half the interest of the whole thing was all the different perspectives people brought to the question. I learned quite a lot, one way and another. Kinda chaps me to have all that dismissed as mindless mobbery.
jon | 18-Apr-09 at 2:44 pm | Permalink
Yeah really. There’s a section in #amazonfail and we’re not done yet: links and perspectives on how it didn’t feel like a mob to me. And totally agreed about how the multiple perspectives is one of the things made this interesting on so many levels …