Sensitivity Training

If I were to say to you, "nuke it from orbit," would you get the reference?

How about,

I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure,

would that ring any pop-culture bells?

Would you be surprised to know that "nuke it from orbit" returns 375,000 results on Google? That there are hundreds of images and memes that "get the reference" on just the first page of image results? That there’s a beer, a podcast, and songs?

For the uninitiated (and if you're among them, just stop reading now, and go watch the movie), it's a quote from the movie Aliens, the 1986 science fiction classic by James Cameron and sequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 SF-horror masterpiece Alien. It's the moment that Sigourney Weaver's Ripley proves her bad-assery to the Marines that survived first encounter with the, well, aliens.

"Nuke it from orbit" is a well-established cliche in contemporary vernacular, memorialized in Urban Dictionary, recognized as a popular meme, and used by millions across these past decades for humorous purposes.

What’s this all about, you might ask?

The other day, an Internet friend posted this picture.

Again, for the uninitiated, the "over the top" Bloody Mary (look closely - there’s a glass full of red at the bottom of the mountain) is a fad that's quite “internet-ready,” as the cool kids don’t say. That is, it’s great for Pinterest, Instagram, and other visual social media platforms. It's absurd, but life is often absurd, and it's a way to get free exposure and advertising on social media (not to mention draw customers).

Noting this particular Bloody Mary's vague resemblance to the "facehugger" form of the xenomorph from the Alien movie franchise, I commented "nuke it from orbit," because that's the sort of thing that people do on social media.

The next day, I found this waiting for me.

Coincidentally... well, probably not, I'd suggest, a friend shared with me his own recent "community standards" experience - he got flagged for something along the lines of "scream in your heart."

Another acquaintance posted this the same day I got mine.

Irony and sarcasm appear to be as alien to the algorithms as humor and cultural references, contemporary or classical.

While anecdotes are not data, these and some other such examples, including seemingly greater frequency of "helpful" links re climate change and vaccines (and the Gulaging of a friend), suggest that Facebook's apparatchiks might be turning the sensitivity dial up ahead of the mid-term elections. Perhaps they want to get ahead of tempers flaring, or perhaps they want to try and tip the scales in favor of a preferred outcome.

I recognize that this is mere speculation, and if we didn't have past history of such scale-tipping, would ring conspiratorial, but it's something that's worth paying attention to.

Fortunately, it's also proof that their algorithms suck. If they can't sort out such widely used idioms from actual incitement to harm or the like, they're as or more apt to prompt mockery as they are to affect electoral outcomes. In 1984, when The Terminator came out, Arnold Schwartzenegger informed us that Skynet went online August 4th, 1997, and became self-aware on the 29th of that month. In 1986, in the movie Short Circuit, Steve Guttenberg's Newton Crosby offered the pop-movie version of a Turing test in treating recognition of humor as proof of sentience.

Here we are, a quarter century downstream, and the Best-and-Brightest haven't yet figured out how to recognize humor via algorithm. As I noted just a couple weeks ago, the machines are FAR from taking over.

What they don't get is that the only people who like the hall monitor are other hall monitors. The more they try to tighten the radius of acceptable behavior, the more resistance and rebellion they'll generate. Already, Facebook is facing a relevance problem, because young people are using other platforms. If they make the platform even more hostile to free speech, they'll encourage even more defections.

But, just as a man with only a hammer sees every problem as a nail, the censorious see every "problematic" bit as a reason to censor. Therein lies the fatal conceit of leftists and technocrats: the notion that people not only need to be managed, but can be managed via such ham-fisted behaviors. We know the Left has no room for comedy in its tent, and we know the Left can't meme. These aren’t the liberals of yore, these are people who, to wear out another cliche, get misty-eyed with aspiration when they read 1984. Efforts to bend others to their puritanical ways are bound to backfire, and produce an outcome diametrically opposed to their desire.

Meanwhile, just to see what would happen, I appealed the "nuke it from orbit" incident, and just because, I noted that there are no nuclear weapons in orbit (at least that we know of). I'll report back if something comes of it.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.