Pseudonymity : displaced, shadowbanned, punished
Not a correction, just an addendum :
>>>punished?
Joint deletion of the Novara Media and Trust.support videos from youtube (the first temporarily, the second : ???), events that happened in the span of weeks. No need to get apophenic, they're not linked through any direct political thread, this is a pure algorithmic accident, probably. Sometimes (often) a pattern is not evidence of a plan but of a protocol or a landscape : there's no will behind the pattern just the workings of automation, interactions outside of actors' direct doing.
It's just bad luck but.
>>>shadowbanning
From this I thought about shadowbanning, the broad term that points and means a bunch of different things to a lot of people whose only real commonality is their "living online", either : the slowing down of growth of followercount, likes or "general visibility" on online platforms (generally instagram or twitter) or the flat-out suppression of a profile or of its content. The term shadowbanning implies a form of intentional secretive move by some entity out there who is conspiring against the poor account holder.
It feels good to have a target : Ascribing agency to an entity wether it's a person or a localisable/personifiable Thing like "the algorithm" means that something can be done towards it. As opposed to it being pinned on randomness which is nothing definite but just the absence of prefigured patterns, chaos.
In the end the only viable attitude is accepting ambiguity, doubt and incompleteness : there's no telling what is going on as long as the black box of "the algorithm" stays shut from the eyes of the wider public and the opening up of that black box would be telling of a very different context than the one we're in right now in terms of the relation between platforms such as Youtube and its userbase as well as its "entreprecarious content creator dataserf base".
>>>displaced
The internet of algorithmic decisionmaking both upholds and destroys anonymity : all accidents feel purposeful and oriented (the variant strains of shadowbanning and content destruction) while being that : accidents, but then again maybe they are truly purposeful ; an accident could be a cover-up for a real action. Or maybe no one is apt at applying this kinda of plan given the complexity of the structures in place, but then again have you seen what's going on inside ? No you haven't, and most employees at those companies don't know because it's not their job to know that : incompleteness.
In the end there's no telling either way : all accidents that emanate from the platform's functioning are indistinguishable from purposeful actions and vice-versa. [insert james c scott quote about legibility here]
There's no way to know until the black box is pried open and this won't happen because that black box is the very driver of their business model. in that way the enclosed web secures a legible userbase will destroying any hope that userbase will be able to make legible the systems it depends on and uses every day.
This is what alienation means.
That is all.