Don’t worry, he’s not going quietly into that tweetless night. By Arwa Mahdawi

By Dilip -

Jordan Peterson is an academic, an internet personality, and a big fan of beef. A man of many accomplishments, he’s most famous for writing a bestselling book called 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos while simultaneously living what can only be described as an incredibly chaotic life. The latest Peterson drama comes to us via Twitter, which the academic has just dramatically announced he will be “departing” forever. Don’t worry, he’s not going to go quietly into that tweetless night; Peterson has promised us all a long article explaining his problems with the platform soon. For now, however, he wants us all to know that Twitter is a hellhole which makes your life infinitely worse.

“The endless flood of vicious insult [sic] is really not something that can be experienced anywhere else,” Peterson tweeted on Monday, “If I have something to say I’ll write an article or make a video. If the issue is not important enough to justify that then perhaps it would be best to just let it go.” He adds, “I like to follow the people I know but I think the incentive structure of the platform makes it intrinsically and dangerously insane.”

I may not agree with Peterson on much but he’s spot on there. And I, for one, am really glad that the man once described in the New York Times as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world”, has finally discovered what everyone else has been banging on about for years. Women and marginalized people, in particular, have been sounding the alarm about how Twitter, along with other social media platforms, ignores violence and abuse on the platform. They have been sounding the alarm about the intrinsically dangerous incentive structures of social media platforms, which prioritize engagement above everything else. But, you know, nothing in life is really important until a rich white guy starts paying attention.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/17/jordan-peterson-twitter-yumi-nu-sports-illustrated


Stephen Marche - The 'debate of the century': what happened when Jordan Peterson debated Slavoj Žižek


Richard Evans: the film Denial ‘shows there is such a thing as truth’. By Harriet Swain


LINDSAY BEYERSTEIN - What Happened to Jordan Peterson? A philosopher, a medical crisis, and a mystery


Facebook has just suffered its most devastating PR catastrophe yet / Jonathan Freedland: Is Facebook the tobacco industry of the 21st century?


KATIE KADUE - Twitter as Suspended Hell


Musk & Twitter: the first lab rat to take over the laboratory


Elon Musk is the king of trolls in an age of troll politics / What better owner for Twitter than master of the ill-advised tweet?


‘It is obscene’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pens blistering essay against social media sanctimony


How the Facebook-Reliance combine and the farm laws pave the way for digital colonisation


‘Moral bankruptcy’: whistleblower offers scathing assessment of Facebook


Book review: The revolution will not be tweeted / Jeffrey Lawrence: Who Owns Your Academic Community?


OSCAR SCHWARTZ: What Was the TED Talk?​


Man’s Godgle Search for Meaning


Facebook Papers paint damning picture of company's role in insurrection



STANISLAV MARKELOV - Patriotism as a diagnosis


Julien Benda: Our age is the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds


Beginnings and Endings


Margaret Mead on the definition of civilisation


Slavoj Žižek vs Noam Chomsky


Books reviewed: The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek


Thomas Moller-Nielsen: What is Zizek for?


Why can’t we agree on what’s true anymore? By William Davies



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