I believe the major change is that now people lose their jobs due to online mobbing and rage mobs can cancel someone’s entire ability to avoid homelessness through Twitter assaults and Facebook campaigns. It is very much like a decentralized version of the soviet thought police. In the Soviet Union when someone said or thought something wrong, the local party leaders would advice their employers who would then remove them from the ability to work. Now a decentralized yet digitally coordinated mob does it. The only solution that I can see is regulations barring employers from punishing people for what they say off the clock. North Dakota in the United States has such a regulation, but I am not sure how it has held up under online conditions designed to create economic pariahs. In the old days that you speak of the issues were localized. Now one is permanently ruined and could have difficulty ever finding work again. Social media’s ability to amplify the mob and the willigness of the leaders in business to go along with mob rule have created this horrible dynamic. For example, I don’t like online communities with the alt-right as they call it, but that’s the only place I can voice my data driven points without fear of never working again and ending up homeless, despite my political alignment matching Noam Chomsky’s.
I believe the major change is that now people lose their jobs due to online mobbing and rage mobs can cancel someone’s entire ability to avoid homelessness through Twitter assaults and Facebook campaigns. It is very much like a decentralized version of the soviet thought police. In the Soviet Union when someone said or thought something wrong, the local party leaders would advice their employers who would then remove them from the ability to work. Now a decentralized yet digitally coordinated mob does it. The only solution that I can see is regulations barring employers from punishing people for what they say off the clock. North Dakota in the United States has such a regulation, but I am not sure how it has held up under online conditions designed to create economic pariahs. In the old days that you speak of the issues were localized. Now one is permanently ruined and could have difficulty ever finding work again. Social media’s ability to amplify the mob and the willigness of the leaders in business to go along with mob rule have created this horrible dynamic. For example, I don’t like online communities with the alt-right as they call it, but that’s the only place I can voice my data driven points without fear of never working again and ending up homeless, despite my political alignment matching Noam Chomsky’s.