Quick housekeeping to start: I’m heavily vetting all comments right now. If we haven’t interacted in the past here or I don’t recognize you, your comment may not be approved. Please don’t take it personally, as I say, this is my home, I set the tone here.
This morning, on Spoutible, CEO Christopher Bouzy posed a question. Here it is:
I shared this [yesterday’s post] with my better half, and then had a long discussion about how so many folks on the left were jubilant about the idea of Spoutible having a security breach. We are trying to provide a safe space for people to communicate, and for someone to celebrate an attack on the platform is gross.
Christopher Bouzy, Spoutible CEO
It prompted me to take a look at twitter, something I haven’t really done in a long time, and I immediately found this:
OK so now we have our ingredients gathered. Let’s make this cake.
Starting with the obvious, I wrote that post, not Christopher. He had no input into it whatsoever. In fact, you can see in that screenshot, he quote-spouted Prof. Kyle, a user who is very much not me who kindly shared the post.
All that aside, you don’t have to pass calculus to do the math in this situation. They are crowing on a site that, itself, has had at least 14 breaches that we know about. I stress that we know about because we cannot know what has not been disclosed.
So let me ask that very blatant question staring us all boldly in the face. Why are they so focused on Spoutible’s?
The most recent breach of twitter took usernames, names and email address, again that we know of. But here’s the fun part from the article: “This data was originally scraped by exploiting an API vulnerability that persisted from June 2021 to January 2022.”
Record scratch, anyone?
The vulnerability persisted for SIX MONTHS. Not a few days as was the case with Spoutible. And we won’t even discuss whatever delay may have occurred between Troy Hunt being notified and his notification of Christopher Bouzy. SIX MONTHS.
The article goes on to say that multiple hackers exploited it. I haven’t seen, as of the time of this writing, any evidence any data from Spoutible was exploited beyond it being added to Hunt’s database, nor any reports of hacked accounts.
You cannot turn something into an issue of race that is already an issue of race. Let us steep in the steaming irony of people accusing Christopher of being cavalier about a breach from the very site ZDNet described as “….Turning millions of accounts into defenseless targets.”
Least challenging Spot the Difference ever.
And let us not underestimate how much of this goes back to Christopher’s point about people, even on the left, finding amusement in a ripple on the surface of Spoutible. I have a theory.
It’s possible you may not like it.
The thing is, even for white people on the left, there is only so far they want to go. There are limits to the amount of privilege they are willing to relinquish; there are limits to the amount of deference they are willing to show a Black man.
President Obama, anyone?
Like the father in Get Out, the “acceptance” hides an obsessive veneer, a sense of superiority driven by a competing sense of inferiority.
I told you you may not like it.
But as the incredible Jane Elliot demonstrated in the linked video, we know. We can pretend we don’t know or we’re not part of it, but we know.
Couple that with what Spoutible is, what it stands for, and suddenly the very system of power on which people rely starts to collapse for its lack of foundation. Unearned privilege is still privilege, but it is not available on Spoutible, in any form.
Your engagement must be earned. Your interactions, earned. Your checkboxes as a person don’t get you to the front of the line, and moreover, they do not give you the ability to create your own heirarchy.
This may be the first online space in history to actually provide equal footing to all users, but when you’re used to walking on the backs of others, apparently it makes you feel low.
And that’s the truth of privilege.
It’s not benign, it’s not a perk. Privilege isn’t given, it is wrested from the literal blood of others, torn from their souls and patched together like a comfy quilt. Privilege is grotesque, it is cruel. If you think about what you steal from others to indulge in it, it should repulse you.
And that is why the left is weirdly gleeful. People who would never say it, but like the benefits of privilege now can say to themselves, smugly, quietly, the system works.
While imagining no one is the wiser.
Well, I’m the wiser. And now so are you.
Have a great Tuesday.
A Bit to Read 