###### Meg Ellis
# Wiki Tutorial


The internet is a wonderful, powerful tool, but, as danah boyd (stylized in lowercase) describes in her talk *Agnotology and Epistemological Fragmentation* at the Digital Public Library of America conference, "a virus has spread, using technology to systematically tear at the social fabric of public life."

### boyd's audience

<iframe width="440" height="250"src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DHhy2Gk_xik" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I'm surprised this conversation that turns into a target towards white supremacist recruitment tactics online is given to a group of librarians. The keepers of the online world, the protectors of information, librarians at their core have the duty of helping others access information. But what if the information out in the world wide web is tailored to a dark side?

### The Oppressor

boyd said in her speech, "Ignorance is often assumed to be not-yet-knowledgeable. But what if ignorance is strategically manufactured?" She discusses the cause of this through the definition of agnotology, or the strategic usage of ignorance through means of oppression.

As a researcher at Microsoft, this is extremely ironic to me. As boyd warns of large entities using their power to an even larger, devoted following, I can't help but think of Microsoft users and their reliance on their everyday devices. I don't know if there's any epistemological fragmentation going on at Microsoft specifically, but it was just odd that all this is coming from a "Big Tech" employee.

### White Supremacy

boyd draws her argument to focus on white supremacy and the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. The terrorist, whom boyd purposefully anonymizes, knew how to hide from Facebook moderators to film a first-person shooter framed attack on 50 innocent lives.

Attached below is the terrorist's manifesto uploaded to 8chan, where he refers to the hard right political commentator Candace Owens and utilizes absurdist internet humor, blaming the 2000 game Spyro the Dragon 3 for teaching him ethno-nationalism.


boyd discusses PragerU rabbit holes and then some, describing the importance of YouTube and how easy it is to alter the algorithm to manipulate the masses.

### Conclusions

By the end of the speech, boyd structures what she has to say in a pretty expected way. It's almost as if she's saying, "watch out for these bad people," the bad people being white supremacists online. Reading out the transcript sounded corny to me, but it's wild to think about how real this is to some people, and how users online really get sucked into some really intense pipelines.

I liked how boyd described our society as being currently in an information war. A war is a strong, bold way of describing that something's gone wrong, and I support it wholeheartedly.