[LINK] "épuration, crowdsourced"
Feb. 14th, 2011 05:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe human flesh search engine, Alex Harrowell let us know at A Fistful of Euros, has come to post-revolutionary Egypt in the form of the Flickr group Piggipedia, "an effort by Egyptian Flickr users to pool their photos from the revolution and identify the plain-clothes cops and private thugs responsible for the worst of the violence, with a view to prosecuting them or failing that, just ostracising the hell out of them."
Last October I'd blogged about the human flesh search engine, and how Internet vigilantism might have been favoured by the Chinese government as a way to distract the potentially unhappy masses with visible, deserving targets for public anger. The human flesh search engine isn't only about that, though; the concessions made by China's officialdom to the desires of its Internet users is proof of those individuals' agency and their organization. Power comes down, and comes up, as people find new opportunities for its use. "If sex infects new media like a virus, yadda yadda William Gibson feh, just wait ’til you see how revenge does." Yes, pretty much.
Last October I'd blogged about the human flesh search engine, and how Internet vigilantism might have been favoured by the Chinese government as a way to distract the potentially unhappy masses with visible, deserving targets for public anger. The human flesh search engine isn't only about that, though; the concessions made by China's officialdom to the desires of its Internet users is proof of those individuals' agency and their organization. Power comes down, and comes up, as people find new opportunities for its use. "If sex infects new media like a virus, yadda yadda William Gibson feh, just wait ’til you see how revenge does." Yes, pretty much.
