Comment by EdwardDiego
2 days ago
> I already felt immense pain and anger by the decision of my husband to suddenly end our marriage. And now I feel a double sense of violation that the men who design and maintain and profit from the internet have literally impersonated my voice behind the closed doors of hidden metadata to tell a more palatable version of the story they think will sell.
That's a bit dismissive of women, does she think that women aren't capable of designing and maintaining software too?
It's easier to swallow when you can blame a group of people for things that are bad. You can other them and not sit with the possibility that people who look like you (maybe even are you) can also do things that harm others. I couldn't do something bad, I'm not one of _them_.
You see this later as well when she slyly glides over women who do what her husband did. When her husband decided to end their marriage, it was representative of men. When women do it, it's their choice to make.
That’s an understandable misreading of what she said. I appreciate that the rhetorical effect could feel like a sly way to slip in asymmetric gender standards about how to interpret divorce.
But I am a pedantic person who prefers to focus on the literal statements in text rather than the perceived underlying emotional current. So I’ll pedantically plod through what she actually said.
She’s dealing with two dimensions of divorce: who initiated it (husband, wife, or collaborative), and whether it was surprising or unsurprising.
That gives several possibilities, but she lists three. What unifies them is that they are all written from the perspective of the abstract woman undergoing the experience.
1. Woman initiated, surprise unspecified.
2. Collaborative, so assume unsurprising.
3. Man initiated, surprising (her situation).
She doesn’t claim this covers all possibilities. The point of that bit is just to emphasize that divorces are different, and to object to treating them as a genre for wellness AI slop.
Here is the original text containing that part so others can easily form their own opinion.
“I also object to the flattening of the contours of my particular divorce. There are really important distinctions between the experiences of women who initiate their own divorces versus women who come to a mutual agreement with their spouses to end the marriage versus women, like me, who are completely blindsided by their husbands’ decisions to suddenly end the marriage. All divorces do involve self-discovery and rebuilding your life, but the ways in which you begin down that path often involve dramatically different circumstances.”
It makes perfect sense if you include the two sentence before your quote:
> We already know that in a patriarchal society, women’s pain is dismissed, belittled, and ignored. This kind of AI-generated language also depoliticizes patriarchal power dynamics.
Man does something bad, it's the fault of patriarchy. Woman do something bad, it's also men's fault because patriarchy made her do it. Either way you cannot win with a person like that. I think I understand why the husband wanted a divorce.
I disagree with her argument as well but it’s a huge leap from that to “I understand why the husband wanted a divorce.” That’s a pretty shitty thing to say (especially given the trauma of the divorce she writes about) and has nothing at all to do with what she’s saying.
I can see why her husband divorced her. Best of luck to that guy from now on.
Marriage is surely the #1 patriarchy control scheme?
I feel terrible asking whether her accusation against Instagram is true... The comments below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46354298 discuss how she might be mistaken. I can't read the link she referred to 404media but that appears to be about retitling headlines, and not about rewriting content.
If Meta were generating text, how would Meta avoid trouble with the Section 230 carveout?
A more cynical me would think they were just trying to juice links for their SEO.
I probably shouldn't be commenting on human slop - that doesn't help either.
It's the bigotry of low expectations that the right often accuses the left of (arguably justifiably). Each side has their shibboleths and hypocrisies, and this is a very "left" one. Everything is the fault of the "other", in this case "all men", apparently.
As someone else said, the red flags of insufferability abound here, first and foremost with announcing something like this which is as personal and momentous as it is, on public social media.
Meta owner: Man
X owner: Man
Soon-to-be TikTok US owner: Man
People who work there - mixture of all genders. Which is worthy of celebration at least, that everyone has the equal opportunity to build the Torment Nexus.
She sounds insufferable
The internet and the web were, and still are, made by and for white rich men. It's not about who can be a prick, everyone can. It's about what the ecosystem pushes towards, and it's not the safety and general good life of women, black people, handicapped people, etc...