Reddit reviews Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology (Short Circuits)

Last things first, first things last:

>I think it's important, if we're going to have a positive effect at the grass-roots and moderator level, to understand Reddit as it really is, rather than as we'd like to see it.

What does understanding reddit "as it really is" mean?

In Interface Fantasy, Andre Nusselder writes:

>[W]e should avoid considering cyberspace as an objective fact or objective information. It is a product of human imagination, in which we use known metaphors for a new domain of information and communication. These metaphors inevitably go along with a distortion, misrepresentation, or bias of the domain they structure, since they describe it as something other than it really is.

>[...]

>As they compose the "real thing," we must be careful not to take metaphors literally, though this can be very tempting in the case of the (metaphorical) worlds that computers create.

Yishan sees reddit as a city-state; you see it as proto-feudalism. Both are equally "real" insofar as the metaphorization of data has a degree of reality.

You're going to run into problems any time you try to talk about something as "something other than it really is." If reddit is not a city state, reddit is also not proto-feudalist.

Because reddit as we see it is reddit as it really is.

EDIT: link