Just a bit of followup on one of my posts from last weekend, about the whole Amazon brouhaha, with LGBT books getting de-listed and such. As I'm sure you've read by now, there turned out to be a tech explanation for the whole thing. Here's a really good discussion by Clay Shirky. I actually hadn't encountered any of the lingering blame and mistrust he references when I originally read his article but a couple of days later I did. Don't remember where now but it was someone with a very definite tone of "Amazon did something wrong" and I'm not letting them off the hook. I believe what they ended up landing on was that all the LGBT books were tagged and that made it too easy for the fucked-up coding to make all those books disappear. And it's suspicious that only those books were tagged. I don't think you have to step that far back to realize how ridiculous that is. ALL the books on Amazon are tagged -- there's nothing sinister about tagging. The payoff quote from Shirky (which was also picked up on by Sullivan, which is where I found it): "We’re used to the future turning out differently than we expected; it happens all the time. When the past turns out differently, though, it can get really upsetting, and because people don’t like that kind of upset, we’re at risk of finding new reasons to believe false things, rather than revising our sense of what actually happened."