A noble mind o'erthrown

The pattern is the usual one.

Step 1: Someone gets his (usually "his") username/IP address banned from an online forum for generally acting like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

Step 2: He gets a new username/IP address to sidestep the ban and his first post, always, is some variation of "I won't be ignored, Dan!"

Step 3: Lather, rinse, repeat and demonstrate four out of five of Kubler-Ross' stages of grief in long angry-denying-depressed-bargaining screeds that demand a detailed response to a long series of enumerated points and sub-points.

The latter two steps don't seem like a reasonable or constructive response to getting banned from an online forum, but then again reasonable and constructive don't seem to be these folks' fortes.

Que sera sera.

Comments

[Jesurgislac]

Fred: You're so sad. You know that, Scott? Lonely and very sad.
Scott: Don't you ever pity me, you smug bastard.
Fred: I'll pity you... I'll pity you. I'll pity you because you're sick.
Scott: Why? Because I won't allow you to treat me like some sockpuppet you can just ban a couple of times and throw in the garbage?

[bulbul]

Crap, what did I miss?

[Jesurgislac]

Scott is the new Number Two.

[Jesurgislac]

Slacktivist: Where am I?
Scott: In the Village.
Slacktivist: What do you want?
Scott: We want information.
Slacktivist:Whose side are you on?
Scott: That would be telling. We want information... information... information.
Slacktivist: You won't get it.
Scott: By hook or by crook, we will.
Slacktivist: Who are you?
Scott: The new Number 2.
Slacktivist: Who is Number 1?
Scott: You are Number 6.
Slacktivist: I am not a number, I am a free blog.

[julia]

Wow.

[Scott Montoya]

Hello! My name is ....uh. What is my name? Anyway, you tried to ban me! Prepare to be spammed!

[bulbul]

Thanks Jesu, both for the explanation and the revamped 'The Prisoner' intro :)

[Geds]

I hate it when I miss all the fun...

[Ursula L]

Such a momentus event requres a gratuitous Tom Lehrer reference. In honor of a much loved bit of humor about the not-loved departed:

"This tragic tale I won't prolong, sing rickity-tickity-tin..."

[scottbot_fails_to_achieve_orbit]

Who ever thinks of the secondary effects of banning? Scottbot had just recently regained its groove, and now, Scottbot well have to find a new theme song, to replace this -
'Yes Sir, I can boogie,
If you stay, you can’t go wrong.
I can boogie, boogie woogie, all night long'

Well, at least Scott wasn't part of the Internet's hydra-headed conspiracy, the one that is so casually deleted when discussing the irony of any forum ostensibly devoted to the free flow of information deleting any opinion contrary to that site's own. Because obviously, censorship only exists in the mind of the censor, and disagreeing with the censor is evidence that the censor is doing the right thing, for the greater good.

Which actually is a serious point, and thus beyond Scottbot's programming. But in the Web 2.0 world, it seems as if monetizing the user base just goes hand in hand with making sure that the non-user base can't disrupt the monetization.

And just like torture is being rebranded, the silent removal of divergent opinions is becoming normal.

Banning someone is fine, publicly declaring their contributions to be simply inappropriate is equally fine, and all hosts have the right to throw uninvited guests out. And sometimes, that is the only way for a host to clearly make the point that a guest has no rights beyond those granted by the host.

What Web 2.0 does is take the corporate approach to managing information flow and attempt to sell it as a benefit, especially if it can be done so painlessly that divergent views simply disappear before anyone can be disturbed by them.

Which has little to do with obnoxious people - it just becomes the excuse to justify creating a lonely ocean in which isolated islands develop. Islands which at least have the self-selected virtue of reflecting nothing but the views of those on them.

And ironically, these islands are then so shocked to discover other islands, they start acting exactly the way which led to their creation in the beginning - by being intolerant of any other perspectives while holding obsessively to their own.

Is this starting to resemble a certain nation? One that uses technological tools to deal with human problems? One that projects onto others its darkest fears and motives, refusing to believe that those others outside of itself aren't like its own tortured vision of reality?

You won't have Scottbot to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last appearance, in a respectable Republican cloth coat, with my canine companion Checkers.

[Jesurgislac]

Ironically, a comment I just posted linking to the Making Light thread where "Never" admits to being Scottbot, too, has been flagged as spam due to the number of weblinks in it. ;-)

Either way: that's the reason we won't see Scottbot around any more.

Or indeed this comment, once deleted.

[Ian]

I've stood up for Scott as much as anybody around here. I suppose I saw his screeds (or rather screed -- it was always the same attack regardless of the post) as being more of a running joke than the kamikaze, thread-derailing insults they were. Once every few months he found something to say that was clever and on-topic, and that plus the comic relief of his Fred-is-a-Communist routine justified his presence as part of this community, or at least that's how it seemed to me.

At this point, good riddance.

Well yes, this blog and its regular cadre of commentators do lean rather heavily to the left. That does not mean, however, that we must rely solely upon the recently banned to offer the "opposing" POV. Indeed, it does not even suggest a binary state of politics whereby all will agree either with Fred or with the recently banned.

I'm a Libertarian... capital "L", because I believe in smaller, more localized business and government. I'm not a Libertarian because of any perceived evils in either the Republican or Democrat parties. It's simply a difference in approach to solving the nation's problems. I've been here before (my first Thursday flamewar was on the cartoon of Hillary Clinton by that talentless hack, Pat Oliphant), but I've been much longer a lurker and reader. Perhaps now would be a good time to stop lurking.

[Jeff Billman]

Why didn't the above comment display my name? I'm logged in via TypePad. This is Jeff Billman, btw, in case this comment doesn't display my name, either.

[me]

Just to add to your vocabulary, my English friends refer to those sorts of people as "bunny boilers" which is kinda cute. 'He's a bit of a bunny boiler, but you'll do okay'

[not_scottbot]

Jesurgislac-
I realize that on the Internet, the question of identity is not really answerable (just ask the Internet's bestest and greatest moderator, she of the hydra-headed sockpuppet), but Scottbot and not_scottbot are from the same (well, same three) keyboards.

I'll be curious to see who claimed to be Scottbot, and what they wrote. Especially since, and I'm not sure sadly is the word, the Original (TM) Scottbot will not be coming back.

Scottbot was an experiment (as was not_scottbot) - generally, I don't care about establishing an identity on the Web. In the past, actually, I used to be quite obsessive about not establishing said identity, but my ISP screwed that up. Which I plan to deal with at sometime, quite soon - the advantage of dealing with the same group of people for the last dozen years. I pay them cash, and they didn't even know my address for the first ten years of our dealings - though obviously, they knew my telephone number. Privacy is not secrecy, after all.

Nonetheless, Scottbot is not a 'TM' nor a 'C' nor any other form of IP (apart from its address, so to speak), so I can't ensure that it won't reappear - but if it does, it won't be the buffed and polished hunk of glistening meandering machinery we have all come to skip over.

[Geds]

So, wait, not_scottbot: were you the one over at Making Light, too? The various scottbots were...odd...and not always amusing, but I never thought of them as trollish and they fit with the overall messing with Scott thing we all did so often,.

Or are we pretty sure that was actually Scott under a different collection of names?

That whole thing confuses me and I'm not so good at reconstructing dozens of paragraphs of disemvowelled entries. I don't read Making Light particularly often and this was the first time I tried to read their comments, so I'm totally confused by this.

[Geds]

So, who's up for pie?

[cjmr's husband]

No pie. Rat pudding, rat sorbet, or strawberry tart. Without so much rat in it.

(any suggestion that the "Real class..." guy is a rat is completely unintended.)

[not_scottbot]

Jesurgislac-
it occurs to me (after searching the now infamous LB banning thread and finding no 'never') that it is possible that 'Never'-something was also me, if a while ago. This occurred after Scottbot made a guest appearance, which led to a fascinating insight into how a mob forms. Vaguely scary, and confirming my belief that mobs are dangerous due to what makes them a mob, even if the mob in fact is only a bunch of people sitting isolated in front of a dimly lit screen.

Which would almost make the point that establishing an identity is a good idea - that way, the mob knows exactly who to go after, instead of flailing around looking for enemies. Or manufacturing them, as the case may be.

See the current state of America for an example - if they could just attach a few real names to the noun they are fighting, instead of having a list of 900,000, which will never be checked once, much less twice.

[Cyllan]

Mmm, pie. Although given the weather this weekend, I'm more in the mood for gingerbread.

[Jesurgislac]

Apple pie. Lovely hot apple pie with cloves, and brown sugar sprinkled over the apples to form a toffee-ish syrup.

Served with thick whipped cream.

Mmm, pie.

Geds -
this thread is now getting a bit disjointed, since actually Mr. Class makes a few good points. Yes, I was one of several people, one apparently being a woman who spent a weekend actually proving that yes, she was real, and yes, she did think that deleting comments simply because you disagree with them to be poor form. For which she received an acknowledgment (apology would be too mocking a term) from the Internet's bestest and greatest moderator, saying that her spelling was poor when she protested against her opinions being simply deleted.

Scottbot was just an attempt to see if somone pretty far on his ledge could recognize that fact. It failed, in general, though I had fun at times writing some of it (beats working).

[Geds]

(after searching the now infamous LB banning thread and finding no 'never')

"Never" was a collection of similar sounding sockpuppet names over on a Making Light thread back in November that, um, somebody linked on the LB thread that lead to the ban. The "Never" on ML was "called out" as Scott by someone, then went on to make bizarre claims that may or may not have been as Scott or scottbot or something. I don't know due to the disemvowelling.

It was all very odd.

[jamoche]

Typepad is worse at remembering that you're logged in than just relying on your browser to auto-fill the name/email fields. (Oh, 6Apart, I don't miss you at all, even if I *do* have to put up with LJs new Russian overlords.)

[Geds]

Scottbot was just an attempt to see if somone pretty far on his ledge could recognize that fact.

So, wait, scottbot was directed at Scott, right? Because that statement in the context of the preceding paragraph could technically point to Fred and the pronoun ain't helping.

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

Posing as a collection of sockpuppets in blog comment threads isn't exactly behavior to be proud of. To call the regulars' objection to such behavior "an example of how ugly mob rule can get" is odd at best, trollish at worst.

Around that time I started skipping any post by a scottbot or not_scottbot variation here, along with any by Scott-his-own-self, because I don't read posts by trolls (if I can help it--sometimes, I don't manage to identify it before reading the whole thing, as now). That the trollish behavior was on another blog doesn't change that.

I don't understand the insistence on "I'm not creating an identity here." Post enough under the same handle, and you will be perceived as one cohesive identity. Declaiming that it was actually three different people doesn't change that. If I can't tell by looking at the handle which of the three people it is, it remains one identity as far as I can see.

Think of it as brand identity. The "scottbot" brand got poisoned for me by its connection to "Never". Simple as that.

[Scottbot and not_scottbot]

Mr. Real Class,
I have no problem in considering how I acted towards Scott, which may or may not be your name. Let's not rehash the identity thing - it gets boring, when we accept the fact that on the Internet, all the dogs can pee anywhere, if they work hard enough at it.

As a matter of fact, not only did I try (and fail) to actually change someone's behavior in a forum, that attempt seems to have been considered mildly amusing by any number of people. Which was better than what most people thought of Scottbot's source material.

And if Scott had made any attempt to actually reply to those posts in a way which was previously seen in the LB threads, or the way he did for a short time, we all would have been happier. I can look in a mirror without any problem, in part because I too thought some of the directed obnoxiousness to Scott had crossed some line of decency. But in time, Scott should have realized what lines he had crossed in other peoples' eyes.

Welcome to how people interact - if you work hard enough, you can get any group of people annoyed, angry, hateful, etc. It proves little beyond your desire to have a group oppose you. Or to place yourself against another individual, one often of your own creation.

So what? Is there anything here worth that much time? It certainly isn't worth mine - and in places where I have been banned (first they come to dsmvwll you...), I do the simple thing - never bother to visit again. The Internet is not exactly limited to a few websites that end in .com.

Project Gutenberg or any other Internet archive would be worth while. Maybe spending some time reading from its abundance. Try Kropotkin - Mutual Aid at http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/kropotkin/mutaid.txt - a Russian Darwinist anarchist should be a nice change of pace, not to mention rigorous natural science from the end of the 19th century.

Scottbot provided some real insight, though it had nothing to do with Scott, who unfortunately did seem to remain fairly robotic most of the time. The insight was in dealing with a forum that gladly posted my (fake - always fake - who cares about e-mail from strangers?) e-mail address ('we never post your information'), and then started deleting any comments pointing out the stupidity of banning people who were opposed to its deletion practices, at least if you in a forum which makes a major emphasis of free culture and attacks corporate and government style manipulation of facts and opinion.

It still bugs me, but has little to do with my life - someone else seemed to be obsessed, if the Internet's bestest and greatest moderator is to be trusted (she who sees sockpuppets in every drawer). I don't waste time abouit it, except in a place like here. We all have our quirks. I plan to be changing some of mine - maybe you should consider the same.

[not_scottbot]

Geds -
Scottbot was always directed at Scott and his mindlessly robotic posting practices. Hence the name.

Nicole -
you are kidding, right? Because Scott is one person (I assume, at least), while Scottbot is a fictional character, created by one not_scottbot. Who is not Scott, and who isn't a robot, either. I thought the joke really too plain to have to explain, but then, some people sneer at anything they perceive to be subtext.

Or don't seem to understand the idea, so post-modern (as one of my better teachers said more than two decades ago, what follows post-modern?), that narratives become reality in the mind of the reader - but I am not so post-modern as to think this is anything other than the phosphors glowing on the screen. The true Tao is not the spoken Tao, etc for the more old fashioned.

However, read some of the not_scottbot posts about torture over the last few months. You might find something objectionable other than 'trolling' or 'sockpuppetry.' But it doesn't make them anymore pleasant to read - and they are certainly not the sort of thing that can't be easily monetized. Or that most people want to acknowledge.

[Geds]

Scottbot was always directed at Scott and his mindlessly robotic posting practices. Hence the name.

That was always my assumption, but something about that previous post struck me and I thought, "Hmm, should I be questioning this assumption?"

[not someone else]

Apple pie. Lovely hot apple pie with cloves, and brown sugar sprinkled over the apples to form a toffee-ish syrup.

Oh my. What do you do with the cloves- just sprinkle them over top into the apple syrup?

[Lauren]

Color me confused. Trying to follow a conversation on an unnested comment thread is hard enough when you aren't trying to recreate deleted posts and keep track of people using different names, or none at all.

Perhaps somebody will answer my idle curiosity: If Scott came back under a new username, what was it?

[Ursula L]

Lauren,

There have been several different names. Along with apparently changing ISP numbers to circumvent the usual software that blocks posts from banned individuals.

Feel free to be confused, and annoyed. It's starting to feel like some very public stalking...

[Brandi]

The sad part is that I suspect our woeful poster only finally ran out everyone's patience when he started sounding like he could be (or had been) replaced by a not very large Perl script. I don't like killfiles/ignore lists myself, but sometimes the signal-to-noise ratio just gets too low.

As for pies, my local paper printed a curious apple pie recipe back in January which I suppose is best described as a savory apple pie, with Roquefort cheese (yes, not the usual cheddar!), thyme, and bacon in the filling! I'm curious to try it, though the bacon bits leave my kosher-keeping friend in the lurch...

[Ursula L]

Bacon in apple pie? It sounds fascinating - applesauce and pork go well together.

Perhaps you could use some kosher turkey bacon, for your kosher-keeping friend? Or perhaps some other suitable smoked/cured meat?

[cjmr's husband]

Bacon & Cheese apple pie, the ultimate in non-kosher desserts. Mmm, bacon.

[Ursula L]

Ah yes, the meat/cheese thing, as well as the pork in bacon.

Perhaps use a smoked cheese, to make up the volume of the bacon, and perhaps some of the Roqfort?

[Froborr]

There are no good substitutes for bacon. Since mostly* giving up pork last year, I have searched desperately for one; there's nothing. Tons of good sausage substitutes, but nothing for bacon or ham.

*The fun thing about quitting foods for environmental reasons is that "mostly giving up" is just as good as "completely giving up". So if somebody happens to be serving a food I don't eat, like pork or seafood, I don't have to be a dick about it. And if it's a special occasion and I really, really feel like it, I can have a nice piece of salmon or a fresh-caught just-about-anything or bacon-wrapped turkey. My rule is that, after eating pork or seafood, I cannot eat either for at least one month. The result has been that I have one or the other two or three times a year, which is definitely acceptable.

[Chas Dean]

Jeez, take a four day weekend away from the computer and I miss all the fun.

FWIW, Fred appears to have managed this as well as can be expected. Please continue with the enlightened discussion and gratuituous pun-throwing.

And Tastespotting had a recipe for candied bacon ice cream (still searching for it, will post URL when I find it). Hmm, breakfast...

[Lauren]

@ Ursula: To the extent that I am annoyed, it is purely the pre-Tivo annoyance of all your friends laughing about something they saw on TV while you were in the bathroom.

@ Froborr: Does giving up seafood for environmental reasons mean you eat only those fish/shellfish that are caught or raised in an environmentally sound manner? And what does that mean to you?

[Froborr]

Lauren: As near as I can tell, there is not currently any such thing as environmentally sound seafood. So I avoid all of it.

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

For apple pie lovers, TNH particled a most depraved apple dumpling recipe that I tried out last Friday. Even the guests originally daunted by the Mountain Dew in the ingredients list decided it was the food of the Gods when they had a bite. For the record, if you mistakenly only buy one tube of Pillsbury Crescent Rolls, Pillsbury Hungry Jacks will work too; just flatten out, stretch, and roll.

I have the last two in the remains of the sauce sitting in a small pie pan waiting to go in the toaster oven. There will be ice cream laid on.

[not_scottbot]

I give up at this point - it seems as if trying to explain scottbot / not_scottbot is not working well, and continues to lead to more confusion, which is not really worth anyone's time.

But which continues to at least intrigue me for one reason - do you all seriously just use one name in every single forum? To the extent that your CPU, MAC, IP number (if you own the domain), etc. (not to mention cookies, referrers, passwords etc.) identifies you, the question of identity is more moot than most people seem to accept, but do you all really post everywhere with the same name? Even more intriguingly, to me, do you really do it with your real one?

I don't even use just one user profile on a PC, at home or work - neither does my wife (she's a programmer, after all), and my children are learning that on a large network that is also a huge database, there is no reason nor obligation to anyone to make it easier to collect and collate personal data. No obligation at all, regardless of what the person collecting, collating, and selling the data thinks.

Germans are strange that way, these days. They actually demand to know why they have to follow rules that resemble those of a police state - I have seen Germans in the U.S. not hand over ID merely because a store clerk demanded it, not walk through a metal detector because some guard says they must, and seen them continue to argue with authority to the point that authority actually backs down. This was an older German woman in 1982 telling a Customs agent that she would either carry her four bottles of wine through for her daughter, or smash them in front of him - his choice, but he wasn't going to take them from her, period. Though these days, I guess they would shackle her as a routine part of her going to some jail, without any right to legal representation.

Germans value their data privacy/protection ('Datenschutz' is the term) - after all, this is the country where the Supreme Court has ruled that the government has no right to 'snuffle' (it's a sort of pun) in a person's PC merely because the government feels the need to. Because a PC is part of a person's private sphere, and every citizen of a constitutional democracy has the right to live a private life, beyond government inspection. Especially when the ground for that inspection is merely the government's self-proclaimed need.

At least in Germany, the way I view the Internet is considered quite normal - why would anyone want to share personal information to an impersonal computer network is not all that easy for Germans to understand, especially the majority who defeated their government's last attempt to take a census because it allowed an opportunity for the government to misuse the collected information, merely by collecting it (no slippery slopes here, never forget).

Well, this went on too long. But still, seeing how extreme some people consider having two user names for a few months in one forum (related names at that - which share the letters 'scottbot'), it strikes me that I might really be out of touch, again, with what many Americans consider normal. Nothing new there. And one reason my children are not being brought up in America.

[Lauren]

I was wondering about what your criteria of environmental soundness was, especially in relation to pork. I thought the environmental argument against eating meat was that you could sustain more people on the grain you feed to the cow than you can by eating the cow, therefore you should eat the grain instead. But I thought that fish converted sunlight to sustenance fairly efficiently.

Additionally there is the argument that farmed salmon wreaks massive environmental damage (so avoid farmed salmon) and that many fisheries are overfished (so avoid those species). But I don't understand why you would avoid everything.

[Cyllan]

do you all seriously just use one name in every single forum? To the extent that your CPU, MAC, IP number (if you own the domain), etc. (not to mention cookies, referrers, passwords etc.) identifies you, the question of identity is more moot than most people seem to accept, but do you all really post everywhere with the same name?

I use Cyllan fairly consistently in public areas -- i.e. those areas where I don't mind being identified as mostly me. I have a secondary name that's a more private persona; that one gets trotted out mostly to friends and other associates in more intimate settings. I use my real name in one forum, but that one is directly related to real-life happenings and is fairly obscure. For some forums, I use completely different names from any of the above when I want to be less publicly identified.

I do generally try to avoid leaving huge amounts of information behind me when I websurf -- there's no email attached to this post, for example and all cookies are turned off. I avoid sites that require registration or use generic ones (thanks, slashdot) for entry. But in general, it seems polite to use at least a mostly consistent name. As my recent round of comment-reading has shown, it's still a pretty small world of blogs that I read.

[Lauren]

@not_scottbot

There is a difference between posting with two names in the same forum, and posting with different names in different forums. I use different names in different forums. On the other hand, most of it is not a concious effort to hide my identity, though maybe it should be. Sometimes, the name I want is taken, so I choose another.

What you are doing is something else. First, you used somebody else's name as part of your own, which is bound to confuse. Second, you weren't the only person posting as "scottbot", even if you were responsible for 90% of the content posted under that name. Since the name was obviously derivative, there was no reason to assume that the same person was using it day-to-day, so there was no way to have a long-term conversation. Finally, once scottbot became established as an identity with multiple users, not_scottbot started showing up, which raises the question: how many people does not_scottbot represent?

But ultimately, the reason I stopped reading scottbot was because the posts under that name were boring. Too long, too hard to decipher. Too hard to figure out what the point was, and whether I was supposed to figure out the point anyway.

[Froborr]

I was wondering about what your criteria of environmental soundness was, especially in relation to pork.

Pig-farming is one of the most environmentally destructive industries out there. Industrial pig farms poison the surrounding countryside for miles around, causing serious health problems to their neighbors. Giant pools of muck are needed to contain the refuse that runs off the pigs (excrement, mostly, but also broken hypodermics with traces of complex, highly reactive organic molecules in them, diseased flesh, and parasites). These pools are bright pink, viscous, and occasionally explode due to a build-up of gases. Workers are sternly warned *not* to try to rescue anyone who falls into one, because (a) he's already dead, and (b) anyone who goes in after him will also die. Needless to say, when they explode, all of this lovely stuff gets into local water tables.

Also, a bit of pedantry: "I was wondering what your criteria were," not "criteria was." "Criteria" is the plural of "criterion."

I thought that fish converted sunlight to sustenance fairly efficiently.

Nope. Net primary productivity (SCIENCE!* for "efficiency at converting sunlight to sustenance") of the oceans is extremely low, mostly because sunlight has a harder time passing through water than air.

----

*This is the universal language of the natural sciences. It is properly pronounced with extreme, melodramatic excitement.

[Izzy]

I use "Izzy" preferentially, "funwithrage" in forums where that's taken.

It seems constructive for me to have a consistent identity online with which people can have conversations--plus, if someone wants to continue an argument they started on one forum, without spamming it, they can email me, post to my LJ, or whatever.

And I'm not terribly worried about the government looking at my stuff. I don't think the government *should*, and I'd vote against laws saying it can, but for me personally, hiding my identity is way the hell too much effort. I'm on a bunch of forums and remembering different *passwords*, let alone usernames, is a lot of work. If the government wants to read my half-finished time-travel romance novel...well, the government can have fun with that.

[Froborr]

I am the only Froborr on the Internet, and so use it everywhere. 30 seconds of googling would reveal my real name.

But that's okay, because everything I actually care about hiding is thoroughly concealed behind other identities, unless you somehow already knew to compare the IP of a poster on one forum to the IP of a poster with an unrelated name on an unrelated forum with a completely different topic, and if you know to do that then there's already no stopping you.

[Lauren]

Nope. Net primary productivity (SCIENCE!* for "efficiency at converting sunlight to sustenance") of the oceans is extremely low, mostly because sunlight has a harder time passing through water than air. -Froborr

My SCIENCE! is a little rusty.

I don't know one way or the other about your sunlight through water argument, but it's tangential to the point I was trying to make. Given a square mile of farmland, raising beans produces food more efficiently than raising beef. Given a square mile of ocean, isn't raising sardines relatively more efficient than raising phytoplankton?

And that's not even minding the fact that phytoplankton isn't people food. Of the 2/3 of the earth that is ocean, seafood is the most efficiently produced food by default. I am wondering why you don't distinguish between the more efficient seafood versus the less efficient. Primary versus tertiary consumers.