The Duck just got canned again. As usual, his performance Tweets anticipating the fantastical political executions that await the more obnoxious among the commentariat were not only a welcome spectacle of the absurd for our faithful, but more importantly, a harbinger of things to come. This year will see major upheavals in technology platforms’ speech policies, with the ultimate aim of hiding ideas that threaten the psychosocial narrative tenuously supporting the Cathedral.
It’s time to plan for this inevitability.
For all of the talk about the Internet’s promise to decentralize or democratize news production and access, the enterprise has curiously tended to undermine those nefarious groups that the establishment never particularly cared for in the first place. The deserving victims of the digital advertising crisis aside, some of the groups most inconvenienced by this “tool of the people” include the enemies of the State Department, lame Christian parents, and idiot racist kulaks. Twitter is great for riling up black proles and inadvertently crowdfunding an elite future in Qatar for that damn clockboy. Comment sections provide an illusion of consensus against the plague of killer cops among the sophisticates that skim articles in The New York Times.
Facebook will make sure that each of its billions of users experiences the correct emotional response to the right trending topics, while protecting them from fakethink as the occasion calls. The hollow values of the “Open Internet” and free speech are vociferously defended only when they serve to support (or at least, do not threaten) what the establishment desires anyway.
The Left has known about and harnessed this power for quite some time. Over a decade ago, the founders of the biggest players in digital media today—such as Vox, Gawker, and Buzzfeed—cut their teeth developing strategies for political control using the Internet. This worked well enough for a while. They pressed the right psychological levers, and we clicked the right links. Gays can now get gay married, or whatever. But their golem is now turning on them as their markets are tanking and their executives are jumping ship.
Last year, we learned that the meme machine the Left put into place is great for right-wing situationism, as well. Dedicated crimethinkers have learned to hijack this mechanism’s outrage complex to broadcast seductive messages and implant confusion among connected nodes. 2015 was the year that the Left got a taste of its own subversive medicine.
There was the occult fascism of Donald Trump’s Twitter feed and subsequent boneheaded media amplification of all of his most gripping political messages. Peggy Noonan said “cuckservative” on live TV. Sam Hyde continued his spree of hate killings across the country as Adult Swim mulls over finally airing that new Million Dollar Extreme pilot. Neoconservatives like the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg were forced to argue seriously on Twitter with users sporting intentionally inflammatory handles like “GrandpaWasANazi.”
Gamergate refused to die and took Ellen Pao down while they were at it. Weev was a constant menace on the Internet. White student unions were wow-just-wowed into existence. The establishment’s bid to finally shut down that hotbed of normie anti-leftism on campus known as Greek life was rudely thwarted by Steve Sailer. An anti-immigrant propaganda video that was formed in the bowels of /pol/ generated several million views on YouTube (and one hilariously upright rebuttal by at VICE). The New Republic editor Jeer Heet can’t make a move online without Ricky Vaughn and his band flooding his feed with jokes. And The Duck, of course, was instigating and accelerating much of this and more from his since-unceremoniously censored Twitter perch.
What these concepts have in common is that they are all concerntroll-proof: the more the Cathedral’s minions predictably protest, the more exposure the wrongthink gets. Wrongthink promoters refuse to apologize, so the limit of the Left’s shaming power is laid bare to see. What else can they do but keep squawking? Life proceeds without catastrophe and people learn to fear the thought police a little less. The public as a whole becomes desensitized and these thoughts move within the sphere of debate.
The predictable fallout from the Cathedral’s internationalist schemes have generated natural “pathologies,” as well. More practically, average folks whose lives have been turned into a living hell have understandably taken to social media to air their grievances. The European situation is illustrative. As thousands of migrants stream into their ancestral homelands, Europeans in enlightened countries are expected to quietly endure the rash of rapes and other unseemly activities left in diversity’s wake without complaint.
Many of them do not. Uppity underlings still dare to transfer their true thoughts to one of the many screens that anchors their reality, thereby allowing like-minded family and friends to get the wild idea that they are not alone or insane to balk at such deadly demographic engineering. No amount of creative photography or suppressed stories that constituted the legacy media’s grab bag of opinion-shaping can prevent a concerned citizen from sounding off in the comment section of an obviously biased report on the dangerous xenophobia fomenting in his town.
Where the strategy favored by Americans is proactive, the European preservation instinct is reactive. The result of both phenomena is the same as far as the establishment is concerned: a crumbling narrative structure and a visibly grumbling majority population.
Obviously, all of this must be stopped. It’s one thing for the tools of sociotechnocracy to be turned against the gross rubes marked for elimination; it’s quite another for them to actually threaten the memetic narrative that justifies the whole racket. 2016 will necessarily be the year of the kindly censor.
The most obvious tactic employed so far has been ad hoc bans. Removing comment sections from news websites fits here, as well. This is quite easy to justify when dealing with obviously rude individuals or a general rabble that you’d rather push to social media to do the actual dirty work. In many cases, social media platforms have begrudgingly allowed wrong-thinking renegades to continue using their platform, despite harboring extreme disagreement with their speech. They made their bed in the late 2000s, promising open expression and for a while they half-halfheartedly lied in it.
Enough with all of that commitment to principles nonsense. The new censorship regime will be deceptive and smarmy. It will tell you it is protecting expression as it blocks your IP—if it bothers to give you any notice at all. It will randomly decide that you shouldn’t see certain information. It will provide little, if any, real opportunity for feedback from consumers. It will force you to use your real name and require a real ID and phone number before registering. It will decide that certain projects don’t deserve funding or access to distribution channels. And it will do it all with a smile, reminding you that all of these restrictions are necessary to keep us safe. This has been a long-running campaign promoted by the usual suspects.
The Zuck was caught conspiring with Angela Merkel to censor speech critical of her open borders policy in September. Twitter has already quietly redefined its terms of service to ban certain political speech. Vijaya Gadde, Woman in Tech and general counsel of Twitter, explained that her employer was not censoring speech by censoring speech but was actually protecting speech by censoring speech. Her argument boils down to: women and brown people don’t like being criticized on Twitter, so we need to shut down those criticisms. I think that Annalee Newitz of Ars Technica put this logic better than anyone could:
Twitter has discovered what many proponents of democratic society already knew: censorship is not the opposite of free speech. In fact, so-called free speech can actually be used as a weapon to silence the vulnerable and dispossessed. Ironically, to maintain its position as a platform for free discourse, Twitter must censor its users.
Needless to say, jihadists will not fear the harassment team, but the more popular personalities at Breitbart sure will. Facebook, Google, and Twitter have already started removing content that is critical of migrants in Germany from their servers. In the Netherlands, an errant Tweet can earn you a visit from the authorities. This trend will continue.
It’s not enough to point out hypocrisy and mutter about our rights. The platforms have the power, and we are at their mercy. This is the time to prepare for a less free future and get smart about how we use the social media access that we still have. Let’s make it count.