There is a debate to be had about how a few tech firms can wipe out free speech, even if you’re happy for Parler to get canned, which I am.
I think the debate that’s not being had is who is ultimately responsible for provision of a platform? What is Twitter or Parler? A forum? Public? Private? A club? Speakers Corner? If they are forums then it has to be established legally whether they are public or private. And as they (internet fora) cross geographic and political borders, to which legal body do they answer? Of course this doesn’t matter to the narrative for millions of internet-users. If they feel aggrieved to lose access to a platform (no matter how it was provided to them, or by whichever conditions/TOS) then they nonetheless feel it is their ‘right’ to have access.
I’d like to think these are simply teething troubles of a culture that is moving from social interaction in the real world to a kind of antisocial interaction in a semi-virtual world. The thing is, in the real physical social world of olden times (in the streets, parks, bars and houses) you’d call someone an idiot/nazi/commie/racial slur to their face and you’d get some pretty immediate feedback from all parties within earshot. And some knock-on feedback in your social life down the line. Not just words on a screen from anonymous people with whom you neither live nor work.
In the ‘virtual’ world the push and feedback looks like a weird dream of millions of semi-people, differentiated and experienced as short bursts of text with a little square profile pic of a tabby cat, a cartoon frog, a Maltese Cross.
So many of the supportive (of Trump) comments I’ve read in youtube after the botched/half-arsed insurrection have been from self-styled objectivists/Randians.
This has been a prominent ‘insider’ trend of internet culture idealogues for 20 years IME. A ragtag collection of libertarians/anti-collectivists/objectivists/confused anarcho whateverists have been with some success attempting to sculpt the internet as their own for two decades or more. For most of the actual public life of the internet. For anyone (like me) who hasn’t jumped down that rabbit hole – you are known as a ‘normie’ and are seen as a sheeplike creature with no brain, beholden in every way to ‘the state’, and your willing dumbitude. The very root of what has become internet culture feels like a sociopath looking for a supply. In ‘pandemic world’ the internet has increasingly become most people’s ‘social’ lives so recruitment of ‘sheep’ is high. Like a game. ‘Prizes’ such as Brexit, Trump, conspiracy, widespread confusion, anti-mask/antivaxx cults, this week’s bizarre ‘insurrection’, destruction of Western social compacts, etc, etc. All was once a game for the players in mom’s basement (including the ones that since moved out yet never grew up) yet now the breach into ‘normie’ world is complete. Now we live in a world where your uncle Fred (who used to like rugby and motorbikes) is instead stuck indoors having a new kind of fun bashing away at his phone in on twitworld, raging against cousin Dave (and millions of strangers/bots/actors whom he never met) about the ‘soyboy feminazi Marxinist Islamist plandemic’. He’s going to take to the streets/Mosque/parliament next Sunday and ‘sort it out’. Freedumb.
Posted 3 years ago
