The recent deplatforming of Sargon of Akkad by Patreon has a lot of people very nervous. I became worried we’d get to this state the first time they went after Gab for not allowing their app in the Google or Apple stores.
It became obvious then that we would wind up here today. It starts with saying that certain things are unacceptable based on arbitrary enforcement of Terms of Service and ends with backroom pressure to cut a person off from making money.
Google began demonetizing channels which were politically unpalatable to its senior management. So, a lot of demonetized YouTubers moved to Patreon, asking subscribers to support them directly rather than deal with intrusive ads.
And now Patreon has gotten into the game. But, we always knew that they would. They went after Laura Southern last year.
Alex Jones was simultaneously thrown off every platform and then Gab was taken down over a 48-hour period with no warning over having a particular user on its platform.
Yes, that guy shot up a synagogue. That’s not Gab’s problem.
It didn’t matter that Twitter still hosts all manner of violent and disgusting content or Facebook hosting sites of terrorist groups. Political opposition to the globalist plan of universal serfdom for us and unchecked power for them was to be snuffed out with extreme prejudice.
Alternatives Rise
Alternative platforms needed to be marginalized to blunt their growth. Steemit is in trouble due to poor governance and the crushing of the cryptocurrency markets now that Wall St. can use the futures market to disrupt the actual market.
The truth, however, is that by trying to marginalize these alternative voices and raise their cost of capital for growth all that they’ve done is made them more popular than they likely would have been otherwise.
Gab is closing in on a million accounts now.
But, make no mistake, the deplatforming was meant to be unfair. It was done on purpose to inflame conservatives and libertarians to scream for a solution — more regulation, more control over the companies who control the on-ramps to the modern internet.
This was the desired solution all along.
To put the blame squarely on capitalism run rampant and keep making the stupid Marxist arguments for total control over speech and the economy. As well to give failing governments a legitimate reason to arrogate even more power to themselves.
Deplatforming is real. And Patreon’s removal of Sargon of Akkad over flimsy reasons is understandable if it was simply a compliance system gone wrong. But, from what I understand of the situation, it’s well beyond that. Patreon was simply looking for an excuse to axe Sargon.
And the reason to go after his Patreon account is to raise the costs of his doing what he does beyond his threshold of continuing. And it is a stark warning to the rest of us that if once you get successful, you’ll be attacked as well.
So, what do we do about it?
Crypto-Solutions
Jordan Peterson talked about this yesterday on his Patreon.
We thought about moving to alternatively crowd-funding platforms such as SubscribeStar, but it isn’t obvious that will constitute a long-term solution. Dave Rubin and I (and others) have been discussing the establishment of a Patreon-like enterprise that will not be susceptible to arbitrary censorship, and we are making progress, but these things cannot be rushed without the possibility of excess error.
But I am seriously displeased about the removal of Sargon (and many other people) and will definitely do something about it.
But, is that enough? Likely not. Because the first alternative, SubscribeStar, has already had its payment channels shut down.
These people are serious about taking us out of the conversation. I’ve been championing people to use alternative platforms for months but inertia keeps them where they are, not wanting to have to rebuild their brand all over again.
But, it is time to embrace the new platforms and find new ways to circumvent these attacks on our ability to make a living. They haven’t gone after me yet, but you have to think in these terms while building a business.
This, to me, is where a cryptocurrency shows its true worth. By being an unstoppable medium of exchange, a cryptocurrency becomes the payment layer that companies like Stripe and PayPal have built their businesses on to this point. But they are no longer serving their customers, they are abusing them.
The problem is, of course, bringing those assets back into the real world to deal with real world issues like paying your rent, electric bill, hosting fees etc.
There are real demands which at this point can only be met with dollars. So, that means a couple of things. The first is that once the payment is made in some cryptocurrency, say Bitcoin, it then has to be converted to dollars, which has become difficult as the same players — PayPal, Stripe etc. — will not exchange cryptocurrency for dollars.
Coinbase will for individuals, but does not do business with companies. The truth is that the solution is in front of us but barriers have been erected to make it difficult or raise costs prohibitively.
And, again, that’s the point. But, that’s where we need to ‘stand up straight with our shoulders back’ as Dr. Peterson would put it and build a supply chain with full U.S. dollar convertibility, even if it means going offshore to do it.
I’ll start with the words from Gab CEO Andrew Torba:
This is the face of the future and the means to change the current dynamic. But, it starts with people recognizing the problem and building workarounds which should be unnecessary and in a free society anathema to contemplate, but which are sadly reality.
If it isn’t Torba and his crew it’ll be someone else. Of that I’m sure. The market provides because there is a profit waiting for someone brave enough to build something someone else wants.
But, as content creators we need to recognize that it starts with us taking responsibility for our businesses and building in redundancy to make them anti-fragile.
This story of internet censorship is no different than the one playing out between countries right now. Russia and Iran are openly defying U.S. diktats on their behavior, utilizing the dollar as the preferred weapon of choice. Every day that they survive to bill another good or another service in rubles or rials is another step closer to being free of the tyranny of the political imperatives of U.S. and European oligarchs.
These platforms were built as loss-leaders to reel in customers to collect their data and study their habits. The costs to us were put off into the future. The costs being they could kick us off whenever we were inconvenient to them.
That future is today.
Join my Patreon to help us find a solution to the current censorship problem
Please post more information on how I and many others can help establishing new, incorruptible media outlets.
Here’s your — and everyone else’s — answer, and it’s coming soon.
This is from FORBES, for heaven’s sake:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffersonnunn/2018/11/26/hedera-hashgraph-enterprise-grade-distributed-ledger-technology/#87325f970a72
It is not a solution if it is not an open-source project. Freedom from ownership of the algorithms is the most important part of the decentralization process. I didn’t see anything in that Forbes article about that.
And, FYI, there are plenty of blockchains out there now doing a million transactions per second. Komodo, for example, is one through its cross-chain clearing within its own network.
http://www.komodoplatform.com
“Sargon of Akkad”
What about this lefty?
Do we only protect the rights of non-lefties anymore? What’s your point?
He even cherished when people on his right got kicked out of Youtube, Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, Patreon and PayPal.
Now you feel sorry for him?
He’s the millennial version of William Buckley and was taking active part, along with the likes of Jordan Peterson and the “Intellectual Dark Web” (which is not intellectual, not dark and not from the web) pushing for censoring right wing content.
I disagree with all of those assessments, but, yes, in general if you aren’t willing to defend the rights to speak of your even your ideological opposite then you don’t believe in free speech.
Period.
(Tom, as there is no reply button for your reply to my deplatforming post above, I’m using this one.)
No, Hedera Hashgraph isn’t open source, but as open source can’t stop forking, the company chose open review instead:
“Hedera will be open for review. When the network is openly accessible to the public, which is expected to be around March of next year, Hedera will publish the entire source code online. Nothing hidden. Any developers can view the source code, and they can suggest changes or improvements to the code base.” — https://yourstory.com/2018/12/decrypt-asia-podcast-hashgraph?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=share
I therefore suggest you look deeper into Hedera, as it’s hbar token is expected to launch by next spring and stands to leave the competition (e.g., anything blockchain-based) in the dust.
Yeah, comments aren’t infinitely nested. That’s good to know… thanks. Transparency is the key first. And I will take the time.
Hi Tom, We have been working on this issue for some time. At the heart of the issue is a micro-payments system that can aid content providers. We are creating such a platform using a gold backed “permissioned” token. I do not believe the permissionless systems will survive the regulatory environment and seem to be easy targets for “Association by Terrorism”.
I’m open to any and all suggestions to fix the current imbalance. I look forward to seeing your project develop.
I should qualify that by saying that I do not believe that the current stable of Crypto Currencies will become a solution to the issue. The nature of a decentralized system is antagonistic to the current BIS,IMF, CB system of graft. To believe a challenge could come from those who don’t have the guns is unlikely. As you saw with the recent scare from a virus attack with the naive demand of payment in BTC, the powers that be have an easy patsy should they want to shut down the permissionless side of things. When I say permissionless I refer to Proof of Work or Consensus tokens like BTC, ETH, and its spawn of ERC20’s.
A permissioned system of XRP or XLM is most likely but the libertarians and crypto anarchists will hate it.
The ultimate solution as I see it will be in the monetization of a network, any network. This will encourage small tribes to emerge that act in their own defined interests and the Distributed Ledger Technology will be ideal for this quasi “stateless” society. Each tribe then becoming a sole node in a binary world of go/no go among other tribes.
Alignment of interest may then occur and those most aligned with human nature would be expected to be the largest of aligned interests in a stateless system.
In short, from a post capitalistic world to a stateless world is possible, But as you can see, those leading the charge will not be allowed to engage under the legacy system they so strongly desire to disrupt. If you want updates on our monetization of networks scheme just go to bulliongrower.co.nz and send us an email.
Great article! Do you have an opinion about Open Index Protocol (oip.wiki) and the incentive structure it creates for creators & platforms?
Thoughtful post. I’ve wondered if a charity as an intermediary would work. People donate to the charity specifying the content creator they wish to support, left, right or centre it doesn’t matter. The banksters would have a bigger problem refusing to work with a charity supporting the Arts.
Disappointed it was a YT vid but you are on BitChute though not posting there anymore. Stick with it Tom, YT is not your friend.
I know that YT is not my friend but at the same time my bandwidth is terrible and uploading these vids to YT is hard enough to get done…BitChute is very hit or miss as to whether the Upload will take… seriously, these take 45 minutes to upload and they fail to BT 50% of the time.
If it didn’t I would x-post everything… it’s simply a matter of logistics… and I’m not selling my house to be able to upload content. :)
Isn’t it a bit ironic to ask for support at the end of the article by directing us to Patron? I know, I know there needs to be a real viable solution before directing us elsewhere, but why not, for consistency, at least reiterate the BTC wallet address?
But OMG, I am so mad at them – all the CEOs of Patreon, PayPal, Twitter YT et al. To listen to that odious CEO of Patreon, I forget his name but he’s the embodiment of smug, talking about being staunch defenders of the 1st Amendment and such, all the while “seeking out hate-speech…” and such. All of this, of course according to their definitions, which are all of course completely self-serving. Shoot me now!!
Meanwhile, bravo for another amazing article. I believe, based on what I have read and researched that crypto is the way forward, and for me specifically, the project Apollo. If you have a minute, check it out. Search apollofoundation and you’ll find it. It’s informed by all the solid libertarian, Constitution-based ideals you could ask for, including privacy. In fact the privacy is almost too good. We’re almost asking for the SWAT teams to arrive :), but meanwhile we are doing what we can. I’d love to hear your take on “the little crypto that could…”
The Deplatforming article has been listed on Krown (https://krown.io/story/what-factors-influence-the-price-of-bitcoin-2) Make sure to upvote your link!