There’s nothing easy about living through a political coup. The Big Tech firms long in cahoots with our government have been pushing a false narrative of evil MAGA-Nazis trying to undermine polite society for more than four years now.
Suppression started with Milo Yiannopoulos, accelerated to include Alex Jones and InfoWars and reach a temporary peak in 2018 with the persecution of alternative social media platform Gab in the wake of the Pittsburgh shooting.
I said this then in a piece entitled: Attack on Gab Proves Speech Was Never Free:
Friday’s attack by an unhinged, vile piece of human excrement on a Synagogue in Pittsburgh wasn’t hours old before real world agendas pushed to the top of the news.
Twitter alternative Gab was immediately dropped by PayPal without specific reasons.
Then immediately, Gab’s latest hosting service unilaterally gave the company a 48-hour termination notice of its contract.
Gab was hounded to the point of extermination and only a herculean effort by CEO and total warrior Andrew Torba and his staff kept the company afloat. Today Gab can only take Bitcoin and checks for payment. Torba himself has no banking privileges or access to credit, payment processors etc.
All for what? Running a social network where someone posted something terrible hours before doing something terrible?
Or was this a political hit job? The coordination of the event with the response is a little too convenient for any person of room temperature or higher intelligence to stomach.
The Rhyme Without Reason
Sound familiar to what happened to Parler? The attack then on Gab was a dry run for this weekend. If no one would stand up for Gab who didn’t have the resources to fight this in court, then when it came time to do it for real to a more high profile firm they knew it would stand up.
This growing duopoly in internet on-ramp gatekeeping by Apple and Google has been something I’ve warned about for years (go look through the archives searching out terms like Gab and Facebook).
No one listened. We all kept retweeting Trump and I even finally broke down and bought an iPhone. Parler just got the Gab treatment literally over nothing.
I’m not going to say both events were scripted false flags (though there’s certainly enough evidence that there was something really hinckey going on at the Capitol) but they certainly had their action plans ready for when the right trigger occured.
In fact, I’d argue that it’s more likely the people posting vile garbage on these networks is a plant than a real violent dissident. We know that the FBI, for example, infiltrates militia groups all the time and in some cases there are more agents working undercover than there are actual militia guys.
When you’re in the narrative creation business and we know that a minimum of 30% of users on Twitter aren’t real but bots, is it really a stretch to think a Deep State actor isn’t posting inflammatory shit on Parler to give the tech giants the excuse they need to do the thing they desperately want to do anyway, namely destroy their up and coming competition?
These companies have normalized suppression of speech in the public commons that their networks operate on top of. I remind people all the time that they are bandwidth pigs, feeding at the subsidized trough of publicly-built and maintained infrastructure.
Net Non-Neutrality
Trump’s biggest sin in his time as president wasn’t, to these people, saying inflammatory things, it was getting rid of their cashcow, Net Neutrality.
Net Neutrality took pricing of bandwidth out of the hands of consumers. It handed the profits from it to Google, Facebook and all the crappy advertisers spamming video ads, malware, scams, and the like everywhere.
By mandating ‘equal access’ and equal fee structures the advertisers behind Google and Facebook would spend their budgets without much thought or care. Google and Facebook ad revenue soared under Net Neutrality because advertisers’ needs are not aligned with Google’s bottom line, but with consumers’.
And, because of that, the price paid to deliver the ad, i.e. Google’s cost of goods sold (COGS), thanks to Net Neutrality, was held artificially low. And Google, Facebook and the Porn Industry pocketed the difference.
They grew uncontrollably. In the case of Google and Facebook, uncontrollably powerful.
Look, I’m more than okay with saying that Apple, Google or Facebook have the right to restrict content on their services, but only if they are also doing that over their own privately-built public networks, their own private wires.
But, we all know that isn’t the case. They utilize the public airwaves, fiber trunks, satellites etc. that we paid to build. As libertarians we’ve always argued that freedom of association also meant freedom from association.
That freedom, through the application of private property, also comes with responsibility to the counter-party in any and all interactions. No one would have allowed these companies to build these networks in a true private property regime.
No way would they have become this big, this powerful or this cowardly if they had had to bear the true costs of their business roll out. These aren’t the bastions of the free market conservatives (and even classical liberals to an extent) think they are.
They are, ultimately, as we’ve seen from their actions this week, the biggest welfare queens in the world simply stepping on the competition to ensure conformity of information flow.
Continued Section 230 immunity has elevated their ever-changing Terms of Service above the proscriptions against limiting speech in the Bill of Rights.
Moreover, these firms use these Terms of Service to provide no guarantee of service. These ToS’s are contracts of adhesion, entered into where one party has unequal standing versus the counter-party.
But, since the whole idea of living under a coercive government is one big contract of adhesion, since you really aren’t an equal partner to the government in the social contract nor did you have any choice but to sign on the moment you were born, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when that reality is shoved into our faces when their power is threatened.
This is the fundamental problem with accepting any of these ideas as valid. The whole society is structured around these enshrined power imbalances and we think we’re going to upend them by voting for Orange Man Bad?
Globo-Stasi’s
The way they operate is far beyond the strictures placed on governments themselves, who have to at least create Byzantine rules to obfuscate the tyranny and force us into a corrupt and expensive court system stacked against us to get the barest minimum of injunctive relief, assuming the judge isn’t a partisan hack or a congenital moron.
I think it’s rich that a person like Angela Merkel, the first political leader to send police into a person’s home for posting hate speech on Facebook, is now clutching her pearls over the censorship by Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google.
Spare me the crocodile tears Frau Stasi.
Because now, anyone to the right of your rank and file BLM member is looking over their shoulder waiting for the hammer to fall on them. It has become commonplace on Twitter for the star-bellied bluechecks to call out for blood against any and all Trump supporters or worse, *shudder* Republicans.
They should be driven to the brink of extinction. Denied jobs or a living for using the wrong pronoun because they are simply, too stupid to matter. We’ve got people honestly thinking it’s okay to take children out of your home for voting for the wrong party.
What comes next is even worse, vaguely-worded legislation from D.C. supporting these companies’ hyper-aggressive market defense, we’re already being treated to it by none other than AOC.
This is all the bad news I can come up with (today). What I do know, however, is that what comes next is that Facebook, Twitter and Google have whistled far beyond their graveyards here.
The backlash will against them will be epic. Shareholder lawsuits as stock prices plummet will gut them leaving them in the position to be bailed out or nationalized by the government.
Because, at the very least, there is still some semblance of sanity in that corner of the legal system. These companies have attacked and alienated their customers. In the process they have tainted their brand and if their stock prices do not recover will have real problems in the future.
They may look invincible now, but wait until the government under control of totalitarians like Pelosi, AOC, Schumer and the rest, turn on them and gobble them up to regain their credibility with a rightfully outraged and horrified public.
The best thing all of us can do is complete that transition to other services, deploy our time, expertise and investible capital into building censorship-proof communications platforms without an owner to lean on.
All things built on a nodal structure have critical points of failure. Amazon nuked Parler, not Apple or Google. Gab is proof that a social network doesn’t need an app to survive or even thrive.
Finding Our Way Home
Dave Rubin, major partner in Locals, is convinced the days of monolithic, massive social networks are numbered and we’ll all be congregating into smaller, more intimate communities. And I don’t disagree with him.
In fact, I hope he’s right.
I’ve tried to use Patreon this way to bring people together. It’s why I started a private server on Slack for people to congregate away from the insanity of Twitter. It thrives today as a place where only the most interested and committed people hang out, share ideas and help each other.
It’s a community. The very thing lefties think libertarians are no good at building. Don’t let the wrapper fool you, though. Community is all we ever have on our minds.
Discord and Telegram are exploding as we go back to the days of Usenet and Yahoo Groups dedicated to specific topics of like-minded people. Gab has had private groups for years now.
The cries about echo chambers being a bad thing are falling on deaf ears all across the spectrum. People complain at me all the time that there are no use-cases for cryptocurrency and blockchains and I just look at them like they are children.
Now more than at any other point in history is there the opportunity for a real, properly-built and decentralized social media platform owned by those that hold the governance tokens and not a corporation or organization which is corruptible.
Because we’ve seen how that story ends.
Join my Patreon if you are looking for a community and not an insane asylum.
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I agree, Tom!
I also think the “insurrection” at the Capitol was staged. Trump got wind of it, delayed his arrival to speak by an hour, then gave a speech lacking energy that ran 15 minutes long, for the purpose of keeping the mass of his supporters away from the Capitol, if the disruption did occur. Only 100 or so “protestors” were involved in breaking in, many more were ushered in through other doors peacefully. Little actual damage was done, a few broken windows. Statuary Hall’s rope lines were meticulously observed! It’s a tragedy that Ashli got killed!
Big Tech needs to be treated like a Utility, for that’s what it is. Membership channels, like your own, are an entirely different animal.
Excellent point. A few minutes ago I posted the same observation (albeit without President Trump doing it intentionally) at the OAN site with the Jack Posobiec / Raheem Kassan story about the timeline.
Methinks that Antifa (and I suspect “Shut Down DC”) aligned to Trump’s announced timeline (starting to speak at 11:00) — which would have timed their mayhem to occur just as Trump folks would have been arriving from the Ellipse.
With Trump starting about an hour late, probably unbeknownst to the Antifa staged at the Capitol for their false flag operation, the Antifa’s started “on time” (for them).
P.S. I was there, though not inside the building. I saw what had to be Antifa.
Tom, do you consider opening a channel on Telegram? Even if Telegram does not seem to be the perfect messenger, it proves to be an excellent tool to publish news, options, videos and links. Became very popular here in Europe over the course of governments & Big Tech over the last 12 months. I would appreciate!
I have a telegram account I just don’t use it.
I would like to share your articles, certainly not on fakebook nor twatter, pardon my ignorance, does not work well to add some shortcut to share your articles on some alternative media to the neo-gulag-genocidal-maniacs?
go right ahead…
Really? complaining about big tech censorship and pushing Patreon ????
Great points. Saw that this was picked up by Revolver today.
Yeah, Revolver creates mad traffic. Always good to see that.
You also made a link from VivaBranesLaw.locals.com, Peace Tom.
That’s excellent…. Barnes and Frei are the very people to popularize this argument about Contracts of Adhesion.
Tom, check out Sav3. Being actively developed as we speak!
Decentralised. Peer-peer. Uncensorable. Yes, there are Sav3 tokens also. Come check out our Telegram group, I’m a mod there. Cheers.
Sav3.org
https://testnet.sav3.org/
https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=@sav3org
Buy the governance token on uniswap:
https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap?inputCurrency=0x6e10aacb89a28d6fa0fe68790777fec7e7f01890
DexTools link:
https://www.dextools.io/app/uniswap/pair-explorer/0xc2b7888a8d7b62e2a518bbc79fbbd6b75da524b6
Nice. I will thanks!
How can I join your Slack community? I searched on Slack for Tom Luango ampnd Gold, Goats and Guns.
Join my patreon. It’s only for patron, $4/mo and up. If you are a patron then send me a message on patreon and i will send you an invite
How can I join your Slack community? I searched but no luck. How
See the comment below. It’s for patrons only. If you are a patron send me a DM on patreon and I’ll resend you the link
The issue goes to private property rights! Digital Personage Rights which includes data, tracking and service records must be protected as private property with a digital right to access, comment and interact in the virtual public square. If a platform creates a public space open to all without membership then it is a free open to within the bounds of the first amendment. To be sure a private or limited access space can be created, but that must be clearly defined.
Thank you for the comment, Gary. I agree it is a property rights issue.
you should use addresses beginning with “bc1”, the “3” ones are crap
other good thing is accept Bitcoin on Liquid
“They utilize the public airwaves, fiber trunks, satellites etc. that we paid to build.”
Also don’t forget that among the most significant sources of revenue that pays for the infrastructure is the concealed-credit-charges that the visa and mc banks euphemistically refer to as “Merchant Fees” but which all of the card-issuers are required to, and do, recognize and record internally as interest / credit-charges received from the card-user, and not the merchant. If the card-user does not pay, then the bank never receives the fee at all, and that reality of the credit business cannot be avoided by a label.
When the covid-crisis began a year ago, the global aggregate amount of these concealed rake-offs was closing in on about the USD-equivalent of $1 trillion ($1,000,000,000,000) roughly every 18 months. That buys a lot of infrastructure.
Timothy, Great point!
Thanks! In addition to the revenue for its own sake, by adjusting the pretended merchant fees from 1% (for gasoline purchases) to 6% (for meals at an expensive restaurant) they keep small business in a constant state of cascade-failure which is then off-set or balanced by more inflationary-fees.
It is quite a racket. Also, about 10% (about $200 million a day) of the gross fees worldwide are a direct rake-off from the government sales-taxes that are run through these accounts to take advantage of the “free-loans”.
I don’t like Twitter. So I don’t use Twitter, don’t read Twitter and don’t talk about Twitter. But amazingly, people who have good reason to feel the same CANT STOP TALKING ABOUT TWITTER. Why, why, why do we continue to validate Twitter by making them the primary topic of conversation 5000 times a day. Could or would the alternative media even exist without Twitter? No. Not even kinda. I will now summarize 75 % of all alternative media articles from all time:
“Look at this on Twitter. It’s a double standard”.
The end. I have just described a full 50% of what is on bitchute, lewrockwell.com, Tim Pool, Alex Jones, etc, etc. Yes, amazingly enough I recognoze there’s a double standard. Probably because you’re elevating the standard all day every day. I just don’t care. You’re the ones validating the standard by being on Twitter, reading about Twitter, following Twitter and yes, pointing out it’s double standards. How is it that nobody gets that?
But lo, hear our cries, without Twitter where do we share every idiotic blip of brain activity we have in a day? You don’t!!!!!! Live your life. ‘Like’ the real things in your life. ‘Follow’ things that directly enrich your life. The narcissism echo chamber of Twitter was always destructive to society and your psyche. An outlet for indulging narcissism is the last thing anybody needs. Even before you discovered that awful double standard. What ever happened to the Libertarian principle of voting with your dollars and consent. Did you ever think that Twitter does what it does because even you, the loudest complainer give it so much attention that you’ve made it impossibly rich. End Twitter today. In your mind and your actions and your routine. Just forget about it. And you’ll see it’s real end happen for real so fast you won’t even believe it. But it isn’t going anywhere so long as you all are so devoted to it. And to be clear, you are. WTF?
“… but only if they are also doing that over their own privately-built public networks, their own private wires.
But, we all know that isn’t the case. They utilize the public airwaves, fiber trunks, satellites etc. that we paid to build…”
wat? They don’t use “our” communications services. They lease BW from private carriers like Level3, AT&T, Frontier, etc. In the case of undersea fiber optic cables that span oceans, they lease that BW also but the big users like Google form consortiums with other big users to lay their own submarine cables, so in that instance Google actually does own the network.
No Tom. I’m afraid that if you honor property rights, then you must acknowledge that the owners of the server farms that host websites can kick customers off their equipment if their contract allows it. The writing is on the wall and the big websites like ZH and Parler should have their own servers and BW contracts secured.
The proper way to combat censorship such as that levied by AWS, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube is use some other service. There are alternatives. These censorship BS social media companies are owned by their stockholders. Are you a stockholder? Vote your shares and throw out the directors and CEO. Or sell your shares.
That is true. What is most remarkable about Parler’s case is that it was totally foreseeable after what happened to Gab, but they had taken no serious steps to prevent downtime by having backup resources (probably because disaster recovery and downtime coverage) was part of the AWS contract.
Unfortunately, the Cancel Culture maggots have already infested higher levels in the internet infrastructure, and it won’t be long before people start losing domain name registrations.
So what happened to the ISP? Do I even have one anymore, or do I need one of my own yet again. That idea was out there then, and still is today where one may need to include servers. Jeez, it never ends.. That quaint ISP of yesterday, that morphed into what is now so removed from sites of kitties and grandchildren, has now become this nightmare of shared and imposed thought from the top all packaged in sensible shoes the only remaining semblances of that time or so we think. Actually it’s not even about them anymore. What of the original concept and Is it still with us? Maybe this is where blockchain comes in. Maybe it’s not that difficult to turn this around, this “sudden” fascistic control by the millennial sociopaths bent on transhumance as a meme. Personally, I like the idea of “distributed government,” and maybe this is how succession could be implemented. Just thinking out loud. Maybe the guys down at Reddit can help. They’ve done such a bang up job bitch slapping the short sellers that maybe that’s the model going forward. Yeah, for a few bucks one joins, or becomes a node or a bot? Not sure but you get the idea. Then it’s off and into how it’s written, by rules where one can write their own path, and if that path becomes well traveled one that’s good, if not, it becomes an alternate route that someday may grow in strength. Either way it’s life in the ether of cyberspace. If Satoshi can write a few lines why not write another story where one can grow and do a whole host of things within the story connected to other real stories.