**** Cyborg Central ****

Caitlin is a very insightful writer whose writing often hits an issue directly on the head, but in this particular case I think she's interpreting a symptom of a problem as the problem. Speech Is Only Free If Dissenting Voices Get Heard is about big-tech suppression of people's speech online. While what she says in the article is true - businesses definitely suppress speech - her point misses the forest for the trees.

The internet is the platform. FB, YT, and Twitter are oversized businesses build on centralization. We could have had a fully distributed internet where everyone has their own easy to find personal site, but users willingly gave that up in favor of monetized content. The lure of being an "influencer" and raking in cash from advertising dollars drove users to these sites. It is no different from the exploitative artist-publisher model used by the music industry. Most people never see a dime. Do well, get paid. Go against it, get silenced.

It was easy to create, too - with MS's monopoly, it was nearly impossible for other businesses to compete, save for on the WWW. No personal web server, no distributed search, no control over your own news feeds even, all of this can be traced back to the desktop choke. This led to even more monopolies - search, instant messaging, video hosting - and the loss of user control over their own data. Controlling your own data is owning the means of production, and we can't have that, after all.

And, as it turns out, the cloud is mostly poison, and if you say the wrong things, you'll vanish. The old ways - personal websites, RSS, IRC, even very old things like USENET - these worked, and were controlled by the people that used them. Just not profitable for businesses. You cannot have a free internet when every single system attached to it is a choke point for someone else's business. You definitely cannot have a free internet when even the systems are owned by someone else.

It's kind of sad, really - most conservatives would never surrender their gun, but they readily hand over total control of their speech to someone else's business, and whine like muzzled dogs when the business silences them. Same with leftists - your words and data ARE the means of production, but who really owns it? Youtube. Google. Twitter. Substack. Facebook. All because it was profitable to have easy point-and-click clients, but not easy point-and-click personal servers.

Listen to a reading of this article: ??- How many journalists are capable of doing what Julian Assange did to expose the criminality of the powerful? Not many. How many are both capable and willing? Fewer still. How many of those are now willing after seeing what's being done to Assange? Even fewer. And that's what his persecution is all about.

Source: Speech Is Only Free If Dissenting Voices Get Heard: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Categorized as: Politics