Amerika

Recently, the podcast No Agenda, which hosts a Fediverse node of a similar name, gave up on that node and released it into the wild as an independent free speech site. One of the hosts of the podcast, Adam Curry (yes, the MTV guy!), gave his reasoning on another podcast he does with his wife, Tina:

Adam: I was going to say that I got all of this clarity which was kind of confirmed for me in Pastor Jimmy’s message on Sunday, which was about not leaning, but standing for what you believe in. And for a long time, this social network that we have with No Agenda has been bothering me. Not because of the people who are on it, because most people who are on it are okay, you know, people go nuts on social media, but there were hundreds of accounts that were just posting horrible stuff, bigoted, racist, anti-Semitic, just all kinds of stuff.

Tina: And it has the name No Agenda? It’s No Agenda —

Adam: No Agenda Social. Right. And it was just like, I gotta talk about this. Even before Pastor Jimmy’s message on Sunday — and this was all out in the open, you know, I was posting with Matt, who runs it; you know, I ran it for two years and he has been running it for four or five years — and I said, you know, “I got a problem with this. This is not okay. Not only do I not like it, just in general, but it’s part of our home; it’s got our name on it.” And we were going back and forth, and that was part of it, I was still up till three in the morning and I was posting, like, “I got a real problem.” And he thought that there was no other solution than to take it down and migrate everybody over to a different server with a different name, which is fine.

He goes on to describe social media as societal failure. To a more seasoned user of online communications however, the story of people blaming the machine is as old as technology. People thought Satanic heavy metal caused murders, bulletin boards caused hacking, and telephones brought on gossip.

In reality, technology reveals us more than anything else. Increase efficiency through irrigation, and you see who is inept. Connect the world through the internet, and you find that the groupthink was not as solid as portrayed in the media and academia, and people in fact have a range of opinions and experiences to match.

Social media gives people a way to interact quickly. This rapidly caused the appearance of unpopular opinions, at which point the response of social media overlords was to work with government and old media to censor, deplatform, cancel, and otherwise suppress all things which were not Politically Correct.

It makes no sense to blame social media for the fact that our society is divided by diversity, with the conformists demanding we avoid “racism, bigotry, and anti-Semitism,” but the realists pointing out that when you have more than one ethnic-cultural group in the same area, you get conflict, and “racism” is just the visible edge of that conflict.

It is hard to blame Mr Curry, since he is simply following the Establishment line adopted by the GOP. It is safe to blame anything except diversity and social class differences for our problems, so if we do not find a conspiracy, we must invent one to explain how our French Revolution system (adopted in US in 1866) is failing us so hard.

We have great sympathy for people such as Mr Curry who are trying to avoid brand damage by having people point out that our political system has failed, our civilization is in decline, and most people are crazy, a result of and exacerbator of the collapse.

However, maybe it is time for humanity to simply grow up and accept differences of opinion, as well as dissent which will frame itself in the crassest, angriest, and least sociable of forms in order to force its point home. We can all get along only by accepting that we cannot all get along, and that diversity is simply making us hate each other.

Tags: adam curry, anti-semitism, bigotry, brand damage, censorship, diversity, john c. dvorak, no agenda, political correctness, racism