Amerika

After the Project Veritas leaks showed multiple Silicon Valley Tech Giant apparatchiks describing their plans to thwart pro-Trump content in 2020 amid the constant suppression of Right wing voices on social media platforms, you hear yet again the demands from the Right to nationalize social media as public utilities or at least revoke their platform status and treat them as publishers.

These approaches seem to miss the point. Nationalizing social media would mean that the government creates a doctrine of participation in all aspects of society as a basic human right. It makes social media more powerful and forces us to use it. If I was a cynic, I would think that this is a situation these social media corporations would even willingly take on, since it makes them have almost total market monopoly instead of just partial control.

In addition, this nightmare of government-supervised socializing — think of an awkward high school dance with chaperones standing around both charmed and bored — will be managed by the same government workers that manage the DMW. These will be the people who will have oversight of these public discussions, acting as paid censors of the regime.

These platforms live off the idea that there is a public debate in which everyone can take part. This keeps people involved with a feminine, passive-aggressive gossip and bickering culture that you otherwise would encounter in an office space where there is more talk than work and menstrual synchrony.

Outside of the sparks of debate, most of social media is meaningless microblogging about the everyday life of strangers nobody cares about and bot-generated clickbait, anyway. Imagine that under the watchful eyes of a moderator staff of dried up catladies that will punish you like a little child when you say something mean, giving you a time limit to clean up your own mess and then sit on the silent chair for a day.

Try to imagine such an environment in the physical world. Why on earth would anyone want to be part of that?

With all the big waves the Project Veritas leaks made, let us remember that Donald Trump was not elected by hashtags, but by an electoral college that maybe even had to hold its nose and decide rather for an orange mystery box than for a known criminal. Hillary Clinton was totally capable of losing that election on her own. Scummy Big Tech geeks recognize as the founding fathers did that voters are driven by the same bickering impulses that these very platforms cater to in their audience, which is why we have a complex electoral process to limit herd impulses.

The power of political movements is created by institutions. Institutions are created to cater to the needs of the crowd. Twitter is not an institution. Youtube is not an institution. These places get used by institutions to create attention for themselves either by practical demonstrations, self-promotion, or by creating outrage. Propaganda without an institution is meaningless and that is something that the Marxists of the olden days learned quickly but the cultural Marxists either forgot or deem less important because the “means of production” today is a mouse click on an Amazon shopping cart and not the steelmill whose smokestacks you can see when you leave your coffee house where you went when you wanted to exchange rhetoric about revolutionary concepts. Without these means of production you are nothing but a daytripper.

Then we should ask what kind of people get targeted by these corporate measures and to a humorous surprise its not even the hardcore Right wing extremists but people like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, the last people who could inspire a fascist takeover of the united states. But this also sheds light on the nature of these measures. With all their data gathering and supposed intel these tech firms seriously target these people and not the real Right wing extremists, because real Right wing extremists are not worth trying to target anyway.

A real right wing extremists already knows that this is not a conversation or debate about how we can find compromise, but that this is a battle between different genetic markers in our own species for which there is just victory, possibly prison, and certainly death. Polarization and an end to the conversation is not a defeat, it is a victory and an important step on the road to separate himself and his personal affairs from people who don’t just have a different opinion. But with Shapiro and Peterson you can keep the debate going and going and going and going.

Most people don’t take place in this phony debate anyways. The people who run institutions and who keep the everyday life within a first world civilization running care little about the latest hashtag outrage. And now you have supposed right wingers who actively demand a place on that table where the biggest scum is already seated to show their presence.

If there is one thing social media should be about, it is simply to harass journalists and politicians, and these things get done by an army of anonymous Pepes and Groypers who get kicked and banned all the time just to be right back the next day. It is fun and provides great entertainment but the Right wing needs to look elsewhere to establish itself as a serious political force.

To the contrary, the measures that Google and Twitter take against right wing grifters who waste time and money on meaningless publicity stunts and the like is rather helpful to the Right wing. The more they censor us, the more it becomes clear that they are afraid of what we say, which means that their position is unstable, which in turn means that their grandiose plans are failing.

These however are concepts of revolutionary theory too complex and uncomfortable to be formatted into an under ten minute Youtube Video meant to inspire a subscription. If we are realists, we should recognize that the main contribution of the Right to social media was forcing it to self-destruct. Log off, live, and fight back in ways that count instead.

Tags: google, project veritas, social media, twitter, youtube