Amerika

Some years ago, I wrote that our problem was herd conformity to the lowest common denominator and the ability to enforce that on others through an echo chamber motivated by socializing. This notion, Crowdism, explained the uncoordinated conformity of the Left and other social decay movements.

We all want to find someone tangible that we can jail or shoot so that their removal leaves us with only the functional in our society. In reality, it works the other way: you can only lift up the good away from the bad, and drive the bad off as a whole group. There is no clear bad guy.

Instead, we have dumb ideas, and since dumb ideas are popular, people use dumb ideas as a way to increase their own popularity. It is as if the whole world were Instagram influencers, just trying to tap into what is trending and get their own share of the attention.

Social media censors the Right in part because the people running social media and their employees are Leftists, but even more because we live in a Leftist time, and therefore Leftist thought is not controversial but conservative thought is.

Even more, since Leftism is based on a conjectural messianic ideology, any alternative to it causes people to defect from the group-think, and this threatens the Left. Rightists censor their critics; Leftists censor those who are insufficiently Leftist.

For this reason, we cannot look at the problem of social media as resting with the Google, Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook cabal alone, but as a problem of our society itself. We can see this through the decision by open source software Mastodon to obstruct Gab:

Mastodon is completely opposed to Gab’s project and philosophy, which seeks to monetize and platform racist content while hiding behind the banner of free speech. Mastodon remains committed to standing up against hate speech; for example, our new server covenant means we only list servers on joinmastodon.org that are committed to active moderation against racism, sexism and transphobia. The Mastodon community does not approve of their attempt to hijack our infrastructure and has already taken steps to isolate Gab and keep hate speech off the fediverse.

Mastodon champions a free API ecosystem and as such all Mastodon apps are created and maintained by independent developers. However, Tusky (Android) and Toot! (iOS) have blacklisted Gab’s domains from their login screens. Gab users will not be able to use these apps to access or post from Gab. We do not currently know if any other apps are doing the same. Mastodon itself allows instance owners to decide which domains to block. Most servers in the fediverse are already blocking the Gab domains and we have done the same at mastodon.social.

Of course: we see the people who are “enlightened” drawing back themselves from those with dangerous ideas. The “enlightened” depend upon the idea of egalitarianism for their own popularity, and therefore, they feel that they can gain points from their audience for lashing out at the alternatives.

Keep in mind that Free Speech Extremist has been operating for some time now. Gab supports the same idea: open conversation.

It faces a problem in that when you set up a free speech space in an unfree nu-internet, you will first get the people with antisocial views. Most of the people on my Gab profile are regular Republicans dismayed at the direction of the country, but you can also find outsider thinkers if you seek them.

A sane person recognizes this and, instead of censoring the other perspectives, realizes that pluralism means that people are going to separate out into their own channels and find each other. Mastodon has simply chosen to try to get popularity points from its audience by coming down hard on a known source of the Enemy, namely Gab. They are behaving like Instagram influences in this way.

Social factors influence too much of our modern thinking. Sane people focus on reality; dying empire people focus on how to make others pay attention to them by spouting the same dogma they get anywhere else, but in new and flattering forms.

In the end, the split of the internet — like the balkanization of America and Europe — has become fact. People are seeking off-mainstream options, but instead they get social status signaling from Mastodon.

The future belongs to those who want to remake the old internet within the new. That is, they want an open space for discussion where if something is not to your taste, you move on to another area. This does not get you outrage points, but it does make you a lot saner than these nu-internet vampires.

Tags: censorship, free speech extremist, gab.com, mastodon