Twitter is doing yet another ban wave, and a lot of people are fleeing. It doesn’t help that the CEO of Twitter just quit Twitter, and left it in the hands of somebody who claims that he doesn’t support the first amendment as the baseline for speech policy on social media. While I agree there’s cause for concern, I disagree with the methods some people are using to allay those concerns. I see these methods as nothing more than counterproductive, as they fall into the same trap that the previous ones have.

But people who don’t understand the root of the issue, think it’s just as simple as switching to a different one. This kind of thinking is dangerous, because it puts all of their power in the hands of the very few and the very rich. Not just that, but it opens them up to vulnerabilities from the very structure of those new places which weren’t even in the frameworks of the previous ones which already failed. Allowing oneself to be tricked in this way is ceding all freedom of speech, and by extension, a variety of other freedoms. So I want to explain the issue, and offer alternatives.

Twitter is an incredibly toxic place with extremely bad moderation, which allows a wide variety of terrible things to happen, and then claims to censor a certain group of people or another in the name of providing a “safe platform.” It’s obviously untrue to anybody who’s paid it a cursory amount of attention, but they swear they’re doing their part to make a healthy, productive place to discuss things. How do they do that?

Well, they will delist certain people from searches, censor certain topics, stop people’s replies from showing up, shadowban them (meaning their account is still there, but people can’t see it by default), lock their account (meaning everything is hidden, and there’s a warning on the page when you look at it, and also the user can’t log in), unfollow people from certain accounts at will, force people to delete certain tweets, limit their account functionality (meaning they can’t do things like message people, like things, or retweet things), and finally outright ban them.

And it’s totally arbitrary.

Many things they claim to police when it comes to one group of people will be completely allowed when it comes to another. You just have to hope that you’re on the right side of whatever mod happens to handle your case. Sounds like a welcoming and safe environment to me.

Even more than that, they can editorialize what people are saying, and immediately sway public perception of oncoming trends by adding text to the subheading of the spot on the trending tab, which details the bias of the staff member in question. You don’t get to know that something is trending because a significant amount of people are tweeting it. You get to know it’s trending because people are doing exactly what Twitter says they’re doing. This encourages a cultural shift in that direction too, because if people read that, and assume it’s correct, they’ll join in too. This creates a sheep-like group of people who will automatically follow the lead, and they don’t need proof of anything. They won’t scroll for a significant enough period of time to figure out whether or not the person responsible for the subtext is lying to them. They’ll just assume that that’s what’s happening. Twitter can therefore successfully censor people by group consensus, which paves the way for whatever kind of censorship they want to enact using the other methods because people will assume it’s justified if they read enough subtext that led up to the decision.

So, why do they have so much power? Well, a certain group of people would like you to believe that it’s because they’re part of some cathedral, and that this shadowy cabal of leftists are subverting everything they hold dear in an attempt to turn the country socialist, or something similar to that. They believe this group of people controls academia, media, etc., and by extension, the state itself.

They believe that these social media companies are specifically and only censoring conservatives, because those conservatives are going against their leftist ideals. They are pretty much willing to do anything in order to get rid of what they perceive to be the left, and they will regularly cite this cathedral as the basis for that set of ideas. It’s another red scare, and Communists are everywhere. Right?

Well, no. In fact, every social media company, including Twitter, has banned a very similar group of people, across the political spectrum, and regularly censors basically anyone who’s willing to challenge the narratives they put forth.

And why do they put forth these narratives? Money.

If they can keep people in a lukewarm state of moderation, they can manipulate public opinion between two or more manufactured sides. Those sides will serve their center-authright agenda, pushing ever more overtly fascist by the day, while offering people fake choices which seem like alternatives to one another, but which ultimately all serve the same group of people. Those people are heavily moneyed interests, and wealthy families, with lineages and heritages that trace back millennia of rulership and domination. The state capitalism Rothbard was totally willing to admit existed relied on this very group of people in order to thrive. He accurately said:

“If we are to keep the term “capitalism” at all, then, we must distinguish between “free-market capitalism” on the one hand, and “state capitalism” on the other. The two are as different as day and night in their nature and consequences. Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government — the State — to accumulate capital for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence. Throughout history, states have existed as instruments for organized predation and exploitation. It doesn’t much matter which group of people happen to gain control of the State at any given time, whether it be oriental despots, kings, landlords, privileged merchants, army officers, or Communist parties. The result is everywhere and always the coercive mulcting of the mass of the producers — in most centuries, of course, largely the peasantry — by a ruling class of dominant rulers and their hired professional bureaucracy.”

They have decided winners and losers for hundreds of years, and they’re not about to stop now. They weren’t any more communist then than they are now, that is to say they aren’t. Any sort of leftist ideal they put on top of what they do is nothing more than window dressing. Wrapping paper. Insert other analogy designed to demonstrate superficiality and fakeness. They do this because after a long run of appealing to the previous groups of people in power, they have all the power they need, and they don’t need to cede any of it to anybody. They already have the money and the power, and they don’t need anybody else’s permission to get anything they want. They just need the consent of enough people to be cogs in their machine, which they both obtain and maintain by a way of indoctrination and fraud, so that they can continue the same course that they’ve been doing since time immemorial.

That is, the enrichment of the powers that should not be at the expense of the working class. That’s you, probably.

So yeah, they’ll put pride flags on drone bombs, as Media Monarchy puts it, and they’ll make rainbow corporate logos for whatever occasion suits them, or commemorate some figure with a special emoji, or even a Google Doodle, but this is all designed to paper over the extreme death grip they have on information, culture, and society, as well as the amount of wealth they continue to extract from all of that. Facebook was originally funded largely by the CIA and intelligence linked people, and now operates as one of the single greatest intelligence databases in the world; that Google Doodle is on a website which was funded by quite the same people, and which now directly does business with them in a variety of ways. Article on that coming at some point soon

They use these unholy and incestuous partnerships to make sure all information is funneled to them to be either useful for intelligence gathering purposes, in order to gauge public sentiment and make sure people are still in line, or just to know your whereabouts and your ideas in case they ever need to make a one a zero. And they do it all because people let them. And because it makes them a ton of money to have a new customer base. So it’s still all about money, and amassing power via the use of the state in order to get ever greater amounts of money, and also power. Power over the common person.

This matches the definition of state capitalism. It’s anything but leftist, and certainly not communism, or even attempted communism.

Finally, they have the actual power because people keep giving it to them. It has been frequently said that when somebody uses a free service they are the product. By using that product, they give it what it needs to grow and get more power and money. They become the things sold to people. In this case, advertisers and state agencies directly, which means that anybody who goes significantly against the state capitalist regime will be censored, generally in a group significantly large enough that no single thread of consistency can be garnered from analysis of said group. It’s sort of like cryptocurrency smuggling, where you shuffle the money that you want to hide through the blockchain at the same time as a bunch of other transactions, meaning yours is hidden in the mass. Only this time, they claim their banning a bunch of people for a given reason, that they have used their machine of media and statism to highlight as the enemy for a significant period of time, so that when they do that, it will seem justified, no matter whether or not certain individuals they added to that group actually qualify as that group to begin with.

Nobody’s going to listen who doesn’t already care about that group, when somebody says they were falsely targeted. And nobody in that group will acknowledge that it’s anything other than targeted persecution, so they’ll reject people in the same boat as them and accuse them of belonging to the other manufactured “side.”

So why does all of this matter?

Well, I’ve seen a disturbing push from people who allegedly oppose the state falling into the trap yet again – the trap of centralized social media with highly controlled terms of service which can and will censor them at the drop of a hat, should their narrative need to be protected. Just like anybody else. It happened with Gab, it happened with Parler, and it will happen with Gettr.

But a lot of libertarians are so bought into this narrative that the left is somehow responsible for all social ills, and the fact that their coffee got a little cold a little too quickly that one morning, that they will be herded into these culture control machines like the cattle they accuse other people of being. These platforms are just as centralized, and because they’re run by conservatives, every single one of them has more restrictive posting guidelines than Twitter does. Absurd things like requiring a government ID to direct message people on Parler (a thing run by an ex secret service guy), not posting anything too lewd or too radical on alleged “Free Speech™” site, Gab, and not making fun of Gettr once you sign up…these all get to get ignored because the platforms aren’t run by leftists. And that matters to whether or not you can have free speech or something.

I mean, it doesn’t. Clearly. And if you look into any of these sites, they still ban a wide variety of people for a wide variety of frivolous reasons, but don’t let that stop you from jacking off about how free your speech is because you don’t have to talk to as many democrats. I’m sure it’s much easier to pretend like you’re the only group that matters.

And even worse, is that while all this happens, and people are herded into these even further right wing centralized social media cattle chutes, they get to act as though they’re making some sort of grand choice that requires political participation in order to rectify, which means they don’t ever have to do any self-reflection, and realize that maybe the Democrats aren’t much different to the Republicans in practice. Maybe they have these stupid manufactured “Debates™” where they act like they really disagree with each other, but in the end run of it, Biden is pretty much exactly like Trump. And it’s pretty much exactly like that down line.

Every political term is going to increase the power of the state, a little bit. The net size of government will never decrease, and the amount of tyranny they can inflict on people will never dramatically drop as long as we have a state, and being on these platforms where it seems like right wing ideas are a threat, when in fact they’re stronger than ever, just camouflaged, will discourage these people from seeking any dramatic change when right-wing power is in power, and turn them into blind puppets for the far right when Democrats are in power, as though those Democrats are going to be remarkably different to their previous Republican counterparts.

It isolates the idea of patriarchy in their minds as a solution to Liberty, as though you can use the state to shrink the size of the state to any effect at all. It’s laughable and absurd, but it still works, because when you’re stuck in an echo chamber, all you hear are the same voices. They get to ignore the long history of failures of right-wing governments to shrink the size of the state, and ignore the propaganda they used to increase the size of the state, most notably in order to oppose communism. They’re upset that there’s a deep state now, but only now that it seems to be targeting them. Ignore the fact that a large amount of the elements of the deep state were initially created to oppose the left, and communism specifically.

Let’s claim that the deep state is some sort of leftist conspiracy! That makes sense. And then they get to flood into groups like the “GOP Mises Caucus”, which is a splinter group that broke off from the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus, but Republican instead of LP. Because it worked out so well the last hundred times. Article about that soon.

The point is that centralization is the enemy of freedom, and ultimately, you’re not going to find any more freedom in one centralized platform than you will another, and they will eventually all homogenize into very similar results, which is your slow erosion of liberty in the name of preserving conservative ideals, or liberalism, or some other political group which is inoffensive and profitable to the elites.

And there are so many blockchain-based social media alternatives, which keep your information preserved permanently, and don’t have a bias for one political group or another. Those places are the places people should flock to if they truly want freedom, but when I bring up the one that I promote the most, I constantly get the impression that people haven’t even heard of it. And then when I tell people to sign up for Odysee, and verify their email, so they can support me and my content simply by watching it, that normally gets no action. Meanwhile, people are still complaining about being censored on YouTube.

Funny. I don’t remember indolence ever solving anything.

There are places of much greater freedom of speech, and I want people to get on those, because they’re the real future of free speech. Decentralization is the first step, not an optional side quest, and that’s why so many people can’t even break out of the tutorial of not going to a platform simply because prominent conservatives jacked off about it.

Like…you – yeah, you. Yeah, it trended on Twitter. That should be all the information you need to know that it’s not an actual solution; that it’s nothing more than a diversion tactic designed to put you in the place they want you to be. You were with me not long ago when I was saying that Twitter tightly controls what trends on their site, and how it’s editorialized, right? So why would they essentially help promote an app that would truly destroy their brand, and subvert their model? Answer is, they wouldn’t.

They’re just happy that so many people are walking away from their place and going somewhere else as though that makes them freer, so that everybody’s information can be siloed on multiple platforms which don’t communicate with one another, and so that the culture war divide can be continued and reified, for the continued profit and power of those who should never make another cent.

Everybody gets to keep doing business as usual, and refining their models for even greater information control, information which, by the way, even on these alleged alternatives, will be used by the state; and the fact that there are new people joining the game, whether it be Torba, Bongina (he hates being called that BTW), or Team Trump, just means that they’ll have an easier time keeping people off their platform when they’re kicked. And these other platforms are tiny by comparison, which means most people will miss out on your truth message if that’s indeed what you spread if you only post it on these alternative sites.

Great. If you are right about there being some sort of leftist agenda, you’ve just helped them get more customers by giving up. Gold star. You did it. And the worst part is, you can get banned from those places, but I get it… that doesn’t matter, because whatever group you go with, they would never do that to you, right?

Aaand, you’re banned.