Twitter has informed me that I have now been on twitter ten years. How time flies.
At first I was reluctant to even try twitter. I had gone onto Facebook, did not like it, and had a terrible time cancelling my account. A friend of mine had been stalked and harassed on Facebook by one of the political stalker and harasser networks which were still common in Toronto at the time, and Facebook did nothing.
A netpal I was regularly corresponding with by e-mail, who I knew through Basic income discussions of that time, urged me to join Twitter. I was reluctant. My first followers seemed to be gay hookers looking for business, oh dear!
However, I soon caught onto it. It was, and still is, the best news feed on the net. I soon ended a web subdomain I had operated for some years, in which I put up links to interesting articles I had uncovered in my searches, replacing it with a link to my twitter feed.
The lady who initiated me into twitterhood lives in British Columbia. I have met her in person only once, at the Basic Income conference in Montreal in 2014. We are still interested in basic Income and communicate regularly by twitter, though she has also become fairly jaded by it.
During those times I tried blogging but gave up on that. I did not like the kind of platforms which were available. I had no idea if anyone was actually reading my stuff.
Recently I have taken it up again. Some platforms are available that just let me put up content, and not bother with technical problems. They let me see if people are actually reading me.
This is an issue. I have put my stuff up on several platforms at the same time and noticed a great disparity. Also, I often do not trust the metrics I am being given.
I do not get a lot of readers because, as I have often admitted, I tend to tell people what they do not want to hear, not what they would like to hear. I will keep doing that. But I am annoyed at this disparity in the numbers of readers I get on different platforms.
It is because of this I am making Substack my main platform. Wordpress is becoming my filing system. I have given up on Medium. There is a shortage of other options.
Many people are also complaining about this shortage of good ways of getting their message out. Twitter used to be a great way of announcing things. Platforms like Reddit and Mastadon are too compartmentalized to be any good for that purpose.
The problem of “algorithms” is well noted in the netiverse but no one has any idea of what to do about it. Many activists I follow complain about “shadow banning” and the throttling of their traffic. They lose hundreds of followers at a time for no reason.
For myself, I wonder why my twitter followership has been stuck at around eighty to one hundred since soon after I joined Twitter. Often about a dozen of my devoted flock will forsake me overnight. I often review these followers, zap those who do not seem to be real people, and download the rest.
As for creating alternatives platforms on the net, discussions on the subject often turn around censorship. All these people want a platform free of all censorship. I love censorship and I will tell you why.
Substack recently put up an article about censorship. The writers see censorship as a problem of a lack of trust in present day society. They regard themselves as being very liberal.
As liberals they cannot see that the problem of lack of trust in institutions is due to untrustworthy institutions. It would no doubt thoroughly discombobulate them were I able to tell them they could themselves be considered an untrustworthy institution because of their stance on censorship. They become a platform for untrustworthy people.
Their argument against censoring by reading everything being published or anything which gets complained about, is that it will inevitably corrupt the censors who will have to read all the garbage. Of course anyone with the job of censoring things that way would go crazy after awhile. But then there is the right way to censor, from the right understanding of the use of censorship.
Explaining this would even further discombobulate those with a liberal frame of mind. Such people lack a concept of objective reality. There is a right and a wrong and wrong inevitably does harm.
Thus censorship of media is required. This doesn’t mean reading every piece of work that comes out; that is ridiculous. It means allowing or disallowing a source according to the nature and aims of the source.
If a source provides creditable information, it is not to be censored. If it is a blowhole for propaganda and perception management, of course it is not to be allowed. This requires a censoring authority which actually knows the difference.
This is where Substack and some other earnest but incompetent media organizations fail. They do not have the necessary right understanding of reality. They are locked into liberal or libertarian ideas involving freedom of thought or of speech.
They buy into these concepts because they have no real ideas. They do not understand that ideas have consequences; bad ideas have bad ones. People with bad ideas are generally not talked out of them by reason or facts.
Thus, the need of any stable society for censorship backed by serious legal sanctions. But there is no way of applying that at present. We do not presently have effective governments which can protect the public’s interest.
We have governments which are strongly influenced by malign interests. Such interests prosper in an environment of no censorship; a tower of babel in which sense is drowned out by nonsense. Or, where they are able to impose their own forms of censorship.
Often they can censor merely by paying trolls to intimidate and shout down what they do not want. They can develop quasi official forms of censorship, such as is being deployed more frequently on platforms like Twitter. They usually do not need outright state censorship.
This is how the earnest platforms who want not to be censors fail; Substack, Vimeo, and even Panquake if it gets itself to take off point. In allowing everything to be heard, they cause sense to be drowned out by nonsense, all discussion drowned in a white noise. The truth is that no public discussion is possible without some way of directly censoring the indirect censorship of malign influencers.
By the way, I came by this conviction when I was the moderator of several discussion groups. This was in the early days of the net, when e-mail discussion groups were popular. I found that if I just let the discussion run, the quality of it invariably declined over time.
I have this funny idea that the object of a dialogue is to come to a decision. I found that people had trouble defining the question adequately and ended up going in circles, with some people trying to turn it into a debate and then get ever more shrill as they tried to ‘win’ the debate. I irritated many people when I pulled the plug on these discussions.
So from this we may ask; is Substack useless? Is Twitter useless? Is Panquake destined to be useless? Are they or wil they be mere vectors for indirect censorship? Substack is and Panquake will be, but they will still be better than quasi official censorship as with Twitter.
We are in a time of rising authoritarianism as the old power structures feel themselves losing control and lash out in desperation. This might lead to a true dystopia; for awhile. We must hope it finally ends with a good government in the best interests of the public.
Such government would give us the communications vectors we really need; where there is no censorship of content but a censorship of intentions. Until then, what we need most of all are platforms in which to discuss how to get from here to there.
On Twitter, it seems to be getting risky to talk seriously about the R word. It does seem possible to talk freely about overthrowing the government of one’s country on Substack. I am sure we will be able to fantasize on Panquake about storming the palace.
Unfortunately, Substack people, we live in exciting times. Only new ways of running things will solve the ‘trust’ problem you have defined. Vectors such as you and Panquake and Vimeo are useful for actually getting out the ideas which will be needed to create and run a post capitalist society.
I am not a yahoo revolutionary or a fossilized Marxist theorist. I do think we must have a clear idea of what we are going to replace the present collapsing order with. To reiterate, we need a way of communicating these ideas.
These three vectors seem like the kind of holy trinity which will enable us to get these ideas out. Most importantly they should give us some breathing space against the indirect troll censors. Of course once we have achieved a real democracy and a new order, these vectors will likely outlive their usefulness.
I do not believe Twitter will ever perform this function. Nothing based on advertising and data licensing will be able to. We will need vectors based on paid subscriptions, but even those can be subject to pressure from governmental actors.
So, I do not think my ten year relationship with Twitter will last much longer. One of these days somebody at Twitter is going to decide I am too radical and kick me off. Or, a suitable alternative will emerge and I will go there.
A final topic to cover here is what a post capitalist internet will look like. Readers will have already gathered that I favour a fairly strict form of censorship, based on intent, not content. Freedom of speech really has nothing to do with democracy; it is a liberal idea, meaning an idea from oligarchy.
I think most people reading this will be fairly puzzled by that last statement. However, it is a topic for a whole blog post in itself, or several. For now I will leave it with this salient point; that all western countries are oligarchies, not democracies.
In a real democracy, the internet would be a public utility. That means, one single service provider. Many platforms on the net are natural monopolies and so would have to be public utilities as well.
There could be privately owned and run platforms on the net. They would have to be licensed and approved. Nobody should be able to just throw out anything they want.
Many of these platforms carry out very specific functions and for them to work, everyone interested would have to be on them. I do not see how having two or more Twitters, Googles, or Facebooks would work.
Twitter is for announcing things. I do not think Facebook serves any purpose at all. All these other search engines depend on Google.
Maybe when we have the net set up this way, we can have what I think has always been missing from the net. That is, a way for everybody to have their own personal web site that sits on their own computer, not in a server. This would be like your own personal browser, e-mailer, and web page all in one.
Something like that would end most of the abuses of the net. Advertising, spam, and malware would have no space in which to work. Nothing could interfere with your personal communications.
So, Twitter, we’ve been together for ten years. I believe I am now in an abusive relationship with you. I want a divorce but I have no way to escape yet.
I got about 3 profiled banned permanently, mostly over stuff I said about Biden, which are as true today as they were back then.