The corruption Musk is exposing at Twitter makes it seem more obvious in retrospect that the Internet would become an instrument of totalitarianism, much more than it would be a bold new frontier for free speech. The idealism of the early Information Age was so sadly mistaken.
https://twitter.com/TheMattBeebe/status/1601731247977693184
The idealistic vision of Internet freedom came closest to reality during the golden age of the blog, which only lasted a decade or so. Bloggers built their own networks and found their own audiences. It was difficult to silence them. They made history a few times.
Blogging was supplanted by social media, which allowed totalitarian ideologies and political corruption to flourish because they created choke points that could be controlled by a few massive corporations and their politicized staffers.
Instead of bloggers setting up their own websites, linking to each other, and building their own traffic networks, now we had a handful of platforms that provided the ILLUSION of free speech, and it seemed to be easier than blogging - but as Musk is showing us, it was a lie.
What we got was free speech and networking for SOME, based on their political affinity with the gatekeepers, while others were overtly or secretly banned, throttled, and suppressed. Shadowbanning is the signature move of the new totalitarianism, invisible to its targets.
The illusion of free speech is the worst of all possible worlds, similar to the illusion of "democracy" staged by many authoritarian regimes. The people THINK anyone can speak out and find an audience, there is a robust competition of ideas, an untamed democracy of discourse...
... but in truth, it's just another totalitarian scam, with arrogant speech police secretly rigging the field to boost their preferred ideologies and suppress dissent. False popularity and phony "consensus" is manufactured to enforce ideological conformity.
Bloggers in their golden age were fascinated by the concept of a "preference cascade," when large numbers of dissidents discover their low opinion of the ruling regime is much more popular than they thought. Dissidents were made to feel isolated but in truth they are legion.
Social media turned out to be a great weapon for THWARTING preference cascades, whereas blogging had enabled them. Musk's revelations show how corrupt social media censors manipulate platforms to make dissidents feel more isolated while making regime ideology seem inescapable.
Early in the information revolution we hoped the Internet would make journalism better, and maybe for a little while in the Blogging Era it did - there was much talk about the rise of the citizen journalist, the stories bloggers were able to push past corrupt media embargoes.
But social media made journalism WORSE, by enabling more journalistic groupthink, allowing lazy reporters to build stories out of a few tweets, signal-boosting ideologically approved stories, and throttling exposure for stories the regime doesn't like - such as Hunter's laptop.
The idealistic early vision of the information revolution underestimated how easy it would be for a few corporations to capture the choke points of discourse, and how easily those corporations would be captured by totalitarian ideology. Obvious in retrospect.
The enemies of free speech hated blogging, especially after the 2004 election. They made a plan to recapture control of discourse and restore "gatekeeper" status over information, and executed it with ruthless efficiency. Musk is showing us the after-action report. /end
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