Hit the like button at the top of the page to like this entry. Use the share or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
I put this together quickly this evening as I was inspired by the taxonomy in Racket News. They did a great job.
For those reading along to the Colour Revolutions and Regime Change series, you're gonna see a lot of familiar faces.
TL:DR: the censors have figured out that outsourcing the job to the tech companies not only insulates censorship from pesky civil rights suits, it also protects the censorship function from unwanted election results.
This is somewhat how Sheriff Buford was The Law in the Jim Crow Era South when it came to arresting civil rights protesters on the flimsiest of pretexts, but at the same time, just a private citizen exercising his fundamental rights when it came to attending KKK meetings.
May 10, 2023·edited May 10, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
One thing I really wish we had was a forensic accountant or something who looked into this. Anyone who can find a money trail. I genuinely feel like it's a Tony Soprano thing where he helps you out in the beginning then asks for a large favor in return. In this case, it was the government or people associated with it giving money, capital, and connections among other things to these big tech companies at their start
I don't buy that this web2 experience which everyone hates emerged organically.
A wonderful roundup of excellent pieces. A serious effort by serious journalists to penetrate power and the fog of us mere mortals trying to enjoy our lives.
Fairly sure that all societies require censorship and had censorship. The "freedom&liberty" libertarian focus of the US is largely only in the imagination of some of its citizens, but it does have a source, the exploration of the continent by men far better and more courageous than we are, before they established government and institutions.
But once the state is established, order must be made out of chaos and anarchy, so I see nothing exceptional in various censorship practices, the only discussion worth having IMO is what should be censored, by whom, how and why.
People like Glenn and Mate have a autistic dedication to shitting on whatever the US does, specifically in the foreign relations realm. Can add Blumenthal, of course. Needless to say I am highly suspicious of them, for highly obvious reasons, just as I am highly suspicious of the US and its own apparatus.
I wouldn't expect fairness, nor freedom, nor liberty, just power games.
Man, those early days of the internet about 99/2000 were great. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for the past but being into PC gaming around the time was absolutely a golden age. Sure, connections were shit, frame rates dropped, poly counts were pathetic and texture resolution was counted in less than 300x300 pixel tiles but when the internet was "just for geeks" it was much better than the crazy authoritarian bullshit installed when normies discovered "social" media. Now everyone's losing their damn minds and everything is cynical.
May 11, 2023·edited May 11, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
The bulshit is mostly in the Anglosphere and in China - most other parts of the internet are largely uncensored because there's limited capacity to finance and implement the censorship. In my opinion the cultural divide will only grow because of this - this is already happening in Europe for example, where in most countries there is a growing and obvious cultural divide between news translated and posted from Reuters or AP from English in the local press, and genuine local news.
This has been an ethernal problem with empires - how to culturally absorb the periphery. In our times, despite having many satellites that ease news broadcasting and costs of distribution of English language news, the US simply has no capacity to brainwash everyone in their local language. The anarchy is well alive in the WWW if you know any other language than English (or Chinese). Even India and Africa, the obvious targets of Anglosaxon cultural absorbtion (and hence the western divresity politics and education of their elites for the spread of English language and culture) have largely been unaffected because the locals read the local news that have nothing to do with the agenda in Washington. The divide is growing and is causing hate - nowadays most Indians and Turks for example have a better opinion of Russia than the US despite formally leaning to the West.
If I was a western spook agency and wanted to expand the western domination in the long run, I would focus not only on diversity at home (which doens't work well because of different population psychometrics driven mostly by DNA) and on pushing big foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie etc) to pay the periphery editors money to push western propaganda, but instead would pour money into language studies at home. This way the US will able to send missionaries that are effective and create own cadres that can communicate and rule over the periphery, like the East India company was doing when it was actually effective at the start. It's hard to make an American learn Lithuanian or Marathi for example, but it will certainly pay in the long run as those people will be able to mix with the foreign elites and influence them to a greater extent than translated news. See Lawrence of Arabia
for example. So, to end up this rant, I think the US censorship state should focus on languages, if it wants to be more effective for its long term goals, otherwise there seems to be a high chance of failing them.
Re Total Information America, I remember when I started piecing together just how bad all the online surveilance was. Got really paranoid about online privacy for a while, until I realized that the only way to actually prevent online surveilance is to become a total luddite. The way I see it, who needs Big Brother when you have Uncle Sam? If Uncle Sam wants to spy on you, Uncle Sam’s going to spy on you, and there really is not much anyone can do to stop him
[if you are going to frenchify you might as well google it and grab the accents]
in the background --> behind the stage
[to keep the metaphor going; the background is a different part of a stage]
to pierce through -->
to pierce
OR
to punch through
both Trump and Sanders in 2016
[& Brexit, Italy, Spain and various other populist surges]
also decimated their shared monopoly on --> also interrupted their shared consensual monopsony (a hundred variants of the same ideas...)
newly-crafted narratives that were to be deployed, and --> newly-crafted narratives
[deployment is basically already in the idea, or if you have to say it-]
newly-crafted narratives for deployment with as little resistance as possible from critics, and maximum public acceptance
fervour --> fervor
that of taking on the CIC --> take on the CIC via a first step of making public its existence
TERF --> a TERF
aside by monetization
[I'd add 'aside by monetization and by technologized corralling' to cover stuff like microsoft's browser wars, HTML bloatification standards, financial transaction security, anti-hacking measures etc etc, that mean a webpage and its browser and the OS to run that browser is far more complicated than the mostly-text thing of 1999...]
informed as best as possible --> informed as well as possible
[adverb indeed required but the correlative as..as makes using the superlative redundant]
one-party dictatorship China --> China's one-party dictatorship
Well, yes, given that you've chosen that substack name with that past participle that will get your stuff insta-blocked in e.g. municipal libraries, and will eventually allow the MSM to have a fit of the vapours when setting you up to be its Trumpian/fascist/far-right etc monster of the day when they notice you someday, you obviously have some capacity to buffer unrealised gains, or trade those off against your own goals and satisfactions...
It’s amazing to me how going through your day and all the pedestrian people you see reveals none of the explosive outward consequences of their internal thought outlined in this and the Racket News piece. Everyone is so banal and tending to regular life duties, but their outputs can be civilizational dynamite. The evidence of cognitive plutonium may only be revealed after a drink over a dinner table, or a presumptive comment during an otherwise normal interaction.
I just think it’s so weird that you’d have no idea there’s an existential war going on in America if you unplugged and just went through your hours getting your stuff done.
The basic bitch substitution game in the quoted Facebook announcement works as good as ever: replace "Atlantic Council" with whatever Chinese state agency you can come up with, and it's just as Orwellian.
But it is so tiresome, just as writing down "Orwellian".
I had some fun last year writing an article identifying professional fact checkers as the same class of people who always rush to wear an armband if it's issued by the hard power to keep the masses under control. No innovations came to my mind since on this topic.
Hit the like button at the top of the page to like this entry. Use the share or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
I put this together quickly this evening as I was inspired by the taxonomy in Racket News. They did a great job.
For those reading along to the Colour Revolutions and Regime Change series, you're gonna see a lot of familiar faces.
TL:DR: the censors have figured out that outsourcing the job to the tech companies not only insulates censorship from pesky civil rights suits, it also protects the censorship function from unwanted election results.
This is somewhat how Sheriff Buford was The Law in the Jim Crow Era South when it came to arresting civil rights protesters on the flimsiest of pretexts, but at the same time, just a private citizen exercising his fundamental rights when it came to attending KKK meetings.
Sigh
One thing I really wish we had was a forensic accountant or something who looked into this. Anyone who can find a money trail. I genuinely feel like it's a Tony Soprano thing where he helps you out in the beginning then asks for a large favor in return. In this case, it was the government or people associated with it giving money, capital, and connections among other things to these big tech companies at their start
I don't buy that this web2 experience which everyone hates emerged organically.
A wonderful roundup of excellent pieces. A serious effort by serious journalists to penetrate power and the fog of us mere mortals trying to enjoy our lives.
Fairly sure that all societies require censorship and had censorship. The "freedom&liberty" libertarian focus of the US is largely only in the imagination of some of its citizens, but it does have a source, the exploration of the continent by men far better and more courageous than we are, before they established government and institutions.
But once the state is established, order must be made out of chaos and anarchy, so I see nothing exceptional in various censorship practices, the only discussion worth having IMO is what should be censored, by whom, how and why.
People like Glenn and Mate have a autistic dedication to shitting on whatever the US does, specifically in the foreign relations realm. Can add Blumenthal, of course. Needless to say I am highly suspicious of them, for highly obvious reasons, just as I am highly suspicious of the US and its own apparatus.
I wouldn't expect fairness, nor freedom, nor liberty, just power games.
Man, those early days of the internet about 99/2000 were great. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for the past but being into PC gaming around the time was absolutely a golden age. Sure, connections were shit, frame rates dropped, poly counts were pathetic and texture resolution was counted in less than 300x300 pixel tiles but when the internet was "just for geeks" it was much better than the crazy authoritarian bullshit installed when normies discovered "social" media. Now everyone's losing their damn minds and everything is cynical.
Imagine how much effort would've been required if more than 10% of the population were capable of thinking for themselves.
Very helpful post I will need to return to!
I'm thankful every time I read their breaking news for the work Taibbi and Fang do on all of our behalf.
The bulshit is mostly in the Anglosphere and in China - most other parts of the internet are largely uncensored because there's limited capacity to finance and implement the censorship. In my opinion the cultural divide will only grow because of this - this is already happening in Europe for example, where in most countries there is a growing and obvious cultural divide between news translated and posted from Reuters or AP from English in the local press, and genuine local news.
This has been an ethernal problem with empires - how to culturally absorb the periphery. In our times, despite having many satellites that ease news broadcasting and costs of distribution of English language news, the US simply has no capacity to brainwash everyone in their local language. The anarchy is well alive in the WWW if you know any other language than English (or Chinese). Even India and Africa, the obvious targets of Anglosaxon cultural absorbtion (and hence the western divresity politics and education of their elites for the spread of English language and culture) have largely been unaffected because the locals read the local news that have nothing to do with the agenda in Washington. The divide is growing and is causing hate - nowadays most Indians and Turks for example have a better opinion of Russia than the US despite formally leaning to the West.
If I was a western spook agency and wanted to expand the western domination in the long run, I would focus not only on diversity at home (which doens't work well because of different population psychometrics driven mostly by DNA) and on pushing big foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie etc) to pay the periphery editors money to push western propaganda, but instead would pour money into language studies at home. This way the US will able to send missionaries that are effective and create own cadres that can communicate and rule over the periphery, like the East India company was doing when it was actually effective at the start. It's hard to make an American learn Lithuanian or Marathi for example, but it will certainly pay in the long run as those people will be able to mix with the foreign elites and influence them to a greater extent than translated news. See Lawrence of Arabia
for example. So, to end up this rant, I think the US censorship state should focus on languages, if it wants to be more effective for its long term goals, otherwise there seems to be a high chance of failing them.
Re Total Information America, I remember when I started piecing together just how bad all the online surveilance was. Got really paranoid about online privacy for a while, until I realized that the only way to actually prevent online surveilance is to become a total luddite. The way I see it, who needs Big Brother when you have Uncle Sam? If Uncle Sam wants to spy on you, Uncle Sam’s going to spy on you, and there really is not much anyone can do to stop him
University One --> University. One
ancien régime
[if you are going to frenchify you might as well google it and grab the accents]
in the background --> behind the stage
[to keep the metaphor going; the background is a different part of a stage]
to pierce through -->
to pierce
OR
to punch through
both Trump and Sanders in 2016
[& Brexit, Italy, Spain and various other populist surges]
also decimated their shared monopoly on --> also interrupted their shared consensual monopsony (a hundred variants of the same ideas...)
newly-crafted narratives that were to be deployed, and --> newly-crafted narratives
[deployment is basically already in the idea, or if you have to say it-]
newly-crafted narratives for deployment with as little resistance as possible from critics, and maximum public acceptance
fervour --> fervor
that of taking on the CIC --> take on the CIC via a first step of making public its existence
TERF --> a TERF
aside by monetization
[I'd add 'aside by monetization and by technologized corralling' to cover stuff like microsoft's browser wars, HTML bloatification standards, financial transaction security, anti-hacking measures etc etc, that mean a webpage and its browser and the OS to run that browser is far more complicated than the mostly-text thing of 1999...]
informed as best as possible --> informed as well as possible
[adverb indeed required but the correlative as..as makes using the superlative redundant]
one-party dictatorship China --> China's one-party dictatorship
than that in the USA --> than it will in the USA
OR [better]
than in the USA
2 others:
Favored not ou
fervour --> fervor
Well, yes, given that you've chosen that substack name with that past participle that will get your stuff insta-blocked in e.g. municipal libraries, and will eventually allow the MSM to have a fit of the vapours when setting you up to be its Trumpian/fascist/far-right etc monster of the day when they notice you someday, you obviously have some capacity to buffer unrealised gains, or trade those off against your own goals and satisfactions...
It’s amazing to me how going through your day and all the pedestrian people you see reveals none of the explosive outward consequences of their internal thought outlined in this and the Racket News piece. Everyone is so banal and tending to regular life duties, but their outputs can be civilizational dynamite. The evidence of cognitive plutonium may only be revealed after a drink over a dinner table, or a presumptive comment during an otherwise normal interaction.
I just think it’s so weird that you’d have no idea there’s an existential war going on in America if you unplugged and just went through your hours getting your stuff done.
The basic bitch substitution game in the quoted Facebook announcement works as good as ever: replace "Atlantic Council" with whatever Chinese state agency you can come up with, and it's just as Orwellian.
But it is so tiresome, just as writing down "Orwellian".
I had some fun last year writing an article identifying professional fact checkers as the same class of people who always rush to wear an armband if it's issued by the hard power to keep the masses under control. No innovations came to my mind since on this topic.
It's all so tiresome.