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a cat’s tale: how getting cancelled by twitter made me more optimistic than ever about free speech.
once upon a time, on an internet not so very far away, there was a cat who met a bluebird. the cat had opinions and ideas. the bluebird had a forum and a promise to “stand for freedom, empower dialogue, and speak the truth to power.” the cat believed the bluebird and set about joining this community. he made many friends and had many adventures. by and by, the cat grew to some small prominence and was friend to pundits and politicians, researchers and soul searchers, nobel laurates and nattering noobs. but twitter was not an honest bird and one day, without excuse or apologia the abusive avian banished the cat from all the realm. many others who failed to suit the narrative of the bullying bluebird were treated likewise. and so began the madness of king jack…
a good fairy tale has a moral and the moral of this sad and all too common parable is this: it is easy to become that which you purport to hate. those who conquer kingdoms by “speaking the truth to power” are, once enthroned, often those least likely to allow truth to be spoken to (or even nearby to) them. after all, who better to understand the dangers posed to rulers by such truths than those who just used them to supplant the sovereign before? put a shiny hat upon a man’s head and watch as he becomes the very king he once condemned: from @jack to @JackBoots in one business cycle. it’s just human nature. you cannot fix it. you cannot get smarter or more noble guys next time. there is nothing new under the sun.
how we respond to this new king and his transformation into the keeper of the very system he once knew to be the problem is going to matter greatly. many conservatives and even self-described libertarians are now calling for government intervention to ensure 1st amendment style access to this modern version of the public square and to eliminate censorship of viewpoints within it. this has greatly intensified after what happened to parler, a competing service to twitter who was gang-tackled off the internet through a savage collusion of apple, google, amazon, and others. they barred them from ap stores, kicked them off the AWS servers with one day of notice, and demanded that service providers from email services to lawyers drop them or get blacklisted. it was a concerted attack to prevent political and personal expression and keep “the conversation” within the confines of spaces the reigning technocracy can moderate and shape. the recent “cancelling of australia” by facebook over a spat about payments to media sites is likely to blow this issue into the stratosphere.
(con't)
once upon a time, on an internet not so very far away, there was a cat who met a bluebird. the cat had opinions and ideas. the bluebird had a forum and a promise to “stand for freedom, empower dialogue, and speak the truth to power.” the cat believed the bluebird and set about joining this community. he made many friends and had many adventures. by and by, the cat grew to some small prominence and was friend to pundits and politicians, researchers and soul searchers, nobel laurates and nattering noobs. but twitter was not an honest bird and one day, without excuse or apologia the abusive avian banished the cat from all the realm. many others who failed to suit the narrative of the bullying bluebird were treated likewise. and so began the madness of king jack…
a good fairy tale has a moral and the moral of this sad and all too common parable is this: it is easy to become that which you purport to hate. those who conquer kingdoms by “speaking the truth to power” are, once enthroned, often those least likely to allow truth to be spoken to (or even nearby to) them. after all, who better to understand the dangers posed to rulers by such truths than those who just used them to supplant the sovereign before? put a shiny hat upon a man’s head and watch as he becomes the very king he once condemned: from @jack to @JackBoots in one business cycle. it’s just human nature. you cannot fix it. you cannot get smarter or more noble guys next time. there is nothing new under the sun.
how we respond to this new king and his transformation into the keeper of the very system he once knew to be the problem is going to matter greatly. many conservatives and even self-described libertarians are now calling for government intervention to ensure 1st amendment style access to this modern version of the public square and to eliminate censorship of viewpoints within it. this has greatly intensified after what happened to parler, a competing service to twitter who was gang-tackled off the internet through a savage collusion of apple, google, amazon, and others. they barred them from ap stores, kicked them off the AWS servers with one day of notice, and demanded that service providers from email services to lawyers drop them or get blacklisted. it was a concerted attack to prevent political and personal expression and keep “the conversation” within the confines of spaces the reigning technocracy can moderate and shape. the recent “cancelling of australia” by facebook over a spat about payments to media sites is likely to blow this issue into the stratosphere.
(con't)
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