Friday, July 12, 2019

Is Internet Censorship Really about Ideology? Or just money?

I think Styx may be right. This may be more about the money than it is about political opinion.

Going by my own experience, I remember how liberating it was when I first connected to the web and specifically, the realization that the print and broadcast media could no longer control the flow of information.

Within weeks of first accessing the web using my 2400 baud modem and the Lynx browser, I started learning HTML and writing my (formerly) letters to the editor directly to the web. My Hamilton-Wentworth Freenet account, as I remember it, came with about 1 Mb of web storage space. I no longer had to pray that some "editor," I.E. corporate censor, would condescend to allow my humble freedom of speech to be actualized by (actually) being published.

And millions of other people had the same idea. A new age of info-freedom was born. What a great ride it has been for a quarter of a century. Freedom!

But as with all good things, it was not to last.

The legacy media began to suffer. They were going the way of the buggy whip. I imagine that for the next twenty-five years legacy media executives were frantically scratching their heads wondering how the hell they were going to put this genie back in the bottle and retain their former privileges as the gatekeepers to the flow of information and opinion. And thus, the flow of the dollars. Or maybe not.

Enter Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and others whose stunning success created exactly the information chokepoint corporate media could exploit to re-establish its dominance. Whether this was a brilliant pre-planned Pied Piper strategy from the start is something I don't know, but once these entities were firmly entrenched the path forward for media cartels became stunningly clear. For them, it was a wish come true.

These last couple of years have not been happy ones for those of us in the laissez-faire capitalism camp. It starts to look like the Marxists were right all along. The problem, as they like to drone on and on about capitalism, is that it always tends toward monopoly and it certainly looks like this is what has happened in the info-market.

But let's not rush to judgment. Until these concentrated media powers succeed in capturing sleazy politicians, like the Trudeau Liberals, (notice I refrained from the use of expletives here) to employ government power to prohibit and otherwise squeeze out competitors, this story isn't quite over yet. There are still other platforms available, like BitChute and Gab for us info-refugees to emigrate to and establish new settlements.

And when they get conquered and taken over by the capitalist media imperialists, we shall have to colonize some other area of cyberspace. And, unlike landmass, cyberspace is virtually infinite.

It won't be easy but I, for one, have no intention of withdrawing from this fight.

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Update: July 15, 2019

Matt Drudge's 'Future' Is Now Realized, And That Has Legacy Media Enraged.

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THE TRUMP SOCIAL MEDIA SUMMIT HAS THE LEGACY MEDIA SCRAMBLING

https://www.bitchute.com/video/RXsqKRSQRsQ/

Even the leftt are feeling it.

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REBEL EFFECT: THEY'RE WAKING UP TO CANADIAN CENSORSHIP | EZRA LEVANT

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