The hit against independent broadcaster Alex Jones’ Infowars operation orchestrated by Google, Apple, Facebook, Stitcher, and Spotify is rattling quite a few cages on the dissident Right. The whole episode is giving me a mild case of the Mandela Effect, since I thought Jones had been banned since last year.
That goes to show how much attention I paid to Infowars, but that’s not the point. I’m all ears now, and so are many people who never gave Jones the time of day before. That’s one point among several brought to the fore by big tech’s coordinated purge of a citizen journalist. Big tech’s ability to purge citizen journalists is another point.
Jones’ deplatforming is a big deal, and not just because his show reached millions of people. His politics are rather mild when you peel back the conspiracy fodder. The combination of civic nationalism and free market economics I’ve heard him promote is pretty standard BoomerCon fare.If you want to explain Infowars’ ban to your parents, ask them to imagine if the big three broadcast networks had teamed up to get Rush Limbaugh kicked off the air in August of ’92. The cultural and political implications are similar but with the stakes turned up to eleven.
As with most turns of the culture war, reactions to Jones’ unpersoning often say more about the commenter than they say about the event. Fake News hucksters from CNN programming directors to J-school grads at Slate getting paid in exposure are tasting blood in the water and circling the wreckage. Alt-Right types are busy saying “I told you so.” The Alt-Lite has declared big tech’s purge of Jones an attack on free speech.
The free speech rhetoric in particular is mostly abstract sloganeering. Google, Apple, and Facebook didn’t set out to destroy free speech. Not directly. Besides, you can’t destroy what doesn’t exist in the first place. Big tech had a concrete purpose in mind when it brought the hammer down on Infowars. Precisely what their purpose was remains the subject of speculation, but some intriguing theories are floating around.
First, and in keeping with the anti-speech angle, is the observation that silencing Alex Jones sends a clear message to those big tech considers potential threats. The citizen journalists, freelance gadflies, and dissident pranksters that haunt YouTube and Facebook are now on notice. If they can take down Infowars, they can take down anybody.
Ratcheting up the political intrigue, some are accusing the tech giants of trying to rig the upcoming midterms. Alternative media is widely credited for delivering the 2016 election to Trump, so this theory holds some water.
Deeper down the rabbit hole, we find folks who are convinced the Left are taking out some kind of ex post facto revenge against Jones for the 2016 election. This theory has merit when you consider that the Left is a death cult totally invested in immanentizing the eschaton. Big tech and the Fake News promised the Left that Obama was their messiah and a shiny utopia was just over the horizon. Hillary was supposed to have cemented the strides made during the Obama years. Her loss had a similar effect on the American Left as getting nuked and hearing the emperor renounce his divinity had on the Japanese, minus the high IQs and strong sense of national confidence. Trump appeared on Infowars during the campaign, so what we’re seeing might be the Left’s equivalent of burning a witch at the stake.
I don’t discount that the first three explanations probably influenced big tech’s decision to take out Jones. I happened upon another possible factor the other day. The news cycle moves fast, so people are already forgetting about Trump’s tweet calling Twitter out for shadowbanning conservatives. In a video from July 26, the same day Trump sent his tweet, Jones claimed that he and his staff prepared a comprehensive report on social media censorship against conservatives. The report was allegedly given to Congressman Matt Gaetz, who Jones accused of misrepresented its findings. However, he also claimed the report made its way to the President himself.
Google and Facebook have already gotten themselves in hot water over their shady business practices. The President promising an investigation into another social media giant is the last thing they need.
Consider the fact that Twitter is playing the role of the dog that didn’t bark. Twitter and Amazon are the only two big tech players that haven’t banned Jones. Occam’s Razor explains Amazon’s avoidance of the whole mess. They’re still primarily interested in turning a profit, so banning Jones’ books wouldn’t benefit them. As for Twitter, the matter of why the ban-happiest social network on earth, which employs a cadre of purple-haired cat ladies to select conservatives for random suspensions, didn’t jump on the bandwagon is a curious question, indeed.
Could Twitter’s conspicuous absence from the Infowars dogpile be tacit confirmation that Jones’ report is at least partly responsible for Trump turning up the heat on Twitter? Even Jack Dorsey has to realize that banning Jones under those circumstances would throw his company from the frying pan and into the fire. What if Jack decided to get even by proxy and called in some favors with the other tech outfits?
However we got here, where we’re currently at is a place where rootless megacorps run by autistic sociopaths can band together on a whim to ruin law-abiding private citizens. The ball is now in Trump’s court, and that means antitrust and RICO charges.
It had better, because the Left’s endgame is making all news the sole domain of the legacy media once again. If big tech have their way, we’ll all be getting our news exclusively from network anchors and a handful of newspapers propped up by said tech oligarchs and Mexican billionaires. In short, big tech wants to turn us all into Boomers when it comes to the news, but in the Millennials’ case, without the condos and 401(k)s.
Banning Jones is closer to Monopolist Suicide™ than Smart Politics™ with the GE in the driver's seat.
This will do more to turn the Normies against FakeNews and Silicon Valley than turn them off — and turning them off is about the best these petty thugs can hope to do.
There is a good deal of building anger by the average Joe and Jane to the Media & SV arrogance. Silencing Jones will only stoke that anger and confirm "Enemy of the American People" suspicions.
Regardless, ready the e-mails to sponsors and start popping that corn. The Ride Never Ends.
You're correct that this is a desperation play on big tech's part. People who are confident in their position don't wig out like this. Colluding to ban Jones proves big tech is terrified, unspeakably stupid, or both.
Everyone already knows that desperation makes the enemy unpredictable and extra dangerous. The key is to take advantage of their inevitable mistakes. Trump is in the best position to exploit the tech cartel's freakout to maximum effect.
The question is, will he? If Trump was out to dismantle the Fake News brick by brick and scatter them to the four winds, he could have revoked CNN's press credentials and had the FCC jumping down MSNBC's throat by now. The leading theory–one I believe–is that Trump considers the legacy media attacks on him an asset. He is supremely antifragile and can turn anything they throw at him back on them.
Big tech is a horse of a different color, though. Unlike the legacy media, they have the power to cut Trump off from his base and seriously meddle with elections. Everything depends on Trump understanding the lay of the land.
I am minimizing my presence on all google products as much as possible. Already switched to duckduckgo. Have a legacy gmail account I will auto forward to a new one. Unsubbed from about 60% of my youtube subs and moved to bitchute.
Twitter account is now deactivated. Dunno which social media to go to next.
Minimizing the amount of money we give to people who hate us is always a laudable goal. Even I'm due for another evaluation of my browsing and spending habits.
The way I've always looked at it, boycotts are a moral; not a practical, matter. Google, Facebook, and Twitter are not going to notice if you or I drop off their service. Apple just became the first company in history with a trillion-dollar valuation.
Uncle Sam is the only entity with enough power to solve the big tech problem. The only outcomes now are 1) the Feds bust the trusts and regulate the net as a utility or 2) massive violence. Since we're not sociopaths, we should pray for option 1.
I agree on the sociopath description, so long as we remain aware that is a generalization. As someone who is autistic, however, I doubt these people have that good of an excuse for their social and emotional ineptitude. The same goes for most SJWs and megacorp media-folks.
Mainly referring to Zuckerberg here.
Matthew
But how does their social emotional ineptitude explain unpersoning Jones? Are they that clueless? I tend to think they amplify their normalcy bias due to the excessive fawNing over their abilities
So we live in Cyberpunk 2020, but without the flying cars, cybernetics, robots, heavy weaponry, true VR and head jacks but instead have the tech company Communist-corporocracy and heroin junkies and their feces in the street in San Fran. It’s suck x 9000.
Anyway, the idiots made Jones a martyr. Gotta love how the sons of Satan can’t resist doing so. Maybe now more on the Right will heed Vox Day’s point that the Right is too individualist for its own good and start organizing and combining forces for a purpose rather than personal gain.
Science fiction's predictive power is limited by the author's thematic focus. Gibson wanted to warn about the consequences of our technology advancing too fast for our ethics to catch up. The consequences of mass immigration didn't occur to him.
The biggest obstacle to unified action right now are free market-worshiping Conservatives. Only RICO and antitrust proceedings will defuse this powder keg peacefully. The "Private companies can ban anyone they want!" cargo cultists need to get BTFO'd.
Update,
Amazon is supposedly quietly dropping recommndations to ALex Jones products
https://www.fastcompany.com/90214900/amazon-seems-to-have-quietly-stopped-recommending-alex-jones-products
O boy. Looks like the RICO and anti competitive law are dropping like on anvil on Wil E Coyote.
You can bet that Jones is furiously melting the phone lines to Congressmen and Senators and lobbying them to stop big tech
xavier
Sorry for the multiple post:
Linkedin has kicked out Jones. So know Microsoft is involved
https://twitter.com/baconmanlives/status/1026932810320408576
This is extremely grave. This is chicom style censorship and must be immediately killed. Some of the nerds will have to go to prison.
xavier
So many irritating "muh free markets" libertarians and RINOs.
*Sigh*
When will the lesson be learned? How can it be called a free market when all tech is confined within 1 of 4 firms who are obviously colluding with each other to political ends? How can it be a free market when we see the clear insidious and incestuous relationship between government and big tech? More to the point, something which these small minded libertarian autists miss by light years, the free market shouldn't come at the expense of the free internet. The "free market" isn't an Aztec altar to sacrifice your children at you stupid FUCKS.
The Chamber of Commerce Right was only viable back when the Left could still be defined by their policy positions. Now that the Left dropped all pretense of being anything other than a hysterical death cult, the Fiscal Conservative faction has been reduced to utter incoherence.
They are fighting the last war.
While they remained The Platform Trinity, they had power. Now they have thrown a huge chunk of market away, and this right as Facebook's lack of an actual profit model is starting to cause a few nervous coughs already.
They don't realize it yet, but this was a huge, critical, historic mistake. They thought they owned their customers.
Yeah. So did Myspace. My kid tells me Facebook is "instagram for old people".
Toothpaste and tubes, genies and bottles; narrative control and the legacy media.
Big Tech just threw its lot in with a rotting corpse, and I am delighted.
"They don't realize it yet, but this was a huge, critical, historic mistake."
It was. Big tech has created a prominent martyr with more on the way. We are to be grateful for having enemies who blunder this badly.
Now imagine if we had leadership motivated and creative enough to exploit the enemy's mistake for maximum gain.
To all major Conservative news outlets and Republican members of Congress: Ask every Democrat running for reelection this November if they agree with Google and Facebook's banning of Jones. Ask them, on the record, if they agree with big tech's definition of opposing mass illegal immigration as hate speech.
The level of blunder here is on par with Ma Bell losing the DOJ monopoly case against it in 1982 (case began in 1974).
What the article doesn't point out is that while Ma Bell was broken up, the activities it engaged in were in general not malicious or targeted toward political parties, social elements, or "questionable thought" such as mass illegal immigration. People complained about phone service, but it was what it was — it was Ma Bell. Ma Bell's mistake was getting arrogant with congress in the late 60s and early 70s on some minor regulatory issues.
Their break-up was in an era where Bell commonly owned all the household phone equipment, dial-up phone set included, not the customer. But they controlled 85% of phone communications in the US (by early decree limiting them to this amount). The US Government saw them poised to acquire most control over communications, to include the new computer industry.
The breakup into the Baby Bells ushered in a revlution in communications. AT&T cracked open the vault on several technologies (including cell phones) since they were now a competitor to the Bells and other companies, and as well as a supplier of R&D.
The current Silicon Valley monoliths are money-exchanging shells for the greater part, and are lacking a true core of technical accumen that could weather a financial downturn. Cut off from ready cash infusions, many to include Twitter and Facebook, will collapse to small manageable SJW nightmare factories eating their own before being sold to profit-minded owners, or will implode outright and go the way of the trilobite.
Calling down the lightning from Washington DC has always ended in either regulatory controls or break-up (or both) for arrogant monopolists. Doesn't usually happen over night, but once it starts it has never ended favorably for the aggressor.
Big tech has to lose in court first. Keep an eye on the James Damore and AmRen cases.
I really hope for another round of anti-trust actions in the near future, this time directed at the big five tech companies: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. They need to be broken up for everyone’s good.
"They need to be broken up for everyone’s good."
Agreed. I wrote the President and my Republican Congressman asking for the tech cartel to be prosecuted under the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts and RICO statutes. Everyone is strongly advised to do the same.
The Big 5 Media companies are not orthogonal to Big 5 Tech. All are due for a major disruption they have richly earned.
The Big 5 tech corporations
The Big 5 media companies
The Big 5 publishers
Enemy action? Sure. But how?
MotA – I agree, they need to be broken up too. So does big Agra, and big Pharma…etc.
Monopolies have been allowed to grow and they all need to be broken up by federal action.