It should be noted that this used to exist in the early days of social media. All of their APIs were open - and mostly REST - and though they were all different it was trivial to make compatibility layers. There used to be at least half a dozen major services that did automatic syndication across over a hundred social media sites, and custom clients that were much more useful (at least to power-users). The problem wasn't in the technology - which was built by engineers who I'd guess saw this as an obvious feature and had to be told by marketing that it was a bad idea.
Then they changed the TOS to make these syndication services and custom clients illegal. Probably not just for spam control, but also to force users onto the platforms to get their eyes on the ads. The multi-platform clients didn't actually inhibit the data harvesting, but nobody cares about the data harvesting until they say something obnoxious enough to get a visit from the FBI or snail mail ads for abortion clinics before they told their parents/SOs that they were pregnant. Privacy advocates notwithstanding.
As you say, many of these networks used to support XMPP. It was not a great protocol, which is probably part of the reason they dropped technical support for it, but the business motivations were more powerful than the technical ones.
Some platforms still support other open-standard protocols. For example Youtube still has channel RSS feeds, but they're buried so deep that most people are unaware of them. So does bitchute incidentally. This is how I watch videos, in an embedded video iframe inside my RSS feed reader. No ads! No account necessary! But they're still tracking me ... or at least my VPN. Ironically most of the big podcast platforms do not use RSS, so if your favorite podcast is not on libsyn or somesuch, you have to download _yet another_ podcast syndication app. Horrible, but I digress.
Fundamentally I don't think platform censorship is a problem. So I'm not sure any of this is the solution. "Twitter is the public square" is just a marketing slogan - not enforceable by law, and not actual reality. You don't need to be allowed on twitter. What you need is to realize that twitter is a platform for discussing progressive politics and how they apply to everything under the sun.
False advertising, and the network effect, are closer to the problem. If you didn't _believe_ twitter was the public square, you would not care that you were banned from it - except all your friends are on there and don't want to be dragged to yet another social media platform to share pictures of their lunch with you.
Moderation is not going away, and that's what the conservatives are complaining about. Anybody who has ever run an internet forum knows moderation is necessary. Even if you hypothetically believe in "absolute free speech on the internet" you'll find that your forum about obscure 1990s video games quickly becomes the latest place to talk about furry fandom, neo-nazism, or your custom-made gender pronouns if you don't ban all of the above or at least relegate them to an "off-topic" subforum. Actual absolute freedom of speech consists of making your own website, but again I digress.
The only really scary problem is the practice of denying access to DNS (or banking/payments!) to people based on political faux pas on facebook and twitter. This is actually technically solvable, and solved, but will be unsolved the moment any of the solutions become widely adopted and gain the attention of boomer senators.
The problem isn't "moderation" the problem is two fold a) an unprecedented in the history of humanity consolidation of power by Corporations b) who all happen to share a very aggressive, illiberal, authoritarian, partisan, merciless, anti-competitive, rigid, ever expansive, non-Rawlsian ideology/doctrine. There were more free-thinkers in the Office of the Holy Inquisition than there are in the HR Departments of every major corporation.
As far as power over information goes, it's _completely_ precedented. Until the late 90s half a dozen conglomerates controlled over 90% of all television, radio, and book publishing. The capacity for some random guy in his basement to reach millions of people around the world is what is unprecedented, and the old media and politics - the Cathedral, if you like Yarvin's designations - have hated this and tried to destroy it from day 1.
The social media platforms were always a bait and switch, and they never existed for any purpose other than to re-centralize control over information. The answer is not an absurd and futile attempt to ensure access to them through legal means. Doing so aids and abets their consolidation of power.
One thing that might help is to realize that these HR departments, content moderation teams, C-suites, and the politicians so many people are begging to regulate them are all the same people. They went to the same schools, they have the same ideas about how to manage society, grew up in the same cities (SF, LA, DC and NY mostly) and the same cultural values - which as you say are illiberal to put it mildly.
Zuckerberg isn't lying when he says he would love for the government to regulate social media. Every market leader loves having their power recognized and enshrined in law, and they love barriers to entry even more. By asking for regulation you're just asking for the right hand of the cathedral to shake the left, which will result in some monstrosity like the FCC - which ushered the last century of total corporate control over information, not by accident but by design.
Media consolidation did not peak in the 90's, media consolidation had different ebbs and flows for its constituent parts, your three examples (television, radio and book publishing) oddly fails to consider newspapers. Amongst other things. I could go on.
Sure, it's not an exhaustive list. I can't think of any medium or media industry that doesn't suffer from some degree of convergence.
You could argue that there were counter-narrative moves (e.g. Fox news, National Review, Reason) but they seem to get hijacked and incorporated into the Narrative pretty quickly. If not wholly then partially, such that while they have a few dissident voices they play the role of controlled or loyal opposition E.g. some people like Tucker, but acknowledge that Fox News as an institution is mostly controlled - so if Tucker is 10% of Fox, and Fox is 10% of the media, then Tucker is 1% vs. 99% - numbers illustrative only. These ebbs and flows are pretty temporary things.
Contrary to the anti-moderation stance, part of the problem is this libertarian sense of "everyone should be free to talk here about anything they like" - this is an invitation to the opposition to embrace, extend, and exterminate. See Vice magazine vis Gavin McInnes, Tim Pool, and basically everyone else who founded and built Vice. See Reddit.
So welcome "all voices", and the monovoice installs itself and purges dissent. This is already in progress on the second- and third-wave attempts at creating "open platforms". See Parler, ThinkSpot; watch out for MeWe, Minds to drop next.
Stop welcoming "all voices" and take a firm stance against Metatron, and you'll be erased - first they came for Daily Stormer, then Infowars, Gab, etc. Watch out for Bitchute, LBRY, et al.
The first strategy is a proven loser. The second strategy has technical issues at a minimum, but may also be a loser. Either way, mere technical solutions aren't sufficient (see Ethereum: DAO catastrophe - no matter how tight your tech, there are humans behind it and they will break the tech whenever it violates some deeply held principle). The proposed third strategy - force everybody to be an "open platform" - is a recipe for a new FCC. Which is a proven loser.
The reason why Dorsey is infinitely worse that Zuckerberg is that at least Zuck pays us the G-D respect to speak and dress and look like a proper Robotic Oligarch.
Dorsey has this Rasputin mentality that because he looks like a homeless peasant, he can't possibly be a part of an entrenched Aristocratic elite. Which makes everything much much much worse.
Forums, IRC, and the chans (4, 8, etc.) are likely the closest we've seen to loyal, internet polities. Some have even been quite large at times (4chan)--but they remain fundamentally fringe. That may have something to do with the fact that these platforms enable anonymous connections among users who don't know each other in real life, whereas the social media giants are focused on existing, real-world connections (Facebook) or celebrities that users assume / wish they knew (Twitter)--in essence, 'normie' interests/interactions.
The anonymity (less usable marketing data) and fringe nature (undesirable marketing cohorts) of the forum/IRC/*chan category have made them a challenge to monetize regardless.
You gotta love the chans. No content recommendation algorithm save for thread bumping which is non-personalized. Thus, no highly personalized positive feedback loop of self flanderizing content curation.
Major *chans are still quite 'mainframy', but honestly the thought of a highly secure fully decentralized imageboard makes me salivate. It would potentially be extremely disruptive, even if the adaption rate is not particularly high.
It would be, but the decentralization dream is still just that - a dream. Things like IPv4/6 and DNS are so integral to how the entire internet works that I'm not sure its even feasible at all in the current system. We are just lucky that the Long March through the institutions hasn't made its way through the international governing bodies of the internet (or has it?).
Other big problem that comes to mind is identity verification without a centralized authority (something better than PGP that the average normie is actually going to be able to lose).
I think this misses the mark a little. Protocol transparency basically already exists. Facebook, for instance, has an extensive series of APIs and SDKs for interacting with their 'servers'.
Anyone with high-school level 'web development' skills can hack together their own custom client to view, for instance, the same information they might see on their feed (and no one will use it, because it will suck). Same goes for Twitter and the like. They are all using pretty much the same toolbox of already-open protocols: publicly documented REST/Graph APIs, OAuth, etc. Heck, a lot of these companies have already released a lot of their internal projects as FOSS - out of the goodness of their kind and progressive hearts /s.
The problem with "Big (Scary) Tech" lies entirely outside of the 7 layers of the OSI model. The problem is that they have a direct line of communication into the brains of "the masses" via the dopamine drips we carry around in our front pockets. The issue is not *how* you access Facebook's servers, but *what* you see when you do. Boomers who might still believe that the news media is "trustworthy and honest" will also likely find nothing suspect with those same news outlets appearing with the same headline right at the top of their Facebook feed, giant 'Verified' logos and all.
Go ahead, see what happens when you mandate that these companies instead use *open algorithms* to determine what gets promoted on their site, and what gets memory-holed. They will run around screaming "But that's our IP! That's how we make all of the money!". And they would be correct. The subtle shaping of public opinion offered by such technologies may be the most politically (and commercially) valuable invention in human history.
Fortunately for us, these platforms are already on their way out - Demographics is Destiny after all, and only Boomers use Facebook anymore. Now all the cool kids are using ChiCom-developed chat apps. Problem solved.
Convincing the tech platforms to give up their monopolies would be like convincing the British Empire relinquish control of their empire. If social justice is the mind virus which convinced the British this was a good idea, then theoretically it could also be used a a vessel to implant the same idea into the heart of the tech behemoths.
Is twitter not the perfect sickly gazelle to spring this on?
Also, assuming the goal here would be to create some kind of urbit based secret society on alter-twitter, it is worth pointing out that secret societies in order to be viable long term need to either be A) actually secret and anonymous or B) attached to significant economic benefit and financial interdependency of members or C) preferably both.
As Moldbug is keenly aware, heretical thinking leads to doxxing, and doxxing leads to poverty. The financial and social benefits attached to membership would need to outweigh the risk associated with being outed.
I think you're being a bit too pessimistic. I don't think doxing at that scale is viable, nor do I believe that anyone would try it. People have been posting all kinds of heretical things under their real names on Gab for example, I'd be surprised if even 0.01% suffered any real consequences that aren't fixable with basic opsec. In any case, there are platforms that already exist and many that are being created that do actually implement 'hard' solutions to all the things you describe. The trouble with Urbit is that it's a little too identity-focused.
Also, the thing with secrets is that many of them tend to keep themselves. Freemasonry is a good example - anyone could get an effective PhD in it just by going to their local library, yet most of its practices remain secret because nobody is interested enough to make the effort. Another good example of this effect is magic tricks. There's a pretty good series of posts about this on LessWrong called 'Antimemetics'. Of course FMs also follow Curtis' rule of detachment, which probably helps.
I read some of those articles on antimemes today while looking at my phone and wrestling my toddler with the other hand. So forgive me if I miss the point a little...
I think nobody has knowledge of how to do magic tricks because nobody except possibly children have any real desire to be magicians. A lot of people have desire though to be... politicians. Or to climb corporate hierarchies. Or to be a public or semi public official. Or to profit from a public persona in any way. The closer you get to power in your aims and station, the more enthusiastically you will find people will dox and defame you.
I speak from personal experience on this issue (hence the noted pessimism), but it honestly doesn't really require personal experience to see that anyone who has a financial dependency on anything which even marginally intersects with the cathedral's sphere of influence requires fairly iron clad assurances of anon/pseudonymity and/or financial security.
Why would, for instance, a corporate lawyer, or an HR professional, or a university official ever in a million years publicly commit wrongspeak of any form?
The desire for a forum to speak the truth as you see it seems to me to have been a major driver for the classic american men's clubs. I have also been lead to believe by old time insiders, the primary draw of the FM in the last century was actually financial.
What does it matter if we get legislation nominally protecting speech from online if we can be easily and summarily *deplatformed from our jobs* in turn?
I think anon/pseudonymity and/or financial security are absolute must haves for the new antijacobin club.
I guess that's kind of my point though - people aren't getting mass deplatformed because there are not that many who are looking to deplatform them. It requires work - and work requires energy. I doubt they'll muster up enough energy to deplatform every wrong-thinker, even those who are in plain sight so to speak.
I do agree with you regarding the more 'vulnerable' people in our society - but then again, I don't think having an internet-based secret society would solve that problem - they'd still have to behave in public - at least for a while.
And really, the rest I agree with you on - and I have to say, I didn't mean for my post to be an argument against implementing better security or anything like that, I just wanted to point out that there's an element of entropy working against our opponents' efforts.
Yeah, I think there is this kind of like, uncanny valley problem that we have, where the more you have to lose the less likely you are to vocalize opposition to the regime in any sort of public or official forum... until you have so much to lose that your actually just a billionaire or a maniac and you can say whatever you want. So you have this mass of like, based boomers with nothing to lose and then this crowd that adam corolla describes as the "fuck me" money crowd. And everyone else in the middle or upper middle is totally hand cuffed.
You are definitely right that you get like a security through obscurity / strength in numbers / dilution of negative attention thing going on. Like I don't think i'm going to get doxxed posting on this substack for example. But if you can somehow bake profitability into the model of dissident action you have a meme that is robust and strong from a darwinian perspective, but also greatly expands the talent pool from which you can pull the *prince who was larped* . Barring profitability you need anonymity, in my opinion.
I think if you take collective right wing political dissident thought and take away profitability and anonymity you end of with the libertarian party :) Or like, the kekistani people. You know?
I think you need to have a mix of desirability and mystery in order to attract intelligent mavericks. What is more desirable and mysterious than a club for secret money?
Any web browser can act as a fully functional third party Facebook client (there are also specialized third party clients). Ad blockers are a dime a dozen. The platforms are still in business because most of their users don't care.
Nice Urbit ad you got here, Curtis. Thumbs up!
I would love to know what percentage of people working on Urbit are 'in the know' so to speak. Anyone have a good estimate?
It should be noted that this used to exist in the early days of social media. All of their APIs were open - and mostly REST - and though they were all different it was trivial to make compatibility layers. There used to be at least half a dozen major services that did automatic syndication across over a hundred social media sites, and custom clients that were much more useful (at least to power-users). The problem wasn't in the technology - which was built by engineers who I'd guess saw this as an obvious feature and had to be told by marketing that it was a bad idea.
Then they changed the TOS to make these syndication services and custom clients illegal. Probably not just for spam control, but also to force users onto the platforms to get their eyes on the ads. The multi-platform clients didn't actually inhibit the data harvesting, but nobody cares about the data harvesting until they say something obnoxious enough to get a visit from the FBI or snail mail ads for abortion clinics before they told their parents/SOs that they were pregnant. Privacy advocates notwithstanding.
As you say, many of these networks used to support XMPP. It was not a great protocol, which is probably part of the reason they dropped technical support for it, but the business motivations were more powerful than the technical ones.
Some platforms still support other open-standard protocols. For example Youtube still has channel RSS feeds, but they're buried so deep that most people are unaware of them. So does bitchute incidentally. This is how I watch videos, in an embedded video iframe inside my RSS feed reader. No ads! No account necessary! But they're still tracking me ... or at least my VPN. Ironically most of the big podcast platforms do not use RSS, so if your favorite podcast is not on libsyn or somesuch, you have to download _yet another_ podcast syndication app. Horrible, but I digress.
Fundamentally I don't think platform censorship is a problem. So I'm not sure any of this is the solution. "Twitter is the public square" is just a marketing slogan - not enforceable by law, and not actual reality. You don't need to be allowed on twitter. What you need is to realize that twitter is a platform for discussing progressive politics and how they apply to everything under the sun.
False advertising, and the network effect, are closer to the problem. If you didn't _believe_ twitter was the public square, you would not care that you were banned from it - except all your friends are on there and don't want to be dragged to yet another social media platform to share pictures of their lunch with you.
Moderation is not going away, and that's what the conservatives are complaining about. Anybody who has ever run an internet forum knows moderation is necessary. Even if you hypothetically believe in "absolute free speech on the internet" you'll find that your forum about obscure 1990s video games quickly becomes the latest place to talk about furry fandom, neo-nazism, or your custom-made gender pronouns if you don't ban all of the above or at least relegate them to an "off-topic" subforum. Actual absolute freedom of speech consists of making your own website, but again I digress.
The only really scary problem is the practice of denying access to DNS (or banking/payments!) to people based on political faux pas on facebook and twitter. This is actually technically solvable, and solved, but will be unsolved the moment any of the solutions become widely adopted and gain the attention of boomer senators.
The problem isn't "moderation" the problem is two fold a) an unprecedented in the history of humanity consolidation of power by Corporations b) who all happen to share a very aggressive, illiberal, authoritarian, partisan, merciless, anti-competitive, rigid, ever expansive, non-Rawlsian ideology/doctrine. There were more free-thinkers in the Office of the Holy Inquisition than there are in the HR Departments of every major corporation.
Your #YayModeration beliefs belong in the 90's.
As far as power over information goes, it's _completely_ precedented. Until the late 90s half a dozen conglomerates controlled over 90% of all television, radio, and book publishing. The capacity for some random guy in his basement to reach millions of people around the world is what is unprecedented, and the old media and politics - the Cathedral, if you like Yarvin's designations - have hated this and tried to destroy it from day 1.
The social media platforms were always a bait and switch, and they never existed for any purpose other than to re-centralize control over information. The answer is not an absurd and futile attempt to ensure access to them through legal means. Doing so aids and abets their consolidation of power.
One thing that might help is to realize that these HR departments, content moderation teams, C-suites, and the politicians so many people are begging to regulate them are all the same people. They went to the same schools, they have the same ideas about how to manage society, grew up in the same cities (SF, LA, DC and NY mostly) and the same cultural values - which as you say are illiberal to put it mildly.
Zuckerberg isn't lying when he says he would love for the government to regulate social media. Every market leader loves having their power recognized and enshrined in law, and they love barriers to entry even more. By asking for regulation you're just asking for the right hand of the cathedral to shake the left, which will result in some monstrosity like the FCC - which ushered the last century of total corporate control over information, not by accident but by design.
Media consolidation did not peak in the 90's, media consolidation had different ebbs and flows for its constituent parts, your three examples (television, radio and book publishing) oddly fails to consider newspapers. Amongst other things. I could go on.
Sure, it's not an exhaustive list. I can't think of any medium or media industry that doesn't suffer from some degree of convergence.
You could argue that there were counter-narrative moves (e.g. Fox news, National Review, Reason) but they seem to get hijacked and incorporated into the Narrative pretty quickly. If not wholly then partially, such that while they have a few dissident voices they play the role of controlled or loyal opposition E.g. some people like Tucker, but acknowledge that Fox News as an institution is mostly controlled - so if Tucker is 10% of Fox, and Fox is 10% of the media, then Tucker is 1% vs. 99% - numbers illustrative only. These ebbs and flows are pretty temporary things.
Contrary to the anti-moderation stance, part of the problem is this libertarian sense of "everyone should be free to talk here about anything they like" - this is an invitation to the opposition to embrace, extend, and exterminate. See Vice magazine vis Gavin McInnes, Tim Pool, and basically everyone else who founded and built Vice. See Reddit.
So welcome "all voices", and the monovoice installs itself and purges dissent. This is already in progress on the second- and third-wave attempts at creating "open platforms". See Parler, ThinkSpot; watch out for MeWe, Minds to drop next.
Stop welcoming "all voices" and take a firm stance against Metatron, and you'll be erased - first they came for Daily Stormer, then Infowars, Gab, etc. Watch out for Bitchute, LBRY, et al.
The first strategy is a proven loser. The second strategy has technical issues at a minimum, but may also be a loser. Either way, mere technical solutions aren't sufficient (see Ethereum: DAO catastrophe - no matter how tight your tech, there are humans behind it and they will break the tech whenever it violates some deeply held principle). The proposed third strategy - force everybody to be an "open platform" - is a recipe for a new FCC. Which is a proven loser.
What now?
Unrelated but not entirely.
The reason why Dorsey is infinitely worse that Zuckerberg is that at least Zuck pays us the G-D respect to speak and dress and look like a proper Robotic Oligarch.
Dorsey has this Rasputin mentality that because he looks like a homeless peasant, he can't possibly be a part of an entrenched Aristocratic elite. Which makes everything much much much worse.
Forums, IRC, and the chans (4, 8, etc.) are likely the closest we've seen to loyal, internet polities. Some have even been quite large at times (4chan)--but they remain fundamentally fringe. That may have something to do with the fact that these platforms enable anonymous connections among users who don't know each other in real life, whereas the social media giants are focused on existing, real-world connections (Facebook) or celebrities that users assume / wish they knew (Twitter)--in essence, 'normie' interests/interactions.
The anonymity (less usable marketing data) and fringe nature (undesirable marketing cohorts) of the forum/IRC/*chan category have made them a challenge to monetize regardless.
You gotta love the chans. No content recommendation algorithm save for thread bumping which is non-personalized. Thus, no highly personalized positive feedback loop of self flanderizing content curation.
Major *chans are still quite 'mainframy', but honestly the thought of a highly secure fully decentralized imageboard makes me salivate. It would potentially be extremely disruptive, even if the adaption rate is not particularly high.
It would be, but the decentralization dream is still just that - a dream. Things like IPv4/6 and DNS are so integral to how the entire internet works that I'm not sure its even feasible at all in the current system. We are just lucky that the Long March through the institutions hasn't made its way through the international governing bodies of the internet (or has it?).
Other big problem that comes to mind is identity verification without a centralized authority (something better than PGP that the average normie is actually going to be able to lose).
i've heard of a software project you may be interested in...
In the long run, the world will be entirely Amish.
And thank God for that.
I like your funny words magic man.
“I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.”
I think this misses the mark a little. Protocol transparency basically already exists. Facebook, for instance, has an extensive series of APIs and SDKs for interacting with their 'servers'.
Anyone with high-school level 'web development' skills can hack together their own custom client to view, for instance, the same information they might see on their feed (and no one will use it, because it will suck). Same goes for Twitter and the like. They are all using pretty much the same toolbox of already-open protocols: publicly documented REST/Graph APIs, OAuth, etc. Heck, a lot of these companies have already released a lot of their internal projects as FOSS - out of the goodness of their kind and progressive hearts /s.
The problem with "Big (Scary) Tech" lies entirely outside of the 7 layers of the OSI model. The problem is that they have a direct line of communication into the brains of "the masses" via the dopamine drips we carry around in our front pockets. The issue is not *how* you access Facebook's servers, but *what* you see when you do. Boomers who might still believe that the news media is "trustworthy and honest" will also likely find nothing suspect with those same news outlets appearing with the same headline right at the top of their Facebook feed, giant 'Verified' logos and all.
Go ahead, see what happens when you mandate that these companies instead use *open algorithms* to determine what gets promoted on their site, and what gets memory-holed. They will run around screaming "But that's our IP! That's how we make all of the money!". And they would be correct. The subtle shaping of public opinion offered by such technologies may be the most politically (and commercially) valuable invention in human history.
Fortunately for us, these platforms are already on their way out - Demographics is Destiny after all, and only Boomers use Facebook anymore. Now all the cool kids are using ChiCom-developed chat apps. Problem solved.
Facebook's API was pretty closed last time I tried to use it. Or am I wrong?
Havent used it in a while so I'm not sure. I could be wrong about that part.
FYI: it's "onore" in Italian, not "honore".
Trillian but for social media let's goooooo
What do you think about Odysee/LBRY? Or Fediverse?
Convincing the tech platforms to give up their monopolies would be like convincing the British Empire relinquish control of their empire. If social justice is the mind virus which convinced the British this was a good idea, then theoretically it could also be used a a vessel to implant the same idea into the heart of the tech behemoths.
Is twitter not the perfect sickly gazelle to spring this on?
Also, assuming the goal here would be to create some kind of urbit based secret society on alter-twitter, it is worth pointing out that secret societies in order to be viable long term need to either be A) actually secret and anonymous or B) attached to significant economic benefit and financial interdependency of members or C) preferably both.
As Moldbug is keenly aware, heretical thinking leads to doxxing, and doxxing leads to poverty. The financial and social benefits attached to membership would need to outweigh the risk associated with being outed.
I think you're being a bit too pessimistic. I don't think doxing at that scale is viable, nor do I believe that anyone would try it. People have been posting all kinds of heretical things under their real names on Gab for example, I'd be surprised if even 0.01% suffered any real consequences that aren't fixable with basic opsec. In any case, there are platforms that already exist and many that are being created that do actually implement 'hard' solutions to all the things you describe. The trouble with Urbit is that it's a little too identity-focused.
Also, the thing with secrets is that many of them tend to keep themselves. Freemasonry is a good example - anyone could get an effective PhD in it just by going to their local library, yet most of its practices remain secret because nobody is interested enough to make the effort. Another good example of this effect is magic tricks. There's a pretty good series of posts about this on LessWrong called 'Antimemetics'. Of course FMs also follow Curtis' rule of detachment, which probably helps.
White devil,
I read some of those articles on antimemes today while looking at my phone and wrestling my toddler with the other hand. So forgive me if I miss the point a little...
I think nobody has knowledge of how to do magic tricks because nobody except possibly children have any real desire to be magicians. A lot of people have desire though to be... politicians. Or to climb corporate hierarchies. Or to be a public or semi public official. Or to profit from a public persona in any way. The closer you get to power in your aims and station, the more enthusiastically you will find people will dox and defame you.
I speak from personal experience on this issue (hence the noted pessimism), but it honestly doesn't really require personal experience to see that anyone who has a financial dependency on anything which even marginally intersects with the cathedral's sphere of influence requires fairly iron clad assurances of anon/pseudonymity and/or financial security.
Why would, for instance, a corporate lawyer, or an HR professional, or a university official ever in a million years publicly commit wrongspeak of any form?
The desire for a forum to speak the truth as you see it seems to me to have been a major driver for the classic american men's clubs. I have also been lead to believe by old time insiders, the primary draw of the FM in the last century was actually financial.
What does it matter if we get legislation nominally protecting speech from online if we can be easily and summarily *deplatformed from our jobs* in turn?
I think anon/pseudonymity and/or financial security are absolute must haves for the new antijacobin club.
I guess that's kind of my point though - people aren't getting mass deplatformed because there are not that many who are looking to deplatform them. It requires work - and work requires energy. I doubt they'll muster up enough energy to deplatform every wrong-thinker, even those who are in plain sight so to speak.
I do agree with you regarding the more 'vulnerable' people in our society - but then again, I don't think having an internet-based secret society would solve that problem - they'd still have to behave in public - at least for a while.
And really, the rest I agree with you on - and I have to say, I didn't mean for my post to be an argument against implementing better security or anything like that, I just wanted to point out that there's an element of entropy working against our opponents' efforts.
Yeah, I think there is this kind of like, uncanny valley problem that we have, where the more you have to lose the less likely you are to vocalize opposition to the regime in any sort of public or official forum... until you have so much to lose that your actually just a billionaire or a maniac and you can say whatever you want. So you have this mass of like, based boomers with nothing to lose and then this crowd that adam corolla describes as the "fuck me" money crowd. And everyone else in the middle or upper middle is totally hand cuffed.
You are definitely right that you get like a security through obscurity / strength in numbers / dilution of negative attention thing going on. Like I don't think i'm going to get doxxed posting on this substack for example. But if you can somehow bake profitability into the model of dissident action you have a meme that is robust and strong from a darwinian perspective, but also greatly expands the talent pool from which you can pull the *prince who was larped* . Barring profitability you need anonymity, in my opinion.
I think if you take collective right wing political dissident thought and take away profitability and anonymity you end of with the libertarian party :) Or like, the kekistani people. You know?
I think you need to have a mix of desirability and mystery in order to attract intelligent mavericks. What is more desirable and mysterious than a club for secret money?
Any web browser can act as a fully functional third party Facebook client (there are also specialized third party clients). Ad blockers are a dime a dozen. The platforms are still in business because most of their users don't care.
Substack equivalent for Urbit when
Already, notebooks. It's still a bit raw, but sooner or later should be fine.