I know that I said in my last entry here on Substack that I had selected a story to use as my next extended fiction presentation, but before that, I'd like to present the following little diatribe. If you know me at all by this point, you know that I don't enjoy or specialize in talking politics or socio-cultural contexts. I find there are plenty of other folks doing more than enough of that, thanks, in both mainstream and independent avenues.
Unfortunately, a lot of these individuals, teams, networks and outlets are doing so by talking past one another and asserting that no matter what, the 'other' guy/s is the bad one/s. They're also frequenty dreadfully unimaginative about it. If you don't want to read another 'Both Sides' piece (since there are a decent number of them online), I recommend you hit the 'Back' button and rejoin me when I start presenting the next story; I fully intend to waggle my freakin' finger at a pretty broad range of people.
Let's begin by way of confessing that this piece is chiefly being written in response to a recent Axios article, which was itself only brought to my attention because one of the many colorful content creators I watch routinely focused pretty squarely on it for a recent video. Or rather, he focused on it for about the first quarter of his video, quickly sliding via a rough segues to another topic which he claims to be adjacent to his issue with the Axios piece, but which I found would require a leap of logic so bendy that only the Kennedy "Magic Bullet" could perform that kind of mid-air course correction to land.
The article in question's tone makes it fairly obvious that Sara Fischer and Dan Primack, the contributors of the piece, are about as centralized as one can be in favor of the Big Tech Primagens, an arena dominated by establishment-left/Democrat-aligned interests and perspectives. Just look at their choice of language in the article's opening line: "Conservatives are 'aggressively' building their own apps, phones', and so forth.
(Original Axios article here: https://www.axios.com/conservative-social-media-crypto-publishing-internet-56a77cbd-89c6-480a-a8a4-6092b7eea481.html )
Why the need for this adjective? 'Feverishly' would be much more fitting, methinks, since the recent spate of proliferation of non-mainstream outlets online that have been flocked to by folks outside of the Big Tech bubble and the socio-political left has resulted in a veritable glut of alternative options. But no, the term they went for was 'agressively'. Why? Follow the etymological logic here with me a moment, if you will. Which term denotes a kind of assault against the current status quo online? Certainly it wouldn't be 'feverishly', since that conveys productivity, and can be viewed as a positive. Why would the folks at Axios give a positive vibe to apps and networks that don't promote them like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Instagram will?
'Oh Josh, you're reading too much into word choice here.' Perhaps, sure. Equally possible, however, is the chance that I'm dead-on; my experience with word choice and narrative construction in both fiction and non-fiction gives me an edge here that I don't think should be dismissed out of hand. I'm usually a fairly humble guy, but not on this one.
The next part of the article that needs to be examined closely and thrown wide open to demonstrate the clear bias of at least these two contributors, if not Axios as a whole, comes in their "Why It Matters" section. In this section, they point out that several of the apps and networks created as alternatives are backed by big money players to allow for online venues that fight back against censorship and cancel culture.
However, the Axios writers put those terms, 'censorship' and 'cancel culture', in what have become known colloquially as 'Scare Quotes', as if to imply that, insofar as Fischer and Primack (and Axios as a whole by endorsing and green-lighting the publication of this piece) are concerned, censorship and cancel culture either don't exist, or aren't a genuine problem on the status quo apps and networks of the mainstream/Big Tech.
I'd like to take a moment aside here to just briefly say to Establishment Democrats, Progressives, liberals and the politically agnostic the following- you made this happen. Yes, between your blood-curdling shrieks of "BAN THEM!" and "THAT'S HATE SPEECH!" and "THAT PERSON IS DANGEROUS AND DOESN'T DESERVE A PLATFORM SPACE!", you have opened the door for things like Gab, Parler, MeWe, and Rumble and etcetera to come into existence in the first place. Yeah, that's right. If you want to know who's responsible for the rise of these networks, apps and services, you need look no further than a mirror.
Did you expect these folks, who fundamentally disagree with your worldview, to just roll over and accept that there was no place for them in the online space? Did you suppose that de-banking them would shut them off entirely from society?
[Sources:
https://newspunch.com/chase-bank-service-conservative/
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/chase-bank-conservative-customers/
https://nypost.com/2019/05/25/jpmorgan-chase-accused-of-purging-accounts-of-conservative-activists/
https://www.dailywire.com/news/credit-card-companies-restore-donations-paul-bois ]
When Patreon started purging people for ideological perspectives and activities they deemed 'naughty' per their TOS, Subscribestar rose up to host those folks. When payment processors such as PayPal and Stripe decided that they would rather drop clients than lose Mastercard as a principal processing partner, alternatives were established.
These folks are not just going to crawl away into a hole and die, and they're no longer accepting the notion that they have to curb themselves to the liking of the masses or the mainstream. Frankly, bravo to them.
Conversely, to the conservatives, populists, and my fellow libertarians who have joined these alternatives and who may well still have a toe on the Big Tech platforms, the following question: do you HAVE to constantly kick the hornet's nest? Even the refs in the NHL will tag you for 2 minutes for Instigating, all right? There are myriad examples of trolling performed for the sake of getting a rise out of people, and from what I can see, these instances don't help anyone's case for supporting the alternative voices.
Put another way, just because you CAN say a thing, doesn't mean you should. Some of these folks have all the social graces of a werewolf accidentally sitting down at a vegan restaurant.
Server: Hi! Can I interest you in a 100% cruelty-free black bean burger?
Werewolf: NO! I'm gonna eat your face and shit down your throat, and wipe my furry butthole on your cute little apron you tree hugging hippie!
[Clears throat]
Ahem. Sorry about that. Where was I? Ah, yes.
The folks who tend to argue that censorship and cancel culture are not real things, funnily enough, exhibit a tendency toward supporting their very real application against people they find objectionable. For example, when Ben Shapiro, Dave Rueben, or Candace Owens get disinvited to speaking engagements at universities that receive public funds for operations, a clear violation of both the 1st and 14th Amendments (the university, due to receipt of public monies, must adhere to Constitutional protections per law), these same people who give you what Joe Rogan calls the 'cunty smirk' while trying to claim that censorship and cancel culture don't exist will be the first to try claiming that those universities don't owe any speaker an audience. They are absolutely correct in that regard; they have no obligation to put asses in seats. However, if they extend an offer of a speaking engagement to a conservative speaker, they must perforce honor that offer and follow through with it, even if literally NOBODY shows up for the speech.
We're all so busy claiming that 'the other side' is an echo chamber that we fail largely to see the danger in shuttering ourselves off from oppositional viewpoints. Yes, I'm on Gab. And Parler. And MeWe. And Facebook. Why would I bother with the 'conservative' apps and networks when I can generate traffic to my Substack far more effectively with just Facebook links, you may ask. To borrow Michael Jordan's famous line regarding this, well, "Conservatives buy sneakers too."
Conservative friends, you may ask me why I bother remaining on Facebook, especially when I've fled Twitter (which is a festering pit of nonsense and hate). Well, the same logic applies, folks. My fiction tends toward the niches of horror and high adventure fantasy (usually without any romantic element or factor), so I can little afford to alienate any potential audience members on the basis of their socio-political worldview.
Trust me, I can hear someone out there screaming that my best chance of avoiding that would be to delete this op-ed entirely, or never publish it in the first place, that doing so is just inviting trouble. Problem there is, I can't avoid these topics forever, because eventually I'll be viewed as inauthentic or like a spammy little machine-man, churning out my fiction and linking to it without ever exposing the guy behind the oddments of that fiction.
Getting back to my initial point, the very folks responsible for the rise of these alternatives, conservative or otherwise, are the people now howling about their audacity for even existing. I'd like to ask them a simple question regarding their concerns and worries regarding those alternatives:
What did you think would happen when you pushed these folks off the digital cliff?
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