Once again, we ponder one big problem with
user-generated content from gratuitous speakers like me – karma. That is, using a "free" (more or less) platform that could not exist if it couldn't allow bad behavior of others. This gets down to personalizing the question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" We could wind up telling speakers that they must be so, or else they become thieves. Yup, it sounds a little Commie, even if it comes from the far right as well as the left.
No, I don’t spam, recruit people, or gather user
information, or traffic anything, display porn (I do get into PG-13 territory),
and so on. I also don’t support specific
candidates in elections – which is both good and bad. I am not very partisan and not
tribalist. I try to use reputable
sources. On something like the gun
debate, there really are two sides – and the opposing camps serve different
positions in life on this planet. So what I try to do is remind visitors of the
nuances on so many interrelated policy questions (even if this all started with
“don’t ask don’t tell” two decades ago). With some issues, like DADT, my approach has
been influential. With some others, maybe I'm "in the way".
And I am able to do this without joining anyone else’s
“intersectional” movement and screaming (with "solidarity") in a crowd about oppression (particularly without carrying somebody else's picket signs). In my case, such claims for myself would make
no real sense.
What’s bad is that I depend on an Internet (including
social media and Facebook) infrastructure that needs a business model to pay
its way, and that business model could not exist without some actors doing bad
things. So we’ve needed Section 230 to
protect providers from downstream liability, because there is no way from them
to tell bad from innocuous prospectively.
Furthermore, the most recent news stories on the Facebook scandal
suggest that these platforms could not pay their own way without the “bad
actors” using them and driving ad revenue (and share prices).
I remember Donald Trump’s December 8, 2015 (post here) proposals to
“shut down those tubes” and even Hillary Clinton hinted at that, to curb the
gratuitousness that has led, for example, to so much cyberbullying, trafficking
(FOSTA), terrorist recruiting and instructions on how to build weapons (which
are out there in print anyway).
Then Trump (despite his distrust of computers and now
his hatred of Amazon) went the other direction, using Twitter to announce his policies
(like the half-transgender ban in the military) and his grievance against his
own version of the improperly privileged. He seems to have much more gripe
against established media companies (except Fox, and now OANN and Sinclair
which are getting more prominent) than
individualistic and perhaps libertarian oriented speakers (me, even Milo).
Could the “bad karma” lead to some kind of edict shutting
us all down? We can imagine that war
happens first – a nuclear blast (or more than one) somewhere from North Korea,
or an EMP level one attack that might shut down tech companies unless they had caged
their data (there is some evidence they are doing just that, not talked about
much).
As a Milo-Dangerous thought experiment, we can imagine
that no free content is allowed:
everything that is available to the entire public has to pay its own way. Free blogs (like this one) are gone. Of course, you can say, you can pay for
hosting. Or you can pay to self-publish
a book. But even that goes. Anything out there has to meet a real “need”
or “want” that a consumer will pay for. That could mean that even a self-paid
book has to sell minimum volume or it is speaker is shuttered, maybe forever. Then at least you solve the karma problem of
the business models. Milo has recently
made most of his content paid subscription, which I first thought was curious,
but could that be his point? I can think
of a lot of obvious problems with this idea – starting with porn (when Congress
has just cracked down on supporting sex trafficking and prostitution,
remember?)
Of course, spontaneous user-generated content backs up
a free press (the Fifth Estate backs up the Fourth) and is a check on
authoritarianism. It’s a little harder
for potential dictators to get away with things. On the other hand, hyperindividualsim can, if
challenged, lead to a reaction that causes a desire for authoritarianism and “rules
consistency” to bubble up from the bottom, and lead back to fascism.
I do wonder if we’re entering a war on introverts and
sophists (certainly schizoids and aspie-types -- and all the Rosenfels "subjective feminines"). The simple
idea of “personal responsibility” that libertarians articulated so well late in
the Clinton years (until 9/11) has become layered. Now, your immediate community as a whole
means something, which is a way to giving less competitive (and more tribally
minded) people in that community more meaning.
That means everyone has to lean to take care of their own first – including
the childless - everybody must "belong" to some group. [Right off the bat, I
wonder about the incredible generosity to strangers I do see online, like the
willingness to undergo intrusive organ donation procedures, an idea unthinkable
in the more closed culture that I grew up in.] You see that in the talk of “demographic
winter” and in authoritarian leaders’ (like Putin’s) idea that the gay
community is discouraging other people from procreating. We may well be heading toward a culture where
you are not heard from until you have your own skin in the game – like having
your own children first.
What seems so
shocking is that a lot of people around the world want this kind of culture
back. But it isn’t as surprising as we think.
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