The Petty Fiefdoms of the Internet

“Be cool or be cast out” – Rush, ‘Subdivisons’

Welp. Cracked.com quietly did away with its comment section recently, an act that seems to have gone uncommented on. Largely because the people most affected no longer have a place to comment. I almost don’t blame Cracked for this one. The users were often funnier and more informative than the articles themselves were. Not to mention that the comments were full of editors, fact checkers, and people that just generally reminded the Cracked writers that they were yet again rehashing the same listicle for the Nth time.

But still. It sucks. Not just Cracked (ha!), but also the fact that the Internet has gotten a tiny bit smaller and more homogenized. Which is now a daily occurrence. Some twenty years ago, long before this trend began in earnest, I coined the phrase “The petty fiefdoms of the Internet”, and it’s now more true than ever.

It’s no secret that I am abrasive and obnoxious. As Wired once pointed out, I’ve been banned from just about every website of note at least once. Often multiple times. But if you can’t say “fuck”, you can’t say “fuck the government”, as Lenny Bruce famously pointed out once. He didn’t say “fuck this heroin”, sadly. You also can’t say “Fuck this website and their shitty practices”. Or, “That is fucking unequivocally wrong, and here’s why.” There’s a lot of fucking things you can’t fucking say. Fuck.

Of course, we’ve been finessed into a corner, here. Often, the very people who tend to say this sort of thing are also ardent supporters of free enterprise. Now any complaints in this department are met with “Private business, they can do what they want.” Unless you’re a baker or are opposed to people wearing masks in your establishment, I suppose.

But corporations are de facto extensions of the government. They are licensed and sanctioned explicitly, while receiving liability protection and special tax laws. That’s…not free enterprise. Corporations are of course not people and shouldn’t be treated as such. Some libertarian thinkers correctly pointed this out over two hundred years ago. But they’re pretty much cancelled today anyway. So it’s unsurprising that governments and corporations espouse the same positions. It’s certainly a very profitable arrangement for CEOs and stockholders. For the rest of us, not so much.

As a side note, you should watch the CBC documentary “The Corporation”, as it’s fabulously interesting. The premise is that they examine corporations from the standpoint that if they are indeed somehow people (did I mention they’re not?), then they should be examined from a psychological basis that applies the same standards we apply to people.

Their conclusion? Corporations are amoral and psychopathic entities. My kids don’t read my stuff, but if they did, I would point out that any time you find yourself agreeing with psychopaths, you might want to rethink your position.

Mass media sites were the first to do away with the annoyance of actual public opinion. While small, privately run websites and forums likely also employ a high amount of control over user comments and content, they are also a fading memory, as a species. If they ever do reach a critical mass, which is now a rare occurrence, they then become corporatized themselves.

I have also called the Internet a double-sided sword. It did, for a while, propagate the free flow of information. But let’s not kid ourselves, here. It was a DARPA project from day one. The national security apparatus tends to have an agenda. If privacy is a concern, you shouldn’t be online. I assume you would then be on another list, one composed of suspicious people who don’t have an online footprint.

Usenet was the last bastion of unfettered speech online, and it has long since fallen into obscurity. You weren’t censored on Usenet, period, and it was far more functional than anything that exists today. The best response to speech you don’t agree with is more speech.

Now, that sword has been turned back upon us.

Google, whose search results once went on seemingly infinitely, is more of a collection of curated and approved links. You can’t really find me on Amazon even when you directly search for my name or a book title.

With disinformation, demonetization, deplatforming, shadowbanning, and general groupthink, there are now only two opinions. You believe what everyone else believes, or you are wrong. The hivemind is enforced through various methods, at this point, many of them not the least bit subtle. The general stifling of dissent is not even the most pernicious approach.

Slashdot’s karma system, and the infamous -1 ‘bitchslap’, paved the way for an inglorious future in which we all agree, or we pretty much don’t have a say, in matters of importance.

Youtube likewise plays host to any manner of vile comments, questionable content, and unsavory behavior. But the most powerful tool users have, the downvoting of videos, is being eliminated, if it hasn’t been already. Because it’s a great gauge of actual public sentiment, as opposed to what some giant of industry wants to put forth.

Reddit, the only social media site I use at this point, has a particularly heinous system which is constantly being tweaked for maximum desired effect. Unpopular posts are instantly downvoted, of course. But the balance of upvotes vs. downvotes is no longer visible. Instead, you get a simple tallying of the two. This does well to mask the number of people who disagree with something. Or has the effect of making an unpopular opinion look like *everyone* disagrees with it. At the same time, once you receive downvotes on a comment, your ability to reply is severely limited. The result is that you can and will be dogpiled mercilessly, at times, without being able to respond.

You can, in some instances, post an incontrovertible fact selected from, oh, the dictionary or an encyclopedia, and receive endless downvotes. Factual statements are not necessarily permitted in some circles. It’s a funny sort of sad phenomenon.

Reddit is a microcosm that reflects the whole of the Internet. Each subreddit is a little kingdom within the greater corporate comment farm. There are layers of censorship and groupthink at work. The newest disturbing trend is banning people from forums simply because they are subscribed to another forum that someone happens to disagree with.

Twitter and Reddit both practice a technique that essentially amounts to “one strike and you’re out”. If you’re banned from a forum, and re-subscribe to it using a different account, you are subject to lose them both permanently. It’s now a technique. When someone is seen voicing an unpopular opinion, they are accused of being someone else, and motions are made to deplatform them. It doesn’t matter if they are two different people are not.

While this practice is often attributed to leftist viewpoints, that same is true for the other wing of the shitbird. I generally don’t frequent any right-wing sites, because they’re all dreadfully boring, samey, and devoid of principles. At least left-wing people don’t pretend to champion free speech, free enterprise, or anything like that. Gab is the only social media I know of that actually permits all views, and it’s not very enjoyable, because there’s not much content. 

We’re not even going to talk about Facebook.

One other site that used to permit all views is a somewhat obscure forum called godlikeproductions.com. For some strange reason.

GLP is something like twenty years-old, and was a fairly entertaining diversion, early on. It was a conspiracy forum that didn’t require any sort of registration for posting. Now, granted, it was mostly crap. But there were gems to be found there, occasionally. For every 100 or so piles of utter garbage, you would find the occasional reasoned, well-thought out, properly researched post supported by ample supplied evidence.

Since the advent of Trump and Q, it’s now easily 99% dreck, for the same agenda-driven reasons I’ve stated above. The anonymity is now allowed and disallowed on an almost daily basis. Threads are summarily deleted without comment. The relatively new ostensible site-owner “Trinity”, a staunch Republican, is so butthurt about a particularly hilarious troll thread I made, whereby I put myself at the center of the coronavirus controversy, that my very name or links to my websites are hard-coded into the site’s filters. The guy is a serious spankard.

Man, I just want to read about how Nibiru is coming. (Spoiler, it’s not.) Funny, you’d think a novel about a maniac who genetically engineers a virus to destroy the psychopathic element of society would be relevant there. Go figure.

What was once a somewhat subversive conspiracy forum is now just another cog in the conspiracy itself. All of the old school users with a healthy and well-founded mistrust of government have been weeded out. These are the fellows like myself that were telling them years ago that Trump was as bullshit as any other president, and that Q was a limited-hangout psyop. Of course they didn’t want to hear that. You can’t go against the home team in your home town. Now that forum is largely populated with people who genuinely believe Trump can still win. Seriously.

There has probably never been a time where we need all the information we can get, and from all viewpoints. And there has never been a time when we’ve been presented with less. Until tomorrow, that is.

Enjoy your mass deaths and hyperinflation, I guess. The canaries are all dead.

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