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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Kanye West is buying ‘free speech platform’ Parler

Kanye West, the musician now known as Ye, is buying Parler, a social media platform that styles itself as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter. The acquisition was announced by Parler in a press release, which said that it has entered into an agreement in principle with Ye that’s expected to close later this year.

“In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” said Ye in a press statement.

Parlement Technologies, Parler’s parent company, said the acquisition would help create “an uncancelable ecosystem where all voices are welcome.” In a message sent this morning to the “Parler Family,” (included in full below), Parlement Technologies CEO George Farmer said, “The current Parler staff you’ve come to know —many of whom you’ve interacted with— will still be working on the app, and the platform will continue to utilize Dynascale’s cloud services.”

How much do you think he paid? (Parler raised $56 million recently after its site famously went down.) My own take is, it seems like a waste of money given that the market for alt-tech is getting saturated and the tendency of these platforms to lose money. It means he is not only buying Parler outright, but also covering all future losses. There is Rumble, dLive, Odysee, Bitchute, etc. None of these small video sites are making much money, probably most will not survive. Social media , like online dating, is a very saturated market, which doesn't make me optimistic.

If someone has $50-100 million to invest in 'free speech' or to promote anti-woke causes, how would/should he or she go about it? Someone like Elon can buy Twitter outright, but Kanye is not nearly as wealthy.

I can maybe envision a version of the future where Billionaires with heterodox opinions invest heavily in ownership interests in social media platforms so they can maintain a direct channel to their audience and become as censorship-proof as possible. That is, they don't want their communications to be mediated by captive mainstream media outlets so they ensure there's always a platform where their unfiltered words can be found.

And this could maintain an ecosystem of competing platforms to the extent people might willingly join up with such a platform to have 'access' to said billionaires.

I too am skeptical of the possibility of effectively monetizing such platforms if they don't have some massive value-added service attached.

But I was also very skeptical that Tidal could compete in the crowded music streaming space.

And yet, Tidal is still around, as is Amazon Music, Apple Music, Pandora, Youtube Music, SiriusXM, and even fucking Napster survives!

Even though Spotify is 'known' to be the dominant player, this hasn't resulted in every other product being shuttered.

So I think there are some markets where competing players can survive even if they only have a fraction of the userbase.

Providing short (tweet-length) text content to users is not a difficult thing, all told. If they have a solid niche and a unique draw for users (i.e., Truth Social has Trump) maybe that's all it takes?

And yet, Tidal is still around, as is Amazon Music, Apple Music, Pandora, Youtube Music, SiriusXM, and even fucking Napster survives!

That is one of the myths about the dotcom companies. They are surprisingly resilient and do not go away even when they lose money for a long time. It's easy to keep these companies alive a long time by cutting costs and with an unending , steady trickle of VC money. Or they get acquired or rebrand.