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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   8666 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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The Closure of the Internet

I recently started reading Arctotherium’s almost encyclopedic article titled The Closure of the Internet documenting the change starting in the mid-2010s from the internet being a free-speech zone to its current state as a censored environment. I only started reading the article since it is so truly extensive in its documentation, and then I skimmed through and read the highlights of the main article and some of the footnotes.

I was having 2 conflicting reactions: (1) this is not news – as anyone here who remembers the departure of this forum from Reddit or slatestarcodex can attest and (2) this is likely “the most important social phenomenon of the late 2010s” (Arctotherium's words) since it changed the dynamic so completely of the place where most people spend most of their free time and I, and most others, have never thought of it that way. In fact, many young people aren't even aware that it happened.

Why is it both not news and unknown? I think the article contains the answer to this question, without seeming to understand its importance - it doesn't have a name:

There have been countless laments of the decline of intellectual discourse on the Internet. Some attribute it to the natural monopolies and economies of scale of Web 2.0, some to the expansion of the Internet beyond overwhelmingly Western intelligent and often technical users, to normal people and non-Westerners, and some to the inferiority of younger generations. Almost none of them point to the successful society-wide campaign to censor and police the Internet covering all major platforms and the means to find things outside of them. Few seem to even realize this happened. That the closure of the Internet happened and its approximate scope should be common knowledge, and there needs to be a convenient name and narrative for it so that it sticks in people’s heads. (italics in original, bolding added by me)

So I propose that we all start calling it the name Arctotherium used: the closure of the internet.

As a second note, I want to push back on the “Did it Work?” section in the article, which argues that the closure of the internet did not work since it failed at its goal of preserving confidence in traditional institutions. The section is true, as far it goes, but it leaves out that the closure of the internet was effective (at least in my view) on its object-level issues. I would argue there is more immigration and there was more compliance during COVID than there would be if discussion of these issues had remained open, but after spending their political capital on, for example, COVID, they have lost the public trust they need to fight, for example, measles.

The Internet isn't closed. The censorship of Reddit just made people go elsewhere or make their own sites. Even at the peak of woke censorship, the Internet never came close to actually being closed.

There were and are instances of payment providers refusing to work with people, but they are so rare that calling the Internet closed because of them would be like saying that schoolkids in the US are constantly being terrorized by mass shooters.

The far-left has Reddit and other places, but the far right is not left out. In some ways the Internet is more friendly to the far-right now than it was even 15-20 years ago. The far-right didn't have anything with the size and algorithmic subtlety of Twitter back then, now it does. When I say that, I'm not saying that Twitter is a far-right site, cause it's not. I'm just saying that you can go there and be pretty much as far-right as you want if you don't explicitly call for violence (but that's easy to work around).

The Internet is not closed, but it is heavily surveilled. One can assume that anything one does online goes into a government computer somewhere, whether or not a human ever ends up looking at it (and with AI, that doesn't matter). Thanks, Bush. Thanks, Clinton. Thanks, Bush 2. Thanks, Obama. Thanks, Biden. Thanks, Trump.

The far-right didn't have anything with the size and algorithmic subtlety of Twitter back then, now it does. When I say that, I'm not saying that Twitter is a far-right site, cause it's not. I'm just saying that you can go there and be pretty much as far-right as you want if you don't explicitly call for violence

That used to be how the entire internet worked. Every social media platform let you be as far-right as you wanted. Then we went through a period where figures like Alex Jones were banned from Youtube and websites like Stormfront were denied payment processing.

I might just have missed it at the time, but did MySpace in its heydey have trouble with political extremists? Independent PhpBB fora generally never promised not to ban users that I recall. And I'm not quite old enough to remember Usenet or whatever AOL was doing.

ETA: I remember Slashdot was always at odds, if less deeply divisively, with veritable armies of troll posters. Moderation was always an ongoing concern, although it seemed to mostly settle after a while.

Not really? It wasn't MySpace's problem. Most social media platforms did not consider it to be their problem. Who cares what your opinions were? Complaining that "Shakes posted something mean" would be up there with "And his lunch smells too". Nobody cared. Why would anybody care? The internet was for posting. I remember debating gay marriage on Pokemon forums. Facebook wasn't going to ban you if you called somebody an idiot. Reddit did not care. AOL didn't care. Nobody cared.

I'm trying to come up with a neutral example that would have offended people. 9/11 conspiracies and jokes? If you posted, circa 2002, conspiracy theories that 9/11 was an inside job, people would get offended. 9/11 jokes were in very bad taste. It wasn't something normal people did. But nobody would say that you should get banned from the internet for saying it. That wasn't even really technically possible, the tech stacks were so much simpler then, anybody could spin up a website and lots of people did. DDOS wasn't a thing, you didn't have Cloudflare filtering out malicious traffic, your bank wasn't going to cut off your credit card because you were using it for a bad website. There wasn't even any money in the internet. You could say whatever you wanted.

There was gradually some censorship, there was a sense that Facebook was less anonymous, Reddit modding was arbitrary, 4chan was where you went if you deliberately wanted racism or gore. You probably wouldn't get along well on tumblr if that was what you liked. But nobody thought of racism on 4chan as a problem to be solved, either.

And this wasn't a partisan thing. This was normal cultural default. Everyone was a lot more normal, actually. Well, a lot of views that were normal then would be considered "extremist" today. But there were fewer extremists by their own standards.

Well, now I'm reminiscing so I'm going to cut myself off. And I know that I have a reputation as The Trump Guy but I have to emphasize here -- it really did all change with Donald Trump. This whole online political ecosystem that exists now did not exist before Trump, and the former parts that did exist could not have fathomed being important enough to play big roles in presidential-level politics. I don't know if you were there and I don't know who reading this was there, but it was surreal watching 4chan get put on TV next to discussions about the president. I don't know how to describe it to anybody who wasn't there. It was one of the most surreal things I've ever seen, it would be life if your private dreams started making the evening news. Imagine if we started having big national debates about banning green-skinned aliens out of your wet dreams, that's about how if would feel if you went back to the late aughts and said we need to police MySpace because there could be white supremacists there.

I'm trying to come up with a neutral example that would have offended people. 9/11 conspiracies and jokes? If you posted, circa 2002, conspiracy theories that 9/11 was an inside job, people would get offended. 9/11 jokes were in very bad taste.

tribute.avi (9/11 footage set to Yakkety Sax) was 2002 and there was no effort to ban Something Awful. As far as I can tell there wasn't even an effort to shame Something Awful.

Alone's last post on The Last Psychiatrist blog was "Who Bullies the Bullies?"...about how there was now a consensus among the media, politicians, and economic interests that the Wild West, anonymous Internet had to go, that the internet was dangerous, in that women were scared, and Something Must Be Done. This was published in May 2014, well before Trump, and more importantly, well behind the curve. It was already the case that elites had decided to go with censorship, they just needed time to propogandize the masses to accept it, and better tools to enforce it. Trump was just the biggest victim of it; recall that it wasn't until the 2020 elections that they decided they could silence him too, long after they'd made it the default that his supporters could be deplatformed, debanked, etc.

In July 2012, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) unanimously adopted a landmark resolution affirming a simple proposition: “The same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice.” Writing in The New York Times, Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister [at the time], hailed the vote as a “breakthrough of fundamental importance,” insisting that “the free flow of information on the Internet is a global call and not something pushed only by a few Western states.” For a brief moment, it seemed as if the world’s democracies had accepted that the open Internet would be the nervous system of modern liberty.

Anyone reading these statements and believing the UNHRC and Carl Bildt genuinely thought this included Steve Sailor citing racial differences in IQ tests, Tradcons saying "maybe women actually would be better off taking care of the home," or any pushback whatsoever on infinity immigrantion (to say nothing of "Tits or GTFO") is, as the kids say, ngmi. "We believe in the free flow of information" has, to this class of person, always meant "spreading neoliberal ideals," hopefully with Color Revolultions, "Girls in STEM!" movements in countries that end in -stan, and endless funding for NGOs, not serious debate on if we need to go in some other direction.

You're right, even Stormfront only started getting really cracked down upon in the 2010s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_(website)

Thinking back now, the censorship of the leaked AACS keys (09 F9 11...) was one of the first prominent examples. But that was the self-immolation of Digg and drove a lot of traffic to Reddit. Hard to believe it's been almost two decades since that.

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