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Notes -
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:
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.
Cause this is a problem for online people, not for the "touch grass" offline crowd.
In the real world, there also aren't many free-speech zones for people to truly unleash their most radical, dark, unsavory thoughts. The real reason free speech flourished in the internet is because of anonymity. If people can speak their mind anonymously in real life, you'll hear them much more often too. In the real world, unless you're crazy and just speaking to no one, you're speaking to an audience, and therefore, they know you. They can judge you, they can laugh at you, they can raise their eyebrows or makes visible that they think you're disgusting, they can think twice about doing business with you, and on and on and on.
I would like to add a second point about the internet is that people who champion it being a "free speech zone" is because not only of the anonymity, which protects them from retaliation, but also reach. If you're the guy shunned by the local community, it's unlikely that they would repeat or share your words with others. Yeah you still got free speech, alright, your speech just isn't landing. On the internet, be dark and edgy and you can go viral, and of course "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes".
The things being censored were normal or mainstream opinions. Opposition to gay marriage, disgust with fat people, support for Donald Trump, even opposition to immigration could get posters deplatformed. The pandemic was censored! If you believed the pandemic came from the Wuhan coronovirus research laboratory and not Chinese people eating bats, you could be banned. If you didn't want to take a novel mRNA vaccine, you could be banned. There were government agencies on tax dollars paying employees to scour social media and report "misinformation" to twitter HQ.
The website you are posting on right now exists because of threats that the conversations that we have here were too "dangerous" for reddit to continue to host them.
This is a problem if you want to pursue truth and not status.
Most people think the truth is a handmaid to status. If a truth is low status, then it is less good to believe it than a lie that is high status. They believe communication is for uncovering the ideas of high status, and not the ideas of high truth. If ideas of low status are banned, that serves the purposes of communication, and nothing is wrong, because it does not matter if those ideas are true or not; they are low status, which makes them wrong.
Or in other words, a factual but low status idea is like a tree that falls in the woods with no one to hear it.
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