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> Never before in history has a small cabal of companies welded such power over what we can say and who we're able to associate with Yeah, no. Any time before
by IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
> Never before in history has a small cabal of companies welded such power over what we can say and who we're able to associate with
Yeah, no. Any time before the internet, getting any sort of publicity was a thousand times harder with lots of very real gatekeepers.
Include anyone but white/male/hetero/christian/upper-middle-class-or-better people in your consideration, and the idea that freedom of speech went anywhere but up, almost vertically, in the last decade or two is laughable.
- lodovic 6y agoNot really. This is like a monopoly on paper. Sure, you can build your own press, but what are you going to use it for if you can't get paper to print on? Maybe freedom of speech went up, vertically, meaning more people can publish than ever before, but it got extremely narrow at the same time. If you publish the wrong thought your life or business can be literally destroyed within a day. (or as long as it takes to fly to Africa)
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y agoParler would have never been a business. Because, for some reason, those gatekeepers weren't entirely terrible in keeping really obvious and obnoxious assholes far away from their printing presses. And let's be clear: nobody gets "literally destroyed", nor even figuratively, for publishing "one wrong thought". Parler had been peddling in low-effort violence-porn for the lowlifes that make up their userbase for what.. two years? That's hundreds of thousands of terrible... "thoughts". And nothing happened, until something happened, which happened to be peoples' deaths and a crisis of democracy. For comparison: reddit got into hot water at some point, and managed to clean up their act. The porn websites are in a similar process. It's all just actions-have-consequences, really. And the public's ire is actually the more nuanced, soft approach to do it, compared to the blunt tool of criminal law.
- beowulfey 6y agoNothing is stopping anyone from starting their own webhost. Free market economy etc.
- inglor_cz 6y ago"Include anyone but white/male/hetero/christian/upper-middle-class-or-better people in your consideration" Jewish and female authors were absolutely commonplace before the invention of the Internet.
- iguy 6y agoAnd it seems especially odd to lump "christian" in there, anyone heard of a little studio called Metro Goldwyn Mayer?
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y agoThey existed, yes. but there were about eight men on the bestseller list for every woman in the 60s: https://pudding.cool/2017/06/best-sellers/ https://pudding.cool/2017/06/best-sellers/ (Switching to "counts" makes it more obvious)
- flippinburgers 6y agoI was unaware that all people in power across all countries on the globe were wealthy white male Christians prior to the internet.