They Only Come Out At Night
That’s all there is to it! You are arrested! And you’ll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike bleat: “Me? What for?”
—The Gulag Archipelago
Jack Dorsey got me. I just found out this morning.
Given the climate, I can’t admit to any particular surprise. Although I didn’t necessarily expect it to happen, given how small my account has been on Twitter, it’s delusional to think that it would never have happened at all. I’m not a guy who argues with people online. I don’t spam other people’s threads and I’m not an exclusive phantom-retweeter. To my knowledge, I wasn’t even reported.
Maybe it’s just me, or my timezone, or my utter lack of awareness, but it seems like the purges only happen at night. For three days, I’d go to bed with a certain number of followers and wake up to find that the number had dropped by twenty, thirty, one night even fifty accounts. Make no mistake, I was a sub-400 account; the fact that even accounts this small were being nuked was a sure sign of what was going on.
I’m not the only one, of course. Much larger accounts than mine were axed, too. Dissident-right publishers like Imperium Press and our friend Mystery Grove Publishing both got nuked. Other anonymous but large accounts were hit in the wave. And accounts even smaller than mine got taken as well. Twitter’s embarked upon ban crusades before, but to date, this has been the most far-reaching yet.
My account was suspended without flags because of the dubious “spam” categorization. What this really means is anyone’s guess, considering corporate accounts that run name-brand products are more than welcome to run advertising that clogs up your mobile feed. Yet that’s not considered spam, because they pay for advertising, and that puts money in Twitter’s coffers. It’s the same for Facebook or any of these massive social media sites. Why more people don’t use adblock, even when they know it exists, is one reason why I have such little hope for a political solution to all of this; by and large, Americans let this sort of behavior by the oligarchs get out of hand, and they consistently do nothing to curb it.
The most in-character and stereotypical American president of the last three or four decades, Donald Trump, exemplified this perfectly. He had four years to stem the tide and mobilize the administration, legislation or both to bring Silicon Valley to heel. Instead, he monitored the situation while his own supporters were systematically un-personed, and Twitter shrewdly kept him on the platform until there was nothing he could do about it. He certainly paid for such incompetence, considering that the tech censorship issue is the number one reason why he isn’t in the White House this very moment. It’s just a shame that his failure has cost the country even more of whatever freedom it had left.
Twitter’s incomprehensible use of “spam” as reasons for deplatforming only indicate one thing: Dorsey, and I suspect the rest of Silicon Valley as well, has decided to move into the next phase of control. Exactly what this means on a point-by-point basis is impossible to yet tell. Some think RFID chips are coming, and given Silicon Valley’s interest in the current COVID vaccination efforts, as well as the somewhat unrealistic propaganda spouted by the likes of Elon Musk with regards to neural implants, getting chipped is no longer in the realm of science fiction. How it will roll out, and whether or not it will be made mandatory, however, is yet to be decided—and, if I had to guess, we’re still at least one or two phases away from something of that level.
This spam excuse serves well to ban any account attempting to maintain some level of anonymity. The tilt against internet anonymity went hard during Gamergate, as it was largely anonymous accounts publicly humiliating game journalists on their own platforms that resulted in such strong push-back against having a cartoon avatar and an incomprehensible username. “Say that to my face and not online and see what happens” has been an internet meme for some twenty years, because it’s the sort of tough-guy talk that twelve-year-olds playing Counter-Strike would toss at each other back in the days when the internet was still something of a free-for-all.
But then Gamergate hit, and it turned out that grifters had taken over the playing field and wanted to change the rules; and unfortunately, the normies, too clueless to put two and two together, were all too eager to go along with it. It’s for this reason that Gamergate was such a catastrophic failure for the people who liked what the internet used to be. Big Tech won, the absurd LGBT narratives that infected game journalism won, and internet censorship won. Some journos losing their platforms and one or two bad sites getting nuked are certainly to be appreciated, but those were acceptable losses for the Regime that forced its way into your favorite hobbies.
While there’s a place for public personalities to have internet presence, the surest sign that a public figure isn’t acting in good faith is when he calls out a person behind an anime avatar or a cartoon frog for being cowardly. Holding an internet presence under your own name isn’t the badge of honor they like to make it out to be. Where a computer screen functions as a wall, and the internet used to be place to glibly exchange information, ideas, and insults, those self-aggrandizing grifter types are more interested in fostering their own cults of personality than they are contributing to a conversation or creating interesting content.
The grifters aren’t the ones at fault for this recent purge, nor for Twitter escalating their exclusionary policies, but they certainly aren’t part of the solution. The push toward an internet devoid of anonymity characterizes much of this, and it’s certainly possible—those still interested in preserving anonymity online will be forced into TOR networks and safely isolated from the rest of polite internet society. Think the sewer dwellers from Demolition Man except online—although, at the rate things are going, it may very well become Demolition Man both online and off. Show us your biometric COVID-VAX tattoo, fellow health-conscious citizen!
In the mean time, Twitter’s made ban evasion a bit harder in the past few years, which means I’ll be off the platform in any significant capacity for at least a little while. Recent forays into the development of alternative social media sites have also been met with only mixed success. Gab was recently hacked, but it can only boast small fractions of a user base in comparison to Twitter. Parler’s fiasco a month and a half ago has effectively ruined their credibility—not just in terms of the bad press they received, but also with regards to their unbelievably shoddy security problems. Maybe that’s been fixed, I don’t know. In any case, both options come across as uninspired efforts by soft-right sympathizers who are ultimately out of their element; Silicon Valley’s infrastructure catches them flatfooted more often than not, and braggadocio goes a long way to veil cracks in their platforms.
The writing is on the wall. It was scribbled there six or seven years ago, and those of us active enough on the right to see it have known about it. But at the end of the day, there isn’t anything to be done. Start alternative platforms? Demand more responsibility from Silicon Valley? Vote for legislators that will change things? Well, good luck.
This speaks to a deeper, more penetrating problem: there is no real right wing in America. There’s a disconnected strain of internet users, but there’s little authentic grassroots support. Even the group that co-opted the America First label end up staging AFPAC and attending rallies where they can network and promote themselves, but that’s barely even a fraction of what needs to be done in order to combat tech takeover. The enemy controls the entire apparatus; they have all the pieces, control the whole board, and are free to re-write the rule book as they see fit. Granted, they’re not necessarily a monolithic and unified group of villains—on the contrary, there’s ample reason to believe that they’re quite a divisive group that put up a unified front only because of the exterior threat that an imagined reactionary movement poses. But the reality remains: you don’t win the kind of game they want you to keep losing. You either find a way to change the rules back to being in your favor, or you stop playing.
I wrote a few years ago about my pessimism regarding any future for the right wing online. It seems that train is nearing the end of its course. You’ll still have your pockets of dissent, but they’ll be safely cordoned off and never given the light of day; eventually, those pockets will also be quietly snuffed out. Hosting providers will be targeted. Bank accounts frozen. Payment processors dropped.
Dissenters, reactionaries, and especially traditionalists must think smaller than this. They must get used to being isolated or divided. They must remember that the problems we’re facing today are absolutely, with zero doubt, going to get worse before anything gets better. Local organization—not even political in nature—is growing ever more tantamount, particular after the lock down shock facilitated by COVID hysteria. Get to know your neighbors. Interact with your fellow parishioners. Invite your priests over for dinner once in a blue moon.
I’ve said it before, but this isn’t a blackpill; this is recognizing the state of things before us. There will be no political solution, and there likely won’t be an extra-political one, either. Little by little our freedoms have been eroded and replaced with nonsense. The counter-force to this madness, I think, is not going to come in the form of some reactionary strongman, much as some of us might like to fantasize about it.
But that’s how it is. An appeal has been filed, but given the way Silicon Valley help desks run, we shouldn’t expect anything to come of it. Move along, move along! I had fun on Twitter. I met a lot of good people, and a lot of psychotic ones, too. Hopefully, at least with regards to the former category, I’ll meet them again somewhere on the net. I’m still on Gab. I’m still on SP3RN. I may reach out to Telegram in the future. Parler, in my honest opinion, has blown its credibility. Counter-intuitively, I may even decide to see how long Patreon will put up with me later this year.
