This article was originally published on Dec 18, 2018 at . Read the unabridged piece there!
The modern-day version of a book burning — y — is deplatforming. The dreadful irony of it is that the ones being deplatformed are constantly derided as Nazis, but day by day it seems more like any sort of dissident is being targeted. Be warned: if you stand up against the cartel-style soft monopoly in Silicon Valley, its iron fist might come down hard on your civil rights. It’s time to start asking ourselves a very simple question: are companies like Patreon the new Nazis? Mark Kern, a well-known game designer who was the team lead for vanilla World of Warcraft, summed it up very well:
Let’s back up a minute. What is this all about?
Sargon of Akkad Deplatformed
Sargon of Akkad — real name Carl Benjamin — is an online influencer who speaks about political topics, such as classical liberalism and GamerGate. Sargon has the wrong . They’re wrong, that is, from the standpoint of those in Silicon Valley — people who are almost invariably extremely far left and anti-free-speech. He is undoubtedly a controversial guy and is most well known for his antifeminist views.
On December 6th, 2018, he was banned from Patreon. This is a pretty big deal. He was earning over $12,000 a month on the platform — a six figure salary! A few days before this, Milo Yiannopolous was also removed. Suffice to say that Patreon is on the political warpath, intent on eliminating political dissidents from its platform. Here’s the big question you should be asking yourself about all of this: in what world does it make sense that this fruitcake should be the arbitrator of whether or not someone can have a livelihood?
Note that there’s no free market to run to here. Free speech oriented Patreon alternatives like Hatreon and SubscribeStar tend to get brutally stomped out by the cartel-style monopoly in both Silicon Valley and the financial world. It’s a sort of wombo combo — Google makes sure you don’t show up on the rankings, the bank card associations or the payment processors down the line make sure you can’t take credit cards, and on and on the great threshing engine goes as it chews up all of our civil rights.
The Inevitably Anodyne Corporate Response
To their credit, Patreon did respond to this controversy — although they took their sweet time doing it.
On December 17th, almost two weeks since deplatforming Sargon, Patreon’s Jacqueline Hart created a Medium post titled “.” For context, this is Jacqueline Hart’s LinkedIn profile:
I like to call people like this “empty suits.” People who work in HR or on Orwellian “Trust & Safety” teams are actually worse than useless — they actively make the world a more hellish place. Imagine having a job where you’re paid to act as a sort of modern-day Internet Gestapo!
Medium, by the way, is the same blogging site which unceremoniously before the creation of my website. Of course, it’s unlikely that they’d ever treat one of their friends in the Silicon Valley oligopoly in the same nasty way, no matter how much Patreon spits on its own . I digress. I’m going to take her response piece by piece…
Published at Wed, 06 Feb 2019 06:00:28 +0000