So much for that, and about alt-tech

Vox Day sorta admits he was wrong.

What happened to ‘trust the plan?’ As I correctly predicted last year, there was no plan. If Trump could not stop BLM and antifa protestors from burning cities, except tweeting for law and order, what hope was there of overturning an election?

I still don’t understand why President Trump didn’t, at the very least, join Gab and aggressively support alternative social media. But then, I don’t understand why every single conservative in the media would rather whine and cry incessantly about Wikipedia instead of utilizing Infogalactic.

I agree that he should have, but I can understand why he didn’t. Conservatism in America is not about winning. It’s about carving out a niche (a profitable one, at that) as being the approved opposition to the left. Conservatives want resectabiltiy. They want to be included in the national discussion/debate even if it means playing by the left’s rules or making major concessions to the left.

As for Gab, a reason why alt-tech fails, by virtue of being an alternative, is it will never have the reach of something like YouTube or Twitter. This is obvious, but given that people only have a finite amount of time to spend on social media, they are inclined to put their efforts on things that will pay off and will generate attention even if it means periodically being banned or suspended. On Gab, you cannot get the convergence of differing ideologies and perspectives necessary for something to go viral or to build a large audience. Rather, you are only broadcasting to an audience limited by the size of the niche of the platform itself, without any potential spillover. Even Andrew Torba, the owner of Gab, uses Twitter way more than he uses Gab [it looks like his personal and Gab twitter accounts are gone as of posting this, after being hacked]. This is understandable for the reasons above.

Also, being hacked is a major risk, like with Gab, or the network inexplicably shutting down (like what happened to Parler). Alt-tech is not immune to outside influence either, an example being the YouTube competitor DLive, which following the January 6th events began restricting content and payouts due to media and legal pressure. I like Substack, but the TOS contains the below clause, which if not enforced now, gives an opening for future censorship:

Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that call for violence, exclusion, or segregation based on protected classes. Offending behavior includes serious attacks on people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition.

4chan can be thought of as an alt-tech success, but the format is very restricted, and there is a lot of censorship there too, such as VPN, public proxies, and Tor IPs being blocked from posting.

As the case with Parler, which had its hosting suspended by Amazon after the January 6th events, it is not enough to just create the platform, but one must also provide the infrastructure such as hosting without having to depend on Amazon. Amazon is just as bad as other tech companies in this regard. Just because the CEO is not exactly on the best of terms with the woke-left, does not mean Amazon is in any way different from Facebook or Google in terms of its proclivity to ban or censor for arbitrary reasons or to accede to online pressure. I remember in 2020 seeing a notice on Amazon about BLM when logging into Amazon Web Services. Here is what it looked like:

Even if one can argue that this is cynically motivated by profit, the CEO himself said that he is “happy to lose racist customers over support of Black Lives Matter,” and in March 2021 Amazon received considerable push back, deservedly so, after refusing to publish a book that linked trans identity with mental illness.

How some individuals evade being banned, while others are banned for seemingly no reason, is hard to know. Ben Shaprio afik has not been de-platformed anywhere. Despite left-wing management, Twitter has a major conservative/Republican presence, such as pundits, politicians, etc. Trump being banned did not disuade them from using twitter.

For alt-tech to truly be a long-term viable contender, will require probably require a billionaire to fund and back it, in order to provide all the necessary infrastructure such as hosting even if it means running it at a loss. Most alt-tech platforms have minimal funding, so when something goes wrong or due to bad press, they either adopt the same polices as mainstream platforms to aoivd losing ad revenue, or just shutdown.

2 comments

  1. It’s all about controlling the population during the decline.

    You have to do two things simultaneously:
    1) take all the money
    2) convince those that you are stealing the money from that they are “special” in some way. Whether jews/blacks/gays/immigrants etc. from the left, or white men from the right.

    It’s called managing the decline. Distract, divide, and conquer. Do Americans deserve it? Many would say yes, but I just think of it as naturally what would happen during the way up (WW2 to late 2000s) and the way down, 2010s to present. America had it’s moment in the sun, it’s over, done, gone. Rome. Soviet Union. British Empire.

  2. This article is about websites and platforms that position themselves as alternatives to mainstream offerings. For environmentally-friendly technologies, see alternative technology . Several alt-tech platforms describe themselves as protectors of free speech and individual liberty, which some researchers and journalists have described as a cover for far-right userbases and antisemitism on such platforms.

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