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THE mistreatment by Twitter, following false accusations and gaslighting [1, 2], led to some deep thinking. Where is the Web (or Internet as a whole) going if few corporations police speech of billions of people "at scale"? Should such a situation be allowed in the first place? Are we permitting one single nation or government or cabal of companies to impose their self-serving or ideological agenda on the entire planet?
"The video above isn't a call to boycott Twitter, as it would potentially lead to yet more balkanisation and echo chambers, dividing the population even further and letting misinformation spread unchallenged."I already have a draft entitled "Boycott Twitter, Don't Post Anything to Twitter Anymore (Not Even Passively)" -- a draft I cannot go ahead with because it would mean immediately ending my presence in that site myself. I've already changed my profile to send people to other sites (I did this a very long time ago), but as long as Twitter gets copies of my posts I basically contribute to a problem related to "network effect". Many of these tech giants with their fictional market valuation/cap operate at a loss for a very long time just to attain domination (sometimes at the expense of taxpayers) and once they secure a near-monopoly or complete monopoly the gloves come off or the mask falls. Then they use their newly-gained power to impose their "worldview" (or corporate agenda) not just on citizens of their country but people across the entire planet.
"Maybe the conclusions reached will, in fact, include a boycott being nothing short of imperative."Sadly, as pointed out in the video, moving away from microblogging and returning to blogging might not be enough as people might end up controlled by the same hosts (like Gulag/Google), not self-hosting with something like gemini:// running on a residential connection. With further restrictions on hosting (and artificially-crippled upload speeds) there's more pressure on everybody to outsource to datacentres and so-called 'clown computing'. Social control media is just a subset of that; self-hosting videos is further complicated by bandwidth demands.
So where are we going? What is a person capable of doing to regain freedom on the Net? With new laws to ban encryption (real encryption) and with devices that presume their owner is a pedophile we're led to a state of learned helplessness and told that becoming digital "vassals" is inevitable (we cannot use metaphors like "slaves" anymore, tell us hypocritical corporations that treat us all like their slaves). These issues will be discussed here more and more in the coming weeks. Maybe the conclusions reached will, in fact, include a boycott being nothing short of imperative. ⬆