I’m not familiar with Kyle Kulinski who apparently is a “progressive.” He’s quite impressive I find and he’s angry over this lunatic censorship mentality and the interview with Susan Wojcicki (wuu-CHIT-skee, in case you were wondering), the chief of YouTube, that he highlights is telling. His new subscriber numbers have plummeted due to his being ghosted by YouTube and Wojcicki lays out why.
Wojcicki thinks that because people uploaded what she thinks was garbage about the Las Vegas shootings THEREFORE YouTube has a solemn duty to police what Americans see and hear lest they be misled by exposure to WrongThink. I don’t for a second think that that’s her real motivation but for what it’s worth, as she says in the plainest of terms, it’s her duty to ensure that only reliable sources of information are what users can see. On the COVID-19 issue, in case you’re wondering, that would be the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control. Top ranking by YouTube. And who doesn’t turn to those guys for the straight skinny on The Vid? Right?
So for this moral and intellectual shinging star, if she thinks there’s a certain odor about you, you become as YouTube-visible as swamp gas or something swimming on the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
Not that we all don’t know this in spades already but what’s particularly interesting about this approach is the the YouTube “solution” is to place the offending citizen and all who might be interested in his ideas and facts in a place from which there is no return. The process is 100% untransparent and Wojcicki disappears him or her, period, without so much as a feeble gesture in the direction of actual intellectual engagement.
Laissez faire is the ideal solution (but for injunctions to embrace cannibalism, child porn, or sex reassignment surgery) but, short of laissez faire, there’s clearly a hands-off alternative that involves no algorithmic re-ranking and disappearing but rather an approach that flags the video and allows the user to make up his or her own mind. The complete banishment “solution” is abhorrent and, let it be said, cowardly as it’s the corporate equivalent of the childish tactic of “I can’t hear you.” This is all the more obvious when corporate refuses to identify what is substantively beyond the pale or provide any meaningful discussion of or appeal from their banishment decision. The very notion of “appeal” is absurd. Who the hell are these twinks that I might have to “appeal” from their moral and intellectual judgments?
Holy moly, this casual transformation of free speech into something subject to the whims of officious, presumptuous, arrogant, precious digital saints is something that should rock our country to its foundations. And it will . . . as citizens come to understand that their opinions — and electoral choices — are meaningless in the eyes of people who sleep on stacks of hundred dollar bills and are insulated from all the woes that mere humanoids have to contend with.
Free speech is messy all of the time but it invariably works to everyone’s benefit and we deny it at our peril. But the political class will never do anything to protect free speech, however, and it’s fast tracked to be as conditional as gun rights have become. Suck it up, peasants.
As I like to say, I know my views are not the only ones on the planet. I don’t mind if particular decisions don’t go my way but it IS important to me that I or likeminded people have an honest say in the lead up to the decision in question. Ultimately, I can move if too many decisions don’t go my way but it’s absurd to think that I could shut down competing views instead. The rotten dynamics of the universal franchise — and I do mean universal AND rotten (think “‘Bama fo”) — will ultimately make moving pointless in this dangerous experiment with democracy upon which the United States is presently embarked. The opinions of imbeciles (and thieves) more and more define events.
All with the connivance — and cowardice — of the Supreme Court, let it be said, but all this is too far afield from the subject of this post.
H/t: Caitlin Johnstone and her piece highlighting this video: “Silicon Valley Algorithm Manipulation Is The Only Thing Keeping Mainstream Media Alive.” ZeroHedge, 5/4/21.
