To call it a breath of fresh air would be an understatement it’s more like a blast of pure oxygen after emerging from a coal mine. Just in the past few months, Substack has emerged as that platform. He continues to be banned from both platforms even as a private citizen, although the initial rationale was that he must be prevented from reaching an audience because he commanded the armed forces.įor those whose epistemology boils down to: Let everything be discussed, and may the best ideas win, it’s essential to build a safe haven for free exchange of ideas. The tech lords simply shrug at anyone who protests when they ban books, movies, newspapers, business bloggers, medical discussions and even a sitting president of the United States, which is what Donald Trump was when he was kicked off Facebook and Twitter. Today, though, a huge proportion of ideas flows through just a few tightly controlled pipelines owned by the e-barons who rule Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Google. So the internet was a democratic revolution. The internet was a democratic revolution. Pre-internet, the accepted cliche was, “Never argue with a man who buys his ink by the barrel.” Consider the title by which Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst and Rupert Murdoch were known: “press barons.” The rest of us were their vassals. If you didn’t own one of the handful of newspapers, magazines or television or radio stations in a given city, you had very little chance of reaching much of an audience. In the 1990s it heralded a breathtaking advance for humanity, which had always been constrained by the distribution costs for ideas, which in turn created an oligarchy of information. The promise of the Internet was that it would be a sort of Speaker’s Corner open to anybody and any ideas, an unlimited vista of imagination and innovation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |